Welcome back to Hell’s Lobby

George Neal moved to Denton in 1991, leaving behind Midwestern State University and Wichita Falls to attend the University of North Texas and immerse himself in the area’s rapidly expanding music community. Since then, he’s been Denton music’s biggest cheerleader, a familiar face at almost every show in town, whether or not he’s onstage with his band, Little Grizzly. So when One Ton Records released the Welcome to Hell’s Lobby compilation in 1994, Neal was a little disappointed. Sure, the disc had tracks by The Dooms U.K., Slobberbone, and The Factory Press, but it focused more on the heavy bands playing in the college town he’d grown to love. Hell’s Lobby was dominated by the so-called Fraternity of Noise — Caulk, Baboon, and Brutal Juice — and much of the rest of the album featured similar bands.

Neal knew there was so much more to the Denton music scene that hadn’t been touched by Hell’s Lobby. And in the past few years, he’d seen enough new bands emerge to know that it was only getting better. With that in mind, Neal decided to attempt to document Denton music himself, with the help of Matt Barnhart and his record label Quality Park Records. The result is Band-Kits: A Compilation of Denton, Texas Music ca. 2000, which is exactly what its title would suggest. Neal isn’t sure he did a better job than Hell’s Lobby, but he’s glad he finally stopped talking about it and actually did it.

“It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Neal says. “I felt like Hell’s Lobby was kind of biased one way and not representative of what I always liked about Denton. And in the intervening years, there’s just been so many good bands that have popped up. It’s just something that I was like, ‘Well, one of these days, somebody should put a comp together.’ Matt just had the means to do it. It’s good when one of your closest friends has a really cool record label.” He laughs. “It helps.”

Several of the bands on Barnhart’s label make appearances on the disc — Wiring Prank, the Baptist Generals, Centro-matic, and Little Grizzly — but no one could accuse Neal or Barnhart of not inviting a variety of bands to participate. The disc has songs from almost every notable Denton band (Lift to Experience and such vets as Little Jack Melody and Brave Combo are the only exceptions that come to mind), groups as far apart on the spectrum as the backward-glancing Budapest One and the forward-thinking The Falcon Project. Other bands on the compilation include Union Camp, the now-defunct Meat Helmets, Corn Mo, Mandarin, Titan Brigida, Lo-Fi Chorus, Coals to Newcastle, Jet Screamer, Slobberbone, and Stumptone. If that’s not an accurate representation of the current Denton community, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better substitute. Plus, save for the Baptist Generals track, the rest of the songs on the album are exclusive to the record. Lo-Fi Chorus’ “Marching Band,” in fact, was written especially for Band-Kits.

Perhaps the best sign that Neal and Barnhart did their job well is that Band-Kits is more than a historical document. It’s a great album as well, the kind of record you can put in your CD player and never want to take out. And it’s not just the big names (well, in a manner of speaking) that deliver the rock: Union Camp’s dirty-South boogie (“War Whistle”) is what most people mean when they say country-rock, and Mandarin’s beautiful “Here and Leaving” has you counting the minutes until its own album comes out in the spring. Of course, Neal’s not completely satisfied. As it says in the liner notes of the disc, “For every band compiled here, there are 17 more who weren’t.”

“I wish I had asked more bands than I did,” he admits. “It’s hard to tell when you’re doing something like that, knowing how long everybody’s songs are going to be and whatnot. And one of the bands bailed out at the last minute. We were going to have 18 bands, we ended up with 17, and it looks like now I could have probably put three or four more bands on there easily. It would have helped us, you know, financially.” He sighs, and laughs a bit. “But, you know, oh well.”