"Well, I was passing by a pawn shop in an older part of town, something caught my eye and stop and turned around / I stepped inside and then I spied in the middle of it all, was a beat up old guitar hanging on the wall / 'What do want for that piece of junk?' I asked the old man / He just smiled and took it down and put it in my hand / He said, 'You tell me what's it worth... you're the one who wants it..."
-- Guy Clark - "The Guitar"

The author with his first guitar crush, a white Gibson SG Jr.

​The ongoing relationship between a musician and their favorite instrument usually represents a lifetime commitment.

At first, you pick this thing up and it makes that initial impression. A connection is made. Time stands still. From that point on, you don't ever wanna let go. Life is good. You're in this for the long haul together.

We never forget that first axe crush. Mine was a white Gibson SG Jr. It had no traveling case or gig bag. A previous owner had apparently left it sitting in the sun for years, and the paint job was cracked like an intricate spider web. Once hospital white, it had turned the color of pale urine; a warped black plastic pick guard bulging at the screws, one single coil pickup and two lowly control knobs: volume and tone. Both dials were turned to "10" and never adjusted.

The thing was barely a guitar. I was barely a musician. Perfect fit all the way around.More >>

DDTers Jason Wolford, EZ Eddie D and Jeff Liles

​ The puke green exterior made the Mitchell Building in Deep Ellum look like a frightening industrial shop of horrors. Far from being accidental, that's by design -- the place was actually a weapons manufacturing facility during Word War II.

In the early '80s, the dark fortress was reinvented as a squatter's art colony. Painters and musicians braved time and temperature to suffer for their means of expression. Dissonant noise was part of the daily fabric; power saws, compressors, welding torches and the banging of nails blended in with new bands like The Daylights, who could often be heard honking and squealing during rehearsals in the middle of the night.

"Decadent Dub Team began at the Mitchell building, in my old studio space there on the second floor," recalls longtime Dallas musician Paul Quigg. "The building was like a magnet that attracted everything from aspiring artists, musicians, writers, future technoids and the like, to runaways, groupies and meth cooks. The scene there on a weekend night was blast. All the bands loading back in at 3 a.m. after their gigs in Deep Ellum, with their attendant admirers, groupies, and partners in debauchery. The freaks came out at night indeed."

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Outside the Theatre Gallery in Deep Ellum a quarter-century ago.

It was the summer of 1984 and the city of Dallas was in the midst of a serious makeover. The Republican National Convention was coming to town and Big D was trying to put a conservative foot forward as the media spotlight fixated on our JFK Bermuda Triangle.

It all comes back around on December 5.

​Our local music scene at the time consisted of a half dozen neon rock and roll bars and a handful of tiny punk rock dives: out-of-the-way places like like Studio D, Metamorphosis Concert Hall and Nairobi Room. Classic rock booking agents ignored the bands that played all original material. It was understood that you were expected to cover all of the top radio songs if you ever wanted to land a gig at one of the "wet t-shirt" nightclubs.

In August of that year, a 26-year-old interior design school dropout named Russell Hobbs drove his 25-year-old Mercedes convertible down Commerce Street looking for an empty warehouse space to live in. The irony of this was evident on many levels. Most of the buildings in this warehouse district just east of downtown were dilapidated and empty -- the name "Commerce" (like Riverfront Boulevard today) was false advertising. And Hobbs wasn't your typical Mercedes owner. He was drifting through a veritable ghost town; Deep Ellum had lost touch with its identity. Once a popular entertainment district during the prohibition era, the neighborhood had fallen into an ongoing holding pattern of relative anonymity.

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[Editor's Note: This is the last time we'll be running Echoes and Reverberations as a regular feature here on DC9. Will we see future installments? Don't know yet. But in the meantime, a big thanks to Jeff Liles for the past 30 installments of the series. It's been fun.]

Shallow Reign, performing at Lee Park in Dallas.

When I was a little kid our family had four really big peach trees in the back yard. Never could stand the taste of those fucking things, but as it turned out, downer peaches were the perfect projectile. There were hundreds of them scattered everywhere. For most of the kids in our far North Dallas neighborhood, everyday life was a war zone with BB guns, slingshots, rocks and rotting peaches. You got used to looking over your shoulder, lest you catch a sniper's peach grenade to the side of the head.

That shit hurt.

Bob Watson and I grew up directly across the alley from each other. From that first day in 1969, there was an apparent conflict dynamic--I was a shameless slave to The Beatles; he was all about the Rolling Stones.

While the other kids our age wanted to grow up and become astronauts or Dallas Cowboys, the two of us wanted to be rock and roll stars, off on some oblivious us-against-the-world action.

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Many of them were tucked away in suburban strip malls, their storefronts always the black sheep of the retail family. They were usually owned by a single lifelong music fan, someone who relished the opportunity to dog-paddle in the eye of the pop culture hurricane. Sometimes they smelled like incense or cigarette smoke. You could hear the music coming out from 100 yards away.

Most of the formative moments of my life happened inside a record store. My grandfather bought my first album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, at the Melody Shop in Northpark. In 1977, the managers of Sound Town at Promenade in Richardson gifted me with free copy of Never Mind the Bollocks... and introduced me to punk rock. A year later, I met the guys in Van Halen at Disc Records in Valley View Mall.

When I was 22 years old, Bill Wisener at Bill's Records bought me a bass guitar so I could try out for a band called The Doo (aka Group Six). I got the band gig, which inevitably led to a job at Theatre Gallery in Deep Ellum.

Fast forward to 24 years later in 2009: As I write this, there is a band practicing in the back of Bill's Records. In honor of National Record Store Day, I figured this would be a good occasion to look back at many of the people and places that helped shape who were are as a culture.

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It was 15 years ago last week when a landscaper found Kurt Cobain's body sprawled out on the floor of his garage apartment.

Time flies when you're dead, huh? His suicide will always be a shining example of why an aspiration to celebrity is such a vacuous exercise in ego. The guy could never admit that he actually liked being in the spotlight. Cobain loved being adored by his fans, but spent the last years of his life trying to prove that he was above all that. Instead, he feigned disinterest and shot a shitload of dope. Then he shot himself in the head.

I'll spare you having to read another account of the Nirvana show at Trees in 1991, but I will share one moment from that night that really put this whole thing in perspective for me.

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The original Nervebreakers lineup.

Defining moment: For a suburban teenage kid from North Dallas in 1977, a delirious new underground movement called punk rock inspired a profound and urgent departure from the regular routine of cruising Forest Lane or hanging out at the Gemini Drive-In movie theater.

It was a Ramones show on a snowy night at Panther Hall in Fort Worth that lured me headlong into the lifestyle; 16-year-old Joan Jett and her band The Runaways were the opening act. Vern Evans' parents drove us to the show and waited all night out in the parking lot. I couldn't stop laughing in the car on the drive back; everything was funny because I was stoned and these punk rock people in leather jackets had just totally rearranged my musical and artistic priorities.

I bought the Sex Pistols debut record without having the faintest idea what the word "Bollocks" meant; had no idea what "Belsen" or "EMI" or "Anarchy" was all about. I was still a kid. Still stupid. They were screaming about God knows what. All I knew is that is was loud as fuck and sounded important. From that point on, I started going to every single punk rock show that happened in town.
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Hal Samples

Carter Albrecht

I was not ready to do this.

For a couple of weeks, I've tried to mentally prepare myself to write a proper story about Carter Albrecht's Jesus is Alive... and Living in London, the recently-released solo album that he was in the process of finishing at the time of his death.

I braced myself for the inevitable emotional breakdown or lapse into melancholy upon initially hearing it the first time.

How do you process something this personal without revisiting the initial shock of loss?

Turns out, this record is a gorgeous thing to behold.

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It was 32 years ago today that Led Zeppelin opened its 1977 North American tour in Dallas.

I was 14 years old at the time, a student at Westwood Jr. High School, and Led Zep was the most important thing in my life.

I knew how to play all of the band's songs on air guitar. Its movie The Song Remains the Same had just come out, too, and the band opened the show with the title track from the film.

There was no opening act, and tickets were like eight bucks. But getting tickets to the show was a nightmare...More >>

"Are you one of the beautiful people? Is my name on the list? I want to be with the beautiful people... I wanna feel like I'm missed..." Eels - "Guest List"

I went to high school with a kid named Greg Holman. His father was a painter named George, who lived in the old Expo Park space that later became the Bar of Soap.

George Holman was the first truly gifted intellectual I had ever crossed paths with; he was the one who showed me the true value of knowledge and information. He was also a guy who loved inspiring young people with his art. My friends and I would often pile into a car and drive down to Holman's place to hang out, gobble some microdot, listen to him talk and watch the creation of his work.

One night, he told us about this French guy by the name of Philippe Starck. George detailed Starck's relevance and introduced us to his sense of design aesthetic by showing us these bizarre catalogs he had brought back from overseas. I was a kinda young and dumb to be thinking about stuff like expensive European furniture, but Holman's description of Starck's creative approach made it seem really interesting.

George also mentioned that he was helping to bring this guy to Dallas to open a nightclub in an old brewery just northwest of downtown. For months afterwards he kept us up to date with details on the renovation of the building.

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