Dallas’s Greatest Musical Protest And Its St. Remedius Connection
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Every year on the first Friday of April Gregorian, a very special tradition runs at the Matilda Theater just north of downtown Dallas, Texas. At 7:00 that evening, the Matilda opens not to the general public, but to a select group of journalists, mostly music critics, all specially invited. No itinerary is available, no program guide, no schedule. All of the invitees file in with the greeting “Enter freely and of your own will” at the door, but otherwise nothing is said to them and they return the favor. At 7:30, the curtain rises and the first musician or group starts playing. From this point on, for the next eight to 24 hours, the ultimate in musical battles goes on, not between musicians but between the assembled musicians and the assembled audience. This is the start of The Audiophiles, the toughest musical event in Dallas history. All invitees are expected to stay for the duration. If they last the entire time without leaving, even to use the restroom, they get unlimited access to the assembled musicians, for interviews, podcasts, and fundraisers, for the next year. If they leave the room for even a second, they are blacklisted and publicly mocked. By the end, the front row is a slurry of urine, vomit, chewed fingernail bits, and various assorted unrecognizable chunks, with both musicians and audience dehydrated and exhausted, neither letting up until the last note falls and the doors open again. Welcome to The Audiophiles, the oldest and most exclusive music festival on the planet, all dedicated to both sides showing their complete contempt for each other and sometimes forging a begrudging respect.
The Audiophiles started in the days when the Dallas weekly Creative Onanism still had real influence on local pop culture and staff writer Benjamin Willard could scream “Do you know who I am?” at musicians and venue owners with a chance of response other than laughter while being curbstomped. Then as now, Dallas was flooded with raw musical talent in various stages of refinement; unlike now, this was at a time when fans and neophytes only learned about players and venues based on their coverage in local weeklies and very occasionally (usually only for fans over the age of 60) on reviews in the Dallas Morning News. Then as now, the writers for those venues were chosen and encouraged based on a combination of hubris and an utter addiction to access, and knew that no matter how insulting or offensive the review, they were the only promotional option for musical acts that couldn’t afford national advertising. Refusing to engage with the writers meant that a potential superstar had no opportunity to reach audiences; in the same vein, the writers knew that their continued livelihoods depended upon getting the right proportion of reader hate mail (thus proving that someone actually read their reviews and articles) versus advertiser cancellations. Musicians and audiences could hate-read those reviews all day long, but any response merely confirmed a readership, and no comment was taken by editors as proof that there was no need to waste further column inches on an act that had no audience. Every attempt made by musicians to blacklist bad or overly entitled critics (Willard himself was famed for demanding freebies and access and then slamming musicians and venues solely because they acquiesced, to the point where “Getting Willarded” was a strange badge of honor throughout the US and Canada) simultaneously meant no coverage whatsoever for the instigators, and those writers went even further, to the point of paying their own way, solely to find a sufficiently caustic take guaranteed for their editors to get furious phone calls for weeks.
Finally, Dr. “Civvie” Ashcraft, a local music addict who also worked his way through college as the first Las Vegas GG Allin impersonator licensed to perform weddings, rolled a response by several precariously functioning clubs and record shops. That is, start a music festival exclusively for Creative Onanism staffers and freelancers. Sit through the entire set without leaving, and the staffers got complete access to every act for a year, from exclusive interviews to getting live plugged and unplugged performances at the paper’s headquarters. However, any who left would be blacklisted for a year, erased from the guest list at every venue in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and listed by name on a full-page ad in the next issue of every publication in the Dallas area with the headline “Guess They Couldn’t Take The Heat.” Those who arrived at that first show assumed that the issue was with duration, with being able to handle an hour or so without a few lines, er, a “bathroom break,” and they had no idea what they really faced.
The innovation as suggested by Dr. Ashcraft was simple: every act and every musician gave the absolute best performance they could do…all in the effort of letting the assembled critics know exactly how everyone in the Majestic felt about them. This could be by playing covers of classic insults, such as Bourbon Crow’s “You Have No Friends” and Frank Zappa’s “Bobby Brown Goes Down.” This could be by wearing everyone down to nubs, as with the famed hour-long marathon melding “Billy Don’t Be A Hero” with Phil Collins’s “Sussudio” and Alice In Chains’s “Rooster.” This could be by deconstructing and mutilating classics, such as “The 1812 Overture” on ukelele or “Mars: The Bringer of War” in prerecorded beer farts. Most, though, settled for their own original compositions about the assembled staffers, relating their high school nicknames (very occasionally, said nickname wasn’t “Spaz”), embarrassing college anecdotes, professional breaches of confidentiality and ethics, and occasional crimes. Partial success was getting the recipients to break down in uncontrollable weeping. Total success was their running up the aisles and out of the theater, only to scream that someone else had filled their pants with crap as they ran out.
Surprisingly, by the time that original set finished, a few of the original staffers remained, even if they squished as they moved. Benjamin Willard, in particular, took the multiple songs mocking his obsessions with the actors of the TV series Space Precinct as validation of his brutal and brutalist reviews, and in subsequent years was diagnosed in absentia with one of the most debilitating humiliation fetishes ever recognized. (He finally broke after the blues band Mandelbrot’s Theorem went into detail on the real reasons he left Creative Onanism.) That’s why the Matilda owners decided that this needed to be an annual event, with even more acts, even more screaming sarcasm, and even more salty popcorn. The list of musical genres expanded past rock to country, reggae, ska, throat singing, and Greek choruses, with CD releases of both the live show (complete with groans and random belches from the audience) and professionally mixed versions: the ensemble cover album consisting of 35 musical greats’ renditions of Smashmouth’s “Sorry About Your Penis” almost went platinum after a year. With the advent of streaming, playlists of the intended selections were “accidentally” released, solely so the assembled critics knew what to expect. Most importantly, the invitation list was opened to other publications: a few Creative Onanism originals survived multiple Audiophiles annuals, but there was a never-ending collection of solipsistic transcribers desperate for a famous or at least notorious byline perfectly willing to engage in the equivalent of walking into a ZestFest and bragging “There’s no pepper out there too hot for me to shove up my urethra.”
Eventually, inevitably, the focus of The Audiophiles changed, mostly with the implosion of the weekly newspaper industry. Readers increasingly moved online, online venues increasingly saw their revenues and readership decrease, and critics were increasingly hired for their enthusiasm instead of their assholishness. Some never changed: both the assembled critics and the readers of the Dallas Morning News still had to be to bed by nine, and the numbers of one declined as the members of the other died from old age. Did this dampen the enthusiasm of both invitees and participants? Absolutely not. The Audiophiles still rates as one of the greatest live musical events on the planet, even at the risk of irreparable and terminal damage to the ego and id of everyone in the front row. 16 and 24 hours of relentless musical abuse: only the most self-obsessed and vindictive can survive, even if they have to be shipped from Portland.
Based on the self-selecting fame of The Audiophiles shows, similar events with other critics started with sporadic success. The first The Cinephiles challenge ran only last year, to truly horrific effect: the promised feature film, the movie adaptation of Pink Flamingos: The Musical in the original Harkun, ended with three aneurysms, four nasal prolapses, and two of the assembled critics challenging each other to a papercut duel (fingers, tongue, eyelids) in the parking lot immediately afterwards. Some fear that continued Cinephiles challenges may lead to a new dark age of deliberately bad cinema: others simply point to the nearest Netflix lineup as evidence that such warnings are already far too late.
And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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