The day after Putin's useful idiot signed his Big Bullshit Bill, further eviscerating the social safety net so billionaires can have even bigger tax breaks, while the Texas hill country tries to recover all the dead from catastrophic flooding that will take even longer to recover from now that FEMA's been defunded so ICE can have a bigger budget than any law enforcement agency in history -- we headed off for an adventure in Oak Cliff because it's my wife's birth month, and we needed a night among friends doing things we like.
Parked the car on North Winnetka, a block from where I lived when I first moved to Texas back in '78, and walked over to Nova, a gem of an eatery where we've been working our way through the menu for 15 years or so, occasionally diverted by the specials (like this evening's watermelon appetizer with feta cheese and macadamia nuts), and had our tab paid by Kessler Theater/Longhorn Ballroom impresario Edwin Cabaniss (we'll repay the debt next time Edwin and his wife are in Fort Worth). Then we strolled over to the Kessler to hear Jeff Liles tell Robert Wilonsky stories of his 40-year career promoting live music in Dallas.
I forget how I first met Liles, back around the time he, Edwin, and Paul Quigg (Liles' Cottonmouth, Texas bandmate and original Kessler technical director) were preparing the Kessler -- a 1941-vintage movie palace, once owned by Gene Autry, dormant since a fire in 1960 -- for its reopening, 17 years since its last incarnation, as a garment factory. I remember Sir Marlin Von Bungy from the Me-Thinks (who appears in The Last Record Store, Liles' documentary film paean to the late Bill Wisener's record store) telling me that we should meet. I remember a Mike Watt show at the Granada where my wife and I met up for dinner and pre-show refreshments with Liles and Quigg where we formed a bond.
Liles -- a child of the 'burbs (Richardson, to be exact) who caught the rockaroll bug when Lightning (a '70s Dallas cover band led by guitar ace Rocky Athas) played a concert at his high school -- was still writing occasional columns for the Dallas Observer then, under the rubric "Echoes and Reverberations." I dug his scrawl, but didn't share a lot of his experiences, because while he was creating Deep Ellum as a music scene with Russell Hobbs and others in the mid-'80s, I was Guarding Freedom's Frontier. After I got out of the service in '92 and split with my first wife the following year, I was working most of the time and didn't have time to go to any shows (except for the time Dan Lightner had an art show with Brian Scott and Brian Jones at some Deep Ellum gallery, and the time Dan and John Bargas took me to see Bedhead and Funland at the Orbit Room).
By the late '90s, I'd started playing music again (driving to Dallas to sit in with rock and blues cover bands whose leaders I knew until I learned that Fort Worth had open jams, which I supported until I realized that if I wanted to do more than spend three hours supporting the bar to play three songs unless a Name walked in, I needed to make my own bands, which is a different story), and writing about music for fanzines and early webzines as relief from my soul-destroying corporate gig. During this period, I went to maybe four shows a year, always at Club Clearview, always touring bands like the Dictators or the Nomads, incidentally catching like-minded local acts like Dead Sexy and the Sunday Drunks. When I lost my corporate job and started freelancing for Fort Worth Weekly, my focus was redirected to the 817 area code to the exclusion of everything else. (Also a different story.)
During my time as a vocational music scribe, I was quite in awe of Robert Wilonsky, a highly prolific journo whose work filled the pages of the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News. Wilonsky and Liles were tight bros from way back when, so it made sense for Robert to moderate Liles' evening in the spotlight at the Kessler. Multiple cameras were on hand to record the occasion, and Wilonsky promises there will be more -- a fine thing in my opinion, as too much of our region's music history has been insufficiently documented. And this evening's dialogue is what Liles has chosen to do in lieu of writing a book.
It was a full house, with Jeff's mom, wife Melissa Hennings (a fine photog who's done important work documenting the ongoing fight for freedom and democracy in Dallas), and mother-in-law in attendance, along with many friends to whom Liles is a bigger deal than Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan (playing across town the same evening). My wife and I were seated next to the mother and stepfather of Graham "Rooftop" Brotherton, a beloved member of the original Kessler team who passed from cancer in 2019. The opening slideshow was filled with images of departed members of the Kessler community, including my brothers Dennis Gonzalez, who lived up the street and played the theater many times with Yells At Eels, and iconic Fort Worth drummer-composer Ronald Shannon Jackson, who played his very last show there in 2012.
To hear Liles tell it, his Zelig-like ubiquity on the Dallas music scene since the '80s has been due to a combination of being in the right place at the right time (trying to book his band at Theater Gallery when Russell Hobbs was looking for a talent buyer) and people who read about him in the paper calling him up, but all self-deprecating bullshit aside, folks hired him sight unseen to do his job because he has the rep of being good at what he does -- and in the music biz, reputation is everything.
A few gems from his bag of stories (he tells them much better than I do, of course, and you should be able to view the video online shortly): seeing metal band Rigor Mortis cured of their homophobia in real time by a gay A&R man from Elektra Records, who'd signed Metallica and wanted to do the same for them; visiting Screamin' Jay Hawkins with Dallas police who needed to serve a summons, and wound up giving the performer a ride to his gig at the Hard Rock Cafe; meeting NWA and explaining to Eazy-E what Thai food was; booking the Roxy in the City of Angels but returning to Dallas to help Edwin reopen the Kessler when his mother begged him "Please don't go back to LA." He spoke with genuine affection of his employer's vision and ability to get things done (I didn't know the part Edwin had played in getting the referendum to allow alcohol sales in Oak Cliff on the ballot). At 63, Liles has no nostalgia for the rough-and-tumble days of Deep Ellum. Those were different times.
Some of my favorite Kessler memories:
1) Attending the groundbreaking ceremony after showing my wife the house I used to live in, and hearing guitar wunderkind Emily Elbert (as in "Whatever happened to...?") play.
2) Playing the Tommy Atkins memorial benefit with HIO before the theater was open (after our set, Liles asked if he could video us in the green room, with the stipulation that he only wanted Terry Horn, Matt Hickey, and me out of our unwieldy ensemble, and he wanted us to only play cigar box guitars -- which was the beginning of the "good part" of HIO for me, at least).
3) The time Britt Robisheaux, Curtis Heath and I went to see Living Colour and were able to tell Vernon Reid that Shannon Jackson was at Sloan-Kettering in NYC undergoing cancer treatment, which enabled Vernon to arrange a week of reunions and farewells for his Decoding Society bandleader.
4) Seeing Charley Crockett before he blew up, telling a story about how Liles told him, "I want to book you in the theater, but I can't do that if you keep giving it away for free all over town."
5) Seeing the Grandmothers of Invention, Shuggie Otis, Ian McLagan (who stopped the show to hail Bucks Burnett when the latter walked in late), Nels Cline and Julian Lage, Nils Lofgren, Jackie Venson, Cam Franklin, the Zombies, and lots more.
6) Abiding regrets: Missing Thinking Plague. And Allan Holdsworth.
Jeff Liles is a Dallas treasure. Long may he run.
