My welcome party at the Dentonpalooza concert last Friday was a man leaning out of the driver’s window of his van, wearing a banana-patterned Hawaiian shirt and a smile on his face.

“The entrance is this way, where it says ‘exit’,” he said, then laughed at the absurdity of his own instructions. Things, it seemed, were about to get silly.

Dentonpalooza started off as a joke, a life case mimicking a fake news meme.

Do you know the graphic design of the 90s rock festival lineup, where artists are listed in order of font size and importance, usually on the back of a t-shirt? One day at the end of last summer, Joey Liechtenstein, a Dentonite who DJed 90s nights by the name of YeahDef, experimented with this art form on the FestivalPosterGenerator.com website. The immediate inspiration was “Tiger Head Keyboard Dude,” a man that Liechtenstein had just seen on the street, wearing his oversized Disney-parade-style tiger head in the hot September sun in front of a local Cinnabon.

Instead of listing the groups under Tiger Head, Liechtenstein listed wacky local characters and legends, capturing the essence of what one guest called “a great little town” in a mosaic of memes sort of way.

It has included “micro and hyper-local celebrities” such as Peter Weller, a University of North Texas alumnus and Robocop Star; Frenchy, a man selling advertising on the side of orange landscape trucks; and the Flat Earth Guy, who plastered anti-spherical propaganda all over his car and home.

“It landed on Facebook and Instagram as a bogus gig flyer, like ‘What if all these people and things were under one roof?’ Liechtenstein said.

Many clearly understood the joke. “But other people thought it was sincere. I got messages over and over again, “where do I buy tickets man, where do I go?”

Even the most relentless promoter would not dream of organizing a festival to meet the conditions of a flyer. But that’s DJ YeahDef we’re talking about. In addition, he already had a place in a hall, Rubber Gloves, in December.

There were controversies before the show took place this Friday: A young musician texted he couldn’t be bothered to come back from Austin for the concert. (He was booed).

The guy from Flat Earth, it turned out, was into hate conspiracy theory, in addition to using surveying equipment to assess the curvature of lake surfaces. It was canceled, either by a vast conspiracy or otherwise.

The scene was at the back of the legendary Rubber Gloves site, a warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Denton that was among the world’s darkest dives until it closed for fumigation a few years ago. It recently reopened with an upscale diving vibe in Weimar, Germany, complete with a cocktail bar and leather-clad mannequin lamps.

When I walked in, a man named Eric Michener was parodying a parody song called “Denton’s Best Death Metal Band”. Maybe it sounds like a joke inside a joke inside, but Michener’s version matched Mountain Goats’ excellent tune for musical quality.

Part of Denton’s musical pedigree was what made Palooza’s joke work. The other reason Palooza felt less compelled than efforts to distill Austin’s essence, like Eeyore’s somewhat sad birthday, is that Denton is still small enough to be distilled. The population may have doubled in recent years, but the same relatively small group of characters have been walking around the square since I moved here in 2009.

The few characters who weren’t on stage during Palooza appeared to be in the crowd. I recognized a guy who was working on my house, carrying an object that maybe came from my house. I even knew the woman who supplied the kids (because, of course, there were kids). She was a mathematician with whom I had lost money in poker.

“I’m pretty much on the staff here,” said the mathematician, who helped hang the spooky sign of old local Howdy Doody convenience stores. When asked where she found the goats, she revealed her understanding of higher order derivatives. They were bequeathed to her by “my mother’s personal trainer mother’s boyfriend, mother”.

“Dr.” Peter Weller, star of Robocop and Naked Lunch, art historian and trumpeter, addressed the crowd, Zooming in from his living room like an intellectual on MTV cradles. His “love letter to Denton, Texas,” celebrated the nation’s premier jazz program at UNT, where he had studied, “because all my idols are jazz musicians.” My mother was a jazz musician. Denton is personal, Weller said.

I had heard of J Paul Slavens’ personal concerts on Monday nights at Dan’s Silver Leaf. A highly skilled key man and comedian, Slavens used to solicit personal details about people so that he could improvise songs about them. No one knows Denton as Slavens, who would have greeted the news of the Palooza event with a joke, “It’s a joke, just like my career. So perfect. “

Slavens’ assistant gathered song prompts from the crowd. She wore a catsuit, or rather a ratsuit, as she depicted the “Murder Kroger Rat”, a reference to a locally famous infestation of the roughest Kroger in town (as opposed to the “Hot Mom Kroger” across the country. city).

Slavens opened his niche with an instant classic. The prompt was “peanut butter sticking to the top of your mouth.” He improvised a Journeyesque ballad about cursed lovers meeting in a restaurant, concocting a big melody on his keyboard.

When he got to the chorus, all you heard through the imaginary peanut butter was “Um Ghlove Ghou Maby”.

It ended with a Fun-Loving Criminals hip-hop jam, getting the whole crowd to sing along to the chorus, something like: “in a bar, being convinced that Flat Earth Guy is right”.

The next musical act was Grammy Award-winning Brave Combo, which was, for a time, possibly the only polka group in the world with its own centrally located head office. They were accompanied by a woman dressed in a fluffy albino squirrel outfit.

“I bet she hits people with that tail,” someone hissed as she passed the bar. Denton has done what he always does whenever Brave Combo plays Denton. Denton danced like crazy.

I missed the headliner (babysitter curfew). A star, I am sure, has been born.

“He killed him, honestly,” Liechtenstein said.

The guy from Tiger Head, real name Joshua Musgrove, had never played his keyboard in front of a crowd before. Until he became the headliner for a crowd of hundreds, he was a curiosity, riding his bike from street corner to street corner with a keyboard on his back and a head of oversized tiger at his side.

Now it was the ultimate act of improvisation, in a city built on improvisational music, wowing a crowd that Grammy winners and jazz fans had warmed up to.

Behind the scenes, Carl Finch of Brave Combo reassured Liechtenstein, who was worried about the degradation of Tiger Head Guy’s keyboard riffs: “This kid has good instincts, he changes at the right time, keeping the audience engaged.”

Dentonpalooza will likely return next year, Liechtenstein said. He weighs the advice of Frenchy, the landscaper who has made thousands of people famous on the side of his orange vans over the years: “You are going to find out that you are forced to do things that you might not want to do. , but they good things, so do them.

An event that seeks to reflect the essence of a city will always be missed. I thought of Joe Pat Hennen, the singer-songwriter who died at the start of the pandemic. His memorial service on the street instead of Dan’s Silver Leaf a month ago was the first funeral I’ve attended where the dance floor got rowdy and at least one hymn was rated X.

But that’s exactly the kind of town Denton is.

Rob Curran is a writer at Denton. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

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