The University Of North Texas is a huge public research school that has a funny way of feeling like a small liberal arts college sometimes. When people ask me what it was like being a student there 10 years ago, I tend to tell them one of two stories: the time I wrote about a block-wide house show “festival” for the school paper, or the time I drunkenly scaled a fence to flee a DIY steel drum ensemble gig as the cops shut it down. Denton, Texas is close enough to Dallas that you can forge the hour-long drive to catch a touring band coming through Deep Ellum if you really want to, but I certainly didn’t need to in order to get my live music fix. Everybody was either in a band or knew somebody in one. There wasn’t exactly a revolution happening in Denton in the mid-2010s, but when I was 19, that understated counterculture felt as close as I could get to being in DC in 1986 or Olympia in 1991.
