Ghosts of DFW music history: Direct Hit Records

It’s 1994, and you’re in the mood for some local flavor. The DFW music scene has come into its own, and Deep Ellum is a hoppin’ place on the weekends. Local music has been taking off on the radio, and the composers and performers of said music are gaining real traction with the teen- and twentysomethings sets. Some bands are even getting signed to national labels and their music is beginning to be stocked in the big name, big box outlets. But on this particular day you’re looking for something a bit less mainstream and a bit more underground in ethos. You pile your things into the car and head out in the direction of the historic Exposition Park strip. It’s in one of those areas where people are supposedly afraid to go thanks to a reputation for being crime-ridden, but this particular carve-out is said to be safe. You pass by Forbidden Books and The Bar of Soap, negotiating the never-ending road construction, and arrive at a small retail store on Parry Avenue, sandwiched inside a row of businesses just across the street from the entrance to the fairgrounds.

On the inside you’re greeted by a checkerboard floor and a D.I.Y arrangement of fixtures and furniture. You peruse the myriad selections of state and local items on offer on the racks, or, if you’re a bit strapped for cash, go through the "What the Fuck Just a Buck" bin. The band posters on the walls, the selection of t-shirts for sale, the fan and music ‘zines... all are things you can appreciate while relaxing on one of the two sofas. Maybe, if your timing was just right, you can even help with stuffing records for Trailer Park's newly-released 7 inch. Or you can just sit down and hang out. If you were a fan looking to support indie music, Direct Hit, and its entrepreneur owner, Kelly Keys, gave you a place to call home.

Direct Hit opened for business on the first day of April, 1989 at 3609 Parry Street, right in the heart of the Exposition Park business strip. In earlier days, 3609 had been home to a quite diverse set of tenants - a warehouse company in the 1930s, a cafeteria in the 1950s, and multiple 200-capacity lounge/dance clubs in the 1950s and ’60s. But for a six year period from 1989 to 1995, it was the setting for one of Dallas’s premiere independent music stores and, eventually, independent record labels. Owner Kelly Keys, a Doc Martens sporting twentysomething with a passion for the music scene and a devotion to helping surface underground, independent artists, operated a haven for the musically disaffected and those who found themselves longing for sounds and vibes foreign to the chains and the big box stores. The Misfits, Fugazi, even a neo-lounge act like Combustible Edison, hailing from Rhode Island, could be found beckoning from the bins at any given time. And if something more eclectic was your jam, you would have no trouble finding less mainstream-accessible acts like Joe Christ or even “Singing Psychic” Fran Baskerville lurking about the store on record or, sometimes, in person. In time, Keys was to build upon this initial foothold in the music scene to facilitate a greater voice for indie and local talent: Direct Hit would be not just in the business of selling records, but also of publishing them.

"It's not a particular sound I look for but more an enthusiasm and love of music," Keys advised a Dallas Morning News reporter in 1996. The initial roster of artists to work with Direct Hit reflected this philosophy, all of them passionate, dedicated musicians who collectively represented a “who's who” of the local indie and underground rock scene. The new label, much in the vein of its founder, was geared toward getting out the music and helping the musical artists make their mark, rather than trying to pull up a seat at the major labels' table. There were no long-term contracts, no ironclad recording arrangements; artists worked with Direct Hit on an “at will” basis with no long-term obligation while retaining full ownership of their own masters and recordings. This approach often paid dividends for the musicians involved: Bedhead, a Dallas-based slowcore act, reportedly struggled to secure live gigs before the release by Direct Hit of their first 7-inch efforts, "Bedside Table/Living Well" and "The Rest of the Day/I'm Not Here". Once these records were in the hands of fans (and, perhaps more significantly, local club booking personnel), demand for Bedhead saw a notable increase. “Bedside Table," issued in May 1992, was the fifth release under the Direct Hit Records banner; the first, the four-song EP “Trigger Mortis,” by local heroes Lithium X-mas, had come out the previous year. Both featured the label’s soon to be iconic (and deliciously provocative) crosshairs logo image designed by Trent Straughan, and both were were produced in runs of one thousand copies. Over the following near-decade, many other artists saw their music released via Keys’ label, most via 7-inchers, all but a handful of them local to DFW (or sometimes to adjacent areas). And up until 1995, all were available in-house at the store on Parry Avenue. Notable early releases included discs by Brutal Juice, Hash Palace, Baboon, and Slowpoke.

In time, Direct Hit’s embrace of indie and underground talent was to extend even further. Although never explicitly in the business of promoting live performances, being an anchor of the local indie scene did lead to some involvement in organizing shows. Of these two are of special note, a 1990 show hosted at a Dallas warehouse, and the 1992 Independent Music festival.

The Canton Street show grew out of with a phone call from Fugazi's Ian MacKaye, who was looking to stage a performance in Dallas and had gotten word of Kelly Keys and Direct Hit through the underground music grapevine. The D.I.Y. spirit of Fugazi and the grassroots ethos of Direct Hit proved to be a perfect pairing. But while artists often visited the retail store, a concert appearance by Fugazi was another matter entirely, and a more appropriate venue was called for. Enter the unused warehouse building at 2301 Canton Street, located on the very outskirts of Deep Ellum. From the end of the 1940s into the 1950s, the building had been home to the Julius Schepps Wholesale Liquor Company, but by the beginning of the 1990s it sat nearly empty, its sole tenant allowed to live on site for the purpose of deterring vandalism. The warehouse's location and largely abandoned status made it prime real estate for a D.I.Y. hardcore show. Better still, its lack of any "official" status as a venue meant that the planned show could be all ages, in contrast to the "legitimate" venues to the east of Central Expressway which were 18/21+. All that was needed was the construction of a stage and some wiring for sound and lights. These were not inconsequential tasks, but Keys enlisted the help of local artist David Akire, who worked with the warehouse's live-in tenant Michael Moore to get the stopgap venue into shape. Denton-based Last Rites were engaged as the opening act, and the show date was set for May 4th, 1990 with KNON as sponsor.

By all accounts, things got off to an auspicious start. Last Rites played through their set, priming the crowd for the headliners to come, and attendance was at least double what had been expected. But the festivities were soon derailed by the appearance of the Fire Marshall with local authorities in tow, and an insistence that the event be shut down. The organizers' D.I.Y mentality had run afoul of municipal requirements for emergency egress, and for a time it seemed the event would come to a premature end. Fortunately, an inspired bit of negotiation between Ian MacKaye and the authorities resulted in an unlikely deal to save the show: the audience would clear the inside of the building, gathering instead on the outside while Fugazi would play to an empty house. The night went on to be an improbable but memorable success, with the police department closing off the street as hordes of sweaty fans thronged the chain link fence separating them from the band playing inside. Estimates of the number of attendees range from 400 to as high as 900, far exceeding the organizers' much more conservatively set goal of two hundred. Kelly Keys was issued a citation for the unpermitted show, but Direct Hit had earned its bona fides.

Fast forward two years, and it's the summer of 1992. It's a typically sweltering summer in North Texas, and Lollapalooza and KDGE's Edgefest have cast a wide net over the evolving musical landscape. "Alternative" music is becoming mainstreamed, and the not yet fully deregulated radio is becoming the go-to place for corporate-endorsed acts in the wake of Nirvana and the grunge invasion. The time is ripe for the still underserved communities of indie and underground artists to have their moment. And the city of Dallas is to be ground zero for a large outdoor festival that will showcase that moment, the 1992 Independent Music Festival. The two-day event is the brainchild of none other than Kelly Keys herself, working in partnership with fellow Dallas-area indie label entrepreneurs Kris McLaughlan and Gerard LeBlanc. The planned series of outdoor performances will be held at the 4000+ capacity Fair Park Band Shell, conveniently located just a stone's throw away from the Direct Hit retail shop, and a total of thirty bands have been booked. Half of these acts hail from the Lone Star State, and the others are coming in from various out-of-state locales as far flung as San Francisco and Yonkers, New York. It promises to be a singular gathering of like-minded fans from across the country.

The event kicked off on Saturday, August 8th. One thousand attendees per day were expected, all of them to be served by a collective of fully independent vendors, contributors, and coordinators. A contract was signed with the city and programs promoting local businesses were prepared. The stage was set for a celebration of mammoth proportions. But the Dallas Morning News would report that actual attendance on that inaugural day numbered only about three hundred, many of them reportedly involved in some way with the show. The cash investment on the part of the three promoters, plus the fees incurred for rental of the performance venue and taxes owed to the city, exceeded actual revenue by several thousand dollars, leading to an announcement that all performances scheduled for Sunday were being canceled. Fortunately, the festival was rescued by an eleventh-hour intervention from the owners of Trees, who offered up their venue space, and by a "local businessman" who stepped up to cover the associated fee. A benefit show was held two months later to help recoup some of the losses, and a much smaller, less ambitious event featuring mostly DFW area acts was staged by Direct Hit in October of the following year. The Independent Music Festival had been a financial disaster, but the intentions and principles which underpinned it and made up its bedrock had been solid. And fittingly, the original bedrock of Direct Hit, that being the retail store, soldiered on... for a while longer.

Eventually, with the elevation of “alternative” and "indie" music to more mainstream status - and, consequently, the growing tendency of big chains such as Blockbuster Music to carry more independent releases - mom and pop stores found themselves pushed more and more to the sidelines as their particular niches were eroded. The 3609 Parry Avenue location became one of a number of such casualties to throw in the towel over the next several years, with Direct Hit's brick and mortar store ceasing operations on July 31, 1995. The day was marked by in-store performances by Lithium X-Mas and the Mullins. Direct Hit's physical space was eventually appropriated by David Quadrini’s Angstrom art gallery, and, beginning in January 2019, by the Rainbow Vomit art show, which still occupies the space today. The record label, however, continued on for a few more years. The remainder of 1995 saw Direct Hit releases by Dooms U.K. and UFOFU; releases by Girl, Trailer Park, and The Moodswings followed in the subsequent year. Ultimately, a growing exhaustion with the grind and the added pressures that came from raising a new family took their toll, and by the late ’90s Kelly Keys (now Handran) made the decision to close down Direct Hit. Even then, however, the gravitational pull exerted by the music scene proved too strong to fully resist. The last years of the label’s existence were defined by several additional, if increasingly infrequent, physical releases. With 1997 came 7-inchers by Mess (including one split EP with The Mullens), The Stingrays, and Fury III, and a one thousand copy run of the Grown-Ups’ complete recorded catalog on CD, titled Rampage! The final releases, The Secession Movement's Count to Four, Arvada by Exit Human, and Living Vicariously Through Michael Dean (by, naturally, Michael W. Dean), surfaced in the twilight days of the 20th century and the very earliest days of the 21st.

Over its decade of history, Direct Hit had a good run, a run punctuated for sure by occasional missteps and hardships, but one nevertheless characterized by a high degree of artistic success. The retail store was well positioned both locationally (being situated right in the middle of a historic area not far from Deep Ellum) and culturally (providing a home for an underserved musical community) for maximum impact on the indie scene. The record label boasted an impressive roster of acts, some of whom went on to garner national attention, and its output ran the gamut from punk to post-punk to ska to hardcore metal to poppier tunes. Despite some ups and downs over the years, Kelly Keys showed that she had understood the assignment. “For a few years, it looked as though Direct Hit could have been to Dallas what Sub Pop was to Seattle or Twin/Tone was to Minneapolis-St. Paul,” lamented journalist Zac Crain of the Dallas Observer. The seed planted via one person's passion project had for a time fully bloomed, and the DFW musical garden had been made the better for it.