Panther City's Power Pop Scene
Fort Worth is a good music city. Not a great one, but a pretty good one.
Billy Bob’s Texas is an essential stop on any rising country star’s road to stardom. The Toadies made a good run in the ‘90s alternative rock radio days. Leon Bridges makes a point of celebrating his hometown nearly any chance he gets. Kirk Franklin helped revolutionize gospel music in the Riverside neighborhood. Plus T-Bone Burnett, Delbert McClinton, Willie Nelson and a host of others have made significant contributions to its music history.
And, from time to time, very small micro scenes pop up there that delight the type of nerdy music fans and record collectors who spend a lot of time looking for the obscure and the odd. There are a few reasons for this – one, Fort Worth music tends to like a certain type of live music that adds a little roadhouse to whatever its aims are. You have to rock it a little. Second, for many years it was cheap enough to live there and goof off in a band. And thirdly, I believe the pervasive country music in the area places a little more emphasis on songwriting.
One such case is the delightful three-CD compilation Fort Worth Teen Scene, produced by Norton Records. The music is the rawest of raw garage rock from the 1960s. It’s closer to The Sonics than Herman’s Hermits and it’s really quite good.
And, dear reader, I too was briefly part of such a scene that has now been totally forgotten, so I figured I might write a little recollection of it for my own good and perhaps to delight those that were there at the time.
Back in the mid-to-late 2000s live music was still going strong, but it was beginning to die a slow death, especially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Over in Dallas, Deep Ellum, which had once been bustling with clubs, was a ghost town in part because the city was bleeding it dry in hopes of redeveloping and gentrifying the area (which it eventually did). Only a few clubs stayed open – Club Dada, The Lounge on Elm (eventually renamed “The Nightmare”) and the Prophet Bar held most of the action. Trees still catered to out-of-town acts after the Gypsy Tea Room closed. Denton was a closed scene that mostly catered to University of North Texas students and their various twee art projects. Arlington was a place where people lived, but not a place where people stayed – and definitely not a place to hear live music.
Meanwhile, over in Fort Worth, there were a few clubs hanging on. On the drag across from Texas Christian University was The Cellar, The Moon and The Aardvark. Closer to West 7th was Lola’s. And a few blocks over was The Blue Grotto, which eventually was shortened to just The Grotto.
Among this dire setting my friend Philip and I decided to start a band, mostly because we enjoyed listening to music and buying records and we wanted to do something creative and fun. We eventually recruited Philip’s co-worker and friend, Pauly, to play drums. Philip played bass. I played guitar and sang. Later we added a keyboard player, Ryan. Our big hope was to meet some fellow music nerds and make friends.
The Blue Grotto quickly became our home base. The owner, Cody, was exceedingly nice to bands and the bar on University always had an open, musical atmosphere. He paid people well, booked similar bands together and generally cultivated a nice space to hang out. We started playing the open mics there, which attracted better-than-average talent – usually young guys looking to find fellow music nerds, though occasionally some backwards-baseball cap bros would stop in to do their rendition of “She Talks to Angels.” Leon Bridges was known to pop in and out of these open mics, too, performing as Active Child, but no one from our crew really remembers seeing him, nor would we have noticed him since he was just another guy trying to get some stage time.
Our first band was not that good – The Missus was a garage rock band inspired by the Stooges (who remained very popular among the older, hipper music people in Fort Worth) and King Khan and the Shrines. Only Pauly and Ryan had played in bands before and we just struggled to find our own sound. I had a tendency to yell into the mic because I was too self-conscious to actually sing. Our gear was cheap and often broken. As a local blog pointed out, we sucked. We fizzled in just about a year.
But the experience of playing in a band was a blast and we loved it. We played Deep Ellum several times, which was a thrill for a bunch of indie kids who had spent the last six or seven years seeing our favorite bands perform there. We played with bizarre and interesting bands like Bastardos de Sancho, who mostly covered Butthole Surfers songs and whose drummer played on garbage cans and buckets. We also played with Bright Light Social Hour and a cool art-punk band called Street Hassle. Bright Light Social Hour was very kind to us, but for the most part we struggled to find any real community. Most bands were either shy or competitive, and sometimes both.
We remained bug-bitten, so Philip and Pauly and I regrouped shortly thereafter to start a new band, which we named See Sunny Florida.
The sound we cultivated in our early jam sessions was a little poppier and more melodic than The Missus. I had recently become obsessed with Big Star, and Philip had a real taste for Robyn Hitchcock. We worked on melodies more, thanks to Pauly’s ear for pop music. I practiced actually singing and bought an electric 12-string guitar. We left more space for Philip’s excellent bass playing in the mix and he also added some harmonies to fill out the sound. We weren’t great, but we were better, and that encouraged us to go out and play some shows.
Fort Worth’s music scene was still reeling after the loss of the legendary Wreck Room, and it was also a small town – a few guys who played in bands with each other controlled most of the booking in town, and they reserved those spaces for them and their friends. We always wanted to play a club on Fairmount called the Chat Room, but they turned a cold shoulder to us.
Back to the Grotto, where we were welcomed with open arms.
I had briefly jammed with my college friend Jameson before we graduated, but I didn’t really have the talent to hang and he already had a band going – JJ & The Rogues. They were a serious concern. They made a CD and had a manager. They even had two separate eras. The Rogues were heavily influenced by The Beatles, so in their early days they wore matching suits and ties. Later they ditched the suits and got heavy into jazzier rock like Steely Dan and Joe Jackson. They were good vocalists and even better players. Jameson had been playing in blues jams since he was a kid.
It’s a lot easier to book a club if you can supply talent for the entire night. We went to Cody with the idea that See Sunny Florida and JJ & the Rogues could bring 30 to 50 people out for a night. In the middle slot was a band I hadn’t heard of called The Hendersons (they were friends of Josh, who was the other J in JJ & The Rogues).
Looking back at it, what these three bands had in common was just how out of step they were with the rock music scene in Fort Worth at the time, which was filled with pop-rock fare like Green River Ordinance, improv noise rock like pffft! and faux-reggae like Pablo & The Hemphill 7. Also, in general, the scene was older – guys in their 40s mostly ran the clubs and booked their own bands. All of us were still in our 20s, some of us barely. There were also some pop punk bands in town, but we didn’t know those guys.
And yet the music we were all playing drew from the same cistern – ’60s, ‘70s and ‘80s garage rock and power pop. JJ, the most accomplished of us musically, jumped off from The Beatles into jazzier directions. The Hendersons were pure, unadulterated children of The Kinks and early Rolling Stones, with touches of psychedelia and orchestral pop. See Sunny Florida was a little spikier – bands like The Modern Lovers, early Who and Big Star were our lodestars.
And then, out of nowhere, a little scene developed. That first show was one of the most fun nights of my entire life. Each band brought out a decent crowd, but The Hendersons, barely out of high school, brought the most. Their set is still one of the best rock sets I’ve ever seen. Nolan, the group’s songwriter and lead vocalist, sat off center and weaved together intricate melodies that I’m still amazed by. But the thing I remember most from that show was their former guitarist, Hayden, front-and-center with his Brian Jones-style haircut, smiling and adding the “bah bah” and “la la” melodies with a big grin on his face. They were outrageously good. I even wrote a review of the show on a previous website that received very mixed reviews among their fans. Every scene needs its drama.
Our set, which opened the night, was one for us to be proud of. We added a few covers, including “Gimme Little Sign” by Brenton Wood, that actually got people dancing and swaying, as did one of our originals, “Don’t Do That.” We were beginning to lean into the smoother, groovier, R&B side of garage rock and it was fitting well for us. We also had a few power pop tunes – ”Lorelai” and “Janie’s in Love” that brought out our sweeter side. Where The Missus had been angry and edgy, See Sunny Florida was melodic and dreamy.
JJ played last and brought their unassailable chops to the stage. Their songs at this point were winding and exciting – they loathed simple rock chord changes and had a taste for the type of songwriting that only gets more rewarding the more you hear it. “Stare Down” and “Indifference” turned into jams live, and the band had a way of blasting off from their bridges into solo breaks.
We’d play with both bands a few more times, talk music and occasionally drink together before life and work got in the way. Hayden left The Hendersons. JJ lost both Rogues to new jobs. See Sunny Florida got tired of asking our friends to come see us play (and not getting better musically). Eventually Nolan briefly joined JJ & The Rogues, but not long after the band went on hiatus. By about 2014 or so it was all over. Only The Hendersons still seem to be making music, and you can find their albums on the big streaming services.
The Grotto closed down a few years ago, but Cody still plays music in the area. Where does a young music nerd go to play an open mic these days in Fort Worth? I don’t know. Time marched right on.
The best of these songs would make a nice little CD (or EP) in the vein of Fort Worth Teen Scene. From JJ & The Rogues I would add “So Fast, So Long” and “Me and My Girl” would be on there. From The Hendersons I would add “Daisy’s Name” and “Delilah.” And from See Sunny Florida, I would say “Lorelai” and “Janie’s in Love” fit on that compilation.
Listening back to these songs without the competition and comparison of playing with other bands, I am just tickled that I even got to be part of it for a moment. Nolan’s songwriting and arrangements blew me away then and still do – I still don’t understand how The Hendersons didn’t get more recognition from the local press. JJ & The Rogues were consummate musicians and their songwriting could only come together if you can play your instrument at that level. See Sunny Florida’s lo-fi style and home recordings hide some excellent bass playing, some clever lyrics and a few moments of pop bliss here and there.
Philip and Pauly and I are still close – we saw King Gizzard & Lizard Wizard together a few months ago in Austin, but I haven’t talked to Nolan or Jameson in years (I texted Jameson while I was writing this). I think, objectively, their bands had more to offer the world than ours did, but I did help book the shows and it was fun to be part of it all. Writing this brings more people into my memory – Zach, who played stellar drums for The Hendersons. Kelly, who managed JJ & The Rogues. What a trip.
I was driving today, listening to Apple Music’s Power Pop Essentials playlist and thinking about how much I missed playing in bands when I realized that for a short period I was in the scene I always wanted to be in, and that power pop, British Invasion, garage rock – whatever you want to call it – was the thread that tied us all together, and that we all came to it from different angles I like.
Fort Worth, as I said at the outset of this article, is a pretty good music town – not a great one like, say Seattle or Nashville, but a pretty good one. And I got to noodle a few notes into that history. In some other parallel universe The Grotto is still open, Hayden still has his Brian Jones haircut and See Sunny Florida can actually hit their harmonies. It’s been a good life all the way.
