May 1985: The First Metal Club
In May 1985, Jerry Warden opened Rascals, a smallish bar in south Arlington, and started booking metal bands. There was nowhere else for a metal fan to go in North Texas — no other club would take the risk. “There was no place else for a metal fan to go,” Warden said years later, “and that place got packed.”
The timing was perfect. Thrash metal was building momentum nationally — Metallica’s Master of Puppets had just come out in March, and bands like Slayer and Sodom were pushing the genre faster and louder. In Texas, a young scene was forming: Rigor Mortis in Dallas–Fort Worth, D.R.I. in Houston, Watchtower in Austin. But there was no venue in Arlington, no focal point where the local kids could gather.
Rascals filled that gap for eight months.
Rotting Corpse: December 6, 1985
Rotting Corpse played their first show at Rascals on Friday, December 6, 1985. The flyer survives: hand-drawn, scratchy, announcing “Rotting Corpse” in that shaky drip-font logo that would become their calling card. Walt Trachsler, who formed the band with bassist Steve Murphy and drummer Randy Cook, was in his mid-twenties. The song titles on the demo tape — “Those Without Conscience,” “Price of God,” “When It Rains, It Pours” — show a band that had already figured out their sound: heavy, fast, angry, technical enough to matter.
That first show mattered. It planted a flag. It said: a thrash metal band can exist in Arlington, can play for a real crowd, and can come back and do it again. Rotting Corpse gigged at Rascals multiple times over the next few months, building an audience that would follow them for decades.
Six Months: Too Intense
By February 1986, the metal shows at Rascals had gotten too hairy. The bar’s owners looked at the crowds — the volume, the energy, the inevitable rowdiness — and decided they were done. Metal fans showed up to thrash, and the bar was built for quiet drinking. It was never going to work.
Warden didn’t stay idle. Later in 1986, he transformed an old tombstone factory in Fort Worth into the Tombstone Factory, a proper metal venue that could handle the scene. It ran until 1989 and became legendary in North Texas for hosting bands and drawing crowds. But Rascals came first.
Why Rascals Matters
Rascals proved something simple: a dedicated metal venue works. It proved there was a real audience in North Texas — kids who would show up, bring their friends, and come back. It proved that metal bands could build a following, that they could play their own songs in front of actual people, that the scene was real enough to sustain a venue.
In the broader history of Texas thrash, Rascals is a tiny footnote. But it is the footnote where Rotting Corpse happened. It is the bar where one of Texas’s toughest, longest-running thrash bands played their first show and found their people. That matters.
Rascals Closed 1986
Open May 1985 – February 1986. First dedicated metal venue in North Texas. Home to Rotting Corpse’s debut show (December 6, 1985) and dozens of early thrash gigs. Closed when metal crowds became too intense for a quiet bar.
Sources
- Fort Worth Weekly — “Still Riveting” (Jerry Warden interview on Rascals and early metal in North Texas)
- Voyage Dallas — “Meet Jerry Warden” (Elmo Jones Productions, Heavy Metal HOF, Tombstone Factory history)
- Rotting Corpse archive — first-show flyer, December 6, 1985, Rascals
- Rotting Corpse band history — formation and early Arlington shows
