It must’ve been ’94 or ’95. The details are foggy. While bar-hopping around the Fry Street area on the north side of the UNT campus, walking across a back parking lot, my fellow carousers and I hear a band taking the stage at Rick’s Place. That guitar! Those drums! I gotta go find out who’s playing this ear-splitting rock! We pay the $5 entry at Rick’s door and are washed over with crunchy guitars, clever lyrics sung in gravelly voice, and cigarette smoke (Again, it was the mid-’90s…Things were different.)
That was my introduction to Slobberbone, led by frontman, guitarist and songsmith Brent Best. Formed in Denton in 1992, Slobberbone has undergone a few lineup changes over the years. Guitarist Jess Barr died in December. But Brent Best has always been at the helm. They’ve released 4 full-length studio albums, including 2000’s Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today, which contains the song “Gimme Back My Dog”, called one of the 3 greatest rock-n-roll songs of all time by author Stephen King.
We had Brent Best in-studio to perform live, solo, in KXT’s early days (December ’09), and he sang two phenomenal songs then, but we’ve never had Slobberbone as a full band here at KXT. We’ll need to remedy that as soon as the calendar allows.
Slobberbone recently played back-to-back shows celebrating 30 years of the band, “30 fer 30”, at Dan’s Silverleaf in Denton. And I scan their Facebook page occasionally, to see where and when I might catch them, and a wisp of a Fry Street memory, one more time.
You can hear even more local music at noon Mon-Fri on Local Bites and on the KXT Local Show on Thursday nights at 7 p.m. If you’re an artist from North Texas, you can submit your music to KXT for consideration right here.
Eric is a weekend host at KXT and the Sr. Director of Radio Operations for North Texas Public Broadcasting. He’s been behind the scenes of every KXT Live Session and shares stories from them during his new segment, The Final Mixdown, on Sunday mornings at 9 a.m.
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