Search Results for: Los Angeles Times

An Atlas of the Cosmos

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Shannon Stirone | Longreads | October 2020 | 16 minutes (4,288 words)

When I was 8, I noticed an atlas on the bookshelf in my room. I had just started amassing large art books from family museum trips but this was the first abnormally sized book in my posession — it was so oddly shaped its pages spilled over the edge of the shelf. One day I used all my strength to wiggle it down off the bookcase. I sprawled on my bedroom floor and began sifting through the long pages. It must have been from the ’50s or ’60s. It smelled old but it was clearly a book that had been cared for over the years. Its pages were a mix of pastels so dizzying and complex; in how pinks separated from light green and the skinniest blue rivers cut across the pages. Once I was old enough to read, my grandpa started ceremoniously gifting me books from his shelves.

One by one, every time I saw him, a piece of his library became mine. He had travelled all over the world and knew how much it could change a person. And whenever I’d visit him, I’d browse the books on the lower shelves and run my fingers along the spines like a car’s wheels over speedbumps, each cover sort of yellowed from years of his cigarette smoke and constant reading. Once this book and I were formally introduced, I began having regular dates with the atlas. Each day I would lay on my stomach and then sit cross-legged hunched over the pages, running my fingers down the rivers in Africa — the Nile, Limpopo, I’d take a trip to France or Chile. I would attempt to pronounce Czechoslovakia and many other long words that threw me into a joyous tizzy. Every mountain range, every body of water, every large city I would look at longingly wondering one day when I got older, how many of these mysterious places I would see with my own eyes. My wanderlust grew as I grew. There was so much to be explored, there was so much space that existed around my little home in Los Angeles. There was so much I didn’t know.

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The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene

Author Judith Krantz (Photo by Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images)

Kristin Sanders | Longreads | October 2020 | 12 minutes (2,551 words)

Decades later, the paperback edition of Spring Collection still arouses me: A tall, thin woman who is clearly a model strides across the cover, wearing a glamorous white ‘90s dress, slit open to the top of her right thigh. Her white high heels are dated, but everything else from the image, which cuts off just above her nose as if to prevent her from appearing as a real woman, is timeless in the way that images of objectified women usually are: just boobs, legs, and arms. The book has the one Judith Krantz sex scene I still remember, have always remembered, between the character Maude and a girl whose name doesn’t matter, a girl who should have been me.

I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when I found my mother’s copy on our bookshelf. It was published in 1997, so I would have been 14.

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Inside the Chaos of Immigration Court

Photo collage: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) / Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Gabriel Thompson | Longreads | September 2020 | 6,849 words (24 minutes)

 

The Equitable Life Building, at 100 Montgomery Street, sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Named after an insurance company, it was the first skyscraper built in the city after the Depression, a symbol of optimism rising 25 stories high with marble walls that sparkled in the sun. Today, it is home to all sorts of buzzy Bay Area companies, from Spruce Capital Partners (“investors and thought leaders in the Life Sciences industry”) to the OutCast Agency (“strategists and creatives” with “a hyper-growth mindset”). To get away from the hectic pace of investing, strategizing, and creating, tenants can burn off calories inside the building’s private gym or take their lunch break atop a luxurious rooftop deck. 

The Equitable Life Building is also home to the San Francisco Immigration Court, though it’s easy to miss. On my first visit last winter, the only hint that a court lay within was the scores of families in the lobby, clutching summonses and looking confused. The court is above, occupying the fourth, eighth, and ninth floors. Up here, the elevators opened into a slightly off-kilter dimension: A security line snaked into a cramped waiting room, which led to a winding and windowless hallway, from which one entered identical windowless courtrooms. It was deeply disorienting. I often encountered people fumbling around in the hallway, not sure how the hell to get out.    Read more…

A Lover’s Blues: The Unforgettable Voice of Margie Hendrix

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Tarisai Ngangura | Longreads | September 2020 |14 minutes (3,715 words)

 

Hive is a series about women and the music that has influenced them, edited by Danielle A. Jackson. Read more at Longreads and The Believer

 

The voice of Margie Hendrix on “Night Time is The Right Time” comes at you out of nowhere, like an explosive, thunderous crack in the sky after a period of steady rain. Long after the song is over, it’s her words that stay ringing in your ear. You’ll belt out, “Babyyyyyyy!” in the shower, while out for a jog, or when giving your friends a hard time as they share their most trying relationship conundrum. On The Cosby Show, it’s her part that is most memorable when reenacted by adorable, pig-tailed Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam. In the 2004 biopic Ray, it was future Academy Award winner Regina King who played the role of Hendrix. King spoke of the difficulty in channeling the musician, as few references, visual or text, were available to use as inspiration for the role: “There isn’t a lot of information out there on Margie, so I had to rely on her voice to guide me.” The kind to stop you in your tracks, Hendrix’s voice remained unchanging, and from her earliest solo releases to her final years, it was an infallible offering from an artist who was moved to sing.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles. I’ve thought about her regularly for years, wondering how a woman with that voice could disappear from the public eye so easily, after making such an unforgettable appearance. It’s a thought that’s stayed with me, because it carries the sobering reality that someone can be incredibly talented — phenomenal even — and still find themselves omitted by history. It could happen to anybody, but it seems to happen most often to talented Black women who are bold enough to chase their dreams, then fall apart from the sheer pressure of it all. Women who are public but invisible and who are noticed without really being seen. Women like Margie Hendrix.

I stared at a blank page for days trying to figure out how best to begin my story on Hendrix, but nothing felt appropriate, fitting enough for the woman who had outsung Ray Charles.

She didn’t look like the performers most record producers wanted Black women to be. She was too dark, had a gap between her two front teeth and was a Southern girl with none of that Northern polish and glam. The music industry of today is incredibly corrosive and toxic, but it was even more so for Black musicians in the middle of the twentieth century, who dealt with nothing but no-good managers, unfair contracts, and stolen music credits. Anti-black racism and its social realities make it astounding that artists emerged who weathered through even when it seemed like everyone at some point or another crumbled, with many never making it back.  The argument could be made that had Hendrix managed to stay far from the drugs that would ravage her body, and kicked those bad habits, she would have lasted longer and achieved success rivaling that of her still living peers from that “golden” era. Yet the number of Black women uncounted and unnamed in music history makes it clear that this wasn’t only a question of sobriety. It was also about opportunity, and a perverse lack of care for the artists whose mental and physical health were secondary so long as money continued to be made. Hendrix’s death and eventual erasure from the mainstream were not simply tragic turns in a complicated life, but the outcome of a series of events that befell a woman unloved by those she committed herself to, and unprotected by those whose coffers she filled. 

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The Endgame of the Olympics

burning torch next to smoking torch
imagedepotpro / Getty Images

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | August 2020 | 5,722 words (23 minutes)

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
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The Proving Grounds: Charley Crockett and the Story of Deep Ellum

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

Jonny Auping | Longreads | July 2020 | 32 minutes (8,734 words)

In 1912 two musicians were playing near the Union Depot on the corner of Elm Street and Central Track in a pocket of Dallas, Texas where, if you believed what the local papers wrote, you’d be wise to keep your money in your shoe. One was 24, likely playing his signature 12-string guitar. The other was 18 or 19 and blind with an acoustic guitar strapped across his imposing frame.

People passed by, some dropping change they could afford to part with. To hear the older one tell it, their music sent women running over to give them hugs and kisses. From there, they’d head a few blocks down Elm Street or Commerce, talking about women, music, and survival, the 24-year-old with the 12-string leading the blind man. They’d stop outside of local businesses, most likely pawn shops, and play. The older one would learn plenty about the blues from the blind one. Their little pocket in the middle of Dallas is known as Deep Ellum. You could walk the whole area in 15 minutes.

Around 1915 the two would part ways and never see each other again. The older one left Dallas with his 12-string. In 1918 he went to prison for murder. He spent the next 20 years in and out of incarceration and was dead by 1949. His name was Huddie Ledbetter, but he went by Lead Belly. The blind man would purportedly die in a Chicago blizzard in 1929. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly’s records with getting him into folk music. George Harrison stated that without Lead Belly there would be “no Beatles.” Kurt Cobain would make similar sentiments about Nirvana. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. King wrote that he “flat-out tried to copy” Blind Lemon Jefferson. That line of influence traces directly through Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years. Anyone with an ear for musical history would hear Crockett’s stories-disguised-as-songs and his blues style as an homage to men like Jefferson and Lead Belly and to a long-ago era of music, but Crockett wasn’t standing in that spot for its history. He was there for a particular kind of foot traffic; the kind where feet were attached to bodies that found street music endearing. By that point in 2014, he had survived for nearly a decade as a musician living on the streets. He’s said to be a distant relative to Davy Crockett, and he’s covered more of the United States, hitch-hiking and hopping trains, than the Texas legend ever did.

Almost exactly 100 years later, a modern songster named Charley Crockett would stand at about that same spot playing for people’s change, though the Union Depot had been gone for over 70 years.

While the journey reflected in his songs has since garnered him national acclaim and landed his music on both the Blues and Americana charts, Crockett is barely a chapter in the story of Deep Ellum. Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink. You won’t find plaques commemorating Blind Lemon Jefferson or Lead Belly’s time there, though it’s more responsible for Texas Blues than any one place could claim. It was a haven for punks and counterculture in the ’80s and breakout stars in the ‘90s. A “Deep Ellum act” can mean anyone from T-Bone Walker to the Old 97’s to Erykah Badu to St. Vincent to Leon Bridges.

For over a century, Deep Ellum has been a spot where Dallas has put either the people it didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with. Crockett fit right in. There’s no way to quantify how different modern music might sound if Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson never spent that time together. But Crockett’s journey to Deep Ellum is as good a start as any to try to explain how music has managed to keep returning to this neighborhood whose own city has never fully understood.

***

By the early 1920s, one third of eligible male residents in Dallas were reportedly members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the few blocks of Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce that made up Deep Ellum were a center of activity for African Americans in the heart of a city that some claim was run by deep prejudice. “Dallas was an intensely racist place,” said Alan Govenar, co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas, the most exhaustive text on the history of Deep Ellum.


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Technically, Deep Ellum has never really been a neighborhood. Rarely have many people lived there. Recently immigrated Jews opened up pawn shops. The Model Tailors sold suits. Black-owned movie theaters and vaudeville houses opened. Places like the Gypsy Tea Room and Park Theater, managed by Ella B Moore, offered live jazz, gospel, blues, and vaudeville shows.

All this happened based on a confluence of realities. Deep Ellum was about a half mile from downtown Dallas. African Americans who had to venture to the heart of Dallas, perhaps for an errand at City Hall or to purchase something, would find few places where they could eat or even use the restroom. “Segregation was formal,” said Jay Brakefield, who co-wrote Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas with Govenar. “It was legal.” African Americans could buy clothes most places in Dallas, but in Deep Ellum they were allowed to try them on beforehand. And once there, they could enjoy live music. It was within these circumstances that a Black and Jewish business and entertainment district formed right under the Klan’s nose.

Check out “Easy Rider Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

It was only natural that musicians found their way to the streets of Deep Ellum, many trying to escape a life of manual labor, singing about the harshness of the world around them. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s lyrics covered the spectrum of human suffering, as mundane as mosquito bites and as crushing as destitution or incarceration. “The lyrics that he sang were about the breadth and depth and scope of human emotion,” said Govenar. Jefferson was from East Texas, and his ability to move around Deep Ellum and in and out of greater Dallas on an apparently daily basis is a testament to how much people loved hearing him play. Jefferson claimed that he could get around just fine by himself, but Lead Belly isn’t the only guitar player who is said to have led him around Deep Ellum. T-Bone Walker claimed that, as a young boy, he used to pass Jefferson’s cup around and collect tips. Walker would have been only 19 when Jefferson died, but it was in that same year that Jefferson would release two recordings that showed Jefferson’s influence and an evolution of his style. Walker’s electric blues guitar innovations and his brand of showmanship became commonplace with live guitar music. Chuck Berry cited Walker as his influence.

But Jefferson is the Father of Texas Blues. In the ‘20s commercial recording scouts found Dallas, and Jefferson’s songs were impossible to miss. Paramount Records sent him to Chicago for numerous recordings, and he became a radio star. “He was the first commercially successful solo blues artist,” Brakefield said. His songs reached the Delta and helped inspire the modern blues movement. “It was like him and his guitar were part of the same being,” B.B. King wrote of hearing Jefferson as a child in Blues All Around Me. “You didn’t know where one stopped and the other started.”

***

The city of San Benito, where Charley Crockett was born in the 1980s, is in Texas, but it was worlds apart from Deep Ellum. Also the birthplace of Tejano music legend Freddy Fender, it’s about 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eight hours from Dallas. Soon after his birth, Crockett and his mother moved 11 miles east to Los Fresnos, a city with less than 6,000 residents, more than 90 percent of them Latino. Crockett’s arrival coincided with his father’s departure. “He was living a rough life,” Crockett said of the man whose last name he claims. “He was pouring concrete and working on shrimp boats and ending up in ditches on the side of farm roads instead of making it home. He wasn’t around.”

Crockett, his mother, and eventually his grandmother shared a small trailer parked on Old Port Road with nothing to see but the oranges, grapefruit, and sugar cane growing around them. Most of his memories of his time in South Texas fall under two categories: poverty or music. Tejano singers like Freddy Fender and Johnny Canales would perform nearby, and Crockett’s mother would encourage singing while doing chores or just to pass the time. “Music was really kind of everywhere in that rural area,” Crockett said. “I think it was just part of the culture.”

Looking for more opportunities, Crockett and his mother moved north to Irving, just outside Dallas, when he was 9. His mother worked non-stop in those days, but their lives didn’t seem to be improving as Crockett grew old enough to understand their struggle. Sometimes a “city of opportunity” only paints a clearer picture of one’s poverty by contrasting it with the expensive shops and generational wealth that’s flaunted in Dallas. In the summers Crockett would go to New Orleans to live with his uncle, who worked in a restaurant in the French Quarter. Before Katrina there was still a heavy street culture in the city. Bands played everywhere. Crockett arrived in New Orleans for the first time as a 10-year-old who had spent much of his childhood in isolation. Suddenly he was immersed in a city of diversity, music, and mischief, playing cards for his uncle in bingo halls. The food, jobs, and agriculture weren’t unlike Los Fresnos. New Orleans had the soul of the Gulf Coast he was born into but injected with vibrancy.

Back near Dallas, his mother lost her job while Crockett was still in high school, but still managed to buy him a guitar from a pawn shop. By the time he was 18, he was completely purposeless. He took that guitar and just started “hobo-ing” around Texas. He’d squat with people he’d meet without a thought or plan for the next day, let alone the next week. “I really felt limited by what I thought my future had to offer me,” he said. He was learning how to steal to survive, “and just kind of becoming a delinquent, getting into trouble, doing stuff I shouldn’t be doing.”

One day, he was sitting on a park bench near a baseball field in the town of Farmers Branch when a woman walked by and threw him 50 cents. In those days, music wasn’t an ambition as much as an introduction to other musicians he could pass the days with. Jamming with street musicians in Carrollton, Crockett met a man who was planning to drive to Northern California the following day. Crockett begged the man to let him join. He knew nothing about the area and had no real reason to want to be there. “I just wanted so badly to get out of my situation,” he said.

So, Crockett rode along on the ride west, but as they neared their destination, the driver decided he had no intention of bringing a new friend to his town, so he stopped in Vallejo, California and let Crockett out in a parking lot with nothing but a guitar.

***

Pre-World War II Deep Ellum served a purpose to the future of music by putting musicians in physical proximity to each other before they went their separate ways and made their names elsewhere. “There was a cross-fertilization that occured between musicians and among musicians who got together,” Govenar said.

It wouldn’t be the last time those same streets would play that role, but as would be the case in later eras, its real lifeblood were musicians whose music was never recorded and whose names were never written down. In a preview of “Exploring 508 Park,” a yet-to-be-released documentary directed by Govenar about the recording studio about a mile from Deep Ellum where Robert Johnson recorded a significant portion of his catalog, 508 Park committee member Carol J. Adams said that, in the area around Deep Ellum, the 1920s and 1930s were, “a time of displacement that created musicians who were practically homeless traveling around with their guitars.”

Then again, the stories of Deep Ellum tend to be written in disappearing ink.

The Great Depression hit some of the local businesses hard, and Deep Ellum’s deterioration became apparent. In the 1950s, Elm Street was converted into a one-way street heading into downtown and away from Deep Ellum, and perhaps not-so-coincidentally, making it much less convenient for drivers to happen upon the largely Black and Jewish area. A collection of merchants came together to carry a coffin down Elm Street in a mock funeral for Deep Ellum.

By 1969, an elevated Central Expressway was built directly over the 2400 block of Elm Street, plowing over what was once the center of gravity for what used to be Deep Ellum and making a distinct line between downtown Dallas and a place where something else once existed. By that point, Deep Ellum had long died its first death under the traffic of a rapidly growing Dallas.

“For me, the sound of the cars rattling overhead evokes the ghosts of Deep Ellum,” Govenar said.

***

The parking lot where Crockett was dropped off wasn’t far from Vallejo’s town square. It seemed as good a direction as any to start walking. He and another musician who was dropped off with him started playing music in front of local businesses and met some young musicians doing the same. They were heading to Santa Rosa and had room in their van, so Crockett hopped in, discovering a culture that would dictate the way he lived the next few years of his life. “Kind of immediately, to be honest with you, there was this acceptance of the drifter thing I was becoming,” Crockett said. “There was no judgement from a bunch of people I’d never seen before.”

As he met more people, he wandered and played in more environments. There were hikes in the hills of Santa Rosa. There were jams on rural open land. There were open mics in town or trips to San Francisco when someone was heading that way. He stayed in Northern California for about a year. In that time, he worked on farms, slept in pastures or barns or spare rooms, lived on communes, did co-operative work or work-traded for food and board, and hitch-hiked with everyone from musicians and hobos to Hare Krishnas. “That’s where I really got comfortable hobo-ing,” he said. “Then I took that [skill] to the rest of America with me.”

The transience that followed Crockett’s time in California might have you believing that the country is far less vast than it actually is. He traveled east and eventually north to New York City where he played on the streets and subway platforms. He still wasn’t much of a musician. “I had a couple songs, but I was comfortable on the streets. I knew how to blend right in with street culture.”

Crockett continued this lifestyle for the majority of his 20s. There was strategy and deliberateness to his survival. It required an ability to befriend people and a willingness to sleep on floors or on benches outside. Seasons dictated what city he might be in. New York City in the summertime. Heading back to North Carolina as it started to get cold. Try to make it to New Orleans by October and potentially stay there until May and try to move along before the hottest months. There were stretches of the New York trains where he could get a few hours of unbothered sleep. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, he was regularly sleeping and living in parks, not because he was part of the movement but because “it was a window when that was being tolerated,” he said.

If the itinerant musician sounds like a relic of the past, Crockett would invite you to look at the current statistics for poverty in the U.S. He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences. “I saw an enormous amount of homelessness traveling around this country,” he said. “I’m talking about homeless people with disabilities, veterans, people from outcast sections of society, people with mental problems, deep systemic multi-generational poverty, [and] drug addictions. It was never lost on me how close I was to that, sharing the same space.”

He was living his life on the fringes of society, and a guitar was the only thing separating him from much darker existences.

***

Plenty of people have their own stories about Jeff Liles, but no matter who’s telling the story, they all seem to agree that he’s someone who’s lived many lives. He’s a guy who could refer to founding NWA member Easy-E as “Eric” (he was also the first DJ in the country to play an NWA song on the radio, in Dallas, and was fired the next day for it). He’s likely booked more ultra-famous bands in Dallas than there are albums in your record collection. He performed an alternative spoken-word act on the same Lollapalooza tour as Snoop Dogg and Devo.

But in 1985 he was just a kid trying to convince a guy named Russell Hobbs at the Theatre Gallery, a rundown venue Hobbs had just opened up in an even more rundown stretch of warehouses, to let his band perform there. In-between booking the show and the date of the performance, Liles’ band broke up. He went back to Theatre Gallery to tell Hobbs.

“I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t walked through those doors,” Liles said, parked outside of where Theatre Gallery used to stand, over 35 years later.

Hobbs asked him if he’d be interested in a different task: helping him book bands. Together, Liles and Hobbs would become the early architects for what some would refer to as the “golden age” of Deep Ellum. It wasn’t called Deep Ellum then, in the sense that a place where no one went to with nothing to offer didn’t need a name. It was Hobbs who had read about a bygone era of music in a place called Deep Ellum. Liles was originally afraid to use that term as it was essentially a reference to an African American pronunciation of Elm Street. Liles lost the argument.

Theatre Gallery was a refuge for musically inclined misfits as much as it was a concert venue. Everything about its early days was DIY and, in all likelihood, very illegal. “We just gave away free beer,” Liles said. “You paid $5 and got beer all night. There were no licenses.” The Republican National Convention was held in Dallas in 1984, and the Dead Kennedys performed outside the convention in protest. According to Liles, when the police came to break it up, they mistook Hobbs, who was simply watching the performance, as being involved and demanded he get the stage off the property. That stage made its way to Deep Ellum and became the Theatre Gallery stage.

Soon, Hobbs opened up the Prophet Bar and Club Clearview in 1985, Club Dada in 1986. A new Gypsy Tea Room opened up in homage to the old Deep Ellum. Liles says a movement started with three specific bands from three Dallas suburbs: Three On a Hill from Carrollton, Shallow Reign from Richardson, and End Over End from Highland Park. “Those three bands were bringing in suburban kids,” he said. “They were hiding from their parents. Those kids started the music scene in Deep Ellum.”

Those bands were eclipsed by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, arguably the first great band to come out of modern Deep Ellum — The New Bohemians would break up after the release of their second album, in 1990, and Brickell would marry Paul Simon. Liles and Hobbs hired Jim Heath to be the “sound guy” for Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar despite his lack of experience. Heath would form The Reverend Horton Heat, a modern “psychobilly” band with a large cult following.

In the mid-80s, Deep Ellum was a scene with no rules and no definition of cool. It was the height of J.R. Ewing’s Dallas and rebellious teens were being suffocated by the images projected on their North Texas lives. It coincided with radical punk movements also manifesting in New York and Los Angeles. In a 1987 story in D Magazine, Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Deep Ellum, “The little underground scene, mostly centered in new-music nightclubs, was so ephemeral that by the time mainstream Dallas had heard of one of these clubs, it had already shut down and another had opened somewhere else.” Deep Ellum became a place where Dallas parents were terrified their children would be exposed to drugs, crime, skinheads, and violence. None of those worries were unfounded.

Still, it was growing rapidly, partially on the strength of Liles’ bookings. Dinosaur Jr. played Theatre Gallery for $50. The Replacements played and hung out in Deep Ellum for three days. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips. Liles has a story of Michael Stipe of REM doing yoga naked on the Theatre Gallery roof. It was a mixture of bands, kids, punks, and misfits walking the streets in the shadow of downtown Dallas.

Then Trees opened in 1990. “Trees took it to the next level,” Liles said. A venue on Elm Street with a capacity of about 500, it would book Radiohead, Soundgarden, Elliott Smith, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Geto Boys, all at the height of their popularity. Pearl Jam performed for less than 40 people at Trees and played basketball in the parking lot beforehand.

But to some people, Trees, and Jeff Liles, will always be known for the night they booked Nirvana in 1991. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had come out four months earlier and there were more people outside trying to get in than had tickets. Trying to accommodate Nirvana’s label, Liles hired more bouncers to prevent the crowd from rushing the stage, but a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

…a few songs into the performance Kurt Cobain lept over a bouncer with his guitar into the crowd. The guitar hit the bouncer in the head. Furious, the bouncer punched Cobain in the face. Cobain retreated backstage.

One thing was clear to everyone there: If Nirvana didn’t finish their set, there would be a riot in Deep Ellum. Liles had to convince Cobain. He found him hiding in a broom closet sniffing heroin and managed to get him back on stage.

“The rest of the show was great,” Liles said.

***

By 2008, Crockett had mastered survival, but he was just starting to master music. He’s a self-taught guitar player, originally unable to play the most basic G or C chords. Instead, he would wrap his thumb around the top of the guitar’s neck to hold down strings, “like choking the neck of a chicken.” He wrote his first song (“Fool Somebody Else”) this way, by experimenting with this finger and thumb placement, moving up and down the guitar’s neck until he’d found enough strums that sounded right. He went 10 years before recording that song.

“Why don’t you fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself. Tell me how it feels.

When you hold somebody tight

And the trust is gone

In the middle of the night

Got to fool somebody else.

Do it to yourself, tell me how it feels

When you hold somebody tight

Then they gone

Like the middle of the night.”

To this day, he has almost never used a guitar pick for a live show or recording. His travels and the musicians he met influenced his music. Older musicians heard him play open-mics and told him he was playing the blues, something he was barely conscious of. He realized that Robert Johnson’s lyrics sounded a lot like the life he was living.

It was in Manhattan, in Lucky Jack’s, that Crockett got the invitation to go to Europe. A regular there from Denmark had heard him play multiple times and told him he’d be a hit there. He offered up his place in Copenhagen and said he’d set him up with gigs at bars and cafes. Crockett took him up on the offer but ended up making as much playing on the streets as he did in bars and cafes, and before long, he’d overstayed his welcome. So he took the money he’d made and bought a train ticket to Paris without knowing a word of French.

He started playing the streets with a surprising amount of success. Perhaps to the French, there was a novelty to this American playing his version of the blues. “They could hear the Louisiana thing in me, which obviously the French have a big connection to that culture,” Crockett theorized. Remarkably, Crockett survived in Paris for almost a year without ever learning the language. “The language barrier was a surprising gift in that it separated me from the culture and put me in a place where I lost all fear,” he said. He couldn’t understand what anyone was saying about him, anyway, so he just played with confidence.

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become. “I think in the streets of Paris, I killed that person,” Crockett said. “When I hit New York stateside again, I was a changed person. I just had no fear.”

American culture tends to demand that we create self-narratives by which to live by, false identities that dictate the person we become.

Back in America, he was starting to expect to make money playing on the streets, and he was getting results. He’d mapped out cities like New Orleans and figured out where to play and when in the day to move from Royal Street to jostle for space and ears in Cafe Dumont before finding a blues jam later that night. He was playing at least eight hours a day, whether in New Orleans or New York. “Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?” he asked. “And as soon as that money goes out I could just make $30 more right then.” Some of his music might lean toward country, gospel, or even jazz, but now he could command a room or a block of street, which was more important than any technical skill he’d learned. Even now, he won’t commit to a traditional genre of music, coining the term “Gulf Coast Boogie Woogie” for what he does.

One day in 2010, Crockett was busking on the subway platform at the Lorimer stop in Brooklyn. Riding the G-train was a 19-year-old street musician named Jadon Woodard, rapping to passengers for tips. When the doors opened, Woodard could hear the rhythm of Crockett’s guitar playing and thought he could rap over it. He convinced Crockett to move from playing on subway platforms and get on actual trains with him. Crockett had a song called “You’re So Strange” that Woodard loved. Together, they each started making more money than either had on his own.

The next time Crockett returned to New York the following year the two linked up with another guitar player and a trumpet player. The group would play on moving train cars for 12 hours a day. “We were making hella money,” Woodard said. On a good day they’d pull in $600 or $700. They called themselves the Train Robbers.

The four band members and a videographer who filmed their performances split a $500 apartment in Bushwick and paid the deposit in small bills. Crockett convinced them to play folk and blues rhythms and Woodard found them easy to rap over. New York runs off the subway system, and thousands of people were seeing them perform each day, some of them in the music industry. They were getting interest from record labels and getting offered residencies to play a few hours a night. A lost Train Robbers album was recorded in the women’s bathroom of a rehearsal space in Brooklyn. Eventually they were making enough money to split two apartments among themselves.

‘Do you know how good it feels to go from begging and stealing to having $30 in your pocket?’ he asked.

Thinking they’d finally made it, they signed a management deal that would ultimately tear them apart. Looking back, Woodard and Crockett agreed that the management was determined to change their sound to something more mainstream and was unfair in terms of publishing rights. That same management arranged a deal with NBC that would largely increase their visibility but would surely push them in a different direction musically. As they walked into a Manhattan office to sign the deal, Crockett backed out and disavowed the management label. “The band didn’t even know how I was feeling,” Crockett said. “I just dropped the bomb on them in that office.” They were still technically handcuffed to the management deal, but Crockett’s decision essentially ended the Train Robbers.

“I harbored some [negative] energy for a while,” Woodard said. “But we were all young and we were all caught up in everything.”

***

The first time Ken Bethea, guitarist for the Old 97’s, went to Deep Ellum was in the fall of 1987. He’d just graduated from the University of Texas. In Austin, he had been indoctrinated to believe that everything in Dallas was lame, but his favorite band, the Butthole Surfers, was playing at Club Clearview on Main Street, just off of Elm. “I thought, ‘I bet that’s in the Deep Ellum place they talk about. Elm? Ellum?”

He left the show with a black eye and a notion that there was something special about the area. “I went there on a Wednesday night and had the best time that I’d ever had in my life going somewhere solo,” Bethea said.

After that night, Bethea ended up living in Denton, Texas for a year, where he’d meet the drummer Philip Peeples. When they moved back to Dallas, Deep Ellum was evolving quickly and driven by music. Bands were meeting other bands, breaking up, and the best members of each band were forming newer, better bands. Rhett Miller and Murry Hammond were hanging around the scene, playing in bands or individually. Eventually the four of them would meet and form the Old 97’s.

The Old 97’s didn’t originally try to play Club Dada or the early days of Trees. They aimed lower than that and played in places without cover charges. One of those places was a cowboy/country bar called Naomi’s Lounge about the size of a Starbucks. “I’d be standing right next to the door as people would come in and I’d have to lean away while playing guitar to let them in,” Bethea remembered. They were winning over fans, and the physical area that made up Deep Ellum was so condensed that the whole scene could hear about a great performance in the same night. “We were playing all the time,” Bethea said. “Rhett was writing so many songs.”

The seeds of Deep Ellum that were planted in the ’80s were growing uncontrollably in the ’90s. Suddenly, along with national acts that Liles and others were bringing to the area, homegrown bands were catapulting from Deep Ellum to national success. Tripping Daisy was a Deep Ellum act that became a household name. Toadies, a Fort Worth band that broke into the Deep Ellum scene, released Rubberneck in 1994, which would sell over a million copies. The Old 97’s would go on to have an enormous national following — one they enjoy to this day. In all likelihood, each member of each of those bands saw each other perform multiple times in Deep Ellum. “The butterfly effect of hearing that things were working out for Tripping Daisy was huge for us,” Bethea said. “We thought, ‘if they can do it, and Edie Brickell can do it, we can do it.’ You want to keep up.”

Every North Texas band with any semblance of success that decade had to play Deep Ellum. The band Funland was an area favorite. Deep Blue Something and Bowling For Soup would be loosely affiliated with the scene. A young St. Vincent saw Tripping Daisy perform at Trees multiple times before eventually joining the Polyphonic Spree, a large choral rock band founded by Tripping Daisy front man Tim DeLaughter.

Meanwhile, when the New York rap duo Mobb Deep came to Deep Ellum, a local singer named Erykah Badu opened for them. Badu’s 1997 debut album, Baduizm, has sold over three million copies. Labeled “the queen of Neo-soul,” Badu has mostly remained in Dallas for the past two decades, almost like she’s looking over its music scene, popping up for surprise performances or guest DJ sets in Deep Ellum and hosting a birthday concert event there every year.

But as Deep Ellum’s streets were packed every night, the crime didn’t seem to be receding. The depiction of crime in Deep Ellum over its various eras has usually been exaggerated but rarely unfounded. Fights broke out, and rich kids were mugged, and for the first time, perhaps ever, greater Dallas was paying attention. A shift was happening in the early aughts as devotees to the scene grew frustrated seeing it be co-opted by polite society, and polite society was just as quick to label it dangerous.

Things came to a head in 2004 when the Old 97’s, by then a popular national act, returned to Deep Ellum for a show at the Gypsy Tea Room. A man named David Cunniff attended the show with his two teenage daughters. Cunniff got in an altercation with a man that quickly turned violent. It would end with Cunniff temporarily immobile, his neck broken in front of his children.

The man who Cunniff fought had affiliations with skinheads. By most accounts, any legitimate skinhead presence in Deep Ellum was long gone and largely an ancillary product of the ‘80s punk movement. But greater Dallas had heard the stories. “I remember people saying, ‘If you can’t be safe at an Old 97’s show, something’s wrong,’” Bethea said. Within a year, Deep Ellum was basically a ghost town.

“This area went dormant in the 2000s,” Liles said. “Trees closed. Dada closed. Bomb Factory closed. Clearview was gone.”

***

Crockett’s journeys can sound like a romantic ode to a simpler time, but outrunning poverty can bring mistakes, and risks can seem smaller when you have almost nothing to your name. Even before Crockett left Dallas his half-brother got him in legal trouble by getting him involved in stock manipulation. “My brother got me into some under-world Dallas stuff when I was younger,” he said. “All that stuff blew up and everybody went to prison.” His brother was sentenced to seven years. Crockett says he had to defend himself in court but wasn’t convicted based on his apparent ignorance of the scheme’s machinations.

In 2014, he says he’d find himself on the wrong side of the law again, when Virginia police caught him with a considerable amount of marijuana. A sentencing was pushed back and jail time was a possibility, but even probation could prevent him from traveling state to state and ending the musician’s life that he’d adopted.

Photo credit: Bobby Cochran

With that hanging over him, he realized he hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. He decided it was time to go home. While in Dallas, he decided to check out a blues jam happening in Deep Ellum. He met a guitar player named Alexis Sanchez, who currently plays guitar in Crockett’s band. That same night, Sanchez introduced him to a guy who had been performing in Deep Ellum named Leon Bridges. This was before Bridges would release his debut album with Columbia Records and win a Grammy, but his name was bouncing around those few blocks. “Something about meeting Alexis and Leon allowed me to realize that there was a renaissance happening in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was as confident in his abilities as he’d ever been, but his publishing rights were still controlled by his old managment for almost another year. So he went back to Northern California and worked manual labor, waiting out his contract with a head full of songs. When the time came, he recorded an album on his own and received donations from locals up there in order to print copies of it. He called it “A Stolen Jewell.”

In 2016 he faced a judge who held his future in his hands. Crockett told the judge about his musical journey, his progress, and his determination to make a real career of it. He even had a record he could show as proof. “They were going to take everything away from me,” he said. “I begged him. Told him I wanted to be legit.” Crockett’s plea resonated with the judge, who spared him any serious punishment for the 2014 marijuana charge. Armed with a guitar, an album, and a second chance, he went to make a name for himself, and he knew exactly where to go.

“It was from that moment,” Crockett said. “I hit the bars in Deep Ellum [as a performer] harder than I ever had.”

***

Kendrick Lamar was performing at a re-opened Trees in 2012, and Cam McCloud just wanted a minute of his time. “I was at the front of the stage at the dead center,” McCloud said. “I’m watching him and turning around and watching the whole crowd, and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’” After the show, he freestyled for Lamar, who validated his skills.

A few years later, McCloud was fired from his job at Olive Garden for missing a shift to open for Florida rapper Gunplay at Trees. In 2015, McCloud would become the rapper and visionary behind Cure For Paranoia, a genre-defying hip-hop/soul group that D Magazine deemed “the poster boys of the new Deep Ellum.”

Trees had been reopened in 2009 by Clint and Whitney Barlow — Clint was a former drummer for Vanilla Ice. They also reopened Bomb Factory, a 4,000-plus capacity venue that books national acts. “The Barlows, as far as I’m concerned, are responsible for the revitalization of Deep Ellum,” said Pete Freedman, the president and co-founder of CentralTrack.com, a daily cultural guide to Dallas named after the street that Central Expressway demolished and separated downtown from Deep Ellum.

Freedman has witnessed and chronicled nearly every step of that revitalization, which represents the most eclectic era of Deep Ellum. Hip-hop had never gotten much substantial coverage or attention in Deep Ellum. Bands ruled the golden era. But hip-hop is arguably the most popular genre in America now, and it’s helping carry today’s Deep Ellum with acts blowing up and being surpassed before mainstream Dallas even hears of them, like the punk acts of the ’80s. “Deep Ellum always reflects the zeitgeist of whatever’s popular,” Freedman said.

A Dallas collective of individual hip-hop acts known as Brain Gang made waves in Deep Ellum at the beginning of last decade. From that group, Blue, the Misfit would go on to have a collaborative relationship with Kendrick Lamar, Bobby Sessions would sign with legendary hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and the producer, Justus, signed with Interscope and was pegged as Dr. Dre’s protege.

Cure For Paranoia reached a turning point when McCloud snuck backstage at Bomb Factory for a performance by West Coast rapper The D.O.C. and saw Erykah Badu and her entourage walking towards him (Badu and D.O.C. have a child together). McCloud approached her and freestyled, impressing her. The next week he got a call. Badu wanted them to open for her birthday concert. The group played at Three Links on Elm Street every Tuesday before bars temporarily closed due to COVID-19, typically packing the venue.

“Deep Ellum is just all over the place,” McCloud said an hour before opening for Houston rapper Bun B, his hair dark purple with a strip of lavender running through it. “I think that’s why it definitely shaped me as an artist. Because you can put us anywhere. We can literally play anywhere. We’ve opened for rock bands. We’ve opened for country bands. You name it. It’s the ultimate domino effect.”

The variety in Deep Ellum, which has expanded in size over the years, but still mostly extends to about six blocks of Elm, Main, and Commerce, is staggering. Every weekend there are hip-hop, punk, country, blues, jazz, folk, and metal shows. “The Deep Ellum music scene is the Dallas music scene,” said Freedman.

“I’ve been to every town in the U.S. and played gigs,” Bethea said. “There are very few places like Deep Ellum in the United States. It’s singular.”

***

Freedman can tell you exactly when Crockett came back to Deep Ellum in 2016. “I couldn’t go to a bar without sitting on one of his CDs,” Freedman said. Crockett had taken his signature hustle, as well as the guerilla marketing he and the Train Robbers had learned, and applied it to the streets of Deep Ellum. Unlike New York, he could canvass all of Deep Ellum in an hour.

“The first night I met Charley I saw copies of his CDs on toilets,” Liles said. “I grabbed them and said, ‘Is this you?’ He said, “Yeah, man.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, have a little respect for yourself as an artist.’ I gave them back to him and told him to just hand them out to people.”

“I put them on top of urinals in every bar in Deep Ellum,” Crockett said.

Crockett was playing two sets a night all over Deep Ellum. On Commerce is a New Orleans-themed Cajun/jazz bar called The Free Man — about the same size as the now-closed Naomi’s where the Old 97’s got started. It’s hard to imagine a crowd more suited for Crockett’s music. Next door is Adair’s Saloon, a tiny dive bar Crockett could play for hours. It cost nothing to walk in and hear Crockett play and sing in rooms where he wouldn’t even have needed a microphone. After Leon Bridges broke as a national sensation, a collection of lucky Wednesday night patrons in 2015 at Twilite Lounge on Elm Street saw Crockett perform with Bridges providing backup vocals.

When he was playing in Deep Ellum he let customers name the price they wanted to pay for a copy of “A Stolen Jewell.” It wasn’t the first time people were appreciating his music, but something was happening on those streets that was new to him: He was gaining reputation. “‘A Stolen Jewell’ was the break for me because Dallas writers and Dallas musicians and the Fort Worth community started championing me immediately.”

Soon, Crockett moved from cleared out corners of bars to stages in venues all over Dallas. He was drawing paying crowds and things were snowballing behind his work ethic. Since 2016, Crockett has released seven albums to critical success with another album Welcome To Hard Times, coming out in July. He toured Texas, and then the United States. Last summer, he headlined an international tour, returning to Europe with his name on marquees in Spain, Sweden, and Paris.

“He didn’t start recording until he’d had all this time on the streets,” said Thomas D. Mooney, a music critic for Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly. “So he had a late start actually recording, but once he started making albums he had this hard-working, hustler mentality that’s in his songs. And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.”

And he’s not pretentious when he’s on stage. Fans realize that he’s working just as hard at his job as they are at theirs.

In June 2019, he was invited to headline the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, arguably the most legendary country music venue in the world. For someone who’d played the streets and “backdoored” bars and clubs all over the country, it’s a surreal accomplishment. “I believe that stage was built up by a lot of artists back in the day who came at it like I have, with the real hard work,” he said. In November, Crockett headlined The Troubadour in West Los Angeles, a stage that’s helped make countless stars.

“[Being in this industry], you know when people are the real deal or not,” said Liles, who now books shows for The Kessler, a venue in a different Dallas neighborhood called Oak Cliff. “Charley Crockett is the real fucking deal.”

“I’m really happy that my brother blew up,” Woodard said. “Make sure you tell Charley he owes me that song, ‘You’re So Strange.’ I’ll come to Texas and we’ll record it.”

Crockett once begged a man to take him to Northern California just to get away from Dallas. At the time, he didn’t understand that the music he’d travel the country and world learning owed such debts to the place he was trying to escape. Knowing what he knows now, having become an obsessive historian of music, he doesn’t waver on its impact. “Deep Ellum is as important to American music as New Orleans or Memphis,” he said. It’s only fitting that when he returned, Elm Street, Main Street, and Commerce were ready for him to come back and play his part in bridging Deep Ellum to its past. He represents both the street musician whose name you never heard and the nationally touring acts that began in those same streets.

“Areas that have a micro-culture of music are based on a foundation of artists who didn’t necessarily ‘make it out,’” said Mooney. “They keep the scene what it is. I think why Charley’s been able to transcend that area and still have such respect in Deep Ellum is that he’s a lifer. He’s lived his music.”

“I feel like Crockett is the human embodiment of Deep Ellum,” McCloud said before taking the stage to rap for an audience of hundreds.

***

In 2022, Uber plans to operate over 3,000 employees out of a soon-to-be-constructed 23-story tower with adjacent parking garage on the westernmost edge of Deep Ellum. The project officially broke ground last November. “The live-work-play environment of Deep Ellum, honestly, it just has us psyched out of our minds,” Uber spokesman Brian Finch reportedly said last fall.

What this means for the culture of Deep Ellum going forward depends on who you ask and what they think about the current commercialization happening there. There’s been an influx of boutiques, restaurants, breweries, and bars with waitresses who dress like they’re catering to a college fraternity clientele.

These aren’t unique developments for an American city. “Creative people create an identity for the neighborhood, they give it a cool factor, then the real estate developers come in and price them out of the neighborhood,” Liles said. Few people have traditionally lived in Deep Ellum (though that is currently changing), so it’s not people who are being pushed out. It’s places, and if you believe those lamenting the death of Deep Ellum, it could be the music. “A building that’s committed mostly to local bands and the local music scene isn’t going to generate a whole lot of revenue,” Liles said.

It won’t surprise you to hear that this isn’t the first time that Deep Ellum has been pronounced dead, and while it’s certainly changed over the years, devotees of the scene were panicking over its changes during the height of its most exciting movements in the ’80s and ’90s. Freedman believes that Deep Ellum operates in 30-year cycles and attributes much of the hysteria over its current changes to “good ol’ days syndrome.” He points out that Uber is building its tower over four vacant lots and that most of the trendier places popping up are doing so in empty building spaces or struggling businesses that the frustrated parties weren’t supporting anyway. “Deep Ellum of today shouldn’t be the Deep Ellum of 1988,” he said. “Under what guise should it be? There were skinheads.”

Deep Ellum’s music survived during the racism of the 1920s (and the less transparent racism since). Will it survive the capitalism of the 2020s? Prior to the restrictions due to COVID-19, the streets of Deep Ellum were flooded with people every weekend, even as crime in the area remains a talking point. Deep Ellum’s cool factor is built on the credibility of places like Trees, Bomb Factory, Twilite Lounge, Three Links, The Free Man, Club Dada, Adair’s Saloon, and so many more. Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum. “I think it’s amazing,” said McCloud, the last person to be accused of conforming his music to anyone. “It just means more money coming in. The music will be fine. That’s what they’re coming for.”

Dallas has woken up to Deep Ellum.

The rapper Post Malone, from the Dallas suburb Grapevine, is not a Deep Ellum artist — prior to his national ascent, he was characterized as a soundcloud artist — but after his single “White Iverson” went viral in 2015, making him a household name overnight, his first Dallas show was at Trees. He played “White Iverson” two times during a 25-minute show, latching on to a bit of the neighborhood’s credibility. “These things don’t happen by accident,” Freedman said. “Deep Ellum is still unequivocally, without a shadow of a doubt, the proving grounds.”

The story of Deep Ellum is the story of music’s relationship to physical space. It can feel like there are no traceable links of influence or even knowledge between the various musical eras of Deep Ellum. Whenever an era ended, it must have been impossible to imagine music ever coming back. But it always did, behind musicians and the people who wanted to hear them play. “In 25 years there won’t be anything wrong with [Deep Ellum] turning over a little bit,” Bethea said before smiling. “As long as they’ve got a statue of the Old 97’s down there for people to worship.”

“Maybe one day all this will go away,” Freedman said from a dark booth in Twilite Lounge. “But for now, I’m still going to play in it.”

***

Now, imagine it’s a Friday night at some point in the future when public gatherings and live music are allowed and deemed safe, and you just saw a show at Trees that you’ll talk about for weeks, exaggerating whatever details you still remember. You’re walking out the front door onto Elm Street with about 400 other people. It’s entirely possible you haven’t been sober since halfway through the set list. It’s 11:30 and the streets are packed with people, some of whom are probably going to manage to find a little trouble to get into, and you haven’t yet determined if you’ll be one of them. Maybe you aren’t ready for the night to be over. You could grab another drink somewhere or find some late-night food. Or you could walk around the area and settle for the first place that’s playing the kind of music you want to hear.

As the Trees crowd pushes you about 50 feet down Elm Street and you try to determine your immediate future — the only future that seems remotely important in that moment — you might look up and see a mural facing you from the brick wall across the street. It’s a tinted image of a man dressed in black with sunglasses and a cowboy hat standing in a field of bluebonnets. The man’s name isn’t on the mural, which is fine. A mural like that in Deep Ellum is for the type of person who already knows who Charley Crockett is.

Or maybe, you’re ready to go home and bask in the buzz of the performance you just witnessed. You’ll have to find your way to the designated ride-share pickup zone on Commerce — the necessity of which is a testament to just how much Deep Ellum has changed. It’s two streets over, so you’ll probably want to cut through Radiator Alley to get to Main Street. As you breeze through the alley, you might see another mural of a stout man wearing a suit and holding a guitar with two musical legends flanking him on each side. Their names are Freddy King and T-Bone Walker, and little crowns are painted above their heads. But those two are clearly in the background. It’s the stout man who’s front and center. No crown is above his head; only a bright circle, almost like a halo. The image is a recreation of the only known photograph to ever exist of this man. His name was Blind Lemon Jefferson.

The people and businesses that make up this era’s Deep Ellum have been drastically impacted by COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions. If you would like to support and help keep this tight-knit and historical community vibrant in the future consider donating to Deep Ellum 100, an organization giving grants to workers, musicians, and artists who have helped make Deep Ellum what it is.

* * *

Jonny Auping is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas. His work has been featured in Texas MonthlyThe New YorkerVICENew York MagazineSlateand McSweeney’s.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Tea, Biscuits, and Empire: The Long Con of Britishness

CSA Images / Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
— Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.”
— Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6.  So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are  demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble. Read more…

This Week in Books: We’ve All Been Briefed

MANHATTAN, NY - JUNE 14: Hundreds of people pack into Columbus Circle to hear speeches of protest against police violence with one protester holding a painted portrait of Floyd George. (Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

“Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day,” writes Laurence Ralph in an excerpt from his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The excerpt is written in the form of a letter to any and all future mayors of Chicago, endeavoring to explain to the mayor—to really explain—police torture in Chicago. “You likely have been briefed about police torture,” Ralph writes to the future mayor, a statement that could just as easily apply to you, or to me. We’ve all been briefed.

“Perhaps you have gotten assurances from the superintendent of the police department. You might have even met with survivors of police torture. But what I have found in studying this issue for more than a decade is that…a strict historical approach, or a policy-oriented approach, doesn’t actually clarify the full extent of the problem. To do that, we need not facts but a metaphor.

“The first thing you must know is that the torture tree is firmly planted in your city. Its roots are deep, its trunk sturdy, its branches spread wide, its leaves casting dark shadows. The torture tree is rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States.”

Ralph goes on to give the mayor the raw numbers; numbers like this have been circulating since the protests began, and they have not lost their power to startle me.

“Police misconduct payouts related to incidents of excessive force have increased substantially since 2004. From 2004 to 2016, Chicago has paid out $662 million in police misconduct settlements, according to city records. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that these figures will decrease. Hundreds of Chicago Police Department misconduct lawsuit settlements were filed between 2011 and 2016, and they have cost Chicago taxpayers roughly $280 million. When I was writing this letter in July 2018, the city had paid more than $45 million in misconduct settlements thus far, in that year alone. Keep in mind that misconduct payouts are only a fraction of what the city spends on policing. Chicago allocates $1.46 billion annually to policing, or 40 percent of its budget—that’s the second-highest share of a city budget that goes to policing in the nation. It trails only Oakland, which allocates 41 percent.”

Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day. Or as New Yorker Molly Crabapple puts it in her dispatch from the protests, “we, the broke and beaten residents and taxpayers, will be paying for their abuse of us.” In between her accounts of beatings and pepper sprayings and arrests, she recounts similar numbers, nearly the same numbers: “Last year, the city paid out nearly $70 million to settle police misconduct cases, up $30 million on the previous year; that number will swell beyond comprehension in 2020. Yet none of this comes out of the police budget.” These numbers are so malevolent to me; they have a sorcerous energy; when things are unbalanced, it is unnatural and disturbing.

“In the end,” poet Cameron Awkward-Rich writes in his account of a protest he joined up with in Massachusetts, at which chants of “Black Trans Lives Matter!” rang out, “the Northampton cops pepper-sprayed a group of demonstrators who got too close to the station’s doors.”

“The station’s been cleaned. The Black Lives Matter flag no longer flies from its post. The demonstration will recur and this time the station will be barricaded hours in advance. A video has circulated online that depicts the brutal beating of black trans woman Iyanna Dior by a group of black cis women and men. Intracommunity calls to defend black trans life have been met with affirmation, yes, but also derision and accusations of unduly diverting attention away from the present struggle. We only get so much access to the feeling of freedom.

“It’s impossible to know what the other side of this will look like, how this unfolding situation will crystallize into a narratable event. Whether a stretched-out moment of insisting that black trans life matters will, in the end, matter. Whether ‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ will ever occupy the simple present tense. In the meanwhile, the Okra Project has begun and funded an enormously ambitious project to connect struggling black trans people with life-sustaining care. In the meanwhile, Dee Dee Watters of Black Transwomen Inc has raised nearly $10,000 to support Iyanna Dior. In the meanwhile, strangers and intimates alike have given Tony McDade’s family more than enough to put him to rest.

“In the meanwhile, the crowd is assembling again outside my window, louder this time, gathering force.”

1. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, The Paris Review

Poet Cameron Awkward-Rich, author of Dispatch, reflects on the intersection of blackness and transness while he protests outside a police station in Northampton, Massachusetts: “…transness, at minimum, is the insistence on the human capacity for once unimaginable change.”

2. “Letter From Brooklyn: Finding Justice in the Streets” by Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Lit Hub

Novelist Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain, wonders just how much the now ubiquitous low-flying police helicopters of Brooklyn are recording; but once he joins a protest, it no longer seems to him like the helicopters are the ones doing the watching. “The rebellion…refuses obfuscation. Too many cameras to count—like the one Darnella Frazier tapped on her phone to record Floyd’s last moments—now point at the true sources of violence and brutality. It’s our turn to shoot.”

3. “In New York, Protesters’ Pride Beats Police Brutality” by Molly Crabapple, The New York Review of Books

Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, co-author of Brothers of the Gun, observes the protests in New York, drawing what she witnesses, and recounting stories others have told. “In the Bronx, while boxed in and waiting to be cuffed, former congressional candidate Andom Ghebreghiorgis witnessed a woman going into labor. Another convulsed in seizures. Blood dripped from the baton wounds police left in protesters’ skulls. Ghebregiorghis himself spent at least six hours with his hands agonizingly zip-tied behind his back. On another night, Jason Rosenberg, a programmer for the 92Y, emerged from jail covered in blood, with a broken arm and a head wound that required six staples to close. A source familiar with the situation in the holding cells told me of a woman who had miscarried after being arrested. Another pregnant woman was beaten, left handcuffed, and denied water.”

4. “An Open Letter to All the Future Mayors of Chicago” by Laurence Ralph, The Paris Review

An excerpt from Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. Police torture, he writes, is best understood as a metaphor; a torture tree. And the nourishing roots of the tree are “this country’s enduring logic of threat.” Ralphs writes: “Frontier logic…is foundational…to modern-day policing. We can see it at work when one court after another acquits cops who gun down African Americans under the pretext that those cops felt threatened. In such cases, the violence enacted against Black people works to turn the police officers who actually committed the violence into the victims of those Black people. This is how the tangled and twisted logic of fear became rooted in the security apparatus of the United States.”

5. “On Charles Dickens’ Devious, Hypocritical ‘Nice Guy’ Cop” by Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub

Oliva Rutigliano writes that Charles Dickens, despite having little regard for authority or social elites, fell into the narrative trap, common in all sorts of media for decades, that transforms fascination with police detectives and undercover cops into admiration. Rutigliano calls Dickens’ “strangely giddy” account of a police ride-along, called “On Duty with Inspector Field,” shockingly hypocritical because, by his own account, most of what he witnessed was the intimidation of the poor. Rutigliano is echoing George Orwell, who wrote that “the only officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.” As Rutigliano puts it, “Dickens runs into what may be the biggest recurring hypocrisy in his career, as well as the history of popular entertainment: the insistence that police officers fighting crime provides exciting content, while avoiding that the vast majority of ‘crime-fighting’ is ultimately the continued oppression and convenient scapegoating of society’s most vulnerable people.” Rutigliano show how the multi-layered, formally complex book Bleak House finally allows Dickens to excavate his own misperceptions; many of the novel’s dizzying number of plotlines are touched by the same undercover agent, and only by gathering together the threads, and seeing the work of the police across many narratives, can one begin to glimpse the faulty machinations of justice.

6. “Look Who’s Watching,” Tracy O’Neill interviewed by Robert Lopez, Bookforum

Robert Lopez talks with Tracy O’Neill about how her new novel Quotients, which is structured around themes of surveillance and communication, relates to the pandemic and police brutality. “In the book I include several real events, one of which is the police slaying of Mark Duggan, a black man. After Duggan’s death, the Tottenham protests lit through social media. More protesters were caught using social media photos than CCTV, supposedly, and BlackBerry’s parent company gave the police information. So on the one hand, we can see how videos of police brutality have helped us in efforts to document police brutality and anti-blackness, yet the same devices that help hold law enforcement to account may be what provides the police with tools to identify and in some cases arrest protesters.”


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7. “‘The Down Days’ Is an Eerily Prescient Pandemic Novel” by Jennifer Wilson, The New Republic

Jennifer Wilson writes that Ilze Hugo’s novel The Down Days is so eerily predictive of even the tiniest aspects of the pandemic—down to funerals taking place on Facebook—that “one can’t help but wonder—if these times are really as unprecedented as the government leaders and insurance companies tell us they are, why was this moment so easy for Hugo to imagine?” Wilson goes on to say that The Down Days has implications for the much-feared inevitable “onslaught of Covid-based fiction”; she writes, “It is a strange thing to have a dystopian work of science fiction suddenly read like a realist novel in the vein of Balzac, but that is what makes The Down Days such a bizarre (but wildly addictive) book. It has the telltale formal qualities of genre fiction…But its content could hardly be called dystopian—since its publication date has rendered it familiar, mundane…It promises an opportunity to see what our response to this moment might have been like if we had never seen it coming, and yet ultimately refuses to give us that satisfaction. Any fiction that accurately captures our so-called new normal, this novel shows, will have to grapple with the old one.”

8. “Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine” by Andrew Durbin, The New York Review of Books

Andrew Durbin writes about novelist and photographer Hervé Guibert, author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, “a stark autobiographical book about his desperate effort to gain access to an experimental ‘AIDS vaccine.’”

To the Friend made Guibert both wealthy and famous, especially after an appearance on the French TV show Apostrophes. Posters of his handsome face went up around Paris, transforming him into a symbol of the intense suffering of seropositive men and women at the time. Though he promises in the opening section of his book to become “one of the first people on earth to survive this deadly malady,” he would die the following year, on December 27, 1991, only a few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, author of an additional five extraordinary books, all of which would be published posthumously.”

9. “DREAMer memoirs have their purpose. But that’s not what I set out to write.,” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio interviewed by Lucas Iberico Lozada, Guernica

Lucas Iberico Lozada speaks with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio about her book The Undocumented Americans, “a series of dispatches from what we might call undocumented America: a country within a country, one that overlaps and undergirds the other.” Cornejo says she was looking to rebut the DREAMer memoir:

“…I felt like… a crazy person who was able to articulate what her experiences had been would be a pretty good canary in the coal mine to talk about the American Dream. The way I define crazy is not just ‘mentally ill.’ It’s a radical term…When this Administration started comparing us to animals, it coincided with a moment when I started undergoing intravenous ketamine treatment for depression. For the first time in my life, I started noticing my surroundings. I noticed—in a purely unsentimental way—certain plants around me. I developed a relationship with this group of crows that lived in my neighborhood, and I began feeding them. I learned that my brain had had a lot of damage because of the traumas related to migration.

“In my interviews and research, I realized that the stories that came out and had become sort of popular about immigrants, undocumented or not, were stories from people who were pretty grateful to America. It seemed like the point in a lot of these narratives was to change racist white people’s minds about us. And that didn’t feel right with me, so I thought, what would it look like if a crazy person wrote this?”

Cornejo also talks about the insidious “memoirization” of women’s writing, especially women of color’s writing, that came up in the newsletter a few weeks ago. “My book is a serious work of literature. When I’ve done interviews, people don’t ask me about literary things, people don’t ask me about formal things, people don’t often ask me about my influences or whether I have any training in writing or who I studied under or things like that. People just ask me about my parents leaving me in Ecuador, or what I do for self-care, things like that. It’s very clear that I’m being seen through a sociological lens.”

There’s a lot more that’s worth pull-quoting from this interview but I suppose I should stop. Wait, there’s this: “I’ve always felt a telepathic connection to Stephen Miller. I wrote an article once in the New York Times, and immediately afterward I became aware that he became aware of me.”

10. “A Different Civil War in the Southwest” by Sam Kleiner, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Sam Kleiner reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which “explore[s] the undertold story of the war in the deserts and mountains of the New Mexico territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico). The evocative title of her book comes from a soldier’s observation that what was playing out in New Mexico was, in fact, a ‘three-cornered war’ between Union, Confederacy, and Native peoples.” Nelson draws on diaries, letters, and other first-person accounts to resurrect the despicable reality of the conflict: that the antislavery forces were also genocidal exterminators.

11. “How Yusuf Idris’s Stories Upended Respectability Politics in Egypt” by Ezzedine C. Fishere, Lit Hub

In his forward to a new Penguin Classics collection of Yusuf Idris’s short stories, The Cheapest Nights, novelist Ezzedine C. Fishere writes that as young reader, his first encounter with a story by Idris “showed me what probably every good story can show: things fall apart for no particular fault of individuals who are just trying—and failing—to keep it together.”

12. “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry” by Jericho Brown, The New York Times

A new poem from Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition. “It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands. / They have washed their hands for you. / And they take the bus home.”

Stay safe out there,

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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Trading Spaces

Henryk Sadura / Getty, Ev MiIee / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Longreads

Cheryl Jarvis | Longreads | June 2020 | 15 minutes (3,812 words)

I’ve reread the letter so many times that coffee rings smudge the words. I’ve won a teaching position at the University of Southern California that will pay my way through graduate school. The year is 2004, and a longtime dream is finally a reality. The aftershocks of my shattered, decades-long marriage — the sleepless nights, the lost months — begin to recede as I fantasize about the life that awaits. Like millions of women before me I’ll go west, to exotic, sun-drenched California, to reinvent myself, start anew.

The ring of the phone jangles my daydreaming.

“Mom!”

My younger son, Brian, is calling from his home in Los Angeles. His deep voice oozes charm.

“How’s my Sweetie?” he asks.

When he wants something, he calls me “Sweetie.” In his youth he exploited his blue eyes and beguiling smile to get his way. At 26, with 1800 miles between us, he has to rely on more sophisticated techniques. My antennae heighten. He’s “psyched,” he says, that I’m coming to L.A., and he’s been thinking, what about living together?

No. No. God, no.

Images flash of size 13 sneakers sprawled across the floor, smelly workout clothes hanging in the bathroom and flung over chairs, grimy dishes congesting the sink, junk food crowding the pantry, the house teeming with testosterone, his friends invading with bulging duffel bags and monstrous appetites. I think of the grocery bills that I’ll end up paying, food devoured before I have a chance to shelve it. More memories of his high school days surface: the urgent calls from school to bring money/ homework/ permission slips, the last-minute requests for help with papers and projects, the late-night calls from the police for assorted misdemeanors. His college years — three schools and a marijuana arrest — ratcheted the strain. Finally, in the five years since he graduated, via long-distance mothering, we’ve evolved to a peaceful co-existence that I’ve not only grown accustomed to but have come to love. But living together?

No. No.
Read more…

Public Education’s White Flight Problem

Compassionate Eye Foundation / Robert Daly / OJO Images

Livia Gershon| Longreads | June 2020 | 6 minutes (1,576 words)

Last year, the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education came and went, and America’s public schools are the most segregated they’ve been in decades. According to a report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1988 to 2016 the share of “intensely segregated” schools in which 90 to 100 percent students are non-white more than tripled. Forty percent of black students and 42 percent of Latinx students now attend these super-segregated schools, which are often in high-poverty areas. The average white student, meanwhile, attends a school that is 69 percent white. Read more…