It looked like a scene from the 1983 classic film, The Outsiders: More than 50 teens fighting hand to hand in an IHOP parking lot in a West Texas town known as “Bomb City” in the late ’90s. It was jocks vs. punks. Spikes and chains, police batons and…
Eighteen children are bouncing around in a stately room, waiting to meet Laura Bush. They’re singing Christmas songs, yelling about their love of spaghetti and meatballs, and generally mugging for the cameras, which are there to capture their interaction with the former first lady. Their behavior is typical of young…
When Woodstock took place in ’69, big music festivals were a rare and special thing. Today, nearly every major city has a generous handful of annual festivals representing a variety of genres. Dallas-Fort Worth has Spillover, 35 Denton, Oaktopia, Lights All Night, Homegrown Fest, Untapped, JMBLYA, and that’s not close…
It’s around this time of year when we see a decline in shows and an incline in hokey holiday hoorahs. But thanks to the efforts of some very cool artists who refuse to let concert goers be reduced to consuming the burned out and repetitive seasonal tunes heard in shopping…
On a Friday afternoon in October 1991, 33-year-old Don Nedler was handed the keys to the building located at 2424 Swiss Ave. after paying $12,000 for first and last month’s rent. This weekend, the business he built there, Lizard Lounge, will celebrate 25 years as a mecca for Dallas’ rave and…
On any given night, Mike Brooks can usually be found prowling from concert venue to concert venue with a set of cameras around his neck, working to capture the evening’s music highlights on film. We spoke with Brooks, who frequently shoots for the Observer, on the smoking patio of The…
This week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit held by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) to continue building on a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux tribe land in South Dakota. However, two Fort Worth benefit concerts intended to raise money for the tribe…
For the past 15 years, RC Williams has been a musical director, producer and keyboardist for Erykah Badu. He’s also become an avatar for music scene in Dallas. In November he released his sophomore record, called The Feel, with his band the Gritz. With the album, Williams meant to capsulize…
Justin Gabrielli does things all the way or he doesn’t do them at all. The musician-producer scrapped more than 30 of his songs under his new indie-trap project DRIP and started from scratch, because he wasn’t sure the feel was right. It’s kind of shocking until you consider the way…
After Saturday’s Dallas Observer Music Awards showcase brought out hordes of well-heeled music lovers to Deep Ellum for memorable performances by 88 Killa, Mothership, Field Guide, Cygnus, Sealion and more than 40 other Dallas favorites, the awards ceremony at the Bomb Factory Tuesday decided which acts had made the strongest…
Joe Walker has about two and half decades behind the decks and he’s still very much a devotee of the art of mixing vinyl. His knowledge of club music is encyclopedic, backed up by his own mammoth-sized vinyl collection. For this week’s mixtape, Walker is performing under his Jon Wang…
Nick Valensi hadn’t planned to start another band. As the guitarist for the Strokes, who could blame him? But as band members Julian Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr. began to invest more time in their solo careers, Valensi found himself with more free time than he liked. “A couple years…
You might not always get what you want in this world, but Tuesday night at the Dallas Observer Music Awards the Dallas music community got a whole lot of what it needed. As the Observer honored local artists for the 28th year running at The Bomb Factory, handing out awards…
The Grammys are routinely slagged and often called an irrelevant pep rally for a music industry in decline. But when an awards ceremony that is broadcast to millions worldwide recognizes acts from our own neck of the woods, it’s still nice to see. It means other local acts will get…
It’s November 2012 and John Stewart has just uploaded a remastered version of Danger Mouse’s legendary The Grey Album to SoundCloud. In a matter of hours it’s gone viral; glowing receptions litter the internet, from blogs to top shelf music publications and magazines. But something about the original never sat…
The Dallas Observer Music Awards showcase, which spotlighted Dallas’ best and brightest in the music scene on Saturday, was a great kickoff to this week’s best concerts. Despite the station’s recent demise, 102.1 the Edge’s annual holiday concert swings into action on Tuesday, headlined by Weezer; Trees hosts an alternative to jolly…
Dolly Parton shimmied through the Verizon Theatre at Grand Prairie on Saturday night with her longtime band, a menagerie of instruments and what seemed to be several metric tons of cubic zirconia. “Leave no rhinestone unturned, is what I always say,” she joked, in her charming-as-all-get-out manner. You learn a lot about…
Denton-based hip-hop artist and magician Ritchy Flo spent the bulk of this year resting after writing, producing, recording and mixing his double album D.I.C.K., an onslaught of music, comedy and magic videos, completely by himself in 2015. But he’s about to come back onto the scene with a new album, and…
How incredible would it be if dogs were toilet trained? There would be no getting up, putting on their leash and being forced to go outside for “fresh air” or whatever the preferred euphemism. Denton musician Ace Hampton and his dog aren’t quite there, but almost. Hampton’s dog, Pablo, at…
Flickering lines jump and crawl across the faces of a trio of darkwave musicians at RBC as Evan Henry is on deck with his analog video electronics. He manipulates the video art in real time and projects it onto the stage, bathing the band, Troller, in colorful abstract light. An…
A good music photographer’s work can be spellbinding. It’s an art that can send pangs of regret through viewers who weren’t there that night, and return others who were there to the ecstasy of the moment. Dallas is home to many talented photographers who work in this medium and bring…
In the perpetual hot today/cold tomorrow world of the nightlife industry, party themes are a common way to carve out a niche. But few have been able to garner the cult-like following of the All/Everything Sunday night series at RBC, which launched in February. If you don’t believe the hype,…
