This Week In Dallas Music History: Wait Till You Hear The Sound of Deep Ellum!

Well, ain't this fitting: Almost a 23 years to the day before The New York Times returned to Deep Ellum and proclaimed that Dallas was getting its groove back, Observer music editor Clay McNear penned a piece about Island Records' interest in the Dallas music neighborhood and its burgeoning scene...

By Pete Freedman

May 17, 2010

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Well, ain't this fitting: Almost a 23 years to the day before The New York Times returned to Deep Ellum and proclaimed that Dallas was getting its groove back, Observer music editor Clay McNear penned a piece about Island Records' interest in the Dallas music neighborhood and its burgeoning scene.

Behind a push from the label's west coast A&R representative, Kim Buie, Island was in the early stages of planning Deep Ellum compilation it would call The Sound of Deel Ellum. As Buie told McNear, she hoped the disc would "represent the area's artistic diversity."

"Next to Minneapolis, [Deep Ellum] is the most exciting scene I've seen in some time," she said.

Today, the disc's still a treasured entity--it was the first thing Robert Wilonsky handed me when I started this gig, telling me I had to listen to it to understand what the Dallas scene once was. And, featuring The New Bohemians, The Buck pets, Three on a Hill, Shallow Reign and others, it remains a fair tribute to the Deep Ellum scene at the time.

After the jump, check McNear's notes column on the disc's planning stages. And, in the briefs that follow, more Deep Ellum news. Turns out whereas the music scene was thriving in 1987, the nightclubs were dropping like flies...

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