Dressed in wide bell-bottoms and puffy sleeves, fiery singer Trees Marie channels her inner Robert Plant as band members flip their long hair in time with the beat. They look like they share space in a Laurel Canyon condo in the early 1970s, as if Henry Diltz’s camera should be vigilantly clicking from a corner.
But the venue is far from Los Angeles. It’s in the heart of Legacy West, an upscale shopping center in Plano, directly across from Gucci and diagonal from Tiffany’s. The entertainment destination has two stories and a cafeteria with endless options. This Friday night in March, there's a non-diverse crowd of at least a thousand patrons. It’s a family-friendly beer garden on fake grass, with dads in baseball caps, children using cupcake mush for face paint and one man in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, karate headband and tube socks who’s dancing like nobody's watching, even though everyone is.
As a smoke machine turns the stage into a cloud, the band closes with the rock epics “Kashmir” and “Whole Lotta Love.”
According to the venue’s schedule, the month is heavy with tribute acts: Pink, Aerosmith and George Strait imitators. Thursdays and Saturdays are DJ nights.
Some of the best musicians in town play in cover or tribute bands, in Top 40 bands or in groups playing Latin, jazz and blues standards. With his rendition of Luis Miguel, Cristian Cuevas can fill hundreds of seats; Matthew Crain of the bands Dead Mockingbirds and Frances Heidy plays in Pearl Gem; Poppy Xander from The Helium Queens and Polyphonic Spree is also in PriMadonna; and The Grays (siblings Kwinton, Kierra and KJ) sell out their Disney-themed nights.
North Texas has an embarrassment of musical riches. Name any genre, from polka to punk, electronic to country, and DFW has a notable export.
Now, name your favorite local, non-cover band, one that no one outside of Texas has heard of. For most, that’s a head-scratcher.
“We need a fan revival, not a band revival,” Xander says. With a full buffet of original DFW talent, more fans should try eating at home sometime, she says, rather than subsisting on a diet of music made by national acts. The table is set for local fans with an appetite for original music, but they have to show up.
Dallas and Fort Worth have long traditions as music cities that foster talent. In Denton, the University of North Texas offers a distinguished jazz music program. One of the most prestigious performing arts high schools in the country is Dallas’ Booker T. Washington, which boasts Norah Jones, Roy Hargrove, Erykah Badu and many others among its alums.
North Texas also has several bustling entertainment districts, from Deep Ellum to Arlington, with hundreds of venues of all sizes; a range of accessible music studios; open mics run by Grammy winners; radio stations devoted to local music; and publications covering the local scene. The infrastructure is solid, the artists are being incubated, the stage is set and the mic has been checked again and again. Are North Texas’ 6.3 million potential fans listening?
The answer depends on whom you ask and which aspect of the music scene they’re describing.
Moses Habtezghi is a booking agent with a company called The Grey Hat. Since 2007, Habtezghi has worked with the band Collab, first doing spoken word and “freestyling, basically rapping,” he says, as the musicians played.
On an evening in March, he was in Deep Ellum watching the group, which can be found at Three Links every Tuesday. A dozen people were there, nearly half of them up front paying deep attention to the bass-heavy R&B groove, clinking cymbals, a screaming rock singer and the spoken word that rattles like a jazz drum.
Habtezghi says Collab has had more than 45 official members, with “Day 1” members Jonathan Thomas, Evan Johnson and Isaac Davies still in the band.
“[Collab] were some of the first people who encouraged me to get into the business side,” Habtezghi says of booking. “It gradually grew to where the venues trusted me to bring talent and the talent trusted me to book them in places where they would do well.”
Last year, Habtezghi started booking artists to play at Dave & Busters. Noting a niche for hip-hop tribute acts, he put together homages to Outkast and Kanye West. A few months later, it was Beyoncė night.
The restaurant/arcade asked him to fill up every Saturday. So Habtezghi called The Grays, who landed on an irresistible concept for September, “Channel Surfing: Decades of your favorite TV theme songs.” The rhythmically gifted group of siblings, who play with their own acts as the Kwinton Gray Project and King Kie, took audiences back with intro songs such as the one from ’90s kid show Gullah Gullah Island and a jamming version of “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” from Cheers. Fans could get chicken wings and play pinball afterward.
Habtezghi says original artists have to moonlight as cover acts. “People love something they’re familiar with; it’s hard to sell them something that’s brand new,” he says.
Social media promotion doesn’t quite replace the power of impassioned, personal word of mouth. A study from 2021 finds that while most people discover new music through streaming apps or radio, nearly a third rely on recommendations from family and friends.
Whether the same applies to the live-music scene is hard to say.
“That still does happen, but not as much as it used to,” Habtezghi says of local fan followings.
While relying on friends might not be a stable business model for a band to succeed, Habtezghi says, having a few followers willing to come out to shows is important.
“It’s not a lot to ask if you’re playing to get like five people to come out,” he says, comparing it to the first dollar in the tip jar, put there to encourage others to give. “When people walk by and there’s nobody in here, nobody [else] is gonna come in here. It takes a party to make it a party.”
The standard $10 cover charge at local bars is small enough, he says, but “random people off the street, when you have 10, 12 options [for other bars] and you’re just trying to get a drink, it makes it a little hard.”
He also raises the point made recently by Jamie Lee Curtis, who complained that most concerts start too late.
“The ones that are willing to come out who pay for tickets, they don’t really want to come out at night,” says Habtezghi, who has been pushing for earlier shows in Deep Ellum. “After midnight, they just want to get back to business."
“It is hard to get people, the non-regulars, people who don’t live in the area to travel here,” he says. “I think a lot of that has to do not necessarily with the violence … [but] the headlines have been so negative. I think the negative headlines for the neighborhood specifically, that hurt, they hurt.”
Still, he acknowledges that the violence is real, citing the example of musician Chief Rebel, real name Cameron Cooper, who was working inside The Free Man on Commerce Street on Super Bowl Sunday when he was critically injured by a stray bullet that went through the venue’s window as two men outside fired shots at each other.
Habtezghi says he wouldn't have his own family come out to Deep Ellum for a late-night show.
As Collab played, about two blocks down from Three Links and less than two hours later, two people died after gunfire in Deep Ellum. A gunman wearing a ski mask fired multiple shots, killing a man named Ricky Gossett on the patio at the Bitter End, along with a bystander, 30-year-old Danielle Jones, a single mother on a moms’ night out. Jones was visiting from Houston and wanted to take her son to Six Flags. Their deaths made headlines.
The Old Cool
Music biopics often share familiar storylines: Play badly at the school dance, start playing better, have everyone rocking in their seats as the squares get mad, cut a small record, freak out when it plays on the radio, begrudgingly get rid of your faithful manager and get signed to a label, become an international success, cheat on your spouse, lose everything to drugs and find redemption … or death.
Most of those tropes applied to a time when TikTok was only a character on Return to Oz. And just as the internet changed absolutely everything and let us cheer for our favorite artists from afar and see what they had for breakfast, music marketing has changed almost entirely.
Paul Slavens moved to Denton from Nebraska and started a band in 1986, when getting the word out required manual labor and a tolerance for paper cuts.
“Making handmade posters and sticking them to telephone poles,” he says. “Making handmade postcards and putting stamps on them and hand-addressing them and getting mailing lists and sending them out; there was no email.”
Though he’s built a name with his bands Ten Hands, The Travoltas and as a pianist and solo artist, he’s not up to speed with what works these days in music marketing.
“It's like Facebook takes the place of everything, but it does a horrible job,” Slavens says. “They have no interest in helping make my gigs well attended unless I send them money for it.”
The biggest difference Slavens sees in fan attendance is that before the internet, the reasons fans came out to local shows were more primal.
“I hate to be kind of crude about it, [but] a lot of it has to do with the mating rituals of young people,” he says. “You're trying to get people to dance. And that's what it was, a place to get dancing and sweaty and rub up against other young people and, you know, see that girl that you normally saw at the gig, and that's the only chance you're gonna get to meet her, that kind of thing. And I'm sure that all is still going on; it's just not going on with original rock bands.”
DJ nights now dominate much of Dallas’ nightlife, but until the early 2000s, there was a bigger local celebrity scene with “Dallas-famous” bands that pulled in sizable followings from the suburbs before breaking out nationally.
“I don't think you can underestimate the effect that the internet has made on every aspect of everything,” Slavens says. “And trying to figure out how it's transformed things is too multidimensional to even maybe get a handle on. It's just that times have changed, and people get their kicks in other ways than they used to.”
Modern consumer habits have altered the way money is spent on live music. Listeners fear making a bad investment in a musical product they don’t enjoy, he says, and that’s a boon for tribute acts.
“With people, it's like, well, if I'm gonna spend 40 bucks going out, I don't want to go and see some shitty band; let's go see Tom Petty, I love Tom Petty,” Slavens says. “I know what I'm getting, and then I can go out and look for girls there.
“The people want to make sure that they're gonna get their money's worth,” he adds. “They look at their experiences as products that they're buying, and they want to make sure that they're buying a good product with the money because the experiences have all been made so expensive.”
Like Slavens, Danny Balis is a well-established radio personality and musician. He’s played in the bands Sorta, Sparrows, Calhoun, and Bastards of Soul and is a co-owner of Twilite Lounge in Deep Ellum and in Fort Worth, both of which keep a packed schedule filled with local talent.
“Dallas is that kind of town where I don't think the culture is of the type of people that seek out stuff,” he says. “It's gotta be kind of a scene, or cool, or they've heard of it, or it's popular or whatever. … I don't think it's their nature in Dallas to really seek stuff out and claim something as their own until it's already kind of handed to them.”
Plenty of North Texas musicians have become household names in the last decade, but most of them “made it” elsewhere, mostly online: JD Beck, Marc Rebillet, Allison Ponthier, Post Malone. Few people remember seeing them play around town before they came home famous.
Grammy-winning producer Jah Born suggests that Dallas’ size — neither small enough to conquer nor big enough to propel international stardom — makes it uniquely competitive.
“This is not a knock on my city. I love Dallas,” he says. “I really feel like right now that if you are from a smaller town that you have a better shot of living the dream in a place where you could win people over and there's a smaller amount of venues [where] the town is coming to hang.”
Rapidly sprawling North Texas may have grown too big for an act to conquer, but it’s large enough for a self-sustaining original music scene, and occasionally we get it right by spotting our national stars first: Power Trip, Bobby Sessions, Sarah Jaffe, Yella Beezy, Snarky Puppy, St. Vincent.
“Dallas-famous” these days may be better described as “Dallas-music-scene-famous,” but that’s not necessarily a small thing, musician Keite Young says.
“Musicians crashing into each other is how the Harlem Renaissance happens. That’s how Atlanta happens,” he says. “The demand doesn't precede the supply, the supply precedes the demand. Artists should give audiences a great night.”
Jah Born also thinks transplants from other states are bringing a very California culture with them.
“I ain't hating on the newcomers, but a lot of the suburban population in Dallas are people that are not from here,” he says. “They don't even know about the scene. These are recent transplants. They're not coming here, like, you know, wanting to support locals. It's gonna take us a minute to win them over.”
“I think there was somewhat of an expectation that once restrictions were lifted and people felt safer about going out, that the streets were just going to be flooded with people wanting to be active and do stuff and see live music.” – Danny Balis
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Newcomers are changing the culture of Deep Ellum, too. What was once the city’s live-music district is now frequented by people looking to have a cute Saturday afternoon. Jah Born calls transplants to the scene “tourists,” and a tourism economy brings musical pandering — see New Orleans, which has a remarkably small original music scene for a world-renowned musical destination.
Some North Texas bands make their following online only and aren’t known as locals (Grand Commander, Polyphia). But online popularity doesn’t always translate to touring opportunities unless an artist has the kind of following Marc Rebillet has, which is so substantial that his audience is seemingly everywhere.
Jah Born says artists should look to Rebillet as a “blueprint.”
The “Loop Daddy'' had a decent following in Dallas venues, such as his weekly residency at Twilite, but his wild musical antics and boxers-and-open-robe videos landed him legions of followers on YouTube. Last year, he got his own Twitch show.
“He's showing it to you there, and he's a real cool dude,” Jah Born says of Rebillet. “I'm not saying go strip down to your drawers and play the piano on Twitch. What I'm saying is, you know, if you really have the mega-talent then utilize every resource at your disposal. And we have so many here in Dallas.”
In a sense, the Rebillet route eliminates the need to move to New York to wait tables in the hope of getting discovered, and North Texas has enough venues taking chances on original artists in the meantime.
The Kessler is one venue betting on local artists, usually filling opening slots with traveling acts. The historic Oak Cliff venue’s artistic director, musician and writer, Jeff Liles, keeps one bit of advice in his pocket.
“What it really boils down to is the material itself, the music that they're making,” he says, “if there's something quirky or if there's something that's definitely different about the approach.”
Liles believes that when someone is good, the public will embrace them, but beyond good, the acts must be exciting.
“A traditional rock band or a traditional solo singer-songwriter or whatever, it takes them longer to establish a base because there's so much of that stuff out there,” Liles says. “People have been doing it for 40 or 50 years now. But you got a guy like Marc [Rebillet], you know, who's just self-contained and does everything, all of his own electronic stuff, or Polyphia — what they do is so unique, you know, it's not like a traditional rock band at all, they have a different guest on every single song — and same thing with [DOMi and] JD Beck … that’s what they're doing. It's a jazz duo, you know. That's rare.”
Some acts, Liles says, are creating a niche and “reinventing the wheel, essentially, musically.”
“They're the ones that blow up and get big faster because people have never seen something like that before.”
Still, some “traditionalist” acts such as Joshua Ray Walker and Charley Crockett have found fame by sticking to typical avenues for discovery: In Crockett’s case, the path led from local press to local radio, to national radio and national press.
Balis also brings up country tunesmith Walker and Vandoliers as examples of stars rising up “organically.”
For Balis, DFW is not necessarily bursting with fans looking for the next big thing.
“I don't know, the culture here is not about music I don't think,” Balis says. “Which is a shame because the history here is incredible.”
What he thinks it’s mostly about is “money, making money, getting paid, doing blow or whatever,” he says with a laugh. “There are a lot of other things [rather than] going out and checking out a local band. It's not like Austin or Portland or Seattle. … Dallas is not that way. It's kind of like the LA of the Midwest in a way.”
One genre that seems to be sheltered from any “LA” attitude toward local bands is hip-hop. Artists do come up in DFW through local fan followings and sold-out shows, building buzz with national audiences who pay attention to Dallas. Female rappers, in particular, have emerged from the DFW hip-hop scene — Tay Money, Kaash Paige, Erica Banks — to find large followings online.
But none of these artists has yet reached worldwide fame, as Jah Born points out, largely because they’re competing with national acts favored by fans.
“It's a really weird time to consume music,” Jah Born says. “Where is the actual super-duper superstar? They're gone. There's a whole bunch of little mini stars now, you know, and we're in this weird transitional stage in music and, unfortunately, local acts are impacted by this change. Hopefully we can adapt.”
While everyone has hypotheses, scapegoats and culprits when considering the challenges facing acts in search of local fans, Dallas remains a working musician’s city. With every major and medium concert passing through town, the opportunities for openers are plentiful. Hundreds of venues hire original acts weekly, and with many studios and producers working consistently with national acts, there are plenty of opportunities for session work and high-paying touring gigs. The gig economy also is generous toward bands looking to play weddings, corporate events and “tourist” music as tributes and covers.
“It's a great city,” Balis says. “If you wanna work, you can make a living and get by playing gigs, but you kind of got to be able to do a lot of different stuff and play a lot and hustle, and you gotta be willing to probably pick up a couple of cover band gigs too.”
Slavens sees his peers doing this.
“Everybody's playing in cover bands, the people that I highly respect,” he says. “And they're loving it, and it makes me a little sad. But shit, man, at least people are coming to see music and at least musicians are making some money.”
The Best Things in Life Aren’t on Ticketmaster
Chances are, nearly any live show you might catch in DFW or in venues from Houston to California was booked by talent agency 13th Floor Music. One of the company’s agents is David Ponder, who was an artist on the roster with his band Somebody’s Darling before he started working for 13th Floor owner Ken Welker.
The company books about 250 shows a week during its “on season” from St. Patrick's Day to Thanksgiving, Ponder says.
Ponder’s clients, he says, request country bands, artists influenced by classic rock and, of course, Texas blues.
“There is an endless appetite for the blues guitar solo here in Texas,” he says with a laugh.
Many bigger venues work with in-house talent buyers, so a large part of 13th Floor’s dominion consists of free shows at bars and restaurants seeking a mix of originals and covers.
“I've definitely seen a growing demand for tribute acts, which is, obviously, covers-only by design,” Ponder says. “Really the main directive, the thing that I get from every single client is we just want something upbeat and fun, you know what I mean? That's the one thing that crosses over every place.”
For Ponder, there are “two different baskets” when it comes to booking venues. The first is venues with built-in audiences, with bands playing for three hours. The attendance, he says, can come from booking a band that’s popular or from patrons who happen to “like the bar, or they wanna play Jenga or whatever on the patio or something.”
The second kind is ticketed shows, usually with established original artists or tribute acts.
Somebody’s Darling is one of the great Dallas-famous bands, more successful in its hometown than on the internet.
“Like that to a T,” he says. “Like we would sell some tickets in Austin, San Antonio, maybe Lubbock. But DFW was kind of the one spot where we could actually sell 400 tickets or so.”
Other bands that have reunited in the past few years have sort of been “grandfathered in” with large local followings from the Y2K days of loyal fandom: Black Tie Dynasty, Jibe, Flickerstick.
The newer original artist scene in DFW contains rare jewels sparkling in plain sight. Young Dean, MATTIE, Jacks Haupt, Cody Lynn Boyd, Revólvers, and Labretta Suede & the Motel 6 are just a few among a crop of newer acts that would probably pass Liles’ test for originality.
Ponder has worked and played all over and says Dallas is one of the best cities for musicians, but the members of Somebody’s Darling kept their day jobs even with their local success.
“It depends on how you define success,” he says. “When I started Somebody's Darling with Amber Farris [in 2007] … my goals were, I wanted to be written about in the Observer. I wanted to be on tour because to me, you were a real band if you were on tour. And we poured all of our resources into making that happen. I mean, we never made any money. Every dollar went back into paying for the van, or we would go on tour and break even.”
Ponder got to tour the country playing guitar in a band he loved and was “able to leverage a 10-year unpaid internship into a job” and is proud that his company has raised the bar for musicians. Artists playing for 13th Floor get paid in more than tips and bar tabs, with a guaranteed minimum, though North Texas, for Ponder, has always paid its musicians far better than Austin, Nashville or Chicago, despite their reputation as music meccas.
“We would go to L.A. as a band, and you're lucky to make $8 at the hotel café. It's just kind of like ‘You're lucky to be here’ was kind of the vibe,” he says.
He thinks Dallas artists have about as good a chance as any in breaking out in some ways.
“What's the trajectory or the likelihood of anyone breaking out of any market anywhere in the country is probably statistically very low,” he says. “I would say that obviously there are success stories that have come out of Dallas, even recently. I mean, I consider Paul Cauthen, Charley Crockett, even Texas Gentlemen, obviously Leon Bridges, all of those bands to be successes.”
While artists are not as dependent today on touring to build a following, Jah Born says they should not substitute live performances with social media.
“It's imperative to give the fan the opportunity to see you live,” he says. “It completes the whole entire experience for them. There's so much value in being an artist and having the opportunity to display what you put on social media to your fans in real life. That's why people pay. That's why there's always a premium for that experience.”
Liles doesn’t think artists need to vie for the sort of screen time enjoyed by TikTok star Addison Rae.
“Be an innovator, not an influencer,” Liles says. “I mean, musicians aren't really influencers. What they are is innovators. They're artists. So the influencers are the people that hear it and say, ‘Oh man, you gotta hear this,’ you know what I'm saying? Those are the influencers. The artists themselves, you know, they don't spend a whole lot of time trying to influence people. And what I'm trying to encourage artists to do is find a sound that you can own, that people will hear it and immediately know who it is.”
Rising Stars
Danni J and Kris W probably wouldn’t put it this way, but the local music industry is kind of their bitch.
The singers play a variety of acoustic covers as duo Danni & Kris; they have a Fleetwood Mac tribute band called Little Lies plus an original project called Prizm, a synth-pop band with which they produce songs for a licensing company for commercial use. They say their original songs have been used by brands such as Doc Martens, Sephora, Igloo coolers and Disneyland, and even by Paris Hilton.
They also perform as “Brixtina,” a Britney/X-Tina crossover tribute act, and they even throw in a bit of NSYNC for the TRL generation, complete with costume changes and backup dancers. The act had its first show at The Rustic in September 2021 and sold 800 tickets.
“The name attached to it with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera has that nostalgic feeling. People want to come out and see it,” Kris says. “I think there's a hunger for tribute bands way more that we've seen pop up just in the last couple of years. We are in multiple tribute bands now just because it feels like that's what people are wanting to see more.”
Danni adds, “Those artists have years and years and years of cultivating a following, and so when you tack that name onto your performance and you are hosting a show, people are like, ‘Oh, my God, we wanna come,’ especially if it's a theme … people love to dress up.”
The musicians are able to make their living performing other artists’ music while also profiting off their original recordings, and all of their bands have their own followers.
“Prizm is a very different type of project, and the demographic, everything is very different,” says Kris. “It's synth-wave '80s-sounding music, which has a really big cult following.”
The licensing company they work with is subscription-based, so Prizm’s music is placed on countless ads and videos hundreds of times a month. The deal is lucrative, but they like performing live, even through the ups and downs of the pandemic.
Many industry people hoped for a shift after the pandemic lockdowns, but the sad silence surrounding empty stages didn’t necessarily set audiences running to support local talent when venues reopened.
Balis says the bar business hasn’t returned to its pre-COVID days, and his bars and neighboring businesses have seen a decline in sales and attendance.
“I think there was somewhat of an expectation that once restrictions were lifted and people felt safer about going out, that the streets were just going to be flooded with people wanting to be active and do stuff and see live music,” Balis says. “I think a lot of people, because it did take so long, their habits changed and they just stuck to their new way, their new normal, their new way of life, which was staying at home. I underestimated that. I thought that people were gonna be bursting at the seams to get out.”
On the Money
On Sunday near the end of March, singer Sarah Johnson’s annual showcase of female talent, Girls of DFW, stacked the stage at Louie Louie’s Dueling Piano Bar in Deep Ellum.
At the end of the set, after duo Penny and Dime’s acoustic harmonies, Jones Monroe stole the room’s attention simply by taking the stage.
The singer grew up with her grandmother in Terrell, dreaming of breaking out like hometown star Jamie Foxx. She took piano and voice lessons thanks to her grandmother, who bartered her services as a caregiver.
Jones did her elders proud. “I placed first in UIL [University Interscholastic League] every year,” she says.
Jones graduated from high school at 16, studied vocal performance at Cedar Valley College and became an opera singer, briefly singing in New York venues. She won a full-ride scholarship to UNT but declined it to take care of her ailing grandmother.
One day, she was singing in a public restroom “just randomly,” she says, when a woman told her she should apply for a job coaching artists. Jones began teaching young artists how to sing and eventually started her own artist development company, Pogue Entertainment. The killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 inspired Jones to return to singing.
“I literally wrote a full album, straight through,” she says. “I decided during that time, I had a message and that I really needed to form and do my own artistry or I wouldn’t actually be happy.”
She ditched her name, Brielle Pogue, along with 40 pounds and picked up her grandmother’s last name as her first before re-emerging as the newly blond Jones Monroe.
First she released the hip-hop/R&B single “Black,” but she’s sitting on 30 songs she’s soon to release.
Monroe is trying every avenue to reach fans — seeking a label hookup through connections, planning an expensive video shoot in Los Angeles and a sponsorship deal with Bacardi.
On stage at Girls of DFW, her blond curls and shimmering sheer dress suggested more Monroe than Jones. She sat for her performance, her old-soul vocals standing tall, but jumped from her seat for a hip-hop reimagining of Ray Charles’ “What'd I Say.” With her movements and presence, she treated the audience like a multitude in a stadium. About two dozen people were there.
And that’s a measure of how many people missed it. At any time in DFW, close to 6.3 million people skip the chance to watch artists like Jones Monroe, who are bursting with all the momentum to break out, hopefully from the comfort of their hometown.
