A Memorial to the Tunnel
28.September.2006

"Hold up. I have to drive two miles between clubs in this city?"

On Sunday, I found myself in Seattle at the end of a long, strange trip both mentally and globally (I'll post my Uganda story at samred.com in the near future). After a span of nearly three weeks, my girlfriend and I had one last night together before I returned to my favorite letters D. Some long distance couples will spend their final hours locked away in romantic isolation, but luckily, I have the best girlfriend in the world. After I dragged her to both an obscure record store and a comic book shop in the University district, Beth grabbed a copy of The Stranger and squealed: "Astronautalis is in town tonight!"

(We play video games together, too. Seriously, she makes the whole jobless thing a lot easier to bear.)

The SMU alum's performance was actually our Plan B for the evening, as another personal favorite, Vancouver's Pink Mountaintops, had a gig at the Crocodile Cafe...or so we thought. Turns out the band was short a few legal documents at the Canadian border, so we hopped in the car and crossed the massive interstate to reach another music venue.

Astronautalis at the Chop Suey (yes, in Seattle...see the coffee cup?)

"Doesn't Seattle have a dedicated hub of music venues?" I asked. She said the city has clusters of 'em, though the clubs we visited were both somewhat isolated (certainly not within walking distance of any others).  Both venues had solid booking calendars, and they were packed--on a Sunday night, no less. Of course, all I could do was think of Dallas, a city with a massive, centralized, mystical destination known as Deep Ellum...

...but I've already written about that district to death for my previous employer. No need for me to rehash its serious strengths (Club Dada's rise, Gypsy Tea Room's continued dominance), its glaring flaws (the continuing downward spiral of the Clearview/Curtain/Liquid complex, ruined by a booking policy that refuses to cross-polinate a given evening's genres) and its boneheaded misconceptions (uh, what crime?).

Still, I couldn't help but compare the two (seeing as how Seattle's entered my crosshairs for a new hometown, should this site not work out in the next few months). Seattle, of course, could have all its venues spread throughout the suburbs and still land a healthy audience for each; it's a young, artistic, college-friendly city with that whole Pac-NW thing going for it. People leave their homes for Seattle.

Do music fans leave their homes for the Metroplex?

I suppose it's a step up for Southern small-towners in terms of culture, entertainment and jobs, and the three big cities--and their respective art/music scenes--are far from crap. But in my general experience, Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton aren't places you go; they're places you wind up, whether by birth, job transfer, family, cheap college or community service.

Then you reach the conversation had in every not-quite-huge city with a great music scene, and Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton fit into that mold more than any other thanks to the glaring contrast between the number of people and the number of music fans here. Everyone has to work harder to find kindred musical friends, to build dedicated audiences, to stand out and get the small crowd's picky, undivided attention. And then when--not if--they fail to do so, they have to keep fighting anyway.

Furthermore, the music scenes are wonderful not because of an inundation of migrant pickers and singers, but in spite of it. The men of The Theater Fire stewed in Fort Worth and Dallas long enough to finally embrace the Southern sounds that they'd heard all of their lives; as a result, their former space-rock leanings transformed into a candidate for the nation's Top 10 list this year, Everybody Has A Dark Side. Bosque Brown's music is rich with the country traditions of Stephenville and amplified by the hungry audiences of Denton. Two of the guys in PPT are in their late 30s, surviving the most embarrassingly underappreciated hip-hop scene in the nation to finally put out one of the genre's most compelling records of the decade. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Deep Ellum tunnel, image stolen from a local Flickr'ian

So I wasn't depressed when I drove past the Deep Ellum tunnel last night and saw loads of roadblock signs barring entry into half of it. Nor was I apathetic about it. The city's management is too shortsighted and politically motivated to appreciate what a non-corporate music center like Deep Ellum can offer a town without a Pacific coast, without a working mass transit system, without a reputation that attracts the best creative minds in the country to migrate this-a-ways. Their boasts of a rail line saving the district are ill-founded, masking the city's real hopes for a GapHutRepublic only minutes away from downtown Dallas (and if you don't believe that, watch the city's anti-dance and anti-tattoo ordinances transform over the next five years to help big business and hurt clubs like Darkside and Dada).

Dallas Area Mass Transit has stated that the tunnel will be destroyed within the next 12 months. Its dusty graffiti and rag-tag appearance will be replaced by a "new gateway" supposedly by 2009, possibly one with the same style and artistic appeal if enough people in the city make a stir about it...but they won't. Just like Deep Ellum didn't, doesn't and won't truly impact how too many quality bands in the city survive and thrive. I don't say that to short-shift Deep Ellum--I am fond of it, I have no issues with it. But this city obviously needs more than a location for bands; it needs to foster excitement and desire for them, or otherwise, nobody will care when the GapHutRepublic shimmies into town.

That's why I wasn't sad or numb about the tunnel's imminent destruction. Yes, it's a bummer to see it go, and it's a nasty bit of foreshadowing about what its home may become. But maybe a few crumbling, falling bricks (and I don't mean the ones in Trees that affected far too narrow an audience) will fire people up enough to make a stir; to make an impact in local press and radio; to reach out to the people who somehow wind up in our cities.

At the very least, I'm fired up. As if bands have it tough enough to make any impact in this city, here I am, arms flailing wildly on a barren Web site with only a fraction of my former audience. But I'm okay with that. While I was out of the country, my most important personal revelation was to realize that my recent firing was a "when," not an "if." As a true local music diehard, I have no choice but to keep fighting. -SM