Olaf Growald
Lou Charles
Lou CharLe$
Celebrating five years since Tulips first opened its doors, the music venue will host an anniversary party Thursday, Nov. 20, featuring local hip-hop icon Lou CharLe$, the same man who christened Tulips’ stage with the venue’s first-ever live performance.
Billed as “A Full Circle Anniversary Show,” the celebration will also feature Gervatti, Jwoodz, Kevin Tyrone, and Day Banks. Taking the stage with Lou will also be his long-time collaborator and DJ, Jose “Chico” Santiago.
“We've put together a really good set that spans the last five years,” Lou says about the performance. “[The show] will take you on the ride through those five years. And we've really dug down and been very intentional with what we put together. I think it's going to be awesome.”
At work on his new album, and on the heels of releasing his latest single, “Pay Me,” this will mark Lou’s first Fort Worth show since February, when he also played Tulips.
“I'm super excited to get back on the stage at Tulips,” he says. “For me, the biggest thing is I've missed community. And that's one thing you can't recreate. I mean, you've got TikTok, Instagram and all the social media networks, but that live show experience is always something different.”
Of course, the fact Lou’s last performance was at Tulips is not surprising considering the unique and singular footprint the business occupies in the city: a hip music joint neither large nor small that attracts national acts.
When our magazine first wrote about Tulips a little over five years ago — before the space had opened its doors — the story’s lede referred to it as “Fort Worth’s first mid-size music venue.” New(ish) to the area and fulfilling my fact-checking duties as the magazine’s editor, I recall doing a double-take and diligently Googling local music venues to ensure the accuracy of the statement.
I mean, how could a city of over 900,000 people not have a comparable space for live music? There’s no way, I thought. Dallas has these spots in spades (Granada, Club Dada, Trees, etcetera, etcetera), and the whole western side of the metroplex can’t get one?
Yeah, it was a striking void Tulips filled when the venue first opened its doors on Nov. 20, 2020 — five years ago to the day — and it has since made its way into the pantheon of cultural institutions. Taking over the Near Southside space previously occupied by Collective Brewing Project, Tulips has gone on to host sold-out shows of national indie acts like Geese, Shakey Graves, Tank and the Bangas, DIIV, Wavves, and Beach Fossils (I could go on) — bands that previously skipped Cowtown for the then-greener pastures of Dallas.
One could argue this success, and Tulips’ continued influence, is the venue’s reward for navigating more than its fair share of obstacles.
Tulips
Geese performing at Tulips, Nov. 4
Owner Jason Suder would sign the lease on the vacant brewery Feb. 1, 2020, just a month and a half before the world shut down for a spell and was collectively traumatized thanks to COVID. Undeterred, and having successfully reconfigured the space into a venue, the new business would launch a month before the vaccine became available — Tulips opened its doors when every other music venue was closing theirs. Lou, on the space’s opening night, sang to a room full of socially-distanced people rocking N95 masks, something that would continue for months.
Resiliency, y’all.
“We lost a third of our investors during the pandemic,” Suder says. “So, our budget was immediately slashed. On top that, we opened at a time when we could not operate the core of our business model [live music].” Regardless, the venue — to this writer, at least — was a breath of fresh air.
Looking to subsidize its income, Tulips pivoted and began operating a deli and coffee shop. While you can still snag an espresso at Low Doubt Bar behind the venue (an addition that opened in early 2024 and Fort Worth Magazine recently named the city’s best bar), the deli was axed in favor of hosting food trucks in the venue’s back patio, some of which, like Gusto’s, have gone on to achieve brick-and-mortar status.
According to Suder, who greets anyone who visits Tulips with a hearty “welcome home,” his objective was always to make Tulips more than a venue for live music. “Music is what we do, but we are a creative cultural center,” he says. “That is the ethos. That is what everybody believes in. We want people to come here and we say, ‘Welcome home,’ because we want everybody who comes through that door to take equal ownership of this.”
Tulips has gone on to team up with local muralists to put their stamp on the venue’s brick walls and metal fences and collaborates with Fort Worth-based art advocacy nonprofit Art Tooth to display works from local artists.
“Fort Worth is filled with so much talent and so much creativity," Suder says, "and it needs space for people to exercise that."
Deflecting any praise for Tulips’ success during a time that’s, let’s face it, not easy for local music joints, Suder praises those around him.
“The vast support network that I have in this place is incomparable,” Suder says. “Everybody who's ever touched this place, everybody who's ever been a part of it, everybody who has been involved for the past six years — we all believe that Tulips is something special because Fort Worth is something special.”
When Suder called Lou (“super, super energetically”) to ask if he’d be willing to perform at Tulips’ anniversary party — to make a full-circle moment — Lou says there was some magic he felt, and the opportunity, its significance, was “too good to pass up.”
“It's tough to find another venue in the city like Tulips,” Lou says. “They've opened their doors to a lot of artists over the years, and they’re doing it for the right reasons [for community]. And anything that I can do to support Tulips, to keep Tulips, I'm definitely down to do that.”
