"One night, in B.B. King's home, this guy comes in, dressed up, and tells Gate, 'You know, I gave you that name. I want you to go and do good with it.'" That man was the late New Orleans gospel singer Arnold "Gatemouth" Moore, 10 years his senior, speaking to Brown as if he were a teen. As the story goes, Moore canceled a Memphis concert decades ago. Brown was in the audience, and when he heard Gatemouth Moore couldn't make it, he jumped on the stage--"Well, Gatemouth Brown is here!" As Cutler tells it, when Moore recounted this story, Brown didn't object to a word. "He just sat there and smoked his pipe."
In April, Brown brought that pipe to Dallas to smoke while watching a benefit concert at Poor David's Pub, where Cutler and his wife performed alongside Bugs Henderson and other local blu--er, sorry, Gatemouth--American music figures to raise money for Brown's rising medical bills. Though wheelchair-bound with an oxygen tube, Brown was still his old self. "Gate was hollering at Bugs when he played," Cutler says. "'I'm gonna kick your ass if you don't turn it down!'"
As a longtime friend and an unofficial father to Brown's daughter, Rene, Cutler shared many stories about the eccentric guitar legend and gave thanks to Brown's longtime bandmates in Gates Express, but he held his composure while talking about the late musician as adept with a guitar as he was with a harp, piano and fiddle. The way he sees it, Brown, with countless album releases and worldwide tours, accomplished what he'd set out to. "He always claimed he was from a vortex beyond Mars, and he came here to teach us humanoids something. I guess he's gone back to that vortex," Cutler says. "I sure miss him."
Radio, radio: The other day, we were browsing through Internet blogs in search of meaningful social commentary and/or chicks in states of undress when we stumbled upon some utterly random--and great--local music news. And no, it didn't have to do with nudity. Andrea Roberts, bassist for the Happy Bullets, stated in an online journal that her band's latest album, The Vice and Virtue Ministry, reached #84 on the CMJ Radio 200 charts last week. Wait--how the heck did that happen? Don't get us wrong, because we think the album is a beautiful chunk of psych-pop, but we didn't know anybody else in America was paying attention.
It turns out Team Clermont is. Undeniable Records, the label behind the Bullets and local super-poppers The Tah-Dahs, has teamed up with the indie-pop-minded publicity firm from Athens, Georgia, that's behind national sensations such as Apples in Stereo and Death Cab for Cutie and Dallas bands like Captain Audio and The Polyphonic Spree. The promotional team-up has resulted in spins on "over a hundred college radio stations" for both bands, according to Clermont publicist Lucas Jensen, and the attention is helping--on a recent mini-tour through Colorado, the band was passing out fliers at a festival and were stopped by a group of teens. "We don't need those," they said. "We heard you on the radio--you're the reason we drove here."
In November, the bands' latest albums will see a national re-release tied into a bigger push in magazines and newspapers, and Jensen hopes for a huge result. "What we're presenting to people is this idea of an emerging Dallas pop scene," he says. "There's no reason for Dallas not to have the same level of attention as other cities." Amen, brother. See what he's talking about when the Bullets play Barley House on Thursday with Chicago's Palaxy Tracks.
Handstamps: Don't hesitate--go to Deep Ellum on Sunday for Deep Relief. Enjoy eight venues of local music and give to the Red Cross at all of 'em... Pilotdrift throws a CD release concert for new album Water Sphere at the Cavern on Monday...Get a lesson in local hip-hop Sunday at Tom Cats from E-One, Steve Austin, Al Lyric and KNES.
