Dallas has a music scene with venues of all sizes, seasoned players, excellent music schools and local publications covering it. The stage is set, the mic has been checked. Are fans listening?
The weather is minutes from cooling down, but the outdoor stage at Legacy Hall is hotter than a habanero's ass. The Battle of Evermore, a Led Zeppelin tribute band, might as well be the real thing. Fans of the original British rockers stand near the stage, singing along, their ears perked for shrieks they know are coming.
According to the venue’s schedule, the month is heavy with tribute acts: Pink, Aerosmith and George Strait imitators. Thursdays and Saturdays are DJ nights. “We need a fan revival, not a band revival,” Xander says. With a full buffet of original DFW talent, more fans should try eating at home sometime, she says, rather than subsisting on a diet of music made by national acts. The table is set for local fans with an appetite for original music, but they have to show up.
“[Collab] were some of the first people who encouraged me to get into the business side,” Habtezghi says of booking. “It gradually grew to where the venues trusted me to bring talent and the talent trusted me to book them in places where they would do well.” Social media promotion doesn’t quite replace the power of impassioned, personal word of mouth. A study from 2021 finds that while most people discover new music through streaming apps or radio, nearly a third rely on recommendations from family and friends.“That still does happen, but not as much as it used to,” Habtezghi says of local fan followings.
“It is hard to get people, the non-regulars, people who don’t live in the area to travel here,” he says. “I think a lot of that has to do not necessarily with the violence … [but] the headlines have been so negative. I think the negative headlines for the neighborhood specifically, that hurt, they hurt.”
Though he’s built a name with his bands Ten Hands, The Travoltas and as a pianist and solo artist, he’s not up to speed with what works these days in music marketing. DJ nights now dominate much of Dallas’ nightlife, but until the early 2000s, there was a bigger local celebrity scene with “Dallas-famous” bands that pulled in sizable followings from the suburbs before breaking out nationally.
“The people want to make sure that they're gonna get their money's worth,” he adds. “They look at their experiences as products that they're buying, and they want to make sure that they're buying a good product with the money because the experiences have all been made so expensive.” Grammy-winning producer Jah Born suggests that Dallas’ size — neither small enough to conquer nor big enough to propel international stardom — makes it uniquely competitive.
“Musicians crashing into each other is how the Harlem Renaissance happens. That’s how Atlanta happens,” he says. “The demand doesn't precede the supply, the supply precedes the demand. Artists should give audiences a great night.”“I ain't hating on the newcomers, but a lot of the suburban population in Dallas are people that are not from here,” he says. “They don't even know about the scene. These are recent transplants.
The Kessler is one venue betting on local artists, usually filling opening slots with traveling acts. The historic Oak Cliff venue’s artistic director, musician and writer, Jeff Liles, keeps one bit of advice in his pocket. Still, some “traditionalist” acts such as Joshua Ray Walker and Charley Crockett have found fame by sticking to typical avenues for discovery: In Crockett’s case, the path led from local press to local radio, to national radio and national press.
But none of these artists has yet reached worldwide fame, as Jah Born points out, largely because they’re competing with national acts favored by fans. The company books about 250 shows a week during its “on season” from St. Patrick's Day to Thanksgiving, Ponder says. “Like that to a T,” he says. “Like we would sell some tickets in Austin, San Antonio, maybe Lubbock. But DFW was kind of the one spot where we could actually sell 400 tickets or so.”
“It depends on how you define success,” he says. “When I started Somebody's Darling with Amber Farris [in 2007] … my goals were, I wanted to be written about in the. I wanted to be on tour because to me, you were a real band if you were on tour. And we poured all of our resources into making that happen. I mean, we never made any money. Every dollar went back into paying for the van, or we would go on tour and break even.
“It's imperative to give the fan the opportunity to see you live,” he says. “It completes the whole entire experience for them. There's so much value in being an artist and having the opportunity to display what you put on social media to your fans in real life. That's why people pay. That's why there's always a premium for that experience.”
The singers play a variety of acoustic covers as duo Danni & Kris; they have a Fleetwood Mac tribute band called Little Lies plus an original project called Prizm, a synth-pop band with which they produce songs for a licensing company for commercial use. They say their original songs have been used by brands such as Doc Martens, Sephora, Igloo coolers and Disneyland, and even by Paris Hilton.
The musicians are able to make their living performing other artists’ music while also profiting off their original recordings, and all of their bands have their own followers. Balis says the bar business hasn’t returned to its pre-COVID days, and his bars and neighboring businesses have seen a decline in sales and attendance.
Jones did her elders proud. “I placed first in UIL [University Interscholastic League] every year,” she says.
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