HOUSTON RESURFACES

As the lead singer of the Avengers, one of San Francisco’s first punk bands, Penelope Houston was a counterculture role model: a young, pretty girl with a severe style that matched her severe attitudes. There were predictions of great things for the band, but the group’s career peaked when it opened the Sex Pistols’ final show, at Winterland in San Francisco. Houston came to L.A. in ’79 to work on a film, but since then little has been heard from one of punk’s first pinups.

Resurfacing at the Lhasa Club on Friday with a three-piece acoustic folk group featuring accordion and mandolin, Houston quickly laid her past to rest, dismissing “the old days” in a song that sounded like a Russian campfire sing-along. OK, time to move on, but Houston’s road seems pretty rocky. She’s still a striking woman, but her singing was pale, wan and often off-pitch. Houston will have to see a voice coach if she wants her combination of cabaret and hootenanny to be more than a footnote to a former punk teen queen’s career.

Preceding Houston was Exene Cervenka, the redoubtable lead singer of X, reading poetry, notes and diary excerpts that snapped, crackled and popped with acerbic wit and unusual juxtapositions of images.