Three Rooms, One Wristband: Denton's DIY Week Hits Full Tilt

Here is a sentence you don't often get to write about the second week of August in a college town: there are too many good shows this week, and they're mostly happening in the same building.

Rubber Gloves opens the stretch with the kind of multi-room chaos that is the truest expression of Denton's DIY DNA. On Monday, Aug 11, the Showroom hosts Sidefect, Maybe in the Next Life, Calling Shot and The Black Velvets while the Rubber Room runs a parallel bill of PRUDE, Juicers, Black Metal, KFN and Rwet — nine bands, one night, two rooms, one door. Tuesday, Aug 12 keeps the pace with Horse Bitch, Wishkit and Modern Modem in the Showroom and a Rubber Room lineup topped by touring act Joan of Bark alongside Side Chicks and the duo of Aaron G. and Sarah Ruth.

Then Wednesday earns the week its soul. On Aug 13, the Rubber Room hosts the Denton Water Project Benefit — Kalypso, rocketland, Cycle, Maple and Max Twaddle playing for a cause — while the Showroom runs Calf In Pasture, Palefire, Gloss and Judge Roy Scream. A benefit show stacked five bands deep in the middle of the deadest month of the year is about as Denton as it gets: the scene showing up for something bigger than the scene, and doing it with a full lineup and a cheap cover.

This is the part of Denton that doesn't make the tourism brochures and matters more than anything that does. These aren't marquee names. Half these bands you'll first hear about by reading them off a flyer stapled to a telephone pole on Fry Street. But this churn — nine bands on a Monday, a benefit on a Wednesday, a rotating cast of locals cutting their teeth in a room that holds around 270 — is the compost the whole ecosystem grows from. The touring acts and the tribute matinees at Dan's sit on top of this. This is the soil.

It's also the answer to the perennial slander that Denton goes dead in the summer. The students are gone, sure. The square is sleepy. And yet a single venue is programming multiple rooms a night, most of it local, much of it for the price of one wristband. The heat doesn't slow the DIY engine; if anything it clears the calendar for it.

If you go — and you should — go early, go curious, and put a few dollars in the Water Project bucket Wednesday night. Talk to the band loading out. Buy the seven-dollar tape. This is how a scene stays a scene: not through legendary rooms alone, but through a Tuesday night where nine bands you've never heard of split a door and mean every note.

Denton in August: allegedly asleep, actually wide awake, and playing in three rooms at once.

Sources: Rubber Gloves upcoming events (Do214); Rubber Gloves setlists (Setlist.fm)