Kevin N.
Yelp
Forgive the prologue, but I'll get to why it's relevant, promise.
So during the summer between my senior year of high school and my first year of college (you know, during the Truman administration), I spent some time as a board operator for what was then a pretty small Houston talk radio station (which has since gone on to much bigger and better things).
They were based at the time in Tomball, northwest of Houston, and had taken over the former space of a AOR station (radio format talk for Album Oriented Rock, or what is now often called 'classic rock' format). Talk format stations are pretty slow business if you're listening to anything other than drive time, and I was running overnights from midnight to six AM. This meant that come about three or four o'clock in the morning, there would be some tax show on, and the entire building smelled like old equipment cleaner, and I had to fight falling asleep at the controls. Enter all the old vinyl they had on the shelves, and I'd sneak into the recording booth sometimes for thirty minutes at a time and listen to Steely Dan records, which beat the hell out of tax talk.
Fast forward to this week in Denton, where I finally made a maiden voyage to check out Dan's, a longstanding paragon of hip, where, as luck would have it, an elaborate ten piece band called Naked Lunch was belting out Steely Dan covers so strikingly accurate you'd swear if you closed your eyes that Fagen and Becker themselves were in there working some magic. So I have a soft spot for that material, and I would have loved that band if they were playing in a condemned parking lot.
But that doesn't really tell all of the story about why Dan's Silverleaf is flat amazing.
I've kept a keen eye on the shows that they book here, and this is clearly a room where a town full of music lovers congregate. That certainly was the case with the most counter-culture cover show I've about ever seen, but it's also the case with any of the up and coming indie acts that pass through this way, and they'll be home to a number of top shows happening during 35 Denton. If you love music and can get there, do it - the room plays shallow but somewhat wide, so even on crowded nights it's hard not to feel close to the stage. Bartenders were quick with a pour, and I mentioned they book like a champ. What else, really, is not to love?