Portable repertoire

I figured I was done playing in bands when Stoogeaphilia drummer Jon Teague moved to Albuquerque the weekend of the first Covid lockdown. But you never see what's around the corner. Last summer, I was on a music writer's panel at KUZU-FM's Revolution Record Convention, where I encountered Cade Bundrick (Please Advise, Chris Welch), drummer-bassist-organizer and fine fella, working the Recycled Books and Records booth and he suggested we jam -- a suggestion I almost never refuse. So we started jamming once a month in August and continued until it became clear to me that this guy was too busy for another project. By which time other stuff had eventuated.

After I got done learning all the Trout Mask Replica guitar parts, during the pandemic, I started singing more, mainly for my own amusement. After awhile, I developed the concept of Stashdauber/Folknik: me singing songs (some political in nature) solo acoustic. In this way, I planned to reinvent myself as the Joan Baez of Fort Worth rockaroll. But only quasi-seriously. 

Then in January I went to Growl in Arlington to see my old Stooge frontman Ray Liberio's new band Bull Nettle Jacket -- basically the dregs of Vorvon, with Tony Medio (Dragworms) on bass and vox. After their set, Tony (whom I'd known for 20-plus years but never heard play) suggested we jam. We started meeting up at his jam room at Cozmik Rehearsal in Haltom City (where the Stooge band used to prac in the Me-Thinks' room) every couple of weeks, drawing on my projected Stashdauber/Folknik repertoire for material. We hit it off, and after awhile, we were ready to look for a drummer. 

At that point, Cameron Long (Merkin/L. Ron Hummer), another fine fella whom I first encountered while playing in the Wednesday night house band at the Wreck Room, reintroduced himself, joined, and elevated us the way a good drummer always does. Because of Cam's work/family schedule, we can only rehearse on a "divorced dad" schedule -- every other weekend, which is fine. Thus, STC (for Stashdauber, Tony, and Cam) was born. Against all odds, I'm in a band again. 

Lately I've been picking up some solo acoustic gigs like the Second Sunday Spoken Word go (where I'll play with house musicians Savanna Sons) previously hyped on this page, and the Indivisible Texas-12 shindig at McFly's in River Oaks (where I'll play with my teacher-soccer coach-activist buddy Ernie Moran for the first time). STC may be ready to gig by the fall, if anyone will have us. How fortunate am I.

Oak Cliff, 7.5.2025

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.

Denton/Dallas, 6.28.2025

Rolled out of the rack late after a good STC practice last night. Regrettably, the video on my phone was shot in slo-mo, so I couldn't upload it to YouTube, but I was able to view it at regular speed on my phone and have to say we played a pretty tight version of "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White." Cam improved us the way a good drummer always does a band. Not that we were planning on it, but this might actually be giggable by the fall, if there's anyplace that would have us. I always say the Stooge band was the most fun I ever had, but this is giving it a run for its money, plus I can remember every time we've played.

My buddy Mike came by and picked me up for the drive up to Denton and KUZU-FM's Revolution Record Convention, which included Spinning Bricks: Record Stores As Cultural Hubs, a lively and spirited panel discussion moderated by Sonido Tumbarrancho producer Ernesto Montiel, with record people Daniel Salas (of Fort Worth's Doc's), Mike West (of Denton's Recycled), Karla Grisham (of Chicago's Dusty Groove), and Kate Siamro (of Oak Cliff's Spinster). The passion for music and community these folks displayed reminded me why slinging platters was the only one of the numerous ways I've made a buck that I would go back to. Kudos to Ernesto for putting them together and asking the questions that sparked their discussion.

In the evening, my wife and I headed to Dallas' The Cedars neighborhood, home of Full City Rooster, recently featured on Good Morning America, and my favorite listening spot in Dallas along with The Wild Detectives (where Ernesto Montiel books the music). The occasion was the recording of a live album by the Monks of Saturnalia, guitarist-composer Gregg Prickett's long-lived Mingus and Ayler-influenced vehicle. 

I first heard Gregg in the last edition of Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society back in 2012, and I've since dug his work with Unconscious Collective and They Say the Wind Made Them Crazy, among others, but the Monks are his oldest aggregation -- a going concern for 25 years now. It takes a lot to maintain a band playing original creative music; a touring NYC muso recently remarked that the reason everyone in that city does improv is that no one can afford to rehearse without grant money, and the same is true here in Texas (with fewer foundation grants) as the cost of living spirals. As tenorman Steve Brown, the large-toned mainstay of the Monks' reed section, told me, "making art always requires a sacrifice."

Besides Steve, bassist Drew Phelps (perhaps Gregg's ideal collaborator), and drummer Alan Green (an understated but hard-swinging marvel who always serves the music well), the current Monks lineup includes newcomer Aden Sears on baritone sax, a SoCal native and recent UNT grad who was visibly delighted to be playing this music with these people, and, with Steve, summoned the spirits of Pepper Adams and Booker Ervin in the '50s Mingus band as they squared off for muscular section work and fiery glossolalia. The palpable joy in this section lifted the music, and watching the nonverbals between the two reedmen as they riffed behind other soloists or faced off for simultaneous expressive flights was a visual highlight.

The music itself was like a sixth presence on the stage, and it moved and danced like a living thing: the winds its breath, the rhythm section its pulse, and Prickett's guitar -- whether playing pianistic chords, splintering single note solos, or using tasteful distortion to add another textural element -- was its voice. It's going to be a gas to be able to enjoy recordings of longtime favorites like the Ayler-inspired "He Walked Into the River" (which I first heard at Shannon Jackson's last-ever concert at the Kessler), the Mingus homage "(Not Because I Have To, But Just for the Hell of It) I Pledge Allegiance," and "Hika," dedicated to Gregg's beloved pet wolf (one of three he raised, now all departed). And a new tune -- "So new it doesn't even have a chart," shades of Mingus at Town Hall in '63 -- sounded as bold and assured as the repertory tunes. But you really have to be in the room to appreciate this music as the players bring it to life. The third element is you.

FW/Denton/Arlington, 6.24-25, 2025

My birthday week. We like to stretch these things out and it just so happens there are a bunch of shows this week, along with KUZU.FM's Revolution Record Convention Saturday, where my friend Karla Grisham of Chicago's Dusty Groove will be appearing on a record store panel (moderated by Sonido Tumbarrancho host Ernesto Montiel) at 12:30pm.

Started the week out woodshedding with guitarist Greg Johnson of Savanna Sons, the house band at Tammy Gomez's Second Sunday Spoken Word, at which I'll be performing on July 13. (It's at Arts Fifth Avenue from 6-8pm.) I've known Greg for about 20 years now, but never got to hear him play until a couple of weeks ago, and we had a nice rehearsal with Sons bassist Walter Williams at the Grackle Art Gallery last week. Simpatico cats, I think this is going to be fun.

Wednesday was the latest Joan of Bark Presents, our favorite monthly experimental music series at Denton's Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios, so my buddy Mike and I headed up there, with a stop at Recycled Books and Records so he could trade some stuff and I could drop off Indivisible zines (two titles: updated Project 2025 and You and Deep in the Heart of TX, a "choose your own adventure" story about the abortion ban). 

Lately, Joan of Bark's been getting more eclectic, and this month's edition started off with the mother and daughter duo of Donna and Grae Gonzalez, who offered a charming line in song and story, encompassing goofy humor, high lonesome harmony, girl group pop, and sultry jazz. The electronic duo Gentle Doom and IMCAT (Aaron Brent and Will Frenkel) made some staticky connections, then the Chelsey Danielle fronted quartet The Side Chicks improvised Denton-centric stream-of-consciousness rock songcraft, highlighted by Lauren Upshaw (The Hope Trust)'s deft guitar lines. Next Joan of Bark is July 16, the night before the Good Trouble Lives On day of action.

Thursday, Mike and I made our way to downtown Arlington so I could deliver more zines and we could catch my favorite band of the moment, Trio Glossia, at Growl Records. Alex Atchley booked the show, and played direct support with his trio Mirage Music Club -- which evolved from his solo project Naxat, in which form he first pinned my ears back at the Tommy Atkins benefit at the Kessler Theatre before it reopened. His guitarist Scotty Warren lit up the strings with metalloid fusion chops, while drummer Brandon Young propelled things nicely from behind his tiny kit.

Alex's pal Jack O'Hara opened the show with his new duo Threshold of Devotion, in which Jack plays an extremely physical guitar to backing tracks of bass and fake drums that sounded incredibly full and powerful, and Denton-based composer and electronic musician Louise Fristensky plays seductive chanteuse. The Nick Cave-y vibe made me imagine that I was in a Wim Wenders film about Arlington. Then I went outside to talk politics with folks and catch up with Michael Chamy (Zanzibar Snails), who filled me in on his latest endeavors in renewable energy and providing affordable housing in rural areas. Always a forward looking cat.

Trio Glossia was returning from a brief hiatus, during which Joshua Canate toured with a rock band and Stefan Gonzalez and Matthew Frerck traveled to Austin to perform with Chicago saxophone eminence Ken Vandermark twice -- in a quintet with guitarist Jonathan F. Horne and ex-Sons of Hercules drummer Kory Cook, and in a trio playing works by Chicagoan Fred Anderson and Stefan's dad, the late Dennis Gonzalez. Vandermark was suitably impressed. "When I met with the other musicians it was clear that they had all worked on the material ahead of time," he wrote in his blog. "In addition, the skill they all possessed was more than technical, it was interpretive -- they didn’t just play the music properly, they brought it to life." Stefan says the unit will perform again.

Since their last Trio Glossia show, both Canate and Frerck have been composing furiously, and their set comprised all new material with the exception of Frerck's "To Walk the Night," which has coalesced into a really strong feature for his guitar and the interplay of Gonzalez's vibraphone and Canate's drums. Opening tune, Canate's "Gnats from Past Meats," featured its composer roaring on tenor over a fusionistic tempest of sound from Frerck on a short-scale acoustic guitar-styled bass and Gonzalez kicking the traps like I remember hearing Alphonse Mouzon with Larry Coryell's Eleventh House. The net effect was kind of like hearing Sam Rivers sitting in with Lifetime. Another new Frerck original, "Vanishing World," was lyrical and orchestral. The three musicians have grown as an improvising unit, in each other's pockets even while extemporizing like demons. They'll next appear in September at Austin's Sonic Transmissions Festival.

After I finish typing this, I'll go wash the dishes and attempt to practice singing before heading out to Haltom City to rehearse with my STC pals Tony Medio (Dragworms, Bull Nettle Jacket) and Cameron Long (Merkin, L. Ron Hummer), the electric analog to my Stashdauber/Folknik acoustic solo covers project. Then tomorrow evening, after RevCon, my wife and I will head to Full City Rooster in Dallas to hear my other favorite band, Monks of Saturnalia, record a live album. It's a great life if you don't weaken.

Autohype

Three Layer Cake's "Sounds the Color of Grounds"

Not writing many record reviews these days, but coming on the heels of Mike Watt's appearance at The Wild Detectives with MSSV a couple of months back, this stunner of a side deserves a little virtual ink. Even 40 years after his Minutemen shipmate's untimely demise, Watt remains "d. boon's bassplayer," and that heritage is writ large in this collection of remotely recorded tracks that Watt and guitarist-banjoist Brandon Seabrook laid down in response to Mike Pride's drum tracks for the second outing by their pandemic-era project Three Layer Cake. It's out June 27 on Stephen Buono's Otherly Love label.

For Sounds the Color of Grounds, Watt laid down his parts on d. boon's birthday (April 1), and composed lyrics in rough sonnet form (ten syllables, 14 lines, three quatrains and a couplet) for his friend, iconic visual artist Raymond Pettibon. The spoken word approach suits Watt's ragged-but-right vocal style, and the flow of his verse recalls his collaboration with poet Dan McGuire in Unknown Instructors. His yeoman bass work shows why he's the model for the plethora of punk-jazz-funksters currently treading the boards. 

As for his bandmates, Pride plays a lot of tuned percussion as well as drums, giving the trio a broad palette of textures and colors. Seabrook's "heavy metal banjo" chops lead the charge out of the gate on the explosive rustic swing of "Deliverdance." "The Hasta Cloth" is harmolodic space rock, while the mutant bebop of "Occluded, Ostracized, and Onanistic" features Pride's mallets to good advantage. "Tchotchkes" abounds with Eastern European echoes, while "Lickspittle Spatter" highlights Seabrook's bowed banjo. Seabrook's last two outings as leader had him helming an octet (2023's Brutalovechamp) and overdubbing solo (last year's Object of Unknown Function). This latest from Three Layer Cake demonstrates the efficacy of the trio as improvising unit.

Dallas, 6.6.2025

No live shots this time. I put a password on my phone and now I'm locked out. Apparently this kind of Android won't let you power it down without entering the password, so now the young person at the phone store says I need to let it run out of power, then come back with my Google password and they can make it lose its mind. Ah, these machines that are smarter than I. 

So I had a very 20th century experience driving to New Media Contemporary in Dallas' Exposition Park to take in a triptych of women working in various forms of experimental music, in the tradition of Pauline Oliveros. Got lost, but was able to improvise my way (heh) to the venue before start time. (Street team and zine distribution action has helped me familiarize myself a little better with Big D's daunting highways and byways.)

Sarah Ruth Alexander's solo music combines pure vocal tone, operatic training, multi-instrumental flexibility, goofy humor, a literary bent (Didion and McMurtry are favorites) and a feminist perspective with an aesthetic rooted in a place (the Panhandle farm where she grew up) to create something resonant and expressive. She opened with an audience vocal exercise, in which we were invited to scream (men first, then women, then the whole audience), then hum together. A way for us to bond and ground ourselves. 

After verbally riffing on Bartok and bar talk, she played a new piece, "Bird Talk," in which she imitated bird sounds on slide whistle and recorder. Another new composition, accompanied on harmonium, expressed sadness at the conversion of beloved elders in her home town to Trump supporters ("although they're not racists" -- ironic?). She apologized for "getting political," but as my friend Tammy Melody Gomez says, all art is political, including watercolors of bluebonnets and barns.

Sarah's most striking new piece was "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," inspired by hearing high school girls singing the National Anthem at the rodeo. Over a bed of roiling, dissonant electronics, Sarah sang the Anthem (using a screenshot of lyrics "because I'm not that big of a fan") in the manner of a variety of "belty" models, including (briefly) Whitney Houston, then extemporized. She played a new work in progress on New Media Contemporary's baby grand piano, drone-y and modal but with some dissonance, and finished with a nice surprise: "Dust Bowl" from her 2015 Words on the Wind cassette (a fave at mi casa and still Bandcamp-available). I enjoy her work in a lot of contexts, but always dig her solo music the most.

Hexpartner is the performing rubric for Grace Sydney Pham, a virtuoso on violin, voice, and electronics who's incorporated harp into her instrumental array the past two years. She uses samples of her voice, keyed to what she plays on her electronically enhanced instrument, to create layers of swirling, through-composed harmonic wonderment and dark beauty. Her projected video complemented her soundscapes, but I think it was paused at a certain point in her performance and never resumed.

Brooklyn-based polymath (musician, visual artist, architect) Sandy Ewen has advanced the language of prepared guitar farther than anyone else. Although best known among Texas rockaroll types for her work with the group Weird Weeds, she's led a long-lived, Houston-based, all-female large improvising ensemble, and collaborated with improv heavyweights like Damon Smith, Weasel Walter, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Kaiser, Jaap Blonk, and Lisa Cameron. She's currently in the middle of a 23-date solo tour that also included multiple dates in Houston, Austin, and Denton. I was unable to attend her show at Rubber Gloves the previous night, so I was happy to be able to catch this one.

Sandy's now running her seasoned Ibanez semi-hollow (strung with a plain D string, the better to withstand her abrasive attack) through a Milkman stereo amp with two 15-inch speakers -- good for capturing the full sonic range of what she's doing -- and her trusty Ernie Ball pan pedal (contrary to ign'ant journos, the only electronic effect she uses). She employs an array of objects -- metal rods, plates, and the railroad spike that provided the name for her record with Roscoe Mitchell (2021's A Railroad Spike Forms the Voice), bells, a stainless steel scrubbing pad, a selection of electroluminescent wires, sidewalk chalk -- and works like a sculptor to create densely textured soundscapes. 

It's fascinating to watch her in action from up close (easily done in New Media Contemporary's intimate, live-sounding room) and hear the sounds of freight trains, shifting tectonic plates, temple bells, and radio static emerge from her highly tactile process. (She says she might do a video shot from above to allow interested listeners to see how it's done.) While Sandy has a number of good solo recordings available (my pick is the vinyl You Win from 2020), you need to be in the room to get the full depth and dimension of her sound, and experience the head-spinning sensation her stereo panning creates, in tandem with her back-projected visuals. An authentic innovator and a true original. Kudos to Sarah Ruth and New Media Contemporary impresario James Talambas for facilitating an enjoyable and edifying evening.