The first venue of Skeletour 2023, CASP Studio One. Photo by Reece Nations.
By Reece Nations
For those on the lookout for Halloween-related shenanigans to be involved in, Lubbock’s informal house show bike tour sprouted as an unlikely bastion for the city’s unique brand of weirdness.
For years, an annual event called “Skeletour” was organized very unofficially by hardcore house show enthusiasts and bicyclists as a do-it-yourself-affair. It was a cheap, fun, low-effort way to bring people together and support bands in the local house show scene.
Then, from 2020 to 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic halted all the festivities. Given the poor state of the house show community at this time and the lack of an organizational drive, one could have been forgiven for thinking Lubbock had seen its last Skeletour.
Last year, Skeletour relaunched with new, determined community organizers. Local artists Josh Ibarra-Anciso and his partner Grace Templin consistently host bands at their house located at 2105 17th St.
He and their coalition of collaborators promote the shows on his Instagram handle @wronside_tx, called such for being “on the wrong side of the tracks,” where they’re advertised as a “[s]afe space for freaks [sic] punks and creatives.”
Skeletour 2023 at Wronside. Photo by Dóri Bosnyák.
“I remember my first [Skeletour] was like 2019,” Ibarra-Anciso, a longtime resident of Lubbock, said. “That was my first time even hearing about it.”
Ibarra-Anciso said at that time, he lived with roommates at a house on 25th Street when they were approached by Skeletour organizers to host one of the stops on the tour. They obliged the request because of their previous experiences with hosting makeshift concerts at the house, but none of them had a clue what the turnout would be like for this occasion.
Josh Ibarra-Anciso in front of his art in the Wronside house, located at 2105 17th St. Photo by Reece Nations.
Ibarra-Anciso remembers clearly when the deluge of bicyclists finally showed up to the house that night.
“I remember looking outside and a bunch of costumed bike riders were coming,” he said, recalling the controlled chaos suddenly upon his doorstep. “I’ve never seen so many people on bikes. It was really cool to see like 40 or 50 of them come show up out of nowhere.”
On a given night during the Halloween season in those years, Lubbock residents could be treated to nearly identical sights and sounds proceeding through their neighborhood. One could be sitting out on their front porch or stoop, and then suddenly be passed by dozens upon dozens of pedaling demons, ghouls, ghosts, pop-culture references and other fictional characters.
It was this experience that inspired him and others to revive Skeletour after the worst of the pandemic had subsided. Finally, it was time to get back to the wacky basics of one of Lubbock’s premiere events in its house show scene.
Ibarra-Anciso is a painter and he and Templin are both experienced decorators of house show setups. When entering the Wronside house on an average day, it looks like normal living quarters — artwork occupies its walls, there’s a kitchen with black-and-white-checkerboard tiles and a wooden dining table in the foyer.
But on house show nights, it transforms into a stage and a mosh pit. It takes some rearranging of the furniture, but one-by-one, patrons arrive and squeeze into the premises where they stand on the same level as the bands.
Despite the noise and sidewalk traffic, he said they haven’t received any complaints from neighbors or law enforcement as of yet. Entry is usually just $5 and eventgoers are allowed to bring in their own drinks.
Wronside at rest. Photo by Reece Nations.
This arrangement made his house a prime candidate to host a stop during this year’s edition of Skeletour. Wronside was the last stop of the Oct. 29 jamboree and the only one not in the Art District located at 719 Buddy Holly Ave.
The featured bands performing during Skeletour 2023 were Clement Hall, Velvet Grove, Strawberry Season, Snailmate, Last of the Lights, Cowboy Cold, Spitlife and World<War. Each group’s Instagram account was tagged in a collaborative Instagram post made by Skeletour’s chief organizers on Oct. 9.
Just days later on Halloween night, Wronside announced it would be hosting another house show event featuring some of the same bands that played during Skeletour 2023. The tenacity of Ibarra-Anciso, Templin and others in faithfully providing spaces for bands and hardcore enthusiasts alike is a testament to their zest for preserving the culture it represents.
“In 2018, I first started doing house shows because before the actual show I had an art house show at my house or my friends’ house,” Ibarra-Anciso said. “I just hung up all my art at this house and invited a bunch of people over to just come and look at it and have fun… we just did that to have a good time. And I remember getting a lot of confidence from doing that.”
Empowerment is at the heart of a lot of what goes into planning and preparing Skeletour, he said. Local artists voluntarily help out with any and all aspects of Skeletour, from decorations to booking the talent.
Dave Clayton, a fellow with the Charles Adams Studio Project, or CASP, said the early versions of Skeletour were much more bike-centric and spanned much farther throughout neighborhoods like South Overton and Heart of Lubbock. Clayton is coordinator of a group called “806 Collective,” a community organization of artists, writers, composers, designers and more that displays their creations and hosts events at Studio C of the Art District located at 408 Avenue J.
Attendees gather at Skeletour 2023. Photo by Dóri Bosnyák.
Some examples of their work can be found on Facebook and Instagram under the handle @806collective. Collaborators with 806 Collective are frequent and prominent fixtures of the First Friday Art Trails held in Lubbock’s Arts and Cultural District.
A Texas Tech fine arts student and printmaker by trade, Clayton said the origins of Skeletour involved the cycling community of Lubbock putting a unique spin on a beer crawl. The riders would dress up, ride from establishment to establishment where libations were served, and later on they would cap their journey off with a house show.
At first, Skeletour was a far more clandestine experience because organizers wouldn’t always advertise the full schedule of stops they planned to make.
“It’s been, like, over 10 years,” Clayton said of Skeletour. “A couple of my studio partners have participated in it for a long time, I’ve done it like one or two years in an official capacity.”
The inextricable connection between the spirit of the event and Lubbock’s artist community was a big inspiration for this year’s Skeletour route, which primarily took place in the Art District, he said. He describes the house show scene in Lubbock as not just a way for young adults to go out and have fun, but as a valuable networking opportunity for creatives to get involved in.
Clayton and others’ prints dotted the walls of Skeletour’s various stops, and multicolored arrangements of lights illuminated bands as they played. This year’s tour began at a CASP studio dubbed the “Chapel of Sacred Soup” because of inclement weather, but Clayton and other’s work was still featured prominently throughout the night.
Wronside pictured at daytime. Photo by Reece Nations.
One of the city’s rare opportunities for displays of local culture and self-expression, the cold and windy weather wasn’t enough to deter patrons of this year’s event. In all, one $10 wristband supplied eventgoers with four shows at three locations featuring eight bands, and vendors were on site to sell their wares as well as special Skeletour-themed shirts and posters.
Originally the second stop on the tour, the Chapel of Sacred Soup is a CASP studio located at 1010 Mac Davis Lane where artists Ema Whitfill and Eli Ragland reside. Their “outsider art space” in CASP Studio One is where they display their work now that they’re CASP studio residents.
“I just love soup,” Whitfill said, joking about the name of the studio. “I’ve been on a soup kick lately.”
Really, the decision had more to do with making fun of the name “Chapel of Sacred Mirrors,” the creative vision of American visual artists Alex and Allyson Grey who constructed a permanent public art exhibition in rural New York dedicated to “interfaith spiritual contemplation and worship,” according to its website.
Eli Ragland and Ema Whitfill in their CASP studio. Photo by Reece Nations.
The duo’s former residence, known as “The Atrium” in the Heart of Lubbock neighborhood, was once notorious for vibrantly intense house shows it held. Whitfill and Ragland are also FFAT fixtures and regular collaborators to house show events at places like Wronside and the backyard of a local residence called “The Cage,” located at 1908 41st St.
Since Lubbock’s house show scene is deeply DIY in spirit, Whitfill said they are breaking an unwritten code in a sense by moving into a studio. It’s not that it’s offensive, they said, it’s just that opening one’s own home up to communal creative expression was meaningful to them both.
“It’s really cool and cozy to have a show in the house, but it’s also really nice to have separate living and art spaces,” Whitfill said. “Especially with giant canvases.”
Profiting from events like Skeletour and other house shows is anathema to their whole point, Ragland said. Any entry fees paid are there to compensate the bands for playing.
The essence of the art they make is free expression, not commercialism, Whitfill said. Their vision for the future of Skeletour and the community’s house show scene is to maintain its low-budget spirit so that anyone can participate regardless of their wealth status.
“I think it gets everybody an opportunity — performers and hosts alike — to have their own take and spin on things,” Ragland said. “We let all the venues choose their artists and stuff like that.”
About Reece Nations
