Dallas Music Blog

"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.

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."

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

"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.

Check out our accompanying slideshow for more images from this week's installment of Echoes and Reverberations.



Sly Stone was born there. Roy Orbison and Don Henley went to school there. Pat Boone and Dr. Phil even made the scene.

But enough about all that: Let's talk about skronk monkeys trippin' balls at Fry Street Fair. Let's remember the graffiti artists getting sick with the acrylic... and smelly jazz doods rippin' minor scales for eight hours straight in an effort to land a spot in the UNT One O'Clock Lab Band.

"OK, you can play. Now play me something I dig." - Miles Davis

Denton, Texas: Where creative artists have been coming for decades to master music theory and wreak havoc on our ear drums and eyeballs. With two big music festivals happening there in the next week, let's belly up to the plank and ask three generations of culture jammers to flip through the psychedelic scrap book...

The staff of the Zoo, as seen on Liles' bedroom wall poster.

I was twelve years old and up way past my bedtime.

The headphones were on and I was hiding underneath the blankets. The stereo was tuned to a Dallas radio station called "The Zoo". A DJ named JD was playing a track from The Beatles' White Album called "Revolution #9", which had no guitars, drums, verses or choruses--just ten minutes of psychedelic backwards tape loops and abstract sound collage.

In 1974, Dallas rock radio was a truly subversive phenomenon. Program directors and DJs had the guts to try some new shit. It wasn't uncommon to hear songs that you were long enough to lose your virginity to: "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin, "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent, and Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like We Do?" were all like sex on the radio. Fringe artists like Funkadelic, Frank Zappa and Little Feat were getting regular spins at night. An experimental instrumental record like the Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein" even registered as a hit single. Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon was on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart for over five years straight.

For a twerp kid in Richardson, The Zoo was the analog portal into a bizarre subversive counterculture. A mysterious black vacuum where men wore earrings, women smoked pot and all of the lyrics were profoundly poetic. (What was a stairway to heaven, anyway? And just how much did it cost? Have you seen the wheel in the sky? I hear it keeps on turnin'.)

Texas music looks great.

It provokes the imagination and illustrates the intangible. For years, we've been providing the necessary flavor to help filmmakers tell their stories.

It's what we do; we're obviously good at this kind of thing.

And it goes both ways: Movie soundtracks are the kind of thing that can break an artist or spark a career.

The late Elliott Smith and his musical contributions to the film Good Will Hunting provide a good case in point. Honestly, had anybody heard of him yet at that point?

The song "Stay" was featured in the film Reality Bites and subsequently introduced the world to Hockaday's Lisa Loeb. Director Ben Stiller's enthusiasm for the song helped spark a bidding war to sign her to a record deal.

We've also provided the odd cameo or stunt band.

They were loud, rude, bratty and obnoxious. They smoked pot, drank lots of beer, did drugs and slept in their clothes. If you were a guy who hung out at Theatre Gallery during the late '80s, chances are pretty good that one (or more) of them fucked your girlfriend.

And they got away with it all because they were the best band in town.

When the Buck Pets' eponymous debut album was released on Island Records in 1987, your girl started making some plans of her own. She saw that album cover and decided she wanted a piece of that action for herself.

Men my age put that record on the turntable and practically jumped out of our skin, wondering how these four kids from north of I-635 could shred shit so poetic. 

In the summer of 1986, the Theatre Gallery was all about confronting the established aesthetic sensibilities of the comfortable arts patron.

Basically, we loved to shock the shit out of people. Our venue existed to raise the bar on outrageousness and freedom of expression.

Example: One of our door persons was the teenage daughter of the Chief of the Dallas Police Department at the time. She was also a talented painter who had briefly dated the member of a high-profile Dallas band. Shortly after the couple broke up, she created a large and shockingly realistic painting of his twisted and sexually-aroused naked torso in the aftermath of a horrible automobile accident. It was like a still frame from a graphic XXX snuff film. But the painting was dope, so we hung that shit in the front window of our gallery space. As far as we can tell, nobody ever told her Dad about it.

That's how we knew our gallery was still under the radar.

The fixation on disgust was fairly evident in our music menu as well. Austin group Dino Lee and the White Trash Revue incorporated the bleeding head of a freshly slaughtered pig on a sharp wooden staff. Other bands like Bad Brains, Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, Flaming Lips and Loco Gringos lit stuff on fire and trudged knee-deep in our blood, sweat and tears.

The autograph collectors of the world are an odd lot.

When you're a kid, the manic splat of a rock star or pro jock occasionally holds some measure of importance.

The stalking, however, was more of a commitment than I was really willing to make. I just didn't have it in me to take it that far. The few autographs that I've gathered were usually just the result of coincidentally being in the right place at the right time.

Occasional good luck wasn't enough of an incentive for me to make a serious go of it as a collector.

But years later I found myself with a steady gig as the booking agent and house DJ at Trees in Deep Ellum. And, by 1990, I had been doing this long enough where I had seen it all firsthand; the fevered rock star egos, the occasional contempt for the audience revealed only behind the curtain. It was this immediate proximity to a weekly barrage of touring acts--along with the simple mechanics of having my record collection stored in the upstairs DJ booth--that gave me a bizarre idea.

Ask these people to sign somebody else's shit.

Yesterday we said goodbye to one of the family.

Tim "Temo" Watson (aka TMO, T-mo or Timo) was an essential part of the original ragtag gang of art punks and ditch skaters who had staked out mid-'80s Deep Ellum as the blank canvas where many of us would eventually leave our mark.

Last week he lost his life after a motorcycle accident in Austin.

Back in 1985, Watson's sister Lauri lived in a tricked-out loft space above the backstage at Theatre Gallery on Commerce Street. T's big sis was a professional gypsy who would juggle flaming bowling pins on the front sidewalk, and also made amazing belts out of leather and snakeskin. She would read our Tarot Cards and did naked yoga on the roof in the middle of the night. Lauri's younger brother Temo was always there to look after her. He had this thing about protecting the people closest to him.The two of them were deeper than purple: courageous souls dedicated to a pure aspiration of experience. They regularly did the kinds of things that nobody else would do.

The guy was large and in charge; he lived for the concrete ditch. At Theatre Gallery, the Watsons were Our People.

When you're 23 years old, it's all about smoking dope out of an empty beer can, having sex in the backseat of your car, and watching Soul Train the next morning with a hammer-to-the-forehead hangover. At least, it would've been for me, if I had actually owned my own automobile.

That period of my life was spent hitch hiking through an obstacle course of dysfunction. I'm still not sure how I ever made it to the age of 24 after a critical mass of epileptic seizures, pot busts, a rehab stint/intervention and the requisite teary-eyed confessional on Oprah.

Twenty-three years old and headed for Hell--something had to give. I wisely chose alcohol and haven't emptied a bottle since. This unfamiliar transition to clarity helped me finally figure out that everybody on Soul Train had been lip-syncing. It was heartbreaking to realize that so many of my heroes were fakin' the funk. Someone had to course-correct this shit. Who would have thought that a gang of four punk rock kids from Southern California would finally bring the grime back to prime time?

Before there was ever a SXSW Music Conference in Austin, there was a yearly gathering in New York City called New Music Seminar. For one weekend each summer, the Marriot Marquis Hotel near Times Square became Ground Zero for an ungodly alternative music clusterfuck.

Industry insiders sat on orchestrated panel discussions that dissected the screwy nuts and bolts of the biz. Credentialed seminar attendees schlepped fat plastic bags of free swag provided by indie record labels and alternative music rags. Bad bands randomly passed out crappy unsolicited demo tapes to uninterested label execs. There were live shows, DJ and MC battles, expensive drugs, exotic parties and naked people with guitars. (Not to tryin' to see all that, Gibby.)

It was the success of this NMS template that later inspired similar industry-driven festivals all over the country, including SXSW.

For more photos, album art and show posters, check out our slideshow here.

Dallas bands are usually judged within the context of their efforts and accomplishments. Some spend stupid money on hair care products and aspire to a label deal; other bands actually rehearse and wanna make an important artistic statement.

Then you had the Loco Gringos. They were here to make you feel good about being drunk. Born out of the ashes of The Devices, the Loco Gringos were brilliant because they were never trying to be anything other than what they already were.

They belonged to us; we belonged to them. Our committed relationship was meaningful and real.

And so I figured that reconnecting with a few folks over our shared memories of the Loco Gringos--who'll be reuniting somewhat to play a show on Saturday, January 10, at Lakewood Bar & Grill--would be a decent and respectful way to start the year for Echoes and Reverberations. Jump here for a colorful Gringo historical retrospective.

What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas. Right?

That's where I left a temporary commitment to sobriety on an airport tarmac in 1982. Time to finally spill the beans on my surreal history in Sin City--but don't get your hopes up too high. This isn't about late night gambling binges or freak sex with expensive hookers. You save all that for the midlife crisis.

This is about a smokin' hot lifeguard getting fired over nothing, an LA punk band making a bizarre appearance on national television and me watching a room full of baffled old people hanging on for dear life.

The set up: My post-adolescent years were spent as the son of the Southland Corporation VP of Public Relations. The company owned 7-11 at the time, and one of the projects my father worked on was the yearly campaign to raise money for the annual Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy Association. Part of Dad's gig was walking onstage every couple of hours and handing Jerry the big oversize check on behalf of the company; I still remember thinking to myself that checks for that large of an amount of money were required to be that size. (I had never had a checking account up until that point, so I didn't understand the concept of credit. Plus I was really into mushrooms and Salvador Dali.)

Life has a way of dragging us off the charted path and into rather randomly obtuse trajectories. Sometimes you just feel like you're everywhere, all the time. Like you've got the whole world in the palm of your hand.

It often comes down to an intangible law of attraction: Many of us have that one person in their life that acts as a sort of magnetic avatar; a charismatic personality who radiates a sense of possibility and importance. Not necessarily a lover or mentor, but more of a spiritual companion in circumstance.

During the mid-80's, Liza Richardson debuted on the Dallas radio airwaves with her first program, The Mad Doll show on KNON. It aired on Thursday nights from 2 to 5 a.m., and the playlist included everything from the Butthole Surfers to Bob Marley.

An SMU student who actually ventured outside the University Park bubble, Richardson's circle of close friends included Elizabeth Wurtzel, the self- declared pharmaceutical lab rat and author of the novel Prozac Nation. Many of Wurtzel's X-ploits in Deep Ellum during this time period were documented in the book, and later in a straight-to-DVD film starring Christina Ricci.

The 11th grade Biology teacher once shared this insightful observation aimed specifically at those of us with long hair: "Sons, this country is divided into three groups of people: the people who shower before work (re: white collar workers); the people who shower after work (see "blue collar"); and the people who don't shower at all because they just don't want to work.

Thirty years ago this month, a band called the Grateful Dead came to Dallas and did a concert at Memorial Auditorium (aka Dallas County Convention Center)--and served as my informal introduction to the walking sewage people who were out reppin' that last group during the winter of late '78.

At 16 years old, I was still pretty new to arena rock shows; I wasn't at all familiar with the Dead's music, either, but I assumed that, with a name like "Grateful Dead", they had to be a heavy metal band like Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin.

It was my sister's first concert, too. She's always been a straight arrow. In retrospect, her even going to this show still makes no sense at all. But let's just set that aside for a moment and ponder if, indeed, everything does happen for a reason.

Driving through East Dallas the other day I had the odd impulse to swing by the old KNON studio. Kind of depressing to see an empty lot taking up that space now.

The studio was formerly located upstairs in a wooden 50’s-era two-story house at the corner of Carroll Ave. and San Jacinto Street. The Dallas chapter of ACORN inhabited the downstairs portion of the building. Bearded hippies wearing panchos and sandals had keys to the place. Climbing up the patchwork stairs was like ascending to a teenager’s secret tree house.

The house on San Jacinto was kinda like a freak Alamo; the last stand for the ghetto underground in Dallas.

Noise is not for everybody.

Some people hear a jackhammer on the street corner and promptly cover their ears; others hear a subsonic melody and random harmonic movement in the staccato repetition of mechanized machinery.

“Industrial music” is the umbrella term used to describe artists who eschew acoustic or organic instrumentation for equipment like samplers, sequencers, and the odd chunk of found metal. Vocals aren’t so much sung as spoken or bleated repeatedly as if coming from a military drill sergeant. The tone is usually quite serious and utilitarian, totally devoid of any sense of humor.

Rule of thumb: If the audience is smiling, the artist must suck. Over the past three decades the definition of industrial music has become even more oblique; popular groups like Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson have incorporated various elements of replicated mechanized noise within the context of mainstream dance music. Other groups like Skinny Puppy, Consolidated and Pigface have leveraged industrial noise as a backdrop to message politics and human rights issues.

It’s hard to imagine that any of us could ever develop an emotional connection to any of the sterile corporate live music venues here in the DFdub. We don’t think fondly of places where the employees wear headsets and matching uniforms, scowl into walkie-talkies or feel the need to cavity search the patrons on their way in the front door.

Fuck that homeland security shit.

How many of us would gladly trade in the House of Blues, Firewater or The Palladium to have back Trees, Arcadia Theatre or the Bronco Bowl?

We’ve seen a lot of distinctive music venues come and go over the years. Thankfully, a few timeless classics like Black Forest Theatre, Sons of Herman Hall and the Majestic Theatre still remain. And all of them have had their individual stories. They’ve all had their good nights and their disasters.

But few have the morbid legacy of the Longhorn Ballroom.

This week's Echoes and Reverberations installment comes with an accompanying slideshow courtesy of John Spath. Check it out here.

In the spirit of the presidential election, let’s reflect upon that memorable week when radical protest art and conservative politics collided on the streets of our hometown.

All eyes were on Us: It was August of 1984 and The City That Killed Kennedy was once again the center of the American socio-political universe. For years we had been sweating bullets at the scene of the crime; the complicity of proximity had shameless conspiracy theorists making money hand-over-fist by preying on our misfortune.

Ronald Reagan was channeling John Wayne and Dallas was host to the Republican National Convention. The local city government was doing what it could to ensure that we put our best foot forward. It was implied that we needed to regain the trust and respect of the rest of the country.

This right-wing pep rally was seen a real chance to leverage the media spotlight and establish the brand of the city as a safe haven for the old money Conservative Elite. For two decades we had been unfairly burdened with the horrible memory of what happened that November morning in 1963. Twenty-one years later, a punk rock band called the Dead Kennedys was coming to town to lead a political protest rally only a few blocks from JFK was assassinated.

Say what you will about DK’s bandleader Jello Biafra, but the guy has balls the size of Jupiter.

During the late '80s and early '90s, I was a frequent contributor to Your Flesh, a seminal Minneapolis-based art and music fanzine.

One of the myriad perks of this gig was that it led to actual paying jobs; YF editor Peter Davis was particularly generous when it came to steering real work my way whenever he was occasionally pitched story ideas that were too mainstream for his own publication.

This was the case one morning when my phone rang and the Caller ID revealed a twelve-digit number--it might have even been the first time anyone had ever called me from overseas. Mine was a very sheltered life; it was already next week over there for all I knew.

On the other end of the line was the female editor of Rip, an offshoot of the German heavy metal magazine Metal Hammer. She introduced herself (I’ve since forgotten her name), gave me the rundown on the new mag, and pitched me an offer to contribute to her publication on a regular basis.

Sounded like a good fit to me; there was a time when I actually listened to heavy metal on a pretty regular basis.

I had faked my way through everything else in life up until that point, and this would require even less effort. "Fuck it," I figured. "I’m in."

The first assignment seemed somewhat within my area of relative expertise: Review a Dallas show by the Canadian band Rush, and interview one of the band members for a companion feature item. I accepted the gig right away. We were still a couple of months away from opening up Trees; I was in between paychecks.

For the 500 bucks she was offering, I would have written a blowjob review of Loverboy; I was so broke at the time she probably could have talked me into anything.

A little over 22 years ago, the Butthole Surfers decided to tape their performances during a weekend-long stint at the Theatre Gallery in Deep Ellum.

It was the first time Dallas-based producer David Castell had tried recording a live album. And he'd rather not relive the memory.

“Oh God, you’re not gonna write about that, are you?” he asked last week. “Please don’t. That was one of the worst gigs of my life. It was a freakin’ nightmare.”

Oh, come on, David. Let’s dig up all of those ugly repressed memories and recreate the carnage. Just for a laugh. Let’s at least give our peeps a little street data they can use to contrast the experience when the original Surfers lineup returns to Dallas for their big gig next week at the Granada Theater.

It was the spring of 1978 and rock music was in big trouble. The Village People’s “YMCA” was sharing space on the Billboard charts with the Bee Gees and Andy Gibb. The Rolling Stones had (gasp!) gone disco with their single “Miss You,” and Styx was encouraging us to come sail away in their twisted tsunami of spandex and hairspray. At the same time -- and still very much under the radar, mind you -- weird stories about bizarre new punk rock bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols and The Ramones were starting to show up in magazines like Creem and Circus.

As the proud adolescent owner of a beat-up old Gibson SG guitar, I was ready to make some noise and take on the world. The only problem was that all of my heroes had either shamelessly sold out, or settled into a comfortable heroin hibernation. Led Zeppelin had lost their swagger, I was already sick of Rush and Yes and all that falsetto prog-rock, and, of course, I fucking hated disco music and everything it stood for.

I needed new ammunition.