Dallas Has a Yuppie Jam Band in The Desk Jockeys

One of the biggest hurdles of any band is to be heard in the first place. The competition for ears and attention is fierce, and it's all too easy to be lost in the shuffle. At last check, on average, Spotify and other streamers like BandCamp, combined, have an estimated 100,000 new song uploads a day.

In the modern social media landscape there is always a chance that at any moment, sometimes for no apparent reason, a song can go viral on TikTok and leap-frog a band from obscurity to notoriety. Then again, one could also win $1 million on a scratch-off lottery ticket. The odds seem eerily similar. Thankfully, there are still more traditional paths to lead your fans to discovering a band's music.

Enter the curious case of The Desk Jockeys. This is a relatively new jam band on the Dallas scene, and they aren't following any of the basic rules other bands do. For example, by design, they play only a handful of shows a year. Normally, any band, but especially one in the jam band genre, believes that playing many live shows is the cornerstone to both gaining fans and getting better as a band.

In the 1960s, The Grateful Dead played a minimum of 100 shows a year, and often many more. The Desk Jockeys practice regularly, but play only three or five shows a year, and most are not in DFW. Even rehearsals are a challenge, as one member lives in Austin and mostly practices on his own to rehearsal tapes. The bottom line is the guys have no plans of leaving their "day jobs," no matter what level of success the band reaches.

So, how is it they just almost sold out the Granada Theater? All the members hail from different parts of the country and met at the Southern Methodist University. The current lineup features Pride Snow, who is the de facto "frontman," singing most of the leads and playing guitar and keys. His "real" job is in industrial commercial real estate. Nick Cacelliere, who plays guitar and sings, does sales for a tech company and currently lives in Austin. Declan Healy plays bass and works for an aviation supply chain company. Drummer Spencer Parsons is in commercial real estate, and the keyboardist works in "consulting." He has requested to leave his name out of the article due to the nature of his work. Not that it adds to the mystique or anything.

Originally, the band was known as JUL (Jamming Under the Influence). It consisted of Snow, Cacelliere and former member Matthew "Stew" Stewart, who joined the band onstage at the Granada show for a few songs. They were a typical college jam band, playing backyards and frat house parties. "I grew up in Tuscaloosa, and there's a great little scene of [Southeastern Conference] bands like CDBD and Winston Ramble and Plato Jones, Perpetual Groove, all these kind of cool little groups," Pride Snow says. "I got a friend who was in on a bar and I got started going to see some of those guys when I was like 15, 16 — he'd sneak me in. I was like, this is such a cool scene and SMU, that [scene] wasn't there. And so that's why we started initially, there's no [jam] bands or parties and stuff for us to go do so freaking, you know, screw it, let's go play music! At that point in time, JUL was just a fun, very side project that went hand-in-hand with campus life and filled a void of jam bands at SMU."

Although they built a solid core following, the band members' top priority was still very much their careers. JUL added members but sort of devolved to even more of a hobby with school being over and jobs kicking in.

The band's manager, Blake Robbins, is essentially the sixth Desk Jockey, handling all the promotion, booking and whatever else is called for. By day, Robbins is an operations director at a supply chain company, so also a true Desk Jockey himself.

"By the time everybody was out of college, I came into the mix," Robbins says. "They had been JUL but hadn't really played beyond backyard gigs. I thought they were legit musicians ... a couple of months later, I was at work thinking, with COVID going on, I needed to do something more passionate outside of work. I shot Pride a text and laid out my experience of being a social chair in college and putting events together, booking artists. I told him I could be a big resource to them.

"We met with the rest of the guys, and that night was the first time I heard the name Desk Jockeys."

The band pulls from a pretty diverse musical mix to find their sound.

"As a band we're influenced by a wide range of bands and artists," Snow says. "Generally we all enjoy the jam scene — Phish, [Wide Spread] Panic, [Grateful] Dead, String Cheese Incident, Billy Strings — but also align with classic rock groups: Little Feat, Talking Heads, The Highwaymen and more. Our keys player comes from a classical background and our bassist was in the jazz band at SMU. Declan also gets into everything from Slipknot to Taylor Swift to Jaco, so it's really all over the boards.

"We try to take all our influences into account when both writing and choosing covers to play. I finally feel like we've found a good pocket sonically that allows us to play our tunes our way and highlight our band while still nodding to the bands that wrote the original music. For instance, a heater organ solo for 'Eminence Front,' as opposed to the more traditional guitar forward arrangement." The band takes the music seriously, and that's one explanation for the new fans that show up. It also helps that there's still a taste of that feeling you're at a kegger with all your buddies and you don't care you have a final tomorrow. Still, the challenge remains of growing your fanbase while playing very few live shows.

Supply and Demand

Snow claims they aren't great at promoting the band, so far sticking mostly to rehearsal jams, to Spotify and to the normal fun band photos doing weird things. Yet, they did almost sell out the Granada. Playing at the iconic Dallas venue was one of their longtime goals, along with being featured in an article in the Dallas Observer, so they are doing something right. (Red Rocks remains on the wish list.)

So how do the Desk Jockeys move forward? Snow and the band have a pretty specific plan.

"How can we make the most out of what we do to reach our goals of playing the music we want, find time to write music, maintain a job, make money, and figure out life, pushing both rocks with as little distress as we can?" he asks. "The formula that has worked is being scarce with how we play. I'm a gigantic guy of the Wolfpack train early on, 2015-ish. I've been obsessed with Jack Stratton and his mentality. The way they did it was, 'We're not gonna play a lot. This is all a side project to us.' and built a grassroots following that led to selling out Madison Square Garden.

"Their model was creative and different. And I think me being a fan, I saw how they were doing, I was like, we can try our own version of that, which is obviously different because we're not all in side projects, that piece for us is just work."

The musicians are headed to the studio for a new EP this month. They plan to stick with no more than five shows a year, and they plan to keep their day jobs.

Is there an opportunity that could shake that plan and lure them into a full-time world of music? Does that scenario even exist? Without hesitation, Snow responds, "Never say never, but it would take an unbelievably unique opportunity to take it full-time. I'm personally sold on our very calculated model of very few live shows. It's seemed to work well, and I think our audience has grown and enjoys the way we do shows. Most importantly, I think it's sustainable. As long as we stay consistent and continue to enjoy it as much as we do, who knows what'll happen."