Kevin Pask, Deep Ellum Blues

It was then something of a shock to me to discover that a place like Deep Ellum had ever existed in Dallas. Places like New Orleans and Memphis might have history and music, but Dallas seemed to exist in the eternal Sunbelt present. I can't remember when I first heard the term used or found out anything about its history, but it was probably in the early 1980s, when some clubs that featured punk bands and alternative music began to open up in the area. Around the same time (January 1983), the City of Dallas issued a plan to "downzone" the neighborhood in order to maintain a form of urban development that Dallas had not really known since World War II. Some kind of memorialization of the neighborhood began as early as 1975, when The Dallas Morning News ran a long feature on the old neighborhood, in which bluesman Alex Moore was one of the featured sources, and some the clubs from the revival of the neighborhood essentially quoted aspects of Deep Ellum's history.


The new Deep Ellum quoting the old: Gypsy Team Rooms, 1930s (left) and 2007 (right).

The Dallas Observer, the alternative weekly that dates from about the same period, began to mention the area as a coming one around 1983-84. My friend, Keith Kaski, who had become part of the local hardcore punk scene, bounced me around a number of clubs in other parts of the city, including the short-lived Hot Klub, behind a Jack-in-the-Box on Maple Avenue in the Oak Lawn area near the old North Dallas Freedmantown. Studio D, which Frank Campagna had opened in his art studio around 1982 pretty far east on Main Street (just before the old Deep Ellum neighborhood reached Fair Park), brought hardcore to Deep Ellum before almost any other clubs opened in the neighborhood.8 Things were informal at Studio D. I remember a performance of the Dead Kennedys in which a motorcyclist drove through the front door of the club and revved his engines in some sort of act of musical appreciation while the Kennedys were playing on the small stage beside the entrance; no one, including the band, seemed unduly surprised by this form of audience participation.

By the time Deep Ellum had begun to cohere into some sort of musical scene in the mid-eighties, Studio D had already moved across Central Expressway into downtown Dallas and acquired an unimproved old loft in the no-man's land just on the east side of Central. Studio D seemed to me the most interesting club in Deep Ellum, but its transitory existence, very much in character for the entire punk history of Dallas, such as it is, finds almost no record in the histories of the neighborhood that do exist.9 I mention this because the club now seems to me to have embodied perhaps most successfully something of the spirit of the old Deep Ellum, right down to its transient existence and its ability to get up the backs of the police. The American hardcore bands of the 1980s had no roots component, and their circuit and culture was decidedly southwestern rather than southern in character: bands typically arriving from Hermosa Beach, California (Black Flag and the bands clustered around SST Records), Phoenix, and other locations in the white Sunbelt. This betrays something of the suburban and national character of the revived Deep Ellum, no longer an urbanizing crossroads embedded in the specific cultures of the South, but rather a kind of post-suburban Sunbelt. Something, however, of the old southern struggle between the sacred and profane remained in the heart of Deep Ellum, where Russ Hobbs, the owner of the once innovative Prophet Bar, had a born-again experience in 1987 and banned secular music from his club, now rechristened The Prophet. His former soundman, Jim Heath, on the other hand, became the Reverend Horton Heat, creating a synthesis that he describes as "country-fed punkabilly."

The revival of Deep Ellum took place in a neighborhood where almost no one had lived in a long time. The North Dallas Freedmantown, on the other hand, was still a black neighborhood in the 1980s, when it was rediscovered and redeveloped as something relatively new for Dallas: in-town living for professionals and the middle class. As Jim Schutze, a thoughtful commentator on Dallas politics, wrote in The Dallas Morning News on October 21, 1985, "The movers and shakers…have been traveling around Europe and Canada taking pictures and gaping longingly on that special urban phenomenon that always seems to work so well there and not here — tasteful, low-rise, residential and retail close-in, development that deals gently with old things, old buildings, parks, cemeteries, all the things that provide texture in a good city." It was perhaps too much to hope that even the new dispensation of urban development would deal as gently with people as with old things. The area became a planned urban redevelopment in 1989, Dallas' first tax increment financing district (financing the debt for city improvements on the assumption of increased tax revenues from redeveloped areas) to redevelop city amenities in the area. Along the way, the neighborhood emerged from its chrysalis as "State-Thomas" or the even perkier "Uptown" of the marketing departing. No embarrassing or difficult associations for its newer residents: in effect, a historical neighborhood without history. Old buildings and homes were preserved and upgraded; old black residents were bought out. As one resident of the rapidly dwindling community told the Times Herald in 1991, "The white people once gave it to the blacks, and now they want it back. And when they want something, they just come and get it, that's all there is to it."10