FAMILIES WHAT YOUR KIDS ARE LOOKING FOR IN DEEP ELLUM

HIS NAME IS DENNIS. BLOND, BLUEeyed, and rangy, he looks like a played-out California surfer, but he’s Dallas-born and -bred. He labors at a large corporate law firm, running the fast track toward making partner, the dark hollows under his eyes speaking stress. He has a pretty wife, who suffers from suburban manic depression, and two kids: Scott, a gawky, sensitive, 16-year-old son, and Alison, a soccer-playing, fresh-scrubbed, 12-year-old daughter.

As a son of Jewish immigrants who grew up in a grim New Jersey factory town, a lifelong outsider who has led a raffish, gypsy life, I tend to think of solid citizens like Dennis and his brood as the Ail-American Family, right out of a Chevy commercial, with their perfect teeth and their handsome golden retriever frolicking as they unpack their camping gear at the lake.

After years of sweat and sacrifice, Dennis has realized his dream. A short time ago, he moved into a $400,000 home in Piano, in one of those upscale developments with woodsy names that are spreading like kudzu across not just Piano but Garland. Highland Village, Carrollton, Lewisville, Flower Mound, and half a dozen more suburbs up north. Ornate homes fronted by soaring red brick pillars that have absolutely no function, the style they call Dallas Traditional.

Except, now that I think of it, the same kind of homes are springing up around Iowa City, Atlanta, Sacramento, and as many other cities as you can count. Homes of harassed professionals and insecure mid-level management types whose average stay is three to five years before the company shuffles them off to somewhere else.

A week after Dennis moved into his dream home, he came down to breakfast and cheerfully asked his son, “So, kiddo, how do you like the new house?”

Scott fixed him with a baleful, unforgiving gaze. “Piano sucks.”

It hit Dennis like a fist in the gut. He was still upset, brooding about it when we met. “I can’t get him to say why he hates the place. It’s like I’m a stranger. Know what I mean? I can’t…I just… can’t figure out what’s going on in his head. Nights he’s up there in his room blasting his goddamn music. Weekends he’s down there in Deep Ellum doing God knows what.”

To Dennis, the world of 16 is another planet. He can’t remember that it is where he once lived. Angry, hurt, and contused, he regarded mc accusingly. “So what’s it like down there in Deep Ellum?”

I shrugged. “Why ask me?”

“I figured you’d have checked it out by now. I mean, with your past. “

Dennis has a touching belief in me as an authority on youth and music because, in the 1940s, when I was in my early 20s, I was part of a group of musicians bedded down in a sprawling loft in Greenwich Village before living in a loft was cool. The hot new thing in those days was folk music, and we were the only folk singing group north of the Cumberland Gap. There were four of us in the Almanac Singers: me, a wiry runt from Oklahoma named Woody Guthrie, a gangling banjo player from the Hudson Valley named Pete Seeger, and a big old Arkansas country boy with the booming bass of an Ozark hellfire preacher named Lee Hays.

Dennis’ words got me wondering. What was the scene down there in Deep Ellum? What kind of music were the local groups playing? What was attracting the kids, drawing them like a magnet from the local suburbs?

What brought us to Greenwich Village in 1940 was the teeming energy of the folk music scene being born. Kids and grown-ups jammed the Sunday rent parties we called hootenannies, wild, freewheeling afternoons that featured friends who have since become legends-Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Blind Sonny Terry with his howling, untamed mouth-harp.

Folk music was fast making its mark, but all around us was jazz. A tew blocks away, Billie Holiday was offer-ing up her naked heart at Cafe Society, and Albert Animons and Pete Johnson were introducing the city to boogie-woogie at the Vanguard. The Village was jumping, a magical, electric place. We were also making the Harlem scene, picking up on gutbucket, juke-joint blues.

We sang our way across the country, traveling in a dead gangster’s Buick with bulletproof glass, marching on picket lines, playing honky-tonks and bars for silver-dollar tips. We were, all four of us, children of the Depression. We had seen bone-aching poverty, bummed freights, hitchhiked the back roads, shared soup and gunnysack blankets. We had what today is called attitude. Cocky and exuberant, we were having a hell of a good time. We were against hunger, war, greedy politicians, and jackleg preachers. We were for the working stiff, the frozen drifter hitching his way down the lonesome highway, the outcast, and the underdog.

We made four albums and a couple of singles, and our songs- Woody’s “This Land is Your Land,” my “Strange Death of John Doe,” Pete and Lee’s “If I Had A Hammer”-were getting around.

My Lincoln cantata, “The Lonesome Train,” was produced as an album, published, and premiered on CBS with Burl Ives singing the lead, then repeated in the Hollywood Bowl with Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, and a 100-voice chorus. Heady stuff.



A lonesome train on a lonesome track, Seven coaches painted black… We were his people, He was our man, You couldn’t quite tell where the people left off, And where Abe Lincoln began.



I was given a24-hour pass from Air Force basic training when “The Lonesome Train” was performed at the Roosevelt White House for Winston Churchill, who had come to sign the Atlantic Charter. It was a night that later led to a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, dinners in her New York apartment, a chance to meet world leaders like India’s Prime Minister, the late Indira Ghandi, and England’s Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, Sir Bertrand Russell, with bis wild halo of white hair and his sardonic smile. “War, my lad, is the ultimate human stupidity.”

Back then, in the early 1940s, we had no way of knowing that an era of hope and innocence was coming to an end. We thought we could save the world.

Aside from writing our own stuff, we had learned songs from gaunt Carolina cotton weavers, Kentucky coal miners, and Dust Bowl refugees. And we left a legacy from folk music to rock ’n’ roll by way of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, both of them and a hundred more our musical heirs.

The last time I sang in public was in January 1968. Woody Guthrie had died that fall and we paid him tribute in Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, performances I put together from Woody’s writings and songs. It was quite a cast: Judy Collins, all Rocky Mountain innocence; Joan Baez with that pure alto that could make you feel sorrow or jubilation; Pete Seeger and Woody’s son, Arlo, joined by a newcomer I’d stumbled across in an East Village joint, Richie Havens, with his rasping voice etched in pain; and Bob Dylan, pale and somber after the motorcycle accident that almost took his life, sounding eerily like Woody as he sang his Okie idol’s song:

I ain’t got no home,

I’m just a-roamin’ round,

A hard-workin’ ramblin’ man,

I go from town to town,

The police make it bard wherever I may roam,

And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore…

But that, as Christopher Marlowe said, “was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.”

Deep Ellum is another country too, as far as parents like Dennis are concerned. What are their children looking for there? Do they know, themselves? Are they finding it?

So I headed down there, prowling the clubs. The Orbit Room, Club Dada, The Bomb Factory, Trees, Deep Ellum Live. Hanging out, watching, talking to people, taking it in. Listening to the Toadies, Hagfish, Tripping Daisy, Anthrax. What was the difference between my day and now, between us and them ? Did Deep Ellum say anything about Dallas, about American life, or nothing at all?



THE STREETS CRAWL WITH TOURISTS. THE LOCALS STAND IN clusters in front of the clubs, prowling restlessly along the neon, graffiti-scarred streets.

I move among them, trying to find the word that expresses their mood. Then it comes to me–joyless, I study the faces I pass. Nobody’s smiling. No laughter rides the air. The young voices carry a faint edge of anxiety, A skinny boy who looks about 20 comes up to two girls who look no more than 15. “What’s happenin’?”

“The usual garbage. How about you sneak us a beer?”

The kids seem to be searching, hopped up, sure that there’s something exciting going on. It just never seems to be going on where they are.

“Hey man, what’s happenin’?”

“Somebody said Anthrax is gonna be rippin’ it at Trees.”

“We been there. Ain’t nothin’ goin’ down.”

“I love those guys.” The girl sways, grabs the boy’s arm for support. ’”Scuse me. I’m a little drunk.”

I pause in front of a club, music throbbing out of it, a wave of percussion crashing over me. I go in, pay the admission. The back of my hand is stamped.

The place is dim, a large, battered space the size of a small warehouse, with an oval bar. A crowd stands facing the risers where a group of five is pounding it out. Drums, keyboard, two guitars, and a young woman clutching a mike. No one has bothered to take a sound check for balance, the percussion is all you can hear. The lead guitar player is short, a thin kid with the bunched cheeks and furtive moves of a small nut-eating animal. The young woman at the mike is pale and defiant, wearing torn jeans and a skin-tight turtleneck. Her voice is drowned out by the drums, but her mouth silently opens and closes, her face twisting in anger like a demented fish,

Directly in front of the stage is the mosh pit, a chaotic tangle of adolescents, bodies writhing, arms flailing, elbows jabbing, shoulders jerking as they careen into each other. Moshing. Welcome to Dallas, Hieronymus Bosch.

Behind the kids, an older crowd is gathered, people in their 20s and 30s downing beers and Cokes. I start talking to a couple. Vanessa is 29 and comes from Garland. Silky reddish hair, long legs, miniskirt, and designer jacket. I peg her as a model, but it turns out she works in the cosmetics department at Neiman Marcus, one of those who spray you with perfume and press a sample on you as you pass. Her date, Kevin, is muscular and balding. He wears a leather jacket, avi-ator glasses, and snakeskin cowboy boots. I don’t even try to guess what he does for a living. Turns out he’s a computer programmer in the accounting department at Sears.

I ask them what they think of the music. Vanessa grimaces. “You kidding? It stinks.”

“So why are you here?”

She looks at me blankly. “Beats sitting home.”

Kevin says, “Maybe the next group’11 be better. ” It seems that tonight there is no name band, just a lineup of unknowns, groups that don’t even rate an introduction, each of them getting a 20-minute shot at the stage.

I move on, parceling out the rest of the night among different clubs, talking at first to the grown-ups. The men: Bruce, a grad student in business at SMU; Eric, a salesman at Circuit City; Emil (“Stitch, everybody calls me Stitch”), an auto mechanic; Duane, a baggage jockey for American Airlines. The women: Marge, a high school history teacher; Sue Ann, a waitress at a Tex-Mex restaurant; Jennifer, a hair stylist whose specialty is blonds. “I’m very good at highlighting.”

They’re in Deep Ellum for all kinds of reasons. Some are lonely, searching for partners, fed up with the singles-bar scene. Some are clinging to memories of their high school years. Some just get off on rock ’n’ roll, though the bands they go for most aren’t local ones.

A common thread runs through the tapestry of their talk. Something subtle, unspoken. I find myself looking at life through their eyes, hearing the echoes in what they say, weaving it together from bits and pieces of feelings, hints of why they’re really here.

You come from Irving or Richardson, and you work at a computer or the perfume counter and you’re bored; Jesus, it’s boring as hell. You get through the week and whether you put it in words or not, you’re kind of saying to yourself, “Is this it? Is this all there is? Is this going to be my life?”

All week you get up and go to work, and then Friday comes. Something has to happen. You have to feel alive. And at least the music has energy. Even the bad bands have energy. And there’s always the chance something special will happen. You’re not sure what. Anyhow, what else is there to do in Dallas?

From then on, I concentrate on the real reason I’m in Deep Slum. The thing that baffles Dermis: the kids.

I drift over to a cluster of them leaning against the wall at The Bomb Factory. I expect to be met with suspicion and maybe a flare of hostility. They’re guarded at first, teasing me, asking what I’m planning to write about them. Jeff, a plump, moon-faced boy of 19 wearing a Longhorns sweatshirt, grins insolently. “What you gonna call it? ’Night Life Among the Animals?’ “

Bit by bit they begin to open up as they sense that I don’t regard them as specimens, that I’m not judging anyone, and that I really want to know what they think and feet.

There are four of them. Carter is a pint-sized boy with a butchered haircut. Monica is plain and broad-hipped, with a morose smile and a blotchy complexion. For some reason, maybe because she looks so needy, my heart goes out to her. The fourth one is Eiko, slim and as elegantly made as an ivory figurine. Dressed expensively in a provocative scrap of mini-skirt and a butter-soft leather jacket, she is the only Asian-American I’ve seen down here. For that matter, there’s an almost total absence of black kids and damned few Hispanics. The Deep Ellum club scene is just about entirely Anglo middle-class.

Jeff, Monica, and Carter are seniors at Marcus High School in Flower Mound. Eiko attends a Catholic school. All four share a contempt for the group on stage; Carter snorts, “Bunch of creepos.” Eiko is into Hootie and the Blowfish, Jeff is a hot fan of the Toadies, Monica has written to the lead singer of Hagfish, offering him her body.

They agree that Flower Mound, where they live, is boring. Their parents are boring. Monica smiles her sad smile. “My mother’s idea of excitement is shopping for a bunch of stuff she gets home and decides she hates, and returns it all the next day.”

I ask, ” What do your folks think about you hanging out down here? “

Eiko shakes her head. “They don’t know where I am. They think I’m over at Monica’s.”

“Don’t they check up on you?”

“My father works for Texas Instruments, he’s always traveling. My mother’s an accountant, weekends she has her bridge games.”

Jeff grins. “My mother’s idea of a conversation is like, you know, ’Clean up your room and do your homework.1 “

Carter chimes in dryly, “Yeah, like my lather. We have these real close talks, like he tells me, i want you to wash the cars.’ “

It’s not hatred or anger. Not even mild antagonism. Just a chasm between them and their parents. In some obscure way, they think of the musicians in their favorite rock groups as their families.

A scarlet-lipsticked, green-fingernailed 15-year-old tells me, “My mother doesn’t know what it’s like to be my age. I go, ’You were never a kid. You were born at the age of 40.’ “

A 20-year-old University of North Texas sophomore says, “Hey, listen, I love my parents, only.. Jesus, I don’t know, they’re always so busy. We don’t really talk. I mean, not really. Maybe that’s what growing up is, that you don’t, like…connect.”

A friend puts me onto a band called Funland, gives me their CD. They’re pretty good. And what do you know? I can actually hear the words. They capture the chaotic emotions of adolescence: the loneliness, the difficulty of making connections with people, the clumsiness, the feeling of never getting it right, the despair.



I wanna die like a satellite, I wanna, Wanna burn up right across the sky, What fun we’d have on our way up there, The colors, all those colors flying everywhere… Leave me to my bedroom, Leave me to my thinking, Leave me to my crying, Leave me to my drinking…



There are three in the group, Clark Voegler, Will Johnson, and Peter Schmidt, plus a rotating bass player they pick up to fill in when they have a gig. All three write music, but Peter, the lead guitar and singer, writes most of the lyrics. He has the long sideburns, the rough-featured, blue-collar look of a garage mechanic. And something engaging about him, an air of decency, a dry humor, a ghost of a crooked smile, a look that hints at pain.

We’re just parallel lines,

Just biding our time,

Nothing lost and nothing gained,

Every song sounds just the same,

And we will never touch again…



I get the sense that although he’s 29, he knows exactly what it feels like to be 16. He’s been through it all and he remembers, even though now, having quit drinking, having gotten past a wrecked love affair, he’s the happiest he’s been in years.



No more bad times, I can’t stand another day.

No more screaming. Not today. No, not today.

No more sad limes, why don’t we throw them all away?



His stark upstairs apartment in East Dallas boasts a life-size cartoon figure painted on plywood, an expensive stereo set-up, a couple of uninspired couches, a Formica table, and kitchen chairs. 1 ask him about his background.

“I spent all my time growing up in Dallas; my mom and dad are divorced. My dad was, like, a Texas Southern Baptist alcoholic. My mom pretty much raised me. You know, the typical, struggling kind of thing. I was the youngest of four children, real overprotected from the nasty stuff. I always had this feeling that something was going on that 1 didn’t know about.”

I nod. “That’s built into growing up, isn’t it, Peter? I mean, what the hell, you grow up in a world where you’re surrounded by grown-up secrets. That’s why kids are natural spies.”

“Yeah, but my brothers and sisters were more clued in than me. They’re all older, there was this protective thing, like, let’s see if we can’t keep the kid straight.” Even before high school, Peter started writing songs. He was shy and uncomfortable with girls, didn’t feel he was attractive. Music was the only way he could get his feelings out. I ask him about Funland’s fans.

“Well, it’s weird. Like, lately we’ve gotten popular with the very young group, starting with ones who are half my age. Say, 15 to 20.”

He hands me a thick folder of letters and a sheaf of messages off Rutland’s mailbox on the Internet. They are messages of yearning for contact from kids whose parents are too busy to take the time to discover what their children hunger for, what their children feel. Notes from angry kids whose highest compliment is, “You guys really kick ass. ” Letters from kids who feel alienated and alone, kids struggling to find self-esteem. It hits me that Deep Ellum and the music are really a mirror of suburban Dallas family life.

Peter stares off, shaking his head. “You take moshing…\ve hate that, because they might as well be playing fool ball in front of the stage. We’re trying to relate to them, and I think they feel like we’re their friends. 1 think we talk to them in a way that other bands don’t. We respect them enough to tell them we prefer they get into our music. If you want to slam into each other, go somewhere else. Smashing into each other is not what our music’s about. One thing that’s different about our band is the kind of connection with the kids. It’s hard, because you can’t have a personal relationship with everyone. You don’t want to hurt diem, but you have to make it clear, I’m not your family, I’m not your best friend. I respect you, and I’m not contemptuous that I’m better than you, but I think you’re smart enough to understand that 1 have my own life.”

One thing I find strikingly different between my time in Greenwich Village in the ’40s and the lives of these Dallas kids in the ’90s is the way we looked at life, the size and shape of our worlds, We looked outward, they gaze in, Our songs echoed what was going on in the country. Peters songs draw a stark portrait of the world of Funland’s fans, a world mostly of pain and bitter anger bonded up inside.

Something the Almanac Singers had in common with Funland was liking each other. Peter is talking about his band, but he could be talking about me, Woody, Pete, and Lee:

“What makes us different is that we’re not careerists in the sense that we’re not just out to make money, to be big. We’re best friends. I talk to other bands and they don’t even like each other. I’m amazed that someone could stay in a band with someone he doesn’t trust, We’re tight, we really care about each other, and the kids pick up on that. You don’t have to play music just to be a star. There might be something you need to communicate.”

The letters. The messages online. From Debbie, Janet, Melissa, John, Virgil, Mike, Kelly, Angelo, Kathy Ann.

“I hear you need a girlfriend, and I want you to know I’d be happy to date you. Your songs are so compelling and so dark…”

On the Internet, a notice to female Funland fans: “The Peter Schmidt Dating Sweepstakes. Submit a sworn affidavit from a local psychiatrist that you are not crazy. A statement of total net worth. If you have enjoyed any movie that featured Bruce Willis, you may want to reconsider your entry. Do you smoke, and what is the color of your teeth? Do you hate your parents? List any other qualities that may be endearing.”

The mail. “I was surprised and thrilled, almost to die point of orgasm when I got your letter today. Thanks for not acting like some huge superstars who have better things to do than write to people like me.”

“Thanks tor always listening to me and answering my questions, and not acting like my father, and not thinking I’m totally weird.”

“In a way, desperation has led me to write to you, because my girlfriend is going to school in Kansas and my best friend and ! don’t talk anymore, and I have no one to talk to.”

“Thanks for taking die time to talk to me. You’re the only one who just makes me want to pour my heart out….”

EVENING IN PLANO. STREET AFTER STREET OF RED BRICK homes, lights on in the windows. A warm, inviting look, like a photograph on a Hallmark card.

Dinner is over, Dennis’ wife and daughter are cleaning up in the kitchen. His son Scott is upstairs in his room, the sound of Tripping Daisy echoing down, a cascade of drums and guitars. Dennis and I are lingering over a second cup of coffee.

I set down my cup and gaze at him. “What’s happening in Deep EUum is a lot of lost kids from nice homes going down there to find a friend, find a family, find someone who can feel what they feel.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Scott.”

Dennis regards me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I don’t say anything. But the words echo in my mind, I hear myself saying softly, “Oh Dennis…Dennis, my friend, wake up.”