Malcolm circa July 4, 2024

By Alex Wukman

Randle described one private New Year’s Eve party at Chez Imbecile by writing that, “it was lovely affair with Malcolm as host; one of those magical nights in downtown Houston on Buffalo Bayou where the ghosts are more palpable than rats of all kinds. I was young and felt rather privileged to be included in, what seemed to be, the cognoscenti of the Houston arts underbelly.”

Will Turner, another long time resident of Malcolm’s social circle, reminisced about one of the “improbably convoluted” Chez Imbecile shows from the late 1980s by writing that, “it was someone’s brilliant idea to allow Malcolm to be in charge of providing the refreshments.” He explains that those in attendance later summarized that the reason Malcolm was allowed to provide refreshments was because “he was in possession of certain, unnamed, insidious blackmail evidence, successfully used as leverage against CSAW’s Den Mother Deborah Moore.”

Turner goes on to state that Malcolm “rose to the occasion with a magnificently huge emerald green pudding cake, and somehow he convinced almost everyone present to try some. What we all so quickly discovered was that Sir Malcolm, to create the unnaturally rich and vibrant jade hue, had emptied eight very large bottles of green food coloring into the cake mix.” Turner goes on to recount how “the crowd rapidly started turning green. Many people got sick, and there were ‘credible rumors’ floating through the dozen or so present of possible death from chemical poisoning.”

He ruefully states that, “when Malcolm finally resurfaced, days later, he explained the entire incident away as one of his ‘experiments,’ wherein he hoped to turn everyone’s poop green for a day or two. While such reckless and dangerous behavior is difficult to justify, it does tend to help establish Malcolm as a legitimate artist, and places him correctly within the Situationists Prankster Movement of which he would often expound.”

Trying to arrange the events of Malcolm’s life into a historical or chronological order is like to trying to define the color, shape or texture of memory—impossible, because they are inexorably intertwined. There are moments that stick out in people’s minds that come tumbling out with no frame of reference, like when Leila Rodgers writes that in 1987 she, “spent 4 hours in a closet in the middle of the night with Malcolm drinking whiskey and eating wintergreen mints to watch our mouths spark up,” or Al Pennison’s description of a late night rendition of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

“After a wonderful night drinking and carousing, two cavalier young poets made their way back to whomever’s house was Malcolm’s current residence,” writes Pennison. “A lawn chair, covered with foam padding and blankets, was provided for me to rest my weary and inebriated bones; while his holiness took the couch. As we lay there he began to recite ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ I will never again experience that poem the way I did that night. It was a moment of pure poetical perfection, never to be forgotten.”

For Malcolm poetry was, and remains, one of life’s greatest pursuits. Throughout the years he has been involved in multiple variations on open mic poetry nights. He also hosted the first regular poetry slam in Houston in 1992 at the now mostly forgotten venue Catal Huyuk. Catal Huyuk, which took its name from the oldest human city ever discovered, was one of many venues at the time that hosted underground performance and video art, like Mark Flood’s 1993 exhibition “100 viewings of the Rodney King beating.”

The club was also known for booking acts that almost no one else wanted to touch, for a variety of reasons. It hosted a screening of “Acid is Groovy Kill the Pigs” by Dallas based shock artist Joe Christ, and his surfabilly band The Healing Faith, that was initially canceled because HPD threatened club owner Duane Hix. Catal Huyuk was also one of the locations featured in G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies’ home video release “Terror in America Vol. 3.”

In this milieu of art, that was considered not just outsider but beyond the pale, Malcolm began the weekly Dearly Departed Poetry Slam. As Mistress of Ceremonies he was known for, as former Public News Music Editor Kevin White wrote, “tearing every poet a new one” and, as Randle delicately put it, “sucking the dicks of passed out young men.” However, it all came to a crashing end that Brad Tyer documented in December 1993 when he wrote how a dispute over $5 of door money led Malcolm to “free willy and strut around the club’s front room pissing on anyone and anything in his trajectory.”

Malcolm’s erratic behavior only increased as the years went by; leading some, like White, to try to find something to pin the blame on. White looked to Malcolm’s trust fund, which he wrote “was once a vast treasure that allowed him to live like the Duchess of Montrose…over the years it dwindled to a mere trickle. But man, on Check Day, everyone all over Montrose drank for free on Malcolm’s magic dime. Cigs fell like rain and every mirror in every house was dusty and smeared. Money just poured out of his pocket.”

White goes on to say that for all the good will and good times the trust fund created, he thinks it may have harmed Malcolm more than anyone would care to admit. “I think the free money caused the trouble; a sort of arrested development in Malcolm. Malcolm, despite all the antics, the poetry, the wit, the culture, and the magic, Malcolm has always been a boy when he could have been so much more,” states White.

However, not everyone is so quick to pin the blame on Malcolm’s trust fund. Tomcala says that he “remembers [Malcolm] getting access to the trust fund that is alleged to have created the monstrous side of our friend. It’s easy to mark that as the lynch pin, it was not.” Tomcala goes on to state that Malcolm’s bad behavior “started much earlier” and that it’s completely possible that it stems from some kind of family trauma. “The little I know about his family always dismayed me and I made a mental allowance for the quirks he displayed even then,” writes Tomcala.

Randle describes Malcolm, flush with trust fund cash, as someone who “was dapper, charming, well-dressed and smelled wonderfully” who would “make last minute runs to [Niemen Marcus] to purchase Guerlain Vetiver,” a perfume that retails for $20 an ounce.

To be continued…

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[Photo Credit - R. John Powers]

Editor’s note: This is the first in a five part series exploring the myths surrounding Houston underground legend Malcolm McDonald. Check back for updates.

By Alex Wukman

When Kerouac wrote that the only people for him were the mad ones, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk…desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars…” he didn’t realize that he was writing the description of a man who one day would become a legend of the Houston underground.

Over the last 30 years Malcolm MacDonald has been involved, in one way or another, with organizations that defined and redefined the Houston art scene, and in doing so he has become more myth than man. He has been called everything from “the Duchess of Montrose” to “the Monster of Morgan’s Point,” often by the same person. However, for the generation that has come of age since the turn of the century he, like so many others, is an unknown entity. If he is known at all to those under 45 he’s just “that creepy drunk old dude at the bar” that they heard “has cancer and AIDS.”

Like almost all of Houston’s arts history—Liberty Hall, Emo’s, Love Street, The Abyss—much of Malcolm’s (author’s note: I have decided to deviate from standard AP style and refer to MacDonald only by his first name because, like Cher or Madonna, those that know him refer to him only as Malcolm) accomplishment have faded into memories that can only be recalled by other “old people.” Anyone trying to recreate the history of Houston’s underground faces two main problems: the lack of anything resembling an official archive and that fact that many of those who were there at the start are gone; either moved to other cities or dead. This makes writing about any underground institution, whether a venue or a person, difficult because one is faced with the problem about what exactly to believe.

None of what is told may be true, all of it can be believed. And in the case of Malcolm nothing seems too far out of the realm of possibility. Should the amateur historian believe the story that Malcolm came to Montrose in the mid-1970s as a young, fresh-faced heir to an oil fortune? Should he or she trust the rumor that once Malcolm arrived in the inner loop he was, as one person who wishes to remain nameless, memorably phrased it, “raised by a pack of wild lesbians?”

What can be documented, from people who say they were there, is a life that runs through the Houston underground and connects scenes as disparate as ‘80s hardcore punk and ‘90s slam poets. It’s a life that has to be contextualized to be understood, placed in a lineage that stretches from people like Aleister Crowley and Oscar Wilde through the Situationists and right up to present day rappers celebrating the culture of excess. To understand Malcolm is to understand the underbelly of Houston.

Most know him as they see him in his current incarnation, a barfly who occasionally makes outlandish statements: something like Cliff Clavin from Cheers, if he drank mescaline smoothies instead of beer. However, that characterization reduces Malcolm to a caricature and discounts his legacy. As Clara Randle, a longtime friend of Malcolm’s, recounts he first gained notoriety as the doorman for Houston’s first punk rock club Paradise Island. Later known as Rock Island and finally, simply, The Island. The venue was Located at 4700 Main, underneath US 59, and hosted shows by bands that would go on to be legends.

In 1981 Black Flag brought their new lead singer, a 20-year-old Henry Rollins, to The Island. The next year saw Husker Du and the Misfits play three months apart. Then in 1983, six months after Husker Du came back, Flipper rocked the house. Randle explains that on one memorable night in early 1981 Malcolm “gave me, Billy Parker, and Ann Heinrich business cards to go see The Judy’s.” At the time The Judy’s, who hailed from Pearland, were the undisputed kings of the Houston New Wave scene. Holding court at the Agora Ballroom, located at the intersection of Richmond and 610, and Number’s, The Judy’s catchy melodies, minimalist instrumentation and themed shows, a beach party celebrating the one year anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, led to a meteoric rise through the embryonic Houston music scene. A rapidly expanding cult following allowed the band to open for the likes of the Talking Heads, The Go-Go’s and the B-52s.

Malcolm’s musical tastes turned him into sort of a tastemaker for much of Houston’s underground. As Richard Tomcala wrote Malcolm was, “one of the people that helped develop [one of] the first punk club[s] in town, and his project –Cafe Mode—remains one of the most interesting club concepts the city has seen since the late ’60’s.” Located at 709 Franklin, Café Mode was to early-and-mid-‘80s Houston what venues like Super Happy Fun Land, Notsuoh’s, Mango’s and Fitzgerald’s are to today’s scene. The place helped to expose Houstonians, who were still in the grip of the Urban Cowboy craze, to bands that would later go on to reshape rock music. The club hosted performances from pioneering Houston punk rock bands Really Red, that featured a pre-Anarchitex Bob Weber, and Grindin Teeth,  fronted by Don Walsh, later of Rusted Shut infamy. Grinin Teeth were among one of the first bands to use the term ‘grindcore’ to describe a hardcore sound that fused elements of hardcore punk, noise, industrial and death metal.

The most widely known Café Mode show happened in June 1986 when, a then little known punk band from New York City, Sonic Youth shared the stage with Houston’s king of experimental music, Culturecide. Culturecide were about to release the album Tacky Souvenirs from Pre-Revolutionary America, a collection of popular songs that had been overdubbed with satirical lyrics, which gained them an international cult following.

Beyond the music Café Mode was also known for its embrace of art in all its forms; which led to the club being known, even today, simply as “Malcolm’s place.” After Café Mode’s demise, the reason of which is not spoken of, even to this day, Malcolm hosted an irregular series of music showcases and performance art pieces at Commerce Street Arts Warehouse called Chez Imbecile. The ‘shows’ were initially attended by a who’s-who of the Houston underground; a group that Malcolm would drunkenly berate. However, over time the novelty of a liquored up Don Rickles impersonation soon wore off and Chez Imbecile began to fade into obscurity, but not before Malcolm created memorable moments and life changing events.

To be continued…

Next: Chez Imbecile to Catal Huyuk