Eagle-eye Erin Rice over at TexasG-, er, Pegasus News just spotted a sad message posted by Will Kapinos of veteran Denton rock band Jetscreamer. Seems there'll be no more live shows and possibly no more band at all.
Key line in the bulletin from Kapinos: "If we're done for good, there's not gonna be any big bang blowout, no last show or anything, so don't even bother asking. That's how these things usually end: in ordinary ways, rather than extraordinary."
If it helps, the times I saw Jetscreamer play, the performances were extraordinary.
You may have already heard this if you're a fan of Dallas pop trio the Tah-dahs. Seems frontman Roy Ivy and wife (also a beloved local singer) Laura Palmer are packin' up and leaving Dallas, putting an end to their musical careers in these parts.
After the jump, read Roy's MySpace bulletin. We'll have much more on this when the farewell show gets closer.
The split is real, according to member Pikahsso, who was the first of the group to respond to my queries this morning. Pikahsso didn't want to lay out all the dirty details, but he provided a bit of insight into why he, Tahiti and Picnic will no longer operate as a trio.
"It's all love between us. There's no beef," the rapper said on the phone early this morning. "We all just have a whole lot of stuff jumpin' off. Picnic is pretty busy doing production for other artists. Tahiti and I will still perform together, but we both have solo stuff going, too.
"It was just getting to the point where we all wanted to do our own thing. Yeah, it's a nick in something we'd built up a lot lately with the Denglish album and everything we'd been doing. And it kinda caught me off guard," he said. "But nobody can put full blame on any one of us. Artists just need managers to help them through things like this, and we were relying too much on ourselves. You learn from it."
Member and man-behind-the-beats Picnic echoes Pikahsso's comments, but paints a less rosy picture of the situation.
"Over time with all of us, some resentment built up," Picnic said in a phone chat. "We -- mostly Tahiti and myself -- had some difference in opinion about the direction of the group. I have mad respect for both those guys, but I felt at some points that the respect wasn't returned.
"So I finally voiced my concerns, and while I expected them to be all, 'Let's talk it over,' they were basically like, 'We feel the same way.' So that was unfortunate. I didn't really want PPT to be done, but it is what it is."
Although Tahiti and Picnic have had a few unkind public words with each other of late in the DFW Hiphop thread, Tahiti was a lot more tight-lipped on the phone this afternoon. He did remember events differently than Picnic, though.
"He's making it seem like we had beef, but I saw him four times after our CD release show, and there was never a word said about him wanting to leave the group," Tahiti said. "We've actually still never talked about it to this day. Everything he did was relayed to me through Pikahsso."
The news of the split is shocking, not just when you think of the press coverage and fanfare welcoming Denglish's release in April, but when you consider the camaraderie and artistic vision the three members shared. These guys finished each other's sentences. When they weren't talking old-school music or brainstorming, they were always jokin' around. It was sometimes hard to keep up.
But Picnic says things started to sour between Tahiti and himself the week after Denglish came out.
"I busted my ass on that record, and wanted it to be something that we all could be proud of. But I just felt like I wasn't being included on some decisions and important discussions," he said.
"All respect to Tahiti -- I love what he does -- but I just don't know where his head is at. We haven't talked. I'm definitely open to talking, but it's all up in the air."
According to Pikahsso, the friendships aren't beyond repair. "I still talk to both of them all the time."
But does he hold out hope for a PPT reunion in the future?
"You never can say never. Anybody can be stubborn for a while. But, in case you haven't noticed, I like to rock. And any time I get a chance to rock, you know I'm gonna do it."
Pikahsso and Tahiti said they'll play the shows they'd already signed up to play as PPT before the split, but that nothing is certain after that.
Tahiti says he is just thankful for the time that PPT had to do what it did. "I'm 40 years old, and just the fact that I was able to do that is amazing. Rap is a young man's game.
"We were all individuals before PPT, and the group helped elevate us all. We definitely don't want that to go to waste."
The Eats blog had something about this late last week, but I wanted to weigh in because I think it's such a loss. Big D's Dogs, the hot dog shop on Lower Greenville that served up house-made Shiner chili dogs and Thai Chili Lime dogs, closed yesterday.
So says Byron Lazlo, the promoter behind Thursday's Panoptikon event. (That's not him in the photo, by the way.) He says the owners didn't want to fight the city anymore -- a few months ago, the City Council denied the club a specific use permit, which it needed to stay in business. The council cited crime problems. (Owner Shelley Martinez has disputed that.)
"It's the end of a huge era," Lazlo says. "It's the end of the big nightclub era in Deep Ellum."
Club One opened on Main and Hall Streets in 1991. Its last day open is Saturday.
Photo by Jason Janik, taken at Club One in July 2006
The Xocolatl Room, a retail chocolate shop in Uptown that hosted spoken-word poetry events on Friday nights, has apparently closed.
I drove by earlier today hoping to pick up some chocolates. The storefront looked empty. Just called their phone number to confirm, and the line's been disconnected.
Their evening events seemed great in theory -- there was a $10 all-you-can-eat chocolate fountain, live music, and poetry. Wish I would have made it out to one.
We defied all logic and hit TMC on Sunday for its last night in current form. (Caven Enterprises says it's weighing options for the club. And we're looking forward to seeing what the new Sue Ellen's looks like in the old TMC space.)
Read all about it in tomorrow's Quick, but we can't repeat enough: Caven, please start a disco (or even an 80s) night at S4. Because Sundays just aren't going to be the same.
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