There are lots of venues that want to be cool, but there’s blessed few that have that elusive vibe simply baked in. The Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas is one of those places—a venue steeped in history but still of the moment, standing tall with a dash of attitude and yet a welcoming atmosphere. Built 72 years ago, it’s the kind of place that hosted both the Sex Pistols and Merle Haggard the same month; that was once owned by Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin, Jack Ruby; and which brought in legends like Al Green, James Brown and Bobby Blue to play “service industry nights” for Black patrons, openly flouting its location where, just outside of Dallas police jurisdiction, segregation laws of the era couldn’t be enforced. The venue has presented everyone from Patsy Cline to Patti Smith, from Tex Ritter to Red Hot Chili Peppers, and from George Strait to Selena. In short, the Longhorn Ballroom is cool.
In more recent times, however, it was also closed. Despite the Longhorn’s legacy, the venue slowly fell into disrepair in the 2000s as it changed hands multiple times before shuttering in the late 2010s, eventually going up for a foreclosure auction on the steps of the local county courthouse during the pandemic. In the crowd that day was Edwin Cabaniss, who knew the venue well, having nearly bought it in 2015.
“At the time, the owners thought they wanted to sell it, but they weren’t quite ready—and I thought I wanted to buy it, but ultimately I wasn’t quite ready either,” he recalls with a chuckle. As the head of indie promoter Kessler Presents, he had resurrected Dallas’ Kessler Theater in 2010, and would go on to wrangle Houston’s Heights Theater back to life in 2016. With both those venues now thriving, when the Ballroom came up for auction in 2022, Cabaniss made sure he roped the Longhorn the second time around. “I understood that, yes, there were a lot of opportunities for improvement, but it wasn’t like it was a massive overhaul; they were all solvable problems,” he says.
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Aiming to bring the venue up to date without ruining what made it unique, Cabaniss and his team moved the stage from the end of the ballroom to one of its long walls, improving sightlines for most of the audience. The one drawback was that a supporting steel pole in the center of the dance floor—already an issue—would now be directly in front of the stage. The answer was to run a steel beam across the entire ceiling, allowing the pole to be removed. Elsewhere, ADA-compliant ramps were added, much of the interior was gutted and rebuilt, and the parking lot was fortified so that cars no longer sank into it.
When it came to the venue’s sound, Cabaniss turned to Dallas-based acoustician Melvin Saunders, who developed a multi-tiered noise abatement strategy that included using Icynene spray foam insulation inside the gutted interior walls to aid sound absorption while improving the venue’s energy efficiency. Meanwhile, Josh Ball, operations manager for Austin-based Nomad Sound and production manager at large for Kessler Presents, spec’d an audio system that included Yamaha CL5 consoles at front of house and monitors, and a sizable Nexo system to cover the now 2,000-capacity venue.
The stage hangs are each comprised of four Nexo Geo M1210 loudspeakers, with a 120-degree flange in the bottom box to provide additional width; four additional M1210s are used as frontfills, hung from the ceiling. For the house-right outhang, S1230s are hung vertically to cover VIP boxes, while two M1210s and an S1230 comprise the house-left outhang; even further out in the room are four PS10s used for delays. All the Nexos are controlled over Dante and powered by four NXAMP4X4 and two NXAMP4X2 amplifiers. Elsewhere in the room are Sound Bridge Xyon subs, and up on stage, monitoring is supplied by a half-dozen Nexo 45N12 wedges, along with Nexo LS18 and PS10s for the drum monitors and a PS15 for the bass rig.
Since the Longhorn Ballroom reopened March 30 with Asleep at the Wheel doing the honors, it’s been getting both good crowds and good reviews—but the revitalization project is far from over. Having bought some surrounding properties, Cabaniss has plans to resurrect the historic recording studio next door and, permits willing, turn the parking lot behind the Longhorn into a 6,500-capacity amphitheater by the end of 2024. “We’ll be doing the Joni Mitchell thing in reverse,” he cracks. “We’ll un-pave a parking lot and put up paradise!
