At Tulips FTW on Friday night, local shoegazers Trauma Ray, having recently returned from a fall tour of the U.K. and the U.S., headlined a bill that also included Denton “emoviolence” band Bullets Between Tongues and local hardcore heavies Ozone, Feral Cry, and Skimp, with DJ Solar Lodge spinning techno in between bands. Tulips, which holds over 500 people, was almost at capacity, some of whom were diving off the stage into the crowd. I’d say that a lot of the people in the room were in their 20s and 30s, but the show was all-ages, and at one point, this guy behind me, the dismay in his tone as thick as boldface type, said, “Huh. It’s like high school all over again. Like the Warped Tour.”
Turning around, I saw that he looked to be the age in which his high school experience happened somewhere in the early-to-mid-2000s, the era when post-hardcore bands like Fall of Troy, A Day to Remember, and other bands with names based around prepositional phrases ruled the arena parking lots of major U.S. cities every summer. Well, no shit, dude, I thought. Who did he think listens to music like this?
For me, an old person, seeing a bunch of people too young to buy booze pack into a pretty big venue for some mostly local bands was exciting. I was watching a scene — area hardcore fans — in action. The music was loud. The crowd yelled along with the singers. The pit looked dangerous but, you know, respectful, with everyone adhering to unspoken pit etiquette. Beyond the edge of the maelstrom, one guy talked shit to another guy and the other guy barked like a dog in reply. When Trauma Ray came on, they played their Chameleon album start to finish. All in all, I had a very nice time!
While I was there, I ran into Daniel “DJ” Alvarez and Osiel “OC” Martinez, co-founders of hardcore/metal show promotion company NoiseROT, and DJ told me to check out a new spot holding DIY events.
“They’re doing their first hardcore show on Sunday afternoon,” he said. “It’s called The Place.”
It turns out that The Place is at 6463 E. Lancaster Ave., the former home of the dearly departed Ozzie Rabbit Lounge, a long-running dive bar that shuttered for good in May 2024. When Ozzie Rabbit closed, Matt Van Cura, a lifelong punk rocker, musician, tattooer, and owner of next-door-neighbor Randy Adams Tattoo, saw an opportunity for the now-vacant space.
Before Ozzie’s, the spot was a bar called the Power Plant, and before that, it was the now-legendary Tattoo Bar, a wild-ass haven for heavy bands and the drinkers who loved them. But opening a bar there didn’t hold a ton of appeal for Van Cura.
“I’d like to bring culture to this neighborhood,” he said. “I want to see music and art and punk markets, like the cool shit I saw when I was growing up. So, me and [Adams] were talking about that. He was like, ‘You should do the Tattoo Bar again,’ but I didn’t want to have to operate a bar during the day. I just wanna book bands.”
Rather than endure the endless parade of hassles and expenses that come with operating a bar, Van Cura decided instead to use it as a BYOB event space. Enter: The Place.
Van Cura held his first party on November 23, a dance night showcasing ’80s New Wave, punk, goth, and electronic music spun by DJ Fat Pee Pee (a.k.a. Elm Street Tattoo artist Lindsey Carmichael) that drew a big crowd.
The Place’s next event featured local hardcore band Antirad and cowpunks Convoy & The Cattlemen. For the show this past Sunday, Van Cura partnered with a dude named Fauz, who books hardcore shows all over North Texas under the nom de guerre Core 4 Core, and Noah Hammer, a tattoo apprentice at Randy Adams who helps run shows. Fauz and Hammer put together an 18+ hardcore bill with Grimoire, Limit of Destruction, Flü, Spit My Rage, and Finesse. The bands crammed into the area between the bar and the front door, and everyone who came to see them fit wherever else they could. Though only a fraction of the 500+ people at Tulips Friday night, the energy was just as palpable and the pit just as gnarly, with a lot of the hands whipping around Sharpied with the X’s. Local scene documenter Gray Muncy (@birddog14) snapped some shots of the bands and the fans. Perusing them on Instagram the next day, I marveled that such an explosive crowd fit into the front part of a small bar.
Between the sets of Grimoire and Limit of Destruction, I went out to the patio with Van Cura, who introduced me to Fauz and Hammer (who’d been taking the show’s $10 cover at the side entrance). From what I gathered, Ozone guitarist Ty Yarborough had sort of passed the show-booking torch to Fauz (who had helped Yarborough put on shows over the years), in part because of Fauz’s devotion to fostering an actual community around the local hardcore scene.
“It’s like everybody that comes to shows is like, ‘Yo, let me help out,’ ” Fauz said. “As corny as it sounds, this is a community. We all gotta be there for each other. This isn’t, like, a me thing. It’s an everybody thing.”
Hammer moved to work the door again, and a few more kids with X’s on their hands filed in through The Place’s backdoor, the menacing crunch of distorted, high-gain guitar spilling out as they entered. The Place’s next event is an all-ages Punk Rock Flea Market on Saturday, Feb. 22, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., featuring DJ D-Beat Dan spinning hardcore and other heavy shit, with vendors selling food, art, and what I assume will be a large variety of black band T-shirts. If some under-21s hanging out listening to the music they love sounds too much like the Warped Tour, I don’t know what to tell you, but everybody else will be having a blast.
