Easter in Dallas

April 2006
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Lightning Rod
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Easter in Dallas

Post by Lightning Rod » April 13th, 2006, 11:29 am

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I spent about a year and a half at the Dunebuggy. It was a Rave Club, strictly off the books. We started out in an old warehouse in South Dallas. The place used to be an automotive shop where they built Dunebggies. We put up a stage and a PA system and a bar and we were in business. It was a rolling party. Every night three or four young rock bands would perform. I was the MC and stage manager.

The staff of the Dunebuggy was a varied crew of about eight people, all of whom lived on the premises. It was a family business, an entertainment commune. The proprietors were Mark and Candy, an unlikely couple. Mark stood 6'5" and was a recovering piano prodigy. He had hands as big as Rochmaninov and could play Chopin to make you cry. Candy was a skinny ex-dope dealer divorcee with four kids ranging in age from two to ten who also lived in the improvised quarters at the Dunebuggy.

In Texas the legal drinking age is twenty-one. But kids begin to have a social life when they hit their teens. They need a place to go and let down their hair. The licensed nightclubs in Dallas would not admit minors, so the rave clubs absorbed the excess under-aged business. We had hundreds of kids per night coming to see their favorite bands. Soon the facility became too small. There were parking problems.

So we moved into a larger building. It was an ex factory/warehouse on South Lamar just on the other side of the Sears & Robuck building. The New Dunebuggy had 36,000 square feet. We had three stages and two bars and enough dance floor to play hockey on. The rent and utilities on the place were $6,000 per month, but at five dollars a head we could recoup that at the door in a week.

In any given suburb of Dallas, there is a garage rock band on every block. These are usually kids with a head full of dreams who don't know any better and think that a hundred dollar electric guitar is going to make them a star. And these kids all have friends. These friends would show up in droves to the Dunebuggy to watch their local heroes go through the contortions of the rock and roll rite of passage.

The New Dunebuggy was huge. It had bay doors that you could drive a car through. Every night I would arrive at the stage in a stalely brown and tan Bentley. We would drive right up to the main stage and I would get out on the wrong side of the Bentley (the steering wheel is on the right) and introduce the first band. You could smell the beer and ecstasy sweat and teen-aged hormones on the audience. There would be chanting from the mosh pit. It was positively pagan.

I was the MC and stage manager, but I doubled as a bouncer. Considering that I only weigh 120 pounds dripping wet, this might be a stretch of the imagination. But it's true. I was a bouncer. On the rare occasion when trouble developed in the crowd, I was called upon to maintain decorum. I could usually do this with my mouth and a microphone, but every now and then there would be intractable difficulties usually surrounding the subject of drunkenness.

One night a kid got out of hand. I had to escort him out. When we reached the back door, the kid began to scuffle and I had to get him in a headlock. He outweighed me by fifty pounds, but he was drunk and I was just pleasantly high. Candy saw that I might need help. She had just opened a Corona. All I saw was the blur of the bottle landing on the kid's head. It was such a clean blow that I barely felt it. Suddenly I had beer foam and shards of glass all over me. I looked at the kid's head. It didn't have a scratch on it, but the stroke surely got his attention.

All in a night's work.
Last edited by Lightning Rod on April 13th, 2006, 11:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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