Late Musician Jess Barr Was the ‘Real Deal.’ Even Stephen King Was a Fan.

Slobberbone’s guitarist, Jess Barr, had this cocky thing he used to do onstage whenever he finished a kickass guitar solo. A former University of Texas college student who had hooked up with the iconic Denton alt-country rock band in the late ’90s, Barr would look at the crowd, make a number 1 sign and, with it, a face that said, “Yeah, I nailed it. Absolutely.”

Offstage, Barr was a mild-mannered Clark Kent type, kind of an unassuming dude. But when he hit the stage, he tore it up like a rock star Superman unleashed on red kryptonite. Often slinging a Les Paul guitar but sometimes a banjo, he’d smoke one cigarette after another, as if possessed by the soul of Keith Richards.

He picked up the tagline, “Jessie Barr on the shiny gold guitar.”

“Some people would say he was pointing to the heavens,” said his best friend and business partner Danny Balis on Friday’s afternoon edition of The Downbeat with Mike “The Old Grey Wolf” Rhyner on 97.1 The Freak. “No, he wasn’t doing that. He was like, ‘Yeah, I just shredded your face.’ It was beautiful and people would expect it. People would go to Slobberbone shows and during his solos, they would have the number 1 sign held up. It was beautiful.”

Even more beautiful was that, in 2014, Barr gave up his musical dream of life onstage, Balis said, to be with his wife and raise his young son. He had begun focusing on another dream: running his Deep Ellum live music bar, the Twilite Lounge, which he co-founded with Balis in 2013.

Barr, who was 46, died Dec. 6. It was a heart attack, Balis said.

“As you can imagine, his people are pretty broken up about this and the less I have to speak about it right now the better,” Balis said in a Friday morning email to the Observer. A few hours later, he’d dedicate a segment to Barr with his co-hosts on The Downbeat, discussing how they met and the impact that Barr had on him as a young fan scouring the North Texas scene for good music in the ’90s.

When word about Barr’s death began to spread, fans began sharing their “Jessie Barr on the shiny gold guitar” stories on Slobberbone’s Facebook page.

“They got a good one! Heaven will be rockin’ tonight. Scoot over and make room for the golden guitar,” Jammy Sochat wrote.

Another fan, Blair Kooistra, wrote, “I only saw Slobberbone a few times back in those late ’90s/early 2000s hey dayze [sic], but apart from the excruciatingly great music, what I remember most is Jess on the left side of the stage, playing the guitar or banjo, pointing a finger skyward, and going through cigarette after cigarette, tossing them over his shoulder and lighting another.”

Balis discovered Slobberbone when the Dallas Observer’s then-music editor Robert Wilonsky wrote a story about the Denton band’s demo album, called Crow Pot Pie. Singer-songwriter Brent Best, also a guitarist, had formed the band with bass guitarist Brian Lane and drummer Tony Harper in the early ’90s. Barr, though, wasn’t part of the band yet.

Instead, Balis recalled that Slobberbone had another guitarist who was proficient but didn’t seem to fit in with the other guys, especially with his Paul Reed Smith, a high-tone guitar often played by high-end jazz players. “It just didn’t fit in with their Fender, Gibson kind of ‘back to your roots, bare bones kind’ of instruments,” Balis told Rhyner.

Somehow Balis got a copy of the album and started to pass it around to his music-minded buddies, all of whom loved it. He began traveling to Denton to watch the band and catching their shows in Dallas at the old Barley House before it was located on SMU Boulevard.

Not long after he began catching their shows, the Paul Reed Smith player left the band and a 19-year-old kid, Jess Barr — who had a full ride scholarship to the University of Texas for a pre-med track — had joined the band. Barr had given up his college dream to pursue his rock ‘n’ roll one, and he joined Slobberbone shortly after they released their second album, 1997’s Barrel Chested.

“The first time I saw them with Jess, I was like, ‘OK, here it is. The pieces are together. This puzzle is complete because he was good looking, he played a Les Paul, and he had a cigarette dangling from his lips like Keith Richards,’” Balis told Rhyner. “He looked the part and when he played a guitar solo, it was blistering but super tasteful, not like a shredder type, just a really melodic tasteful rock ‘n’ roll guitar player.”

Slobberbone began playing the Barley House frequently, and Balis became friends with the band and good friends with Barr.

Dallas drummer Jeff Ryan, a member of Pleasant Grove, remembers playing many shows with Slobberbone and traveling with the band during the early 2000s when, he says, the Denton band were “diehard road dogs” and touring constantly. They traveled to Wisconsin and Chicago and played at the legendary 400 Bar in Minneapolis.

“What was cool about Jess was he would have a beer with you and a cigarette, do a shot and then he’s onstage and he’s all business,” Ryan said. “He was absolutely a phenomenal guitarist and just incredible. He was kind of like a rock star but not a cheesy deal. It was the real deal. He was the real deal.”

When Barr moved to Dallas about midway through his run with Slobberbone, he and Balis became inseparable, hanging out four or five nights a week. Balis described Barr as one of the funniest dudes a person would ever meet, with a “cutting wit,” “a dry sardonic sense of humor” and an infectious “best laugh in the world.”

Balis was there for Barr’s wedding to Ashley Barr in New Orleans and fell in love with the city. Barr was at the height of his musical career with Slobberbone, releasing 1998’s Your Excuse Live EP, a couple of albums – 2000’s Everything You Thought Was Right Was Wrong Today and 2002’s Slippage. He played on several compilations, including “Scuffed” on Band-Kits: A Compilation of Denton, Texas Music, 1999’s “Piece of Crap” by Neil Young on This Note’s for You Too! A Tribute to Neil Young and 2005’s “Some New Town” by Bruce Springsteen on Thunder Road Tracks Inspired by the Boss.

“He was kind of like a rock star but not a cheesy deal. It was the real deal. He was the real deal.”– Jeff Ryan

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Horror legend Stephen King mentioned Slobberbone’s “Gimme Back My Dog” in his novel Black House and called it one of three greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs ever in a February 2007 column for Entertainment Weekly.

About 12 years ago, Balis was looking to find a partner for a dive bar he was planning to open. He’d been in talks with one possible partner that didn’t get very far, and was lamenting about it to Barr, who was tending bar at Barley House, which had moved from Henderson to its current site on SMU Boulevard.

“Dude, why don’t we do it?” Barr asked him. “I have been wanting to open a bar for forever now.”

Balis’ talks with Barr turned into action and soon they were meeting with commercial real estate agents, touring properties and getting turned down by landlords before they finally landed a place off Elm Street in Deep Ellum. They called it the Twilite Lounge.

Shortly after they opened the bar, Barr called it quits with Slobberbone and received the band’s blessing. Best, Lane and Harper lauded him for his contributions to the band, “especially the solo he did on ‘Josephine,’” they said, in a Dec. 7 CultureMap report.

In 2017, Barr and Balis brought in another operating partner, Jimmy Morton, and opened another Twilite Lounge in Fort Worth. Morton ran the Fort Worth location while Barr focused on the Dallas bar. Both locations have received best bar awards and helped to keep the local music scene beating.

“He just wanted to run his business, be with his wife and be with his kid, and that’s probably what he’s been doing the last six or seven years,” Balis recalled Friday on the Downbeat show. “He was the nuts and bolts of that place. He knew how to do all of the stuff. Compared to what he knew and me being in the bar business it’s not even close. Jess knew 99 percent of it and I knew 1 percent; and he probably knew the 1 percent that I knew. But somehow we were pretty good partners through that whole thing.”

It was early Tuesday morning when Balis received a call from Barr’s wife that Barr had suffered a heart attack overnight and died in his sleep.

Balis had received several calls over the years about musician friends breaking on through to the other side: Carter Albrecht, a 34-year-old keyboardist for Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians and Dallas rock band Sorta, who had been shot and killed in 2007; Bastards of Soul vocalist Chadwick Murray, who died at 45 from a rare and unexpected illness in 2021; and Trey Johnson, a 53-year-old founding member of Sorta and Ryan’s boss at State Fair Records, who was experiencing heart problems shortly before he died.

“When you get past the age of 40, the events like the ones we are about to discuss happen more frequently than we like,” Balis said to Rhyner. “You and I have been through a lot of these together, and it is never easy. I never really know how to approach these things because I think all of them have happened since I’ve been on the air in one form or another.”

By Friday afternoon, Balis was still processing Barr’s death. Earlier that morning, he’d gone to meet with Barr’s wife and Barr’s 15-year-old son, Liam, and shared tears and memories. He found a few more tears falling when he made it to work at 97.1 The Freak before he went on the air to share their journey with listeners.

He called Barr “a great friend,” “a great bar owner” and someone people would no doubt remember as “that fiery-ass guitar player from Slobberbone.”

At the end of Friday afternoon’s segment, Balis played an edited version of Slobberbone’s cover of “Josephine” and focused on Barr’s guitar slinging, which he called “awesome Jimi Hendrix-type lines” in which Barr “just rips into this bending solo” and “hits the same note three times in a row but the chords move differently underneath it every time.”

“This is vintage textbook tasteful Jess Barr rock ‘n’ roll,” Balis told listeners. “Shoutout to sweet Jessie Barr on the gold guitar from Abilene.”