Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. When I saw Led Zeppelin in Dallas in early March 1975, during the Physical Graffiti tour, it started a chain of events that ended with the extremely unlikely photograph…
The whole question about Fair Park, our 277-acre albatross that everybody thinks should be turned over to a private entity, is whose entity. Seriously down-at-the-heels but still shabbily beautiful in its own way, this vast “exposition park” in South Dallas is going to become somebody’s baby. Please note quotation marks…
Hard to know at present if The Dallas Morning News is really going to carry through on its announced plan to move to the George-Dahl-designed building that I remember lovingly from its years as the Dallas Public Library, and less lovingly as a major beacon of rat urine on hot…
A letter to Enrique Peña Nieto, president of the United Mexican States, from a newspaper columnist in Dallas, Texas. Dear President Peña Nieto: Please don’t pull the rug out from under us. We need your help, and the world needs your help. If you temporize too much with the regime…
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols and isn’t shy about talking about it in his monthly column, Namedropper. I bought Vanilla Ice’s Mind Blowin’ from Blockbuster Music the day it came out on March 22, 1994. I gazed in awe at the cover, which showed Ice wearing dreadlocks and blowing smoke…
A longer video depicting the prequel to a controversial arrest in Fort Worth shows how everything is racial
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. Last Wednesday, my plan was to go down to Austin, watch Alejandro Escovedo tape his fifth Austin City Limits performance, get interviews with him and his band and…
According to court documents filed yesterday (copy below), the State Fair of Texas wants to make a legal issue out of the fact that I called them “moneyed gray-hairs and blue-beards from the Park Cities.” In a motion asking that State District Judge Staci Williams remove herself from an open-records…
One brave woman gives chase to a dog thief, and a very sad story gets a very happy ending.
Bucks Burnett has met most of his music idols. In this monthly column he shares tales from the front lines and backstage. I’m known for having numerous what-the-truck stories about unlikely encounters with the greatest heroes of the day. I used to have an ego about it. Who could blame…
DART, our regional transit agency, is doing us all a big favor by being so useless. If we stare into the mess that is DART long enough, like a shaman stirring a pile of charred dog bones, we can see the pattern that will tell us what we need to…
Editor: Jim Schutze is away from Unfair Park briefly to work on a cover story for us, but we snared this from his Facebook page because we liked the writing and because we didn’t know four-legged coyotes make it down to Swiss Avenue. Beautiful encounter with a coyote on Swiss…
When Alec Jhangiani and Ramtin Nikzad set out to start Fortress Festival in DFW, they knew they needed help. The pair had spent nearly a decade working together with the Lone Star Film Festival and Lone Star Film Society and, as they looked to assemble their own music festival, sought…
The battle for Fair Park is the story of the city right now. It’s a window on what the old leadership doesn’t get, but it also offers us glimpses of a smarter future. And that’s all before we even get started on fixing Fair Park, our sadly decaying 277-acre art…
When Maren Morris walked out onto stage at Austin City Limits Festival last Friday, she did it in perfect fashion: with Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes-Benz” playing as her entrance music. That one song choice brought so many of the right pieces together for the up-and-coming Arlington native: a nod to a…
From rock ‘n’ roll music to country music to virtually every major professional sport, the United States houses a hall of fame for just about everything — even though, for most of the rest of the world, it’s literally a foreign concept. Americans just love picking favorites. Earlier this week,…
Bucks Burnett isn’t a journalist. He’s a namedropper. He may not have met every one of his music idols, but he’s met 90 percent of them. And he’s here to tell you all about it, however he sees fit, in his monthly music column, Namedropper. I was born in Dallas…
Just perusing some of the financial disclosures for the “nonprofit” online news service based in Austin called The Texas Tribune. And this, by the way, is a column about my own craft, journalism, which I will try to make as painless as possible because I know many of you did…
Every time I see another story calling Trump a bully, I duck. I’m always afraid somebody will call me. So this is my declaration. I am not an expert on bullying. I wrote a true-crime book 15 years ago about a bunch of horrible Florida mall rats who killed one…
They could all turn out to be wrong in the end, of course, or maybe just not right enough, but close observers around town are beginning to place bets on strong rumors that the Walt Humann Fair Park deal will fall apart soon. The ostensible reason – the one for…
When does City Hall do anything even vaguely related to your life? Can City Hall help you find you an apartment in a safe neighborhood at a rent you can afford? Can City Hall help you get to work? Can it leave enough money in your pocket at the end…
Settle down. Sit back. Face it. The mayor’s plan to give a private group virtual ownership of Fair Park, a 277-acre exposition park at the heart of the city, is a done deal. He’s got the votes. The count I heard yesterday was 10 in favor. That leaves five dissenters…
