New York “Times” Surprised To Find Bands In Large College Town

The New York Times‘ Travel section this week ran its music issue, which had polite descriptions of festivals in Mali and Morocco, as well as rundowns of the music scenes in Stockholm and Istanbul. More local exoticism can be found in the podunk town of Denton, Texas. Seems that beneath the country bumpkin facade of “Piggly Wiggly markets and dusty pawnshops” lies a thriving and eclectic music scene! How did that happen? Maybe it’s because of the University of North Texas’ music school, or the presence of the largest state-funded women’s college in America, or the city’s population of over 100k. Wouldn’t it be more shocking if Denton didn’t have a band like Midlake living there?

With its Piggly Wiggly markets and dusty pawnshops, the Texas college town of Denton does not look the part of a Woodstock in waiting. A Romanesque courthouse juts out of the central square, as in that fictional town in “Back to the Future.” And whenever the local college football team plays at Fouts Field, the entire town seems to put on Mean Green T-shirts.

…At last count, more than 100 bands were polishing their sound in the city’s dive bars, rooftop spaces and fraternity basements. Even the local record store, a converted opera house called Recycled, has a section devoted to Denton bands. The bin dividers read like a Lollapalooza T-shirt: Lift to Experience, Centro-matic, Jetscreamer, Vortexas, Robert Gomez, Stanton Meadowdale, Mom, Mandarin, and Matthew and the Arrogant Sea, to name just a few.

Not bad for a college town of 110,000, prompting more than a few music industry insiders to call Denton the next Austin.

“There’s this combination of artistic fervor and small town naïveté,” said David Sims, a music columnist for The Dallas Observer. “Artists here don’t know they’re not supposed to be Bob Dylan so when they start a band, they shoot for the moon.”

…Much of the musical genius can be traced back to the University of North Texas’s College of Music. Walk through the college’s leafy campus and you can eavesdrop on any number of lab bands polishing their chops, or pianists pounding away on a Steinway in the racquetball-court-like rehearsal studios.

Denton is also one of the fastest growing cities in America. Here’s hoping that “small town naïveté” that allows bands like Lift To Experience and Jetscreamer to “shoot for the moon” won’t be lost when the Piggly Wiggly gets replaced with a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Oh wait, there are already two in town.

An Indie Scene That Comes With a Texas Twang in Denton [NYT]