I was born in California but we moved to Fort Worth Texas in early 1969 when I was three years old. My parents always talked about how the Hippie migration ruined their San Francisco paradise. My family first settled in a row house on the corner of Bristol Lane and Bailey Avenue (now a Medical center) until the Summer of 1970 when they purchased a house on Collinwood in Arlington Heights, which is where I grew up. About a year later, my childhood pal Brett and his Mom Diane moved in next door to us, which is where my musical story began. My parents’ record collection was all over the map from Jefferson Airplane and Beatles through Four Seasons and Jimmy Reed, yet they were only casual listeners. Their little fondue parties or entertaining guests was the only time the family Hifi was put into action. Brett’s mother Diane always had music on the turntable and was serious about listening. So did my Uncle Raymond, who I’d visit quite a bit as a youngster. Between those two adults, as well as Brett who was already a young radio-head, I learned a lot about new music. And a LOT of it was made in Texas. The radio played Texas Music. There seemed to always be long-haired bands playing at the Trinity Park Shelter House on weekends. Blues bands were everywhere. School carnivals featured local pop and rock bands. So I grew up with local music heroes.
ZZ Top was the very first Texas band that I remember. Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres was seemingly always on Uncle Ray’s decks. Diane listened to more of the country-rock side of things, with Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson in her eclectic collection. Brett was into contemporary music, an avid Ron Chapman KVIL listener every morning, and together we learned about modern hipness with the sheer bravado of youth. My pal Darren and I would regularly raid his sister Laurie’s record collection, finding Shotgun Willie, Rusty Wier, and Joe Ely in the process. I met this kid named Stephen at school, who’s parents had this hilarious old single by a band called Bubble Puppy which we played over and over to our utter amusement. My friend Terry’s parents had a lot of diverse Texas records, which is how I discovered Nitzinger as well as Space Opera, one of my first favorite local bands (who also get lots of mentions in these here blog pages). Space Opera were my Beatles! I listened to that Epic album so many times as a youngster! It seemed like everyone’s older brothers or sisters had a Bloodrock album in their fold, with “DOA” also getting late night freeform radio airplay occasionally. You’d also see a lot of Roky Erickson and 13th Floor Elevator albums floating around collections. I knew about Doug Sahm and his music from hearing it played at various houses and on KERA when I was young. Every home seemed to have a copy of that first Guy Clark album. I could sing along with Freddy Fender songs because his music was completely everywhere at one point. I saw so many Leon Russell albums on different friends’ parents shelves, that I figured that he must be from Texas (which was false yet so true, as he was beloved down here). Robert Ealey and Gatemouth Brown were Texas blues legends you’d hear on a Saturday night blasting out of older folks’ house parties. It was not odd to hear to country, rock, blues, and folk music daily while living in Texas in the 1970’s and that was reflected in our coming-of-age taste. We had Austin City Limits and Every Tub On It’s Own Bottom on local PBS TV, providing live jazz, rock, and Tex-Mex-Country on our screens. FM102 KFWD was Freeform album rock until 1978 when it became Q102, blasting out new rock with a Texas twist. Will Rogers Auditorium was right down the street, where some of the best local concerts occurred. And so my formative years were spent chasing the sounds, searching for the newest local band, supporting the scene by sharing the music, and buying as many platters as I could afford on my lawn-mowing money.
Have I mentioned Schwantz Lefantz yet? Well, I first encountered them at an early Mayfest around 1978. They had a violinist (just like Kansas…well count me in), sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, and played the local bars throughout the Metroplex practically every weekend. But I was too young to go to these bars, so I had to improvise by riding my bike to nearby places like Blossoms Downstairs, Spencer’s Corner, or The Hop, standing outside listening to them play. Now you have you remember that this was the era of free-range children, kids who snuck out and rode the mean streets on bicycles all night long all summer long, meeting up on the boulevards to watch the adults cruise, mass hide-and-seek tournaments at the schoolyards after dark, hanging in alleys behind bars listening to bands play. We were practically teenagers at 10 and adults at 12; hip to everything around us, absorbing grown-up life beyond our bedrooms and parental restrictions. I didn’t get to see Schwantz play again “legally” until I was 18. As progressive turned to power-pop turned to punk turned to new wave, I watched our little local scene start to gain new bands and new forms of Texas musical expression. Schwantz was there for us all through the genre changes, College and beyond, still gigging their incredible brand of snobby Art-Rock and perfectly executed covers. I still listen to them at least twice a year in a personal frenzy of nostalgia and reminiscing. Which is probably also how my young listening taste went from Progressive Rock to Power Pop to Punk to New Wave and back and forth again. They changed with the times and I followed suit.
When Punk Rock started to sweep the neighborhood as well as the city venues in the late 70’s, suddenly it was people from my age group who were stepping up to the plate to play. We had our first local punk band in The Fort Worth Cats. Yeah, there were others around the area, but none of them could hold a candle to The Cats in my humble opinion. They were jangly, wiry, herky-jerky guitar voodoo, and I adored them. Their early single, “Fun In The Sun“, had a record release party at Peaches followed by an afterparty at Mama’s Pizza; I rode my bike to both, where I met Cliff from Housewives’ Choice as well as the jazz/punk poet Kid Daniels. They were so influential to me and my friends; the fashion sense, skinny ties, tight suits, bizarre sunglasses, and short spiked hair. The Ejectors popped up in my High School a year later, all of them a couple of grades older than me; their style also highly influenced by the fully-blown DFW punk scene of the early 80’s: the Cats, The Nervebreakers, The Skuds, Hugh Beaumont Experience. The Beaumont boys formed at Fort Worth Country Day School, played all ages shows, and had a fantastic single called Cone Johnson. My pal Anthony and I listened to them constantly when the vinyl came out. The bands and players were approachable, easy to chat with, suggesting obscure albums for us to find, playing all ages places just enough for us to get our fill. Local bands even played our dances, with repeated performances from Power Pop locals The Pengwins always a treat! I think I saw every Ejectors school dance performance! I hounded their drummer Fred constantly about new music, him being a wealth of musical knowledge regarding punk. Unique new music was everywhere around us, all of it of local origin. When I was 16, I met someone who was a new musical fountain, constantly flowing with hip records, singles, and fanzines: Mark Perry. He was a few years older than me, but soon started taking me to Punk and New Wave shows while filling my collection with mixtapes of everything subversive, stylized, fresh, and worldwide. Through him, I figured out the fake ID pass into certain “flimsy door policy” venues as well as 18-and-over shows. I also learned how to find show announcements through local underground rags and stores as well as stalking the clubs for event fliers during that pre-internet age. Mark and I would hit record shops every weekend, as I discovered all the hipper stores around the area: VVV, Metamorphosis, Bills. I also figured out that lots of young people were into the same things, the same looks, the same sounds, and congregated in the same places. It was a fantastic time to be young.
The drinking age was still 18 when I passed that fateful age, which meant legal entry into the clubs, the bars, the venues, the gigs; the once forbidden places. I infiltrated the fledgling early dirty dangerous Deep Ellum scene down the Highway in South Dallas quickly, already familiar with Hot Klub, soon moving over to DJ’s, Circle A Ranch, then Prophet Bar, and Theater Gallery. This is how I discovered a wealth of Texas acts, including Butthole Surfers, who were just a little local sensation at the time, years before becoming a national act. I saw them about 10-12 times in a two year period, watching their trajectory, stage show, and sound improve with each gig. It was equal parts, psychedelia, noise, and performance art, like NOTHING before or after. Their drummer King was a local boy himself, once a Beaumont as well as part of the fanzine Throbbing Cattle, who graduated from Easter Hills High before moving to Austin. Mark and I hit so many shows back in the day that people thought we were from Dallas! Not unlike The Flaming Lips, who were also hitting Deep Ellum nearly every weekend to play or hang, driving all the way in from Norman Oklahoma. Interestingly, my band ESP never tried to play in Dallas during our existence, which I find odd considering how much time I spent there on weekends in the 80’s! I honestly think we were too intimidated by the Dallas scene.
One night at Theatre Gallery, Mark and I stumbled upon The Buck Pets to our complete obsessive fascination. They had long stringy uncombed hair, wore tattered wrinkled thrift store clothing, chain-smoked cigarettes, drank beer onstage, and sounded like an onslaught of modern alternative heavy punk-influenced bombast. I was into them instantly from the moment they started playing. That nonchalant aloof attitude combined with their sonic blast of fresh power-pop totally took me to another place. I think I saw them about 20 times during their first few years of existence. I would later discover the Minneapolis sound where they gleaned some of their style, but I still think they were the one local band from all those years ago who should have hit it HUGE. In saying that though, I can also acknowledge just how talent stacked DFW line-ups were back then. There were so many amazing players with their own thing going back then, it was hard to tell who would rise above the others with listeners, fans, and industry product.
I first ran into New Bohemians at a NTSU house-party in Denton around early 1985. They were a ska-influenced groove band with chops galore, mostly an instrumental jam thing. I figured they were a college band from Bruce Hall. Of course, in Denton that’s par for the course; kids from all over American honed into their craft at the prestigious music school. I was up there for two years, taking minimal classes, living clandestinely in unisex Bruce with my cool girlfriend, while still also living and working back in Fort Worth. Life was 24-7 back then, a whirlwind of school, work, band rehearsals, gigs, and clubbing. I honestly don’t know how much I actually slept back then with all that was going on. That being said, I keep seeing the New Bo’s name all around DFW, my curiosity now piqued from that Denton gig. They were playing this swanky little Greenville Avenue bar called Rick’s Casablanca where Mark, Meredith, and I saw them a few times. With their new female vocalist and new songs! Their singer sounded a bit like Rickie Lee Jones, the guitarist had a Jerry Garcia tone. My entire circle of friends became instantly enamored with them. Theatre Gallery, Prophet, early Clearview, 500 Cafe, Club Dada, even J&J Blues Bar and Caravan of Dreams in Funkytown, we followed them around during their formative years. I got to personally become fast friends with Brad Houser, their amazing bassist, who was a mountain of musical knowledge. He talked with me all through their long signing process with Geffen, giving me the inside scoop on the major label trip as well as how the industry machine can squeeze a band enough to reshape them into a commercial mold. It was through the New Bo’s that I became enamored with some of their local contemporaries Ten Hands and Mildred. The Deep Ellum scene was diverse and quite unique, with some amazing players and personalities, as witnessed by Island record’s compilation The Sound of Deep Ellum.
Meanwhile back in 1980’s Fort Worth, there was a young music scene waiting to happen. As I have previously documented HERE as well as HERE, that era was a wasteland for new music in Funkytown. Tons of bands with no clubs to play beyond The Hop, which mostly catered to a cover band crowd but occasionally would let original acts in, IF they had a large following. J&J’s and Caravan would let Dallas bands play on odd weeknights, but it didn’t last long. My band, ESP, played every venue available as well as booked our own private parties, filling a spiral notebook with 500+ addresses for our mailing list to gain audience. Other acts were also playing these little upstart rooms like Greenhouse Cafe or Garage Cafe with some luck, as well as renting out warehouses or throwing renegade parties with no permits. But until Axis Club opened in 1989, it was sparse to find a good monthly gig in Fort Worth. After the Axis closed a year later, I moved to Portland, as Fort Worth continued to grow exponentially thanks to Melissa Kirkendall and Kelly Parker: The Crossing, Mad Hatters, Engine Room, Impala. Soon after followed Aardvark, Wreck Room, and others as new faces plugged into the scene and ORIGINAL LIVE MUSIC was all over town. I returned to Fort Worth in 1997, finding the entire D/FW music scene in a full-blown musical renaissance. Thousands of good high quality local bands playing unique original music nightly. I’m so glad to have been there in the early days to watch it grow into the scene that it is today. And I’m glad I get to continue to play new places in Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin in my late 50’s…
Dancing in the Moonlight of our Existence 