Report: The Dallas Metal Scene Remembers Abboud "Abb" Greig And Joe's Garage
February 25, 2009, 15 years ago
The Dallas Observer has issued a report on Abboud "Abb" Greig and the impact his club, Joe's Garage, had on the original Dallas metal underground. Greig was killed in in January 2009 during an attempted robbery. An excerpt from the story appears below.
The Metal Scene Remembers Abboud Greig And Joe's Garage
By Pete Freedman
All it takes is a little perspective, really. A little added backstory.
In the story of Abboud Greig, the 74-year-old Fort Worth landlord killed early last month during an attempted robbery, a little perspective goes a very long way.
See, there's quite more to Greig's case than his death—stuff that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in all its dutiful coverage of his death over the last month or so, failed to pass along to its readers.
Take, for instance, the story of Joe's Garage, the restaurant-turned-music venue that Greig, or "Abb" to his friends, owned and operated in west Forth Worth from 1984 until it closed 10 years later. During that time, Greig was something of a father figure to metalheads, offering area thrash and, at the time, underground metal acts like Pantera, Rigor Mortis, Gammacide, Rotting Corpse and Solitude Aeternus a place to call home, a stage on which they could express themselves and, in many of these bands' cases, some of their very first gigs. And it all happened because Greig was willing to take a chance on these outsider kids.
"He didn't like our music at all," Rigor Mortis and Texas Metal Alliance frontman Bruce Corbitt recalls. "He was a funny guy, a nice guy. He was in his 50s, and he didn't like our music, but he was smart enough to see that we had a pretty big crowd. Joe's became our home for all of that. People from Dallas would drive a good hour just to get out there. It was far, but it was the original birthplace for underground metal in the area, so we'd drive."Go to this location for the complete story.
