This Week in Texas Music History, grunge hits Dallas, and Dallas hits back.
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
On October 19, 1991, Nirvana took the stage at Trees in the Deep Ellum district of Dallas. Their breakthrough album Nevermind had dropped less than a month earlier and succeeded beyond all expectations. On that night in Dallas, Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl found themselves playing in an undersized room for an oversized crowd. Sister Double Happiness opened the show, fronted by Dicks frontman Gary Floyd. A veteran of early Austin punk, Floyd knew trouble at a show when he saw it. “The club was too small for the band,” he said, “and there was a bad vibe all night.”
As audience members and security collided in the sweltering venue, tensions boiled over. Fans stormed the stage and were met with resistance from security. As bouncers tried to prop up a crowdsurfing Kurt Cobain, he bashed one of them in the head with his guitar. The offended bouncer retaliated, and a fight with the band ensued. Nirvana exited the club promptly and piled into a taxi for the getaway, but one of the enraged bouncers caught up and punched out the cab’s windows. The night would become one of the most infamous rock shows in a city that’s hosted many.
The concert was something of a portent of things to come at Dallas-area alt-rock shows. In 1993 the Stone Temple Pilots faced a riot at Fair Park Amphitheater after a storm delay, and in 1995 at Fair Park Coliseum Nine Inch Nails fans pulled large boards from the floor that covered the ice hockey rink underneath. As audience members hurled the boards toward the stage and fans slipped on the icy floor, opening act the Melvins plunged into thirty minutes of pure noise. The same trick had been tried at Nirvana’s late 1993 Fair Park show promoting the album In Utero, but perhaps Cobain had come to wearily expect the Dallas antics amid his uneasy stardom. He stopped the show, made a joke about the spectacle of “grunge on ice,” and continued once the floor had been restored.
