What’s the difference between a festival and a block party? Last year Deep Ellum celebrated 150 years of existence with the former, an event that featured the oldest school of rap—Doug E. Fresh and a member of Run DMC—as well as Wichita Falls pop punk act Bowling for Soup. The Deep Ellum Music Festival 2023 capped off a year of anniversary programming that culminated in a modest tribute to itself that went well enough to repeat—and improve.
Musician Cameron McCloud, of Cure for Paranoia, says a block party is “to bring the community together,” as opposed to the marquee-vanity status a festival provides for a musician.
“Block party, you think old movies, where it’s families and neighborhoods coming together to celebrate something,” McCloud says. “When you think festivals, you think Coachella. This is not Coachella. This is a family reunion of sorts.”
This year’s event is the Deep Ellum Block Party, which feels more appropriate for the district. This weekend’s rap headliner is now updated from the 80s to at least the 90s; Raekwon from the Wu Tang Clan will perform at 4 p.m So will the Polyphonic Spree. Around 80 acts in total will navigate the closed streets, rushing to sets stacked from early afternoon until last call. Daytime programming is free and a $5 pass allows entry into the venues for evening sets. The music begins at noon.
The staggering number of artists is due in part to the hyperactive booking efforts of Gavin Mulloy, a promoter and marketing mind who has had stints with the Dallas Mavericks, the Granada Theater, and The Factory in Deep Ellum, to name a prominent few. He had a light touch adding some bands to last year’s lineup but his impact is more apparent in 2024’s edition. Currently a freelancer, Mulloy has had the time to book almost too many performances.
“I have a problem right now,” Mulloy says while making the rounds at his old workplace satellite, Sundown at the Granada. “I am addicted to booking bands for this thing. I need to stop.”
Mulloy will claim that not everyone likes him but then seems perturbed when someone doesn’t. On his walk around Greenville Avenue he becomes visibly upset that a gas station clerk doesn’t remember him from his time in the neighborhood. He won’t drop it. He punishes the guy with jokes until he cracks. Then he’s back to the block party. He says he “bit off more than he could chew” with this year’s edition. “I feel like Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis,” Mulloy says.
In a whirlwind evening tour of the two neighborhoods in which he has operated—Lower Greenville and Deep Ellum—Mulloy goes from chatting with old bosses in owner suites to fist bumping a tamale guy on the street to checking in with some break dancers. He is either making sure everyone knows where to be on Saturday or that they still know his name. He operates as if he’s been running for mayor since 2012.
Later that night he jokes he is going to crash Aurora, the outdoor art event at City Hall that operates entirely on artificial light and is returning downtown for the first time since 2018. Mulloy claims he is going to take a $50 projector and will bring his own DJ to set up at the event to promote the Deep Ellum Block Party.
Only, he is not joking. He shows up uninvited to the unrelated art event two days later and projects block party advertisements that are visible from Young Street. He is scouring the grounds to shake hands with officials from Aurora so they don’t get mad at him for running this secret performance. With him is Stan Francisco, an artist who got his start DJ busking on top of his car in Deep Ellum. Nobody from Aurora seems angry at their stunt. Realizing Stan Francisco doesn’t have a microphone, he procures one—it retails for $2,000—from DJ Blake Ward, who is there on official business.
“I have a problem right now. I am addicted to booking bands for this thing. I need to stop.”
Gavin Mulloy
This year’s block party has other markings of Mulloy’s work: Non-music programming. You can spot one of his productions immediately. It often has nothing to do with music and at times can overshadow the stage, which is why he still stands out in this field. Dunking booths, spelling bees, basketball themes, and a Michael Irvin promotion are all speckling social media the week of the event. There will be an attempt to break the world record for people in tracksuits being in the same place at the same time, nevermind the fact that Deep Ellum is 1,500 miles from New Jersey.
Mulloy is the king of bits. He often seems like a jock who doesn’t know how he got mixed up with all these art freaks. If you challenge him on the logic of these gags, he will remind you that you don’t have a business degree. When pressed on what large-scale festival or event has had the most impact on him, he mentions Fun Fun Fun Fest, which took place in Austin annually between 2006 and 2015.
That’s where he “got to see the nuts and bolts” of the production due to his connections.
“I got to shoot the taco cannon,” he says, longingly. And indeed, Fun Fun Fun Fest appears to have gone down as a balanced mix of a big music event and an intimacy that Austin may chase the rest of its existence. North Texas had events that felt similar—35 Denton and Deep Ellum’s Index Fest both come to mind—which makes the block party the latest in this lineage.
Mulloy works closely with J. Damany Daniel, another alum from his days at The Factory. Daniel has been a board member of the Deep Ellum Foundation for three years and owns an event company called The Event Nerd, a brand that plots the experiential tweaking of corporate events. It places DJs and bands at otherwise bloodless work conferences. He supports Mulloy’s thinking on programming, believing music should be accompanied by more than drinking and other adult-focused activity.
“I got two kids,” Daniel says. “My kids need a place to play that’s not a car show. So we got rides and games. The inspiration genuinely was: How do we create a party for the block?”
Daniel may have willed the Deep Ellum Block Party into reality. He bought the domain name four years ago before he was ever involved. He gained a reputation by being outspoken at community meetings. Bringing the event into a commercial symbiosis with the businesses was his focus.
“One of the things that we heard consistently from the neighborhood is that all of these things that happen outside are great for the outside,” Daniel says. “But how does it benefit Dada and Twilite and Louie Louie’s and … Elm Street [Saloon] and Will Call? How does it benefit us? That’s fair.”
The foundation is paying the bands, which makes bar owners rejoice. Originally from Brooklyn, the block party concept is nothing new to Daniel.
“Brooklyn block parties are just different,” Daniel says. “Every part of the block party is live. You’ve got people on the stoops. We don’t have stoops but we have parking lots. How do we create that energy on the street so that—from one end to the other—it’s live?”
While a number of locals are returning from last year’s lineup—Cayuga All-Stars, We Them Grays, Cure For Paranoia—the headliners and the programming overall appears more finely honed. There is a temporary zone at Elm and Good Latimer and inside of Cheapsteaks called The Latin Quarter. For this you can credit the Deep Ellum Music Foundation’s Veronica Young. Before gravitating toward the rock and rockabilly of acts like Rodeo Clown Dropouts on Elm Street, she was listening to Lighter Shade of Brown and Latin hip-hop with her family.
“I’ve had several lives in Deep Ellum,” Young says. “My earliest memory was, I used to cruise here way back in the early 90s with my cousins and their low riders. I wasn’t old enough to drive. I wasn’t old enough to be in a bar. We would come out here every Sunday and we would start at Reverchon Park and we would cruise Reverchon and then we’d drive through Deep Ellum, bumping our loud music and going through the streets of Deep Ellum. I didn’t frequent any of the venues. I was one of those kids outside hanging out in the parking lot.”
The current underground Dallas cumbia scene and its placement in the block party ties together several threads for Young.
“Now cumbia is becoming the new punk scene,” Young says. “I just went to a house party a few days ago in Pleasant Grove. My family’s from Pleasant Grove; that’s where I lived when I was in elementary school. We used to have a lot of house parties like that. I was raised by a family of musicians. My grandfather taught mariachi. He actually brought mariachi to DISD public schools in the 70s.”
The programming in the Latin Quarter will feature Ollimpaxqui Mariachi as well as Ballet Folklorico. Cheapsteaks in general has featured Latin music heavily throughout the year, a contrast to the punk and metal shows it also often hosts.
“That sort of DIY culture and the house parties and bringing families together, eating carne asada, playing some music, family, kids, people running around—that’s the energy,” Young says.
A photoshoot that attempted to gather all the Deep Ellum Block Party performers took place in the final week leading up to the big event. As the artists gathered into the room to stand school photo shoot-style on the stage of Three Links, the ubiquitous instrumentals of Houston act Khruangbin softly played at a department store volume in the background. It felt eerily like a memorial, of which there have been too many. A number of musicians have died recently. Deep Ellum is perhaps the most self-aware place in Dallas. A new campaign features portraits of key Deep Ellum figures on the district’s street lamps, which feels oddly like a remembrance rather than a celebration. There was even a giant mural of Mulloy painted on a wall in Deep Ellum in 2020. Would any other neighborhood ever stand for having a promoter painted on a mural? How about anyone living who isn’t a sports star or singer or musician? How about an Angela Hunt statue on Lower Greenville? A DART train with a decal of Avi Adelman?
Upon hearing the suggestion that the atmosphere seems a bit morbid, Mulloy snaps: “It is a memorial because Deep Ellum is fucking dead.” Then he starts laughing hysterically.
There is some suggestion that the neighborhood is again at risk of a downturn, and the recent complaints from business owners concerning the Sisyphean construction efforts don’t help. Mulloy admits that making money for the venues is his priority and that he also hopes to break even. Responding to the chatter that activity is down in Deep Ellum lately, Mulloy says “I wouldn’t say it’s the best of times right now.” He also says that anything that goes wrong will be his fault.
Deep Ellum Foundation head Stephanie Hudiburg was previously the director of programs and partnerships at The Real Estate Council. Navigating Deep Ellum’s future is clearly a departure from that organization’s mission statement, even though you can see them as linked. She calls herself a “policy wonk” and touts accomplishments such as installing band loading zone signs on the street, as important as they are unheeded.
“They don’t work perfectly yet but we got them out there,” Hudiburg says from the stage of Three Links to the crowd of musicians. “Because y’all tell me that’s the kind of thing we need, that’s the kind of stuff I work on.”
“We spend a lot of time pushing paper around for this very moment to be able to happen,” Hudiburg says. She then launches into a profane send-off: “What’s going to happen on Saturday is fucking magic. Let’s do this shit.” Mulloy is shocked to hear Hudiburg curse on stage.
Hudiburg reiterates that this year’s block party will prioritize the bars and establishments that make Deep Ellum what it is. Then she admits that throwing music festivals is not what she learned at TREC.
“Thankfully for us, what do we have in spades? Musicians and music people that know how to do this,” Hudiburg says. “I don’t. It’s not my background. We’re very fortunate and lucky to partner with a lot of people that are very passionate about this neighborhood and passionate about music in this neighborhood … I’m a kid from an immigrant background and Deep Ellum was a place that welcomed immigrants when other places didn’t and allowed them to cut their teeth and make their dreams come true. It was a place for entrepreneurs. It was a place for innovators.”
Betting on or against Deep Ellum in its 151st year seems aimless; the alt weeklies, newspapers, and magazines have spent decades rallying for authority on this point. Across the state, there are signs that speculative real estate is winning out against the edifices—large and small—that house culture. Arguably two of the most unique venues in Texas, Austin’s disco-mirrored Outer Heaven and the insomniac hub Club Eternal, recently announced their respective closings. While the Capitol is three hours away, it could very well be a warning sign of the future here if multiple music venues are shutting down in a legitimate music hub like Austin.
Dust the construction mess off of yourself, Deep Ellum. Get out there and enjoy the neighborhood. It may never be this good again.
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