OLD 97’S COME HOME FOR THE LAST NIGHT OF THE YEAR / TULIPS / 12.31.26
Old 97’s close out 2026 at Tulips on New Year’s Eve, bringing one of North Texas’ great rock-and-roll catalogs into a room small enough to feel every loose string, shouted chorus and bad decision. Buttercup opens.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
There are bands whose longevity eventually becomes the story. Old 97’s have managed to avoid that problem.
More than thirty years after Rhett Miller, Murry Hammond, Ken Bethea and Philip Peeples started making records together in Dallas, they remain remarkably uninterested in behaving like an institution. The songs are still too fast in places, too ragged around the edges, too funny about things that probably weren’t funny when they happened. The guitars still sound like they might outrun the people playing them. Miller still writes like love, drinking, regret, sex, loneliness and getting older are all happening simultaneously, because usually they are.
That makes New Year’s Eve at Tulips feel particularly appropriate.
Old 97’s belong to North Texas without ever becoming trapped by it. Their 1994 debut Hitchhike to Rhome helped define a version of alternative country before anyone seemed completely certain what alternative country was supposed to mean, pulling punk velocity, country songwriting and rock-and-roll instinct into the same room. From there came Wreck Your Life, Too Far to Care, Fight Songs and a catalog that has accumulated without settling down.
There are songs that now feel inseparable from the band — “Timebomb,” “Barrier Reef,” “Big Brown Eyes,” “Victoria,” “Murder (Or a Heart Attack),” “Rollerskate Skinny,” “Question” — but an Old 97’s show has never functioned particularly well as a museum tour through them.
The band’s most recent record, American Primitive, arrived thirty years after Hitchhike to Rhome and sounded considerably less interested in maturity than that sentence suggests.
Miller has described the record as a kind of de-evolution, a deliberate movement toward songs that were bigger, dirtier and more immediate. It makes sense coming from a band whose chemistry was established before most of the machinery surrounding modern music existed. Four people learned how to play together, kept doing it, and discovered that the original arrangement still worked.
There are easier ways to spend three decades.
Old 97’s have gone through major-label years, solo records, side projects, changing musical fashions and the strange transition from young band to veteran band without replacing the central idea. Bethea’s guitar still cuts across Hammond and Peeples rather than politely sitting on top of them. Miller still appears to regard a microphone as something that should occasionally be attacked. The songs can carry enormous amounts of craft without presenting themselves as precious objects.
Tulips should suit that beautifully.
A New Year’s Eve show can easily become an event first and a concert second. This one has the potential to work the other way around: a real Old 97’s show that happens to arrive with a midnight attached to it. In a 600-capacity room in Fort Worth, a few miles from where the band’s history began, there isn’t much space for ceremony anyway.
And perhaps that is the better way to mark thirty-plus years of Old 97’s.
Not by asking everyone to look backward, but by putting the same four people onstage, turning the guitars up and seeing how much trouble they can still make before the calendar changes.
