Dallas Times Herald
April 3, 1988
by Marcia Smith

Russell Hobbs walks in the valley of the shadow of debt.  Having forsaken the booze, pot and womanizing that marked his reign as host of a three-year party in Deep Ellum, the born again nightclub entrepreneur is impatient to get on with his new life. Yet, debts accrued and enemies made in his effort to bring Art to Commerce Street keep yanking the 29-year-old away from his prayers.

Hip, glib and rock-star handsome, Hobbs once circulated confidently among the punks, skinheads and suburban poseurs who populated Theatre Gallery and Prophet Bar and Grill, the clubs he created with borrowed money in a 60 year old warehouse and a crumbling hotel.  A TG regular recalls a quintessential expression of his swagger: As a police officer sternly warned him about selling liquor to minors, Hobbs leaned against the brick facade of the club and cooly pulled on a Corona.

That Hobbs is dead.  Last Christmas, Hobbs walked into an Oak Cliff church with his janitor and there, he says, felt for the first time the presence of God.  Now, he's a shepherd, he says, a seeker of truth, a divinely inspired repenter who wants to share the source of his newfound happiness.  The U-turn he says, was part of God's plan for him.

"I was a rebel without a cause. Now I am a rebel with a cause," Hobbs says, while retaining his glibness.  "I'm fighting in the army of the Lord now I'm here to defeat Satan and his lies and the pain he bestows on so many young people."

With his first blow, Hobbs banished alcohol from his clubs.  Cigarette machines were hauled away.  Workers painted over murals created by Dallas artists.  To the white washed walls, Hobbs' disciples have added "God loves you" and "Jesus is love".  Healing classes and Bible studies now take place in the early evening.  Later, Christian bands play for customers content with mineral water and fruit juice.  Hobbs again circulates among his minions, trying out his new, apparently inexhaustible vocabulary.

In mid-February, on the last night Hobbs allowed a punk band to play at TG, someone scrawled near the bar, "Russ, You're killing yourself to live."  What the author meant, says Hobbs, is "I'm running around so hard to find the everlasting life that I'm killing myself.  But what it really means, and it's so profound, is that I'm killing my old self.  And that's exactly right."

Tracy Smith, who helped Hobbs launch TG, suggests the conversion reflects a loss of faith in himself, his dream for Deep Ellum, and the people around him.  Hobbs' detractors are less charitable.  Says Charlie Gilder, once the owner of a competing club, "I sincerely hope he has converted to Christianity, because if anyone needed to change his ways, it was Hobbs."  Old friend Logan Daffron says Hobbs probably believes his own conversion, but "I don't think that makes it authentic."

It's not Hobbs sybaritic past that draws such fire. It's money.  By his own admission, Hobbs is a terrible businessman.  Deeply in debt, he blames sloppy bookkeeping, lax employee supervision and misguided largess.  Others suggest something more sinister--that he has consistently cheated bands booked in his club, that he traveled to Europe on money owed to them, that Russell Hobbs could more aptly call himself "Hustle Robs."

Hurt by such accusations, Hobbs likens his critics to ungrateful teenagers who resent parental authority.  After all, Hobbs sold his 59 Mercedes and borrowed $40,000 from his father to convert a coffee warehouse into an art gallery/Theatre/concert hall, where, he dreamed, artists would pursue the truth.  The search for that truth brought him to Deep Ellum, he says, and that same search brought him to God.

Hobbs calls his Richardson boyhood normal.  He made A's at school, sang in the choir at his Presbyterian church, and even then, showed an entrepreneurial bent.  He built go-carts in the family garage and sold them to neighborhood kids.  When he was 10, his parents divorced. He stayed with his mother, but spent weekends with his father, then a vice president at Dillards.  He showed the usual boyish interest in football, soccer, and dirt bikes.  He graduated from Berkner High School with no college plans.  Instead, he saved $1400.00 to go with two friends to South America.

"I wanted an adventure," he explains.  "I wanted to be in the middle of the jungle with a machete and have to fight for my life instead of being another package in a car going down the street."

When the trip fell through, Hobbs spent his savings at South Padre, the beginning of a year-long period of "messing around."  He enrolled at Richland College for a semester and studied design at North Texas State University.

The first nine months of TG's life, Hobbs says he was a "generous, positive, giving, inspired happy person."  Buoyed by the city's commitment to supporting an arts district, Hobbs opened his doors to young artists, playwrights and musicians.  Arts patrons citywide ventured into downtown after dark to share the excitement of the underground scene.  But by the end of that first year, music had begun to dominate.  TG's ability to attract big road shows with big sound systems and the kids who came to hear them, ran off older customers. To Hobbs' dismay, TG became a concert hall with "some art hanging up front."

Disappointed that he allowed TG to evolve into a hangout for punks and skinheads, Hobbs moved across the street in 1985, to the spiffier Prophet Bar, to recoup his original dream.  He invited artists to paint on the walls, asked poets to read, and opened a tapas bar.

The clientele included downtown workers who stopped for a beer and left a tip, an unheard occurrence at TG.  With his attention focused on the Prophet, Hobbs says TG took on a life of its own.  Reports of violence between white-racist skinheads and longhaired, heavy metal fans appeared in the newspapers.  The TG crowd spilled onto the sidewalks and crossed the street.  By January 1987, the kids had claimed Prophet too.

Hobbs' business increasingly suffered from his inattention.  Inconsistent as a bad parent, Hobbs was already indulgent and strict with employees and customers.  When he was feeling flush, beer flowed and cover charges were waived.  But when the money was tight and paychecks weren’t forthcoming.  Hobbs sometimes asked bands to take less than their promised fee to keep him in business.  Less-assertive bands often didn't get paid at all.  Hobbs ignored bills by stacking them under papers on his desk. "I didn't like to think of bad news, so I went on booking bands," he says.  I thought the bills would take care of themselves."

In June, Deep Ellum bands raised $9000 in a weekend marathon to pay Hobbs' tab with the Texas Alcoholic Commission.  A month later, Hobbs left for a six-week trip to Europe with fiancée Anna Mosca, and Italian model.  His absence, the third in a manner of months, exacerbated the clubs' problems and fueled rumors that he had absconded with money owed to bands.  Hobbs said that he paid for the Europe trip with bond money the TABC refunded when he settled his tax debt.  The bond money came from his father, he says.

While he was gone, kids charged hundreds of dollars of long distance calls to his office phone, Hobbs says.  Bartenders gave away too much beer. Someone even stole Hobbs' clothes, including the silk jacket from the YuppieRuss days.  Hobbs blames himself.  "I was not in control because I didn't like control.  Control is not my thing.  I wanted everything to flow free.  I was naive.  My dad gave me money to run a bar and I ran it like a party."

Hobbs ability to sweet talk his creditors explained how the TG and Prophet stayed open, according to Logan Duffron, who owns 10 percent of the clubs' corporate stock.  When Hobbs' charm failed to impress the TABC, the clubs would close "for remodeling" says Daffron.  "When he reopened, the floors wouldn't even be swept."  The TABC often added late-payment fines to the monthly tax bill, an unnecessary financial burden on Hobbs' mismanagement. Overdue rent, utilities charges, and late taxes were a fact of life.

No debt has proved as troublesome as that Hobbs owes a collection of Deep Ellum bands.  In September, the bands earned $11,000 at the Change Your Life festival in Deep Ellum, a three-day street fair Hobbs conceived to promote local musicians.  The Change Your Life Group elected to donate $7,000 to pay Prophet Bar's bills and to renew the clubs' liquor license.  In return, the bands expected a full-decision making partnership in the Prophet Bar, bookings at The Prophet Bar and TG, free admission to both clubs, and receipts from the Prophet's Thursday-night "door" (i.e. cover charges). 

Two months later, the newly born Hobbs closed the Prophet's doors to the Deep Ellum bands and rendered useless the $2,500 liquor license.  Change Your Life threatened to sue.  At a February meeting, Hobbs agreed to repay $6,000, having decided he fulfilled $1,000 worth of the agreement in December.  Terms of repayment will be determined by a newly formed board of governors for Change Your Life, says spokesman Tim Sanders.  The bands considered the settlement small compensation for the times they rescued the clubs.

Hobbs says he bitterly resents the bands treachery and lack of trust. "They trusted me when I was the guy who sold his Mercedes and wore ratty clothes to bring art to Deep Ellum.  I want them to trust me now and say "Look that guy was down there and we went and played at his club and now we're a big band with a record label.   I gave them everything, free beer, a place to play.  I let them sleep here. I gave, gave, gave to the wrong people, and they didn't appreciate it."

"He's played that card time and again," counters Sanders.  "What Russell gave to them was no more than what Russell could sell."

With the financial troubles mounting, and his fiancée modeling in Tokyo, Hobbs became despondent.  "I was really looking for something. I could have gone with hard drugs and fornication with wild women," he says. Instead, he tried exercise and fasting.

Then Maceo Anderson, a janitor at Hobbs' clubs, told his employer, "Russell, you can be happier than this," and invited him to church.

On Sunday morning, Dec. 13, the two drove to an Oak Cliff apartment building.  Hobbs assumed his friend had stopped to pick up something, but Anderson led him inside.  "I thought it would be a big building with people in suits, but we go into this apartment living room with hand-drawn posters on all the walls.

Maceo told me to take off my shoes to show respect for a house of worship.  I felt this cool air like air conditioning , but it wasn't air-conditioning because it was December.  There were about 13 people there, little kids, old ladies, they stood up and gave testimony, like "I prayed for my mother who was sick and now she's well," and I stood up and said, "Thank you Maceo for bringing me here, and thank you God for bringing me here."

Then Hobbs said, "I want to start a new life. "  The congregation came to him and Hobbs said, "They loved me and hugged me and I felt like I was home.  I had been to church before this and it wasn't like this.  People laughing, hugging, singing, dancing.  It was real solid primitive worship."  Hobbs fell to his knees, lifted his arms and said, "Father, help me give up my past. I want to live more like Jesus."

A week later, Hobbs returned to church and spent hours after the service asking questions of Anderson, who pulled his answers, directly, and to Hobbs, impressively, from the Bible.  When Hobbs returned to Deep Ellum that night, he locked up the liquor and told his employees, "I'm not serving Satan another day."  He pulled out the Bible his sister had given him for Christmas.

Nothing has been the same since. "Finding Jesus just changes everything," says Hobbs.  "Like the health inspector came in...I used to be so afraid of him because this place used to be so in violation.  And he says, "How's it going?" And I said, "We've made a lot of changes. I'm walking with Jesus now and business is good."  And he says, "Hallelujah!" and starts telling me about the Lord and says, "You ain't got nothing to worry about now."

The potential for new worries can't be ignored.  Observers of the scene wonder whether Deep Ellum is the right "milieu" for Christian gatherings.  Says Smith of Deep Ellums' older days: 'There was no place else for kids to go in Dallas to hear music and express themselves in clothing, music, and art.  I think Russ will have to gain support again.  It takes a lot of devotion to get regulars and I expect there will be a clash between newcomers and people who want it to be the way it was."

Sanders say Hobbs is out of business as far as Deep Ellum bands are concerned.  "He was only valuable when he had a venue to offer.  Even if he got off the Christian thing, we've learned it's so hard to make it, we don't have time do deal with a musical Gadhafi."

Hobbs says he doesn't need the "Satan bands" because "Jesus bands are better."  Filled with a heady sense of mission, he's nurturing another nascent music scene--in which Christian messages merge with Rock'n'Roll rhythms, even heavy-metal ones.  Each week, he says, more Christian bands will call and his audience grows.  The den of iniquity over which he presided now houses ministry and for that reason, he believes his success is assured.

"When I found Jesus in Deep Ellum, I said, "look, Lord, do with me what you want.  If you want these clubs to close, you'll close them.  If you want them to stay open, you'll keep them open."  Apparently he wants them here to show some people his word.  God wants to work through these clubs now.