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Recent Articles By Jesse Hughey

National Features

On a Friday afternoon one week after the Transoma Five reunion show, Sloppyworld is doing a fantastic job of living up to its name.

It's dark and filthy, lit only by a few barely functioning fluorescent tubes. Dozens of bottles—empty, half-full or broken—litter the floor and every horizontal surface. Hundreds of cigarette butts have been swept into piles randomly scattered throughout the cavernous space like landmines of grime. Behind the particle-board stage, black plastic sheets hang in an apparent attempt to separate a tiny portion of the stage into "backstage." Sawhorses stand near the door, waiting to be put to work the following night as a flimsy barricade.

It's a beautiful sight.

Sloppyworld is the kind of midsized venue that could perfectly accommodate touring bands whose audiences have surpassed the Cavern's capacity but couldn't quite fill the Granada. Even better, the free parking, $5 cover for most events, laissez-faire approach to crowd control and BYOB policy give it the kind of laid-back attitude that is the polar opposite of the sterility and rapacious prices of the Palladium's Loft and the House of Blues' Cambridge Room.

I'd heard good things about Sloppyworld but hadn't been there until the January 11 Transoma Five show. It was the first time in my life I'd ever come away from a show more excited about the venue itself than the music I'd just heard. That night, I was certain that the space would be a catalyst for Dallas to regain its status as a city with a thriving live-music scene. After talking with two of the minds behind it, I'm even more excited about the possibilities, and I've mostly gotten over my nagging little doubts.

The venue is the brainchild of owner John Freeman, former frontman of '90s art-rock project The Dooms U.K. and the creative force behind the Dutch Treats (as well as an occasional contributor to the Dallas Observer's Night & Day section). It's not his first foray into the business side of local rock shows. He worked at Denton's great indie venue The Argo and at clubs in Brooklyn and until recently booked shows at The Amsterdam, an Exposition Park neighbor to his new venture.

Freeman still isn't booking shows consistently enough that he feels comfortable calling Sloppyworld "officially" open, but he thinks that day is coming soon. Maybe it'll be in March, when bands make Dallas stops on the way to or from South by Southwest. Or maybe it will be when he gets all the permits in order, a process he likens to a Kafka novel. Or maybe it will be when the city finally turns on the water. Hell, maybe making it "officially" open will just be a matter of convincing City Hall that 3601 Parry Ave. actually exists.

"That's kind of a weird line," he says. "We are open; we are having shows. But when we're 'officially' open is when we're having shows every weekend. We'll have two fully functioning bathrooms, a little bar built in, all that stuff. It should be February-ish, basically."

Since Sloppyworld first began hosting shows last fall, the initially sporadic bookings have become more and more frequent as word about the venue spreads. Since the New Year's Eve blowout with the Tah Dahs, Great Tyrant and Laura Palmer, the venue has been the host of shows including a Laptop Deathmatch and the Transoma Five show with the Theater Fire. Other exciting shows are in the works as well. Negativland is scheduled to play its first-ever Dallas gig on April 20, and Sloppyworld will be one of the venues participating in the Exposition Park-wide Melodica Festival February 22 and 23, an event that will draw national acts such as Silver Apples and Spectrum.

With the "official" opening date pushed back after every show, the water yet to be turned on and Freeman still plagued by permit issues, there's a bitter little pessimistic part of my brain warning me not to get my hopes up. Freeman has had setbacks, both personal and professional, but he seems to have the sheer willpower that it will take to make the venue work.

"I signed the lease in March 2007, and I've been having numerous permit problems, you know, just because the city seems to not want people to open new businesses, especially when they're entertainment-related," he says with a laugh. "The main problem I've had is that when I signed the lease, the space had been vacant for two years, and the business that had been here before apparently was running without a certificate of occupancy, so the address did not exist, according to the city. So I had to go down to City Hall and establish the address before I got anything done, and that took months...It's a combination of things, and part of it is just me being lazy."

Freeman, who is open about his past struggles with heroin addiction, admits that he lapsed back into using the drug—but insists it didn't hamper his efforts to open Sloppyworld.

"I had a small relapse," he says. "I was clean for years but had a little slip-up and went to rehab for a couple weeks. But I'm better now. I took care of it. It wasn't that big of a deal. On the scale of relapses, it was probably a two out of 10.

"That's always a danger, though. When you're working in the music scene, there's a lot of drugs around. I don't drink, I never have, so that's not a problem. But if someone showed up with some heroin, I'd probably do it. I hate to say it. Luckily, that's not really a problem in this town like it was in the '90s."

After getting clean, he says, he refocused his efforts to make Sloppyworld happen.

Write Your Comment show comments (11)

  1. Not sure whose mistake it was, so I'll go ahead and blame the writer-it's TRANSONA Five, not 'TRANSOMA'! Typical.

    Comment by Rachel — January 23, 2008 @ 04:58PM

  2. Yes, that was my goof. Rachel is correct, it should be Transona Five. I apologize for the mistake.

    Comment by Jesse Hughey — January 23, 2008 @ 05:57PM

  3. This is such a great article! I wish I had written it myself. Oh wait, I did. Six months ago.

    And great job not mentioning the show before it happened, btw. I'm guessing we'll have to wait for a TransoNa Five cover band to form before the band gets any decent press in this pathetic publication for aging hipsters and perverts.

    Whats next? An article about The Party? Or DIY Denton? Oh wait, this paper was six months to a year late on those as well.

    It is great to know that the Observer takes us so seriously though.

    Comment by stonedranger — January 25, 2008 @ 10:50AM

  4. The worst thing, besides the borderline plagiarism, is the serious hopeful tone of the article. Of course it's hard to take an article seriously when you fuck up a legendary band's name in the first paragraph and then continue to do. It's funny when heartfelt backfires!

    Comment by Josh — January 25, 2008 @ 12:14PM

  5. Jesus Christ, will you people back the fuck up offa Jesse and get a life? The guy accidentally types an "m" instead of an "n" and now he's fuckin' Public Enemy #1? Honestly, it's probably not a good idea for either one of you - WSJR or the Observer- to be writing about or publicizing Sloppyworld until John Freeman gets all of his ducks in a row. Still, you wanna take your territorial pissing public, even if it means putting Freeman in a precarious position with code compliance officials and his landlord. Sloppyworld could probably exist for years as an underground venue if it were a strictly word-of-mouth endeavor, but a) you had to claim Freeman's story as your own, and b) you felt the need to leverage the Observer's public profile and Jesse's article to try and validate your own fuckin' blog. Look, I'm actually one of the half dozen or so people who actually read WSJR and find it occasionally amusing, but when you stoop to this petty bullshit - pushing Sloppyworld that much closer to either getting busted or shut down by the landlord just so you can look cool- then you lose whatever credibility you ever had with me. Look, if you don't like the Observer, then go start a newspaper of your own. A blog is not a newspaper. You're hiding behind a screen name. Jesse actually signs his real name when he writes something. Until you are willing to actually stand behind your opinions, your opinions mean absolutely nothing to anyone but yourselves.

    Comment by Liles — January 27, 2008 @ 02:05PM

  6. hey MC Liles,

    Chill the fuck out. For starters, and for the record, I didn't accuse Jesse of plagiarism, I just noted that we had published a similar story six months ago. And I didn't say that the story was "my own" or that I had an exclusive right to tell it, I was just pointing out the similarity. Frankly, the Observer's former music editor never had a problem with trying to write negative stories about us in the past, so I don't see what the problem is.

    And second, how in the world do either of these stories OR my comment cause problems for Sloppyworld? We worked with John on our story and he was happy to tell it and have it posted, just as I'm sure he was with this story. If Sloppyworld thought it was a problem, they would have told us not to publish, and we would have agreed out of our interest in the venue succeeding. It's not as if John was telling us to keep it underground and we tricked him or something. We were trying to do something good, not bad, and frankly, your accusation that we don't give a shit about the venue and are in it for our own glory is completely off base to the point of being funny.

    Comment by stonedranger — January 27, 2008 @ 07:35PM

  7. John was open about everything with me as well, and seemed glad for the coverage. I didn't get into all the minutia of the code issues with him, but I think that as long as he's not selling beer or food at his "private parties" and doesn't have neighbors complaining, he should be OK till he gets in compliance.

    Comment by Jesse Hughey — January 27, 2008 @ 08:33PM

  8. Stonedranger (whoever you are), I'm chill. No worries. But help me understand something. The apparent justification for the existence of your blog is to turn open-minded people on to valid creative projects (musicians, bands, artists, venues and galleries) which manage to exist under the mainstream radar. Right? So what happens after that? You help to create a larger awareness for your favorite indie/DIY artistic endeavors, and then, if you've done what you set out to do, these projects by proxy become part of the mainstream you so thoroughly despise. Correct? Or, is there some other motivation for the implicitly promotional angle of your presentation? I'll give you guys props for having an infinite awareness of subversive culture, but what, exactly, is your motivation for promoting them to a larger potential audience if having that audience means destroying whatever indie street cred an artist may have had by existing under the radar? And is that really what any of us wants for a place like Sloppyworld? For John Freeman to legally generate enough revenue to make SW a self-supporting and cost-effective endeavor, it will certainly take regularly bringing in a much larger audience than the one which exists merely of regular WSJR and/or Dallas Observer music section readers. At what point will you flip and accuse Freeman of selling out? You have to understand that when you write, "I wrote the same article six months ago...", it looks like you're already beginning the process of "owning" the process of establishing- and eventually, destroying - the credibility of Freeman's venue once the necessary larger audience eventually discovers and then ruins it. So set me straight. Which side are you on? Will you still support Sloppyworld when Freeman is forced to book the kinds of bands or DJs who will actually generate enough revenue to turn a profit? Or, will you dismiss his DIY commitment to the venue as invalid once he starts to make a little money off of the artistically-challenged Uptown crowd?

    Comment by Liles — January 27, 2008 @ 10:01PM

  9. Liles, it's not just that he typed an 'm' instead of an 'n' (several times BTW). He didn't know their name, and he was at the fucking show! That's just pathetic and sloppy writing. And apparently since, along with you, he is one of the 'half dozen or so people' who reads weshotjr (do a quick search for his articles and you'll find that he's swiped many of his subjects from weshotjr), he should've paid attention to the many times weshotjr mentioned the Transona Five show and maybe he could have done a little research on them as some writers might do and find out the correct spelling of their name. Instead, he wasted all of his energy trying to write something important and just ended up looking foolish. I don't want to speak for stonedranger but the fact that the same thing has been covered by his blog isn't what really offends him. It's Jesse's complete lack of originality and understanding of his subjects that is more bothersome. I mean, the guy wrote an impassioned article about fucking Sorta. How can he comprehend anything remotely cool?

    Comment by Josh — January 28, 2008 @ 07:53AM

  10. Again with the territorial pissing. Josh, I think Jesse can be forgiven for misspelling a band's name when they haven't released a record in almost ten years. They might have been cool before Y2K, but "legendary"? Come on. They released two seven-inch singles, two EPs and one album before they disbanded. I'm sure they were interesting within the context of whatever was happening back in the late 90's, but are they relevant now? Please. Your assertion that Jesse Hughey (or any other writer) lifts their story ideas from WSJR is laughable - just another vacuous effort to claim the empty title of Arbiter of Taste. (This afternoon, I was very curious to see if WSJR had ever written about James Hall, Pleasure Club, The Spores, Pedestrian, Scro11, The Radishes or LA Riots, but I guess their website was down. James Hall has released five albums and played DFW at least a dozen times - you'd think he would have shown up on the WSJR radar by now. And you guys really need to check out Scro11 and the Radishes - Earl Harvin plays drums on both records. Blair Sinta, also from Denton, is the drummer for Pedestrian. But I digress...) Oh, and I happen to like Sorta. Does that me uncool too? God, I hope so. I mean, I know gimmicky shit like Ghosthustler is all the rage these days (or is that Ghostland Observatory?), so I'll do my best to keep up with all of your favorite GarageBand "bands". In the meantime, give Jesse a break and spare us the insinuation that WSJR is the ONLY place to go to get the real story on anything...

    Comment by Liles — January 28, 2008 @ 05:14PM

  11. Pissing match aside, how great is it that something like SloppyWorld even has a chance at existing in the dead zone that is Dallas? Freeman is one of the funniest guys I've ever met, and he has impeccable musical taste - I'm not sure that is a recipe for successful club owning but I'll be rooting for him.

    Props to John for giving the Argo its due. In its heyday the place was absolutely wild ass and open to basically anything. My favorite memory was of a show that didn't happen - the silver dracula John Cale refusing to get out of his bus because his manager demanded all the $$ up front (or some such nonsense). Robe and the boys were all 23-26 yrs old and just making it up. When "techno" was "faggy" and "anti-indie" Rob and the guys welcomed it against their own personal tastes. I also notice that the Argo gets little recognition in the history of the Rock Lottery, but whatever...

    Godspeed John. I'll never forget "Mediterranean Houseboy".

    Comment by Zack — January 28, 2008 @ 10:13PM

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