The telephone poles in your cozy little home neighborhood are festooned with flyers for garage sales, lost pets, and maybe a high school cheerleader car wash.
Telephone Pole, Deep Ellum, Texas
This, however, is Deep Ellum and the wooden poles aren’t decorated… they are armored. The solid steel coating… the Staple Mail, as it were… comes from one source. Band Flyers. Lots of Band Flyers. Decades of Band Flyers.
How long do they stay here? I guess pretty much forever. The real Renaissance of Deep Ellum happened in, say 1982 or so (when I moved to Dallas and started going down there to the Prophet Bar and Theater Gallery) so I suppose some of these are over thirty years old.
See that one staple a third of the way down? Yeah, that one. That’s from an old concert by MC900 Foot Jesus. Below it is one by Reverend Horton Heat. That old, rusty one at the bottom… New Bohemians (featuring Edie (Eatme) Brickell). There’s TimBuk3 and Mo Jo Nixon and True Believers. Don’t forget the Butthole Surfers with Grinding Teeth opening. The Loco Gringos left one behind. There’s one from The Blasters and another by Joe Christ and the Healing Faith. Of course there’s a shiny new one for Home by Hovercraft and a bunch of them from Brave Combo shows.
(yes, these are all shows that I have actually seen in Deep Ellum)
On and on. Think about it… every one of these staples (and the thousands you don’t see, they go all the way around, from knee high to ten feet in the air) represent a music show at a Deep Ellum Club sometime. That’s a lot of music. That’s a lot of memories. That’s a lot of steel hammered into creosote and pine.
It was time for another Setlist on the Green in Klyde Warren Park – I had been to the first and second ones last season, and the one last week was rained out (though the weather didn’t seem so bad to me). I really have enjoyed these, so I rode the DART train downtown after work and bought myself a sushi roll from a food truck, a beer from the beer trailer, and sat down with my camera down front, ready to rock.
What’s cool about the Setlist on the Green is that, with six different folks playing only a half hour each, you get a variety of styles and attitudes – and if there is one that does not fit your fancy, well, wait a minute and there will be another one. The park is a unique gorgeous urban setting, – even if the stage area and the restaurant site next door seems to be in a perpetual state of construction.
TreyChick at Setlist on the Green
The festivities started with TreyChick (Trey Pendergrass and Natalie Young) who brought a nice sense of humor to their performance. They also were the first band I’ve ever seen using iPads for setlist and lyric sheets. I made a note of one of their lyrics – “I”m not good enough to love you, only good enough to fix your car.” I know that feeling.
Then Luna Matto, Johnny Beuford, and Becky Middleton (from Ishi) did their sets – and they were really cool. As each performer performed and the evening went on, the sun setting, the clouds skidding by overhead between the skyscrapers like oil paints smeared on the sky, behind the stage the distant cars on the busy road shooting down into the buried highway under the park, the crowd slowly growing… it was a great time.
The crowd slowly grows in Klyde Warren Park.
But, I have to admit, almost everyone, me included, were there to hear the last performer, Home by Hovercraft.
First of all… what a damn cool name for a band. I remember, back in the early days of the world (1981) sitting down with another music fanboy and systematically deciding on the best band names. We even made a bracket and voted and such. In the end, he had Talking Heads as the best band name – and I agreed, though I thought The Teardrop Explodes was a hair better. This was thirty years before I had heard of Home by Hovercraft… which would give those titans of the time a run for the money.
Second, there is a lot of buzz about this band and I wanted to see them in the worst way. When the news of something hot and new reaches me, the least cool and hip person on the planet, you know it must be worthwhile.
Home by Hovercraft is greatness. The first thing that strikes you is the instrumentation. The lead singer plays a tarnished euphonium when he isn’t singing. The backup singer (his wife) plays keyboards plus there’s another singer with a mandolin or harmonica. Tonight they added a cello player. There’s a drummer on a kit, but he is assisted in the rhythm section by an Irish Dancer (the lead singer’s sister), stomping out beats on a hunk of basketball court hardwood. When she isn’t dancing, she plays a small glockenspiel.
Home by Hovercraft
Lead Singer with Euphonium
Drums and Mandolin
Irish Dancing Rhythm Section
Keyboards
Home by Hovercraft
Despite the odd instruments, this isn’t a novelty band. They are very tight and extremely talented. The vocals are strong and unique.
I have no idea what genre their music falls into (other than that awful moniker, “indie,” which means nothing)… I guess it can be best described as sounding like Home by Hovercraft.
Home by Hovercraft has a strong theatrical background which comes through on stage – they are very entertaining and confident up there. They have done a musical On the Eve which will be produced by Theater Three later on this year. I have got to see that. I think a lot of the music on their album Are We Chameleons? (I downloaded it from Amazon) is from the musical.
Across the parking lot from Deep Sushi down Deep Ellum way there is a wall painted with four portraits. I have no idea who painted these or why…. I haven’t done any research on the paintings. For some reason I don’t want to.
The parking lot for Deep Sushi, down in the Deep Ellum section of Dallas.
The four are all Dallas musicians… but a very eclectic lot. First off, Erykah Badu – by far the most famous. You know who she is.
Erykah Badu
The next is a little more obscure. Ronnie Dawson was pure, absolute, Dallas Rockabilly. He was born here in 1939 and died of throat cancer in 2003. He was much more popular in England than here.
Ronnie Dawson
After these two classics, there are two current up-and-coming local artists. I have seen both of them in the last year and have written about them. First of all, the duo called the O’s. I saw them at the Patio Sessions at the Winspear Opera House… and was very impressed.
So here they are. If nothing else, a pretty good set of examples of the wide variety of music spawned on the overheated streets of Dallas. I’ll bet there are folks like that where you are from too… even if there aren’t paintings of them on a wall somewhere.
Bill Chance 