Storytellers With The Observer: Jeffrey Liles on the Untapped Potential of Dallas Talent

On Thursday, we shared the first part of our conversation with Jeffrey Liles, Dallas historian and artistic director of The Kessler Theater and Longhorn Ballroom.

In the second part, Liles reveals he was a contributor for the Observer, running a weekly column called Echoes and Reverberations. It was a historical retrospective about things that have happened over the years in Dallas. “It was in the 2000s,” he remembers. “Robert Wilonsky actually gave me the gig. Right after that, Pete Freedman replaced him. They brought Pete in and Pete became my editor for those things. But Robert was the one who came up with the name Echoes and Reverberations.”

As we delve into his career, he zooms back to the construction of The Kessler and Longhorn, explaining how Edwin Cabaniss purchased and refurbished both places to transform them into historic Dallas landmarks. They were updated live music venues and performing arts spaces, hosting all kinds of touring and local artists for Dallasites to enjoy. Liles had his hand in the restoration process by booking the talent and keeping an eye on who was up and coming.

Although this has been an opportunity to get to know Liles better before his second Storytellers at the Kessler with Wilonsky, he gave the Observer praise for being the only voice for the original music scene in Dallas in the early aughts.

“The first music editor was a guy named Clay McNear during the ’80s. And Clay was the first one who went out there who covered what was going on in Deep Ellum like it was an actual news story,” Liles says. “Just having that profile and having so many of these artists see their name in the paper, to see someone actually noticing what they’re doing, that’s so huge, because there are so many artists, there’s so many kid musicians who don’t have a way to mark points in time where they decide whether or not to keep doing it.”

“For a lot of kids, it was hearing their music on KNON or hearing it on George Gimarc’s rock and roll alternative show, which was the first radio show in Dallas to play alternative music and on a commercial station on Sunday nights,” he continued. “Hearing your band on the radio is a huge deal. It’s enough to keep you going. Or reading about your band in the Dallas Observer, if you’re kind of on the fence on whether or not you want to get rid of your guitar and get a day job. You want to keep doing it. ‘Whoa, we got noticed in the Observer. I need to keep doing this.’ There’s no telling how many careers that saved, just by you guys noticing it and helping to spread the word.'”

Thank you, Jeff. We’ll keep doing our part. Below, he talks about the present and future of Dallas music, and why “hoarding” years of memorabilia is a time capsule of what life was like back then.

You’ve had your job at The Kessler Theater since 2008, right?
We actually opened in 2010, but it took us about 17 months to get the building ready to go. That building had been empty for 17 years when Edwin Cabaniss bought it. His wife owned a dance studio for kids. And he wanted to be able to move her into a larger space to do her dance studio and doing live music there was kind of just something maybe in the back of his mind. There was a guy who used to be a contributing writer for the Observer named Jesse Hughey, who lived here in the neighborhood and his kids took dance lessons from Edwin’s wife. He had mentioned to Edwin that you should do live music in there.

At the time, Oak Cliff was still a dry neighborhood. You couldn’t sell alcohol in this neighborhood, so that’s kind of something that would preclude you from ever doing live music venues. Because that’s kind of an important piece. That’s where the profit margin lies. So when he first called me to ask if I’d be interested in helping him, I was still living in Los Angeles and managing the Roxy at the time. Came back here for Thanksgiving and he called me when I was here in town. Went over and looked at it and my first impression was this is never gonna work. This is going to be a massive undertaking to get this building presentable if he’s really serious about doing this. I mean, the whole interior had to be gutted and pour new foundation. It had been a church at one time, I think during the 1950s or 1960s, so it had a sloped floor where it was low in the front and then gradually got higher, which makes it impossible to build a dance studio on. It has to be flat. He had to gut the entire floor and pour a new foundation that’s that was flat and start over from scratch. And then he built a front dance floor on top of that, which would work for her and the kids. That entire process, from building the exterior to the interior with balconies and everything, took 17 months, and I was the first employee that Edwin hired.

The first couple of years, we didn’t have a marquee. We didn’t have a phone. It was largely based on word of mouth. Oak Cliff was still a tiny neighborhood. So. One of the things Edwin did that’s really remarkable is that he went to the city and had to put a referendum on a ballot to turn Oak Cliff into a wet neighborhood, and it passed. After about a year and a half of having this like private club type bar in the front to became fully legal and had a real bar. Once the Kessler opened, it kickstarted a whole bunch of economic activity around it. You know, bars and restaurants and stuff started opening up, up and down W Davis Street, Bishop Arts District started to flourish and now you look at it 15 years later and The Kessler and The Texas Theatre are pretty much the two big tentpole attractions in North Oak Cliff. 

The Kessler Theater remains a landmark after all these years, serving as a benchmark for local artists to headline. Dezi 5 has done it. Cure for Paranoia has done it.
It’s a big step up. You go from playing in a nightclub to playing a theater? Then it’s on you to put the people in the building. If you’re playing in my club, you’re playing it in a room that already has an audience here, whether you’re playing or not. There are going to be people there to see whoever’s playing. But the Theater, it’s a destination. You don’t just go hang out at the Kessler regardless of who’s playing. The popularity of the artist that’s on the marquee is what’s going to put people in the room or not. So that’s why the artists feel particularly responsible about talking about it being a transformative thing for their career, because it’s on them all of a sudden to make sure that there are people there to see them, you know, and there’s a lot of pressure there. It’s not easy. 

When did you start as the artistic director at The Longhorn?
I actually worked at the Longhorn in the ‘80s when the next place that I went after I booked the Theatre Gallery, The Prophet Bar and Dada was I got hired to be the booking agent at Longhorn. I was 23 years old at the time. It was a different owner then, and I had told Edwin all about the Longhorn and its significance and how important it was back then. Years and years went by, and the Longhorn started to deteriorate or fall into the hands of people who didn’t really know what they were doing.

And it was after COVID-19 happened that the building was in danger of being torn down. One of the things Edwin loves to do is preserve historically significant buildings. He took it upon himself to try and save the Longhorn. Again, it was a process that took years. He demonstrated an incredible amount of patience, waiting for it to become available and affordable, and then assembled a team to invest in it and save it. And then he had to go before the city. And I mean, I went with a number of times for when he had speak before the City Council to describe what his intentions were and figure out whether it’s going to be doable, whether the city was going to address the infrastructure issues around the building that the city was responsible for fixing. 

So he had to go there and say, ‘Look, we’re serious about doing this. This building is historically significant and if you’ll give me the opportunity to do this, we’ll make it happen.’ And he did it the same way he did with The Kessler, the same way he dead with The Heights Theater in Houston. He just has a real gift for seeing these buildings that are endangered. They are significant. And the people who live here in the city love them, and they don’t want to see them go away.

Didn’t the Longhorn do a soft opening for their backyard amphitheater?
Yeah, it’s a good space. It’s a perfect space for it, too, because carving out a space to do something like that is really difficult in a major metropolitan area, simply because things are so densely packed now. But where the Longhorn is situated and the way the amphitheater is situated out back is actually perfect. It will not intrude on any residential areas. The sound won’t be so loud that people will complain about it. There is no one who lives anywhere near the amphitheater. It’s likely to accommodate around 5,000 people. 

The whole campus will be amazing with office spaces, restaurants and the amphitheater. It’s one big area that’s called Rock Island. And Rock Island is kind of like Deep Ellum in the respect that it had this whole history back in the day. It wasn’t incorporated into Dallas. In fact, when I worked at the Longhorn the first time, it was on Rock Island, which is what they called it. I think that eventually you’ll start to see people identifying that whole Longhorn campus as Rock Island. 

I love your Facebook because you share everything from ticket stubs to newspaper clippings. When did you start collecting?
Believe me, I have been doing it ever since the ‘80s. I just collected everything and I saved it. It was all at my mom’s house out in North Dallas. Robert is the same way; Robert is a hoarder too. He has a ton of historical stuff. At the time, you don’t really realize you’re keeping a scrapbook. However, there was a time when all this happened before the internet existed. And so, many of these newspaper clippings and other items, such as ticket stubs, are not stored in a digital space for people to access. So there’s a lot of archival work that has to be done to shoot photos of it, crop them and change the color on it so you can still see what they said. But the thing that I found that is the most rewarding out of all that is a lot of this stuff is all dated. The ticket stubs have dates on them. So, you know, if you sat there and laid out the 250 or 300 ticket stubs over a certain period of time, you can see how the trajectory of how things happened in time, over time. I love trying to find things and make sure they have a date on them somewhere. 

You shared D’Angelo at the Bronco Bowl.
That was the most incredible show. That was still before the turn of the century, that was before 9/11. It helps people within their own headspace figure out where they were in their lives at that particular moment. That concert ticket, more than anything else, will help you connect with where you happened to be at that particular time. I see my Led Zeppelin stub from 1977. I remember I was in the 9th grade, you know? And that was back when you’d have to camp out for concert tickets, your whole life revolved around pitching a tent downtown because you’re waiting for the Led Zeppelin tickets to go on sale.

I should look through some of my old concert tickets.
Just photos of them and post them somewhere. You’ll find people will post comments underneath them that talks about where they were in their particular lives at that time. It helps everybody revisit and archive their own personal history.

What is your take on the future of Dallas music?
I still see brand new artists every weekend. I get digital files from brand-new artists every weekend, so it’s more than ever. There are still artists out there who are emerging from the woodwork, and they are phenomenal. And to me, I love seeing them play here in their hometown. But two weeks ago, we went to Shreveport and we had Dezi and Cure for Paranoia playing there and it was thrilling to watch them play in front of a big room full of people where nobody knew who they were. It was a Battle of the Bands-type event where Cure for Paranoia won $10,000. They blew everybody away. 

What was amazing was watching them see Dezi for the first time and see Dezi playing in front of an audience where he had to win them over. Just watching everybody run over to the ballot box to go vote for him. I remember walking backstage and telling him, ‘Dude, I think you just won this thing.’ And then Cure for Paranoia came on right after that and just blew them away again, even took it to another level. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ It’s one of the things I’ve always loved, just seeing how Dallas bands perform outside of their comfort zone, outside of their hometown. That to me will always be the most thrilling thing.

Storytellers at The Kessler: Cottonmouth, Texas Chapter 2 will take place on Saturday, Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. at The Kessler Theater, 1230 W. Davis St. Tickets are available starting at $32.42 on Prekindle.