Amid a challenging landscape for music venues nationwide, a local law firm and event production company are working together to help revive Dallas’ live music scene. Beginning later this month, Shane Mullen and Joe Morrison, two attorneys at Mullen & Mullen Law Firm, will launch The Mullen & Mullen Music Project alongside Spune Productions, a family-owned production company responsible for booking shows at live music venues across North Texas for almost 15 years. From now through April 2025, the project will host a series of 12 dynamic shows at Tulips, Club Dada and Ferris Wheelers.
“Dallas has just been so good to us — you don't last 41 years without getting support from the community,” Morrison says. “Shane and I both believe that it's important to give back, and this music project is just a fun and unique way for us to do that.”
The idea was spawned by a conversation during one of Morrison and Spune general manager Corey Pond’s regular Rocket League matches (which, by the way, Morrison says the two are “pretty darn good at”). It just so happened to come up that one of Spune’s venues, Ferris Wheelers, was right across the street from Mullen & Mullen’s offices. There was never an idea for Spune or Mullen & Mullen to pursue something like this, but everything fell into place at the right time, Pond says.
The Music Project is a new undertaking, but it’s not the first time Morrison and Pond have bonded over their love for local artists — the two have known each other for over a decade. Pond was a former owner of Frisco restaurant and music venue The Common Table, which Morrison says was his “Cheers” back in the day. Morrison and a group of regulars would usually catch local concerts together, which is where they’d often run into Spune Productions’ CEO Matthew Harber and owner Annette Marin. That shared connection, in part, is what has driven a lot of success and passion behind the project.
“Live music is one of the few times you can kind of put all the noise out and get with a group of people and have this collective energy and these shared experiences that mean something,” Morrison says. “And we don’t want to see that go away anytime soon. Shane and I want to drive people to these independent venues, and the venues themselves are making significant improvements, and we want people to get out and see what they're doing.”
Morrison says independent, locally owned venues are launching pads for artists. He remembers seeing Fort Worth’s Leon Bridges play at Club Dada early in his career and how Pond booked Marc Rebillet years back at The Common Table.
“Leon Bridges also played at The Common Table in front of like 20 people, and it was Spune who booked him,” Pond says. “Joe and Matthew and I went to the Neutral Milk Hotel concert at The Majestic, and it’s one of my favorite memories in the history of my life. … There’s a history with all of us and these smaller venues, and I think the reason why small and local matters is because, if you really look at Mullen & Mullen, at its heart, it is a small local business just like the rest of the people that we're talking about in this program. And so, it seems natural for all of us to want to support other small and local businesses.”
As a local firm that battles giant insurance companies on behalf of injured people on a daily basis, Morrison says Mullen & Mullen have always been fans of the "little guy." In turn, he believes reviving and championing the success of smaller music venues is important to maintaining what makes the neighborhood music scene so distinctly Dallas.
Aside from community concertgoers and venue owners, Marin says she’s also seen artists want to go back to their roots and play smaller venues. Just recently, Keith Urban, who has played multiple shows at American Airlines Center, booked an underplay with Club Dada because he wanted to get closer to the local community and his audience, Marin says.
While in the process of booking other future underplays from other artists, Marin has seen a trend in wanting to lift up and support smaller music businesses and venues that have closer ties to the areas and the people they serve.
“This just goes to show that as long as people care, they'll continue to improve on the things that are important to them and make a difference in their communities,” Marin says.
Through the concert series, Harber hopes Dallas’ music community can come together at these smaller-capacity venues and experience the kind of magic and intimacy that can’t be replicated at larger locations like American Airlines Center.
“I think just being close to the artists and the artists being close to the crowd and the crowd being all there together, it creates its own unique community,” Harber says. “If you’re at a small club show, you probably plan to be there and talk about the bands. It's more deeply ingrained in the culture there than I think at an arena show, so, there's something that I think is very important that happens in the small venues across North Texas that doesn't in the corporate spaces. It's just more human and less about commerce.”
Scene Upgrade
In addition to the concert series, the partnership has helped speed up extensive upgrades that were already in place across the featured venues. Ferris Wheelers has upgraded its stage and created new suites, and its Ferris wheel has been renovated to light up and sync with performances. Club Dada has added a new outdoor patio stage and large murals by local artists, and Tulips has installed a $25,000 video system for concert livestreams and recording videos.
The second show of The Mullen & Mullen Music Project will take place at Tulips and will be the first to use the venue’s new locally built video system. Most of the shows won’t headline local bands, but almost all of them will have local bands included. The bands that play that evening will be given a copy of the video, which will be edited by Mullen & Mullen’s in-house videographer, to use however they want.
Pond says supporting the careers and success of local venues and the artists who play them perfectly captures the ethos of the partnership and what it’s truly about.
“What I think is a pretty unique aspect to all of this is, I think most of the time a lot of people would just write a check and walk away and look for recaps,” Pond says. “But this isn't that; this is way more of a collaborative thing. We talk every week at length, sometimes longer than I think we want to, about ways to make it better and cool stuff we can do because we like being involved. We like seeing the change this can actually make.”
The Mullen & Mullen Music Project Show will kick off on Aug. 6 at Club Dada with headliner Ben Nichols from the band Lucero. The Quaker City Night Hawks, who launched their career at Lola’s in Fort Worth, will return to Tulips on Aug. 30 after a touring hiatus. Pond says word on the street is that the band may debut new music for the first time in five years.
More details on The Music Project can be found on the partnership’s webpage.
