Bringing on the leather

"We have three pretty unique concepts," Allen says of himself and his partners in the gallery. "It seemed like fun to try to run a shop exposing people to all three: Joey's art is really nice, Sarah does her posters, and I have something like 25,000 16-mm films. We ran across this space in Exposition Park, which is a great area for us, and we thought we could have this great venue for experimentation."

Right now, Allen plans on hosting music in the back yard the last Friday of every month, and Sock Monkey debuts as a live-music venue on opening night: At 8:30 p.m., Captain Audio will perform a half-hour set--the only "real set" of the evening, Allen explains--followed by "experimental performances" by a number of local bands, including some of the guys in Tripping Daisy performing as The Platinum Experience; Bedhead's Chris Wheat and members of Bobgoblin playing as the neat project; and members of the Hazy Daze Collective, local DJs who make the rave-circuit rounds.

"It's completely disorganized," Allen says of the night's lineup, laughing. "And we're going to see how it works with the DJs on one end of the yard and the bands on the other. It's going to be a psychedelic freakout. The idea is to have it all be experimental. I mean, we're not gonna have bands perform. We're trying to highlight artists, to let them do their thing in a more artsy manner, something you can't do at Curtain Club or Trees. Most creative people have stuff they do in their bedroom with a four-track, but you can't necessarily take it out to the masses because they're not paying to hear you experiment. So I'm trying to provide it in a gallery without a cover charge." Sounds like, well, paradise.

Scene, heard
The rare opportunity to catch the Earl Harvin Trio is reason enough to recommend the handful of club dates forthcoming this week; that Harvin, pianist Dave Palmer, and bassist Fred Hamilton will be recording a live album makes it that much more special. On July 31, the trio will perform at Sambuca in Deep Ellum; the next night, they'll play Dan's Bar in Denton. Then, on August 3 and 4, they'll take the stage at the Gypsy Tea Room, where they will record the forthcoming disc for Mark Elliott and Keith Foerster's Leaning House Records, the best jazz label in America, run by two former Thomas Jefferson High School students who never seem to make any money capturing lightning in a bottle. The Harvin Trio live album, with an indefinite release date, will mark Leaning House's second in-concert disc: In September, the label will release former Atlantic Records alto saxophonist Wessell Anderson's recording of his recent appearance at the Village Vanguard in Manhattan. And score one for Elliott: Reverend jazz critic Stanley Crouch is writing the liner notes for Anderson's album--appropriate, as Anderson plays with Wynton Marsalis, and Crouch and Marsalis are tighter than David Coverdale's pants...

They're not exactly opening for Metallica, but it's close enough--if you count being on a completely different stage, like, close. Chet Arthur (the metal band, not the 21st president of the United States) was just named one of the dozens of semi-finalists in Musician magazine's ongoing "Best Unsigned Band" contest, along with such local bands The Visitors and Triprocket. The grand prize--to be determined by a panel of judges that includes Ani DiFranco, Joe Perry, and Moby--is a bunch of equipment. Good luck!

--Robert Wilonsky

Send Street Beat e-mail and Dio eight-tracks to rwilonsky@dallasobserver.com