On a fateful day in New York, a teenage Sergio Elizondo roamed the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in search of enlightenment. His eyes landed on a display of graffitied bricks and concert posters, attributed to the famed music club CBGB. The exhibit planted a seed in Elizondo that lay dormant until 2023, and is now fully blossomed as CC Riffs, a project documenting the vivid history of hardcore music in the Coastal Bend.
“That exhibit got me thinking, ‘This is really cool; I wonder if there’s anything in Texas like that,’” Elizondo recalled. “The thought stayed in the back of my head until [October 2023], six or seven years later.”
A shy theater kid from Alice, Texas, Elizondo’s metalhead tíos raised him on stories of their visits to the city shows. Not only of the bigshots they saw at Concrete Street and Brewster’s, but of those in since-shuttered venues: the now demolished Memorial Coliseum, Executive’s defunct neighbor Buckets, now El Camino, and Elizondo’s most meaningful loss, Johnny Canales’ festival grounds, formerly known as Johnnyland.
“Johnnyland is the whole reason I started doing this. I wanted to learn more about it,” he said. “I helped people organize their [memorabilia] and talked to them, hoping they had stories about Johnnyland. That was my end goal, but I’ve found way more stuff than I ever would have.”…