Somewhere in the Arizona desert we decided to start a band. Last summer a friend and I drove Route 66, America’s first major highway, from its starting point in Chicago to Los Angeles and the sea. Richie and I had a lot of time to kill between visits to Al Capone’s favorite diner and the World’s Largest Covered Wagon, so we constructed elaborate fantasies. You might call it playing pretend. Richie had just returned from World War II, and I left my spinsterish classics department to go with him to California to drink red wine at the ocean’s edge. We were Okies. The fistfull of change that dragged my dirty jeans lower and lower on my hips each day was maybe enough for some sandwiches tied up in waxed paper. I counted it jealously before dumping it into the cupholder. We were Bonnie and Clyde, opening our slick mouths to laugh at Texas lawmen in gray western towns.
We were thinking about being outlaws, or I was anyway, and we were thinking about music. When we weren’t talking, we played the stereo loud to fill up on sound. Rt. 66 is mostly a network of frontage roads and state highways now that it’s been replaced by slick ropes of interstates. We went hours sometimes without seeing other cars, so we played music for the empty roads and emptier skies.
We met waiting on the train. You asked me for a cigarette, which I had because in this story I smoke. He turned down the music.
I was on the lam.
No, I told him, we’re musicians this time. We’d both finished shows. I’m in a girl band, the drummer. We play the music sisters would play who lived their whole lives alone in a creaky old farmhouse. A Rose for Emily, the musical.
He told me what music his band would play, but I’ve forgotten. Probably something that sounded like McClusky.
He was on the lam, he insisted. He asked me to come with him there at that train station because, even though we’d just met, he knew we’d get along. I said yes because in this story I said yes to things and believed in love at first sight.
In the Arizona desert, we sat in seats dampened with sweat and planned the band we’d start when we began our lives over again in Los Angeles.
Wait, why are you on the lam?
I, uh, cut down those damn trees inside Trees.
As well you should've.
Trees, one of Deep Ellum’s oldest rock clubs recently closed. Deep Ellum is Dallas’ oldest entertainment district and home to a motley assortment of clubs, bars, and restaurants. Trees has a pretty good history for a rock club. A lot of your favorite bands from the ‘90s played there, probably before they were your favorite bands. Right after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" broke, a Nirvana show famously erupted in chaos. Kurt Cobain got his ass kicked. Mudhoney, the Toadies, and Radiohead all played Trees, albeit with less attendant drama.
But now no one plays there. The doors are locked. Someone's taped up a couple of signs, and already the corners are crinkly with this damn humidity. Richie didn't chop down the trees, those big columns that--as far as I could tell--were once growing in a forest somewhere before they were brought in to support the roof, block the stage from certain angles, and give the club its name. Richie didn't kill Trees.
Or at least he didn't kill Trees any more than I did or any of Dallas' other rock fans who could be going to Deep Ellum but mostly choose to go to another part of town. Club Dada, another of the old guard, closed last month. Deep Ellum, some people fear, is not only long past its glory days of the 1980s and 90s but is fading out all together. Robert Wilonsky, a music columnist for the Dallas Observer, claims that at the very least that great rock shows will be replaced by 18 and up dance clubs, growing crime rates, and what he elegantly designates butt rock. We mustn't let that happen. Sure, there are plenty of great music venues in the city, and if Deep Ellum no longer exisited as a place to see bands, we'd still have plenty of options. But something precious would be lost.
In the 1920s Deep Ellum was the sweaty navel of the country blues universe. Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sonny Boy Williams played on street corners for the clang of nickles in their tin cups. Inside juke joints black folk and white looked on slack jawed as musicians beat their guitars like they beat their wives. The streets were slick with horseshit and mud and, on Saturday nights, blood. Seems like somebody got stabbed down there 'most every weekend. Women slipped into "pharmacies" for whiskey and cocaine while their men shot craps in the alleys.
In 1938, bluesman Robert Johnson recorded a long walk away from what used to be Trees. The building's still there. It's boarded up and crusted over with grafiti and notices from the city. Its doorways stink of piss and vomit. Dallas, one of Johnson's girlfriends recalled in a documentary, was what killed him. In Texas the kid from the Delta traveled among his people as a star ran headlong into segregation. Men had opened their flasks and wallets to him; women their thighs. In Dallas, they locked the front doors of buildings and sent him in the back way. People said he learned the guitar in exchange for his soul.
I don't know what the next several decades were like in Deep Ellum. There were warehouses, I know. Under the glossy facades of clubs and restaurants, there are signs of colorless urban past, a time when America was consumed with throwing up unlovely buildings to house and display their post-war wealth. There were drunks and junkies in the doorways when the artists and musicians came back in the eighties. But bands played on Fridays, and galleries filled up rooms where machines once clanged with bright light and strange sculpture. One developer talked about making Commerce and Elm into Bourbon Street.
Many people I know are afraid to go to Deep Ellum now. There is a good chance you'll run into panhandlers. Once a wizened man sang me some Motown song about a beautiful girl in a voice I couldn't believe, so I gave him a dollar even though the signs everywhere say not to. Another time a man blocked my way on the sidewalk and demanded money more than asked when I was walking with a friend. I was a little frightened then, but we stepped into the street and continued around him without incident. About half the stories I know about car break-ins take place in Deep Ellum. And a couple of bloody headlines have daubed the area's reputation. A couple of kids started shooting at each other outside a dance club. Two girls' father was beaten almost to death at an Old 97s concert. Cops glare at you even if you're sober and walking neatly down the sidewalk. Why on earth would anyone go to such a place?
I go to Deep Ellum because, in a city mostly dedicated to tearing down its history and putting up shiny new condos, it still wears a gypsy jumble of old architecture and new. We go to Deep Ellum to acknowledge that music is more than the shitty screamo and hardcore your hear there most weekends and even more than this week's indie darling. The corner of Elm where blues legends played is the sacred ground I can walk in my beer-damp Chucks after a Gossip show. We go to Deep Ellum because rock music at its best is no about thosands of people, upholstered seats, eight dollar beers, and a laser light spectacle. Rock music is musicians crowded up on a stage, squinting through smoke-blue air as people press close to the stage giddy on beer, yes, but on this strange closeness and music they feel in their bellies.
This weekend, go to Deep Ellum. Bring a friend. Bring twelve friends if you're worried about safety. Lock your doors, and don't leave shit laying out in your car. But go. Eat at Deep Sushi. Or, better yet, grab dinner at Angry Dog. They have some of the best burgers and hotdogs in town and, best of all, a great vegetarian sandwich. Go to the Curtain Club and the seven other clubs you can get into for one $8 cover on "Deep Fridays." You'll see some butt rock and, probably, some college freshmen who love Dave Matthews more than anyone should. But maybe you'll run into something great, something everyone'll be talking about in three years. It might be the beginnings of a story to tell your grandchildren.
Or spend fifteen bucks at the Gypsy Tearoom to see a national act. Three drinks in, you might notice the picture of Blind Lemon tacked up on the curtain is begining to smile benevolently right at you. Somehow the smells of smoke and beer and sweat are strongest here, and when you leave they'll stay in your hair and on your clothes like the ghosts of a thousand shows.
Two step with a drunk middle-aged cowboy at Adairs while twentysomethings pound out the country music your grandparents listened to. And drink some Shiner bock out of little plastic cups until, secretly and sheepishly, you start to love Texas. Close your night at the Velvet Hookah sitting on pillows with goth kids and hipsters and dance club kids and cowboys and those dozen friends you brought to save you from mugging. Drink one of the dozen or so chichi martinis they serve, and try not to leer at the belly dancer. On your way out, proposition your designated driver and hold tight to your purse.
When you wake up the nexxt morning and your ears and mouth feel packed with cotton, know that you've done your part to keep Dallas from losing what's best about itself in a crush of silicone and skyscrapers. If you don't live in our around Dallas, don't think you're off the hook. Find where local music is being made. Find where the buildings are older than you are. Find a bar or a restaurant that exists only in the town where you live and not in the movie Office Space. And go there. If in ten years, we're all saying there's a Starbucks where something cool used to be or a crack house, it will be our own faults. I'll have to turn Richie and his axe lose loose you then, and you will deserve it.
Spring 2005
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