Preston Barta
Audio By Carbonatix
Want to see your favorite artist on tour? Easy. All it takes is divine timing, your entire life’s savings and signing a blood oath to name your firstborn Live Nationiana.
Jokes aside, the price of attending an arena concert can easily slip into the low thousands for merely decent seats. Nose-bleeds with a goalpost-sized column in your direct line of sight can still carry a triple-digit price tag. Don’t forget parking, which costs about as much as a concert ticket to see ’70s superstars in their golden years. Hopefully, you have the sense to tell the venue bartender a single is fine before you’re taking out a loan to afford a watery double vodka-soda.
But it doesn’t have to be that way; there are still affordable concert tickets in this city, with street parking and dive-bar beer prices, if you can believe it. Sure, the bathroom stalls may have unsavory messaging, and a few of the speakers may be blown out, but what they lack in laser beams, they make up for in price.
For a moment, we thought the ongoing concert ticket and price-gouging fiasco perpetrated by scalpers and enabled by systems like Ticketmaster would end. But alas, a recent settlement in an antitrust lawsuit between the U.S. Department of Justice and Live Nation Entertainment slashed those dreams. Guess we’ll settle for the cinema version of major concerts. Independent venues are better recipients of our hard-earned dollars, anyway.
Fighting against concert conglomerates is the good fight, and the effort has many soldiers, including a handful of artists who recognize that more than just the top 1% deserve the joys of live music. Some artists, such as Noah Kahan, are using new identification authentication tools to combat the lethal combination of bots and dynamic pricing models. Other artists, including Olivia Dean, have used their platforms to demand refunds on service fees for fans.
Some artists, like Harry Styles, have chosen to release filmed versions of their concerts behind paywalls. Thanks.
Maybe the resistance will continue to grow, and the music industry will witness the reform it so badly needs. Until then, as the connoisseurs of cheap (free is a key component of our design model) and good, here’s a list of shows and venues that don’t require you to work extra shifts.
N8NoFace
Double Wide
3510 Commerce St.
You want experimental? Look no further than the N8NoFace show at Double Wide on June 11. The artist made his name in chip-tune punk, a niche corner in New Wave (a larger corner of punk music) that used computer chips and gaming consoles to make music. He got sober and stopped doing that, but now his music has deeper beats and strong anti-establishment sentiments. It’s just as good now as it was then. If you’ve ever seen fuzzy videos of ’80s goths bopping to synth beats and felt you belonged in that generation, then this is the night for you. As an insider tip, there’s a free lot tucked in the alley near Double Wide; sometimes spots are open even into the wee hours of the night. And the best news, the show is on a Thursday, so Double Wide’s extremely generous happy hour, which goes until 9 p.m., means you can order that double. Tickets are $25, but Double Wide regularly produces shows for less.
Sela Shilon
Ritt Momney
Club Dada in Deep Ellum
2720 Elm St.
Ask all of the major indie artists if they’ve ever played Club Dada, and the answer will be yes. Whoever is the booker for one of the greatest venues in Dallas has an unmatched taste for the next big thing. Seriously, Charli XCX played the small room in 2013. If you’d like to be one of those annoying people who say they saw an artist years before they blew up, then keep a close eye on the Club Dada calendar. Our recommendation on the cur-rent slate? Ritt Momney, who, even after a few viral TikTok sounds, is playing the intimate venue for less than dinner and a movie. We recommend pregaming at some of Deep Ellum’s hole-in-the-walls. While Club Dada is a great venue, its beer prices are mid-range, and cheaper options are available within walking distance. Tickets for the show on April 30 are $25 plus a $7 service fee.
Beach Vacation
Ruins
2653 Commerce St.
Surf rock is one of those genres, like disco, that peaked and has all but disappeared, aside from the few remaining stragglers. But the good news is that surf rock paved the way for surf pop, and Beach Vacation is one of the best examples of the easy-going soft genre. The band plays at Ruins, which has managed to survive in the midst of the Deep Ellum road construction from hell. The bright side is that, fearful of the one-way road littered with orange cones, many do not park in the street right outside the venue. It’s $3 for just the amount of time a concert at Ruins lasts. Plus, the wall art in the Limbo Room, the concert area, is cool, and Ruins serves a damn good enchilada. It’s not cheap, but it is tasty, and they’ve got to make a buck somewhere. After all, tickets rarely get higher than $40. Tickets for Beach Vacation are $19 with a $5 service fee. It happens on May 8.
Cut Worms
Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios
411 E Sycamore St., Denton
If you can tolerate a drive on Interstate 35, Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios is well worth the trip. The venue offers a space for all the bad dorm-room bands at the University of North Texas to play on stage — important work. It also keeps a rotation of artists who are big enough to have a short, picture-less Wikipedia page, such as indie country artist Cut Worms. The artist is building a name in the “y’allternative” sphere and is probably on the playlist of every cool coffee shop you’ve ever been to. If $28 for tickets is out of your price range, the venue has shows almost every night, with varying quality but, more often than not, very good. The parking lot is big, and street parking is readily available. A food truck serving vegan hot dogs is always parked nearby. The perfect preshow snack. Cut Worms plays April 24.
Red Light Management
Le Cure
Lee Harvey’s
1807 Gould St.
Cover bands hold a special place in our hearts, mostly because they’re the best and easiest way to go to a concert where you’ll know all the words. No originals here, please. OK, one or two is fine. Le Cure is a The Cure cover band, obviously. The frontman even has the post-punk jet-black hair swoop. Almost every month, they play a regular show at Lee Harvey’s, the diviest dive to ever exist. Le Cure is just one of several cover bands that rotate through the venue, and always for free. If not them, then surely a local Madonna impersonator or a Tears For Fears understudy will tickle your fancy. If you’re trying to make a day of it, you can start the day at Lee Harvey’s Dive-In, the swim club located directly across the street.
