24 April 20–26, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents finds that while most people discover new music through streaming apps or radio, nearly a third rely on recommendations from family and friends. Whether the same applies to the live-mu- sic scene is hard to say. “That still does happen, but not as much as it used to,” Habtezghi says of local fan fol- lowings. While relying on friends might not be a stable business model for a band to succeed, Habtezghi says, having a few followers will- ing to come out to shows is important. “It’s not a lot to ask if you’re playing to get like five people to come out,” he says, com- paring it to the first dollar in the tip jar, put there to encourage others to give. “When people walk by and there’s nobody in here, nobody [else] is gonna come in here. It takes a party to make it a party.” The standard $10 cover charge at local bars is small enough, he says, but “random people off the street, when you have 10, 12 options [for other bars] and you’re just try- ing to get a drink, it makes it a little hard.” He also raises the point made recently by Jamie Lee Curtis, who complained that most concerts start too late. “The ones that are willing to come out who pay for tickets, they don’t really want to come out at night,” says Habtezghi, who has been pushing for earlier shows in Deep El- lum. “After midnight, they just want to get back to business. “It is hard to get people, the non-regulars, people who don’t live in the area to travel here,” he says. “I think a lot of that has to do not necessarily with the violence … [but] the headlines have been so negative. I think the negative headlines for the neighborhood specifically, that hurt, they hurt.” Still, he acknowledges that the violence is real, citing the example of musician Chief Rebel, real name Cameron Cooper, who was working inside The Free Man on Commerce Street on Super Bowl Sunday when he was critically injured by a stray bullet that went through the venue’s window as two men outside fired shots at each other. Habtezghi says he wouldn’t have his own family come out to Deep Ellum for a late- night show. As Collab played, about two blocks down from Three Links and less than two hours later, two people died after gunfire in Deep Ellum. A gunman wearing a ski mask fired multiple shots, killing a man named Ricky Gossett on the patio at the Bitter End, along with a bystander, 30-year-old Danielle Jones, a single mother on a moms’ night out. Jones was visiting from Houston and wanted to take her son to Six Flags. Their deaths made headlines. The Old Cool M usic biopics often share familiar storylines: Play badly at the school dance, start playing better, have ev- eryone rocking in their seats as the squares get mad, cut a small record, freak out when it plays on the radio, begrudgingly get rid of your faithful manager and get signed to a la- bel, become an international success, cheat on your spouse, lose everything to drugs and find redemption … or death. Most of those tropes applied to a time when TikTok was only a character on Re- turn to Oz. And just as the internet changed absolutely everything and let us cheer for our favorite artists from afar and see what they had for breakfast, music marketing has changed almost entirely. Paul Slavens moved to Denton from Ne- braska and started a band in 1986, when get- ting the word out required manual labor and a tolerance for paper cuts. “Making handmade posters and sticking them to telephone poles,” he says. “Making handmade postcards and putting stamps on them and hand-addressing them and getting mailing lists and sending them out; there was no email.” Though he’s built a name with his bands Ten Hands, The Travoltas and as a pianist and solo artist, he’s not up to speed with what works these days in music marketing. “It’s like Facebook takes the place of ev- erything, but it does a horrible job,” Slavens says. “They have no interest in helping make my gigs well attended unless I send them money for it.” The biggest difference Slavens sees in fan attendance is that before the internet, the reasons fans came out to local shows were more primal. “I hate to be kind of crude about it, [but] a lot of it has to do with the mating rituals of young people,” he says. “You’re trying to get people to dance. And that’s what it was, a place to get dancing and sweaty and rub up against other young people and, you know, see that girl that you normally saw at the gig, and that’s the only chance you’re gonna get to meet her, that kind of thing. And I’m sure that all is still going on; it’s just not going on with original rock bands.” DJ nights now dominate much of Dallas’ nightlife, but until the early 2000s, there was a bigger local celebrity scene with “Dal- las-famous” bands that pulled in sizable fol- lowings from the suburbs before breaking out nationally. “I don’t think you can underestimate the effect that the internet has made on every aspect of everything,” Slavens says. “And try- ing to figure out how it’s transformed things is too multidimensional to even maybe get a handle on. It’s just that times have changed, and people get their kicks in other ways than they used to.” Modern consumer habits have altered the way money is spent on live music. Lis- teners fear making a bad investment in a musical product they don’t enjoy, he says, and that’s a boon for tribute acts. “With people, it’s like, well, if I’m gonna spend 40 bucks going out, I don’t want to go and see some shitty band; let’s go see Tom Petty, I love Tom Petty,” Slavens says. “I know what I’m getting, and then I can go out and look for girls there. “The people want to make sure that they’re gonna get their money’s worth,” he adds. “They look at their experiences as products that they’re buying, and they want to make sure that they’re buying a good product with the money because the experi- ences have all been made so expensive.” Like Slavens, Danny Balis is a well-estab- lished radio personality and musician. He’s played in the bands Sorta, Sparrows, Cal- houn, and Bastards of Soul and is a co-owner of Twilite Lounge in Deep Ellum and in Fort Worth, both of which keep packed sched- ules filled with local talent. “Dallas is that kind of town where I don’t think the culture is of the type of people that seek out stuff,” he says. “It’s gotta be kind of a scene, or cool, or they’ve heard of it, or it’s popular or whatever. … I don’t think it’s their nature in Dallas to really seek stuff out and claim something as their own until it’s al- ready kind of handed to them.” Plenty of North Texas musicians have be- come household names in the last decade, but most of them “made it” elsewhere, mostly online: JD Beck, Marc Rebillet, Alli- son Ponthier, Post Malone. Few people re- member seeing them play around town before they came home famous. Grammy-winning producer Jah Born suggests that Dallas’ size — neither small enough to conquer nor big enough to propel international stardom — makes it uniquely competitive. “This is not a knock on my city. I love Dal- las,” he says. “I really feel like right now that if you are from a smaller town that you have a better shot of living the dream in a place where you could win people over and there’s a smaller amount of venues [where] the town is coming to hang.” Rapidly sprawling North Texas may have grown too big for an act to conquer, but it’s large enough for a self-sustaining original music scene, and occasionally we get it right by spotting our national stars first: Power Trip, Bobby Sessions, Sarah Jaffe, Yella Beezy, Snarky Puppy, St. Vincent. “Dallas-famous” these days may be better described as “Dallas-music-scene-famous,” but that’s not necessarily a small thing, mu- sician Keite Young says. “Musicians crashing into each other is how the Harlem Renaissance happens. That’s how Atlanta happens,” he says. “The demand doesn’t precede the supply, the sup- ply precedes the demand. Artists should give audiences a great night.” Jah Born also thinks transplants from other states are bringing a very California culture with them. “I ain’t hating on the newcomers, but a lot of the suburban population in Dallas are people that are not from here,” he says. “They don’t even know about the scene. These are recent transplants. They’re not coming here, like, you know, wanting to sup- port locals. It’s gonna take us a minute to win them over.” Newcomers are changing the culture of Deep Ellum, too. What was once the city’s live-music district is now frequented by peo- ple looking to have a cute Saturday afternoon. Jah Born calls transplants to the scene “tour- ists,” and a tourism economy brings musical pandering — see New Orleans, which has a remarkably small original music scene for a world-renowned musical destination. Almost Dallas-Famous from p23 Mike Brooks Jah Born thinks Dallas’ size makes it competitive for musicians.
