There’s a moment, right before The Polyphonic Spree takes a stage, when you can feel the atmosphere change. Twenty-some people in robes, horns glinting, a choir warming up like a sunrise getting ready to happen. It looks like a benevolent cult. It sounds like joy with a conductor. On July 11, all of that controlled euphoria has to fit inside Tulips FTW — a 500-person capacity venue with a lot of heart and not nearly enough square footage for this act. Spoiler: that’s the fun part.
If you read our recent conversation about Tripping Daisy, another project of the Polyphoning Spree’s frontman, Tim Delaughter, you got one chapter. This is the next one. Same DNA, different organism. To tell it right, we handed more of the microphone to the bassist in both projects, Mark Pirro — the quiet architect behind so much of this story — while DeLaughter filled in the margins.
A Detroit kid finds Deep Ellum
Before there were robes, there was a teenager from a suburb outside Detroit, transplanted to Richardson at 17 when his family moved to Texas for a job. Pirro didn’t arrive looking for a music empire, but he found one anyway.
Around 1986, he wandered into Deep Ellum, “rogue and off the beaten path,” as he describes it: The Theatre Gallery, Prophet Bar, Club Dada and Clearview as his playground. He caught Reverend Horton Heat before Reverend Horton Heat was a name people said with reverence, and watched the New Bohemians turn a barroom into something electric.
That scene rewired him. As a punk kid soaking up everything, he eventually landed at the University of North Texas, where fate stuck him in a dorm hall next to a guitarist named Wes Berggren. The two had no business getting along on paper. Berggren loved hair metal and Pirro loved punk, but the chemistry was immediate and the kind that you can’t manufacture.
The introduction to Delaughter came sideways, as the best ones do. Through friends of friends, the Berggren and Pirro met DeLaughter — a guy with an unmistakable “Deep Ellum hippie vibe” — and by the early summer of 1991, they were improvising songs in a space behind Tim’s house. Tripping Daisy was born without anyone announcing it.
When the music almost stopped
What came after, you mostly know. What you may not know is how close everything came to ending.
After Beggren’s unexpected death, DeLaughter felt finished. Not pausing — finished.
“I thought I was done making music,” he says.
The thing that pulled him back wasn’t ambition. It was his son Oscar’s birth that shifted something loose inside him. He started writing at the piano, and what came out was bigger, brighter, almost orchestral — music that simply would not fit inside Tripping Daisy’s frame.
The Polyphonic Spree, fittingly, was an accident. When it was suggested that they open for Grandaddy at the beloved, now-shuttered Gypsy Tea Room, the band was assembled in roughly two weeks. DeLaughter only meant to write and direct it.
“I wasn’t going to be in it,” he admits.
The reluctant bassist and the robes
Pirro, coming off Tripping Daisy’s end, was hesitant to join the new, experimental band. A strict punk at his core, he eyed the choir, the horns and the white robes with healthy suspicion.
The robes have a purpose, DeLaughter explains. With that many bodies onstage, individual personal aesthetics become visual noise. The robes erase the distraction and point every eye at the music. But logic wasn’t enough to make Pirro love them. He simply set his ego down for the collective and slipped one on in a small, telling act of trust.
His melodic, improvisational bass became a load-bearing element of the Spree’s sound. The skeptic became essential many times over.
The deleted scene most fans have never heard, though, is that both Tripping Daisy and the early Spree relied on a vocal effect that gave DeLaughter a lo-fi, AM radio, telephone-on-the-other-end-of-a-dream sound. Live, it was a nightmare to patch — inconsistent, fragile and unreliable.
So, Pirro built a solution. He studied microphone design and rigged a prototype out of PVC pipe, duct tape and old phone parts. To survive the road, he swapped in copper plumbing fittings and a drill press, and in 2001 handed DeLaughter the first “Copperphone.” Other musicians and engineers spotted it on tour and wanted one. He started selling them, and by 2003, Placid Audio was official. He still hand-builds character microphones today.
A tight squeeze, on purpose
The Spree have always treated cramped rooms as invitations, which brings us to Tulips and the band of 13-plus people who will take over the small stage. The group extend stages with road cases, perches choir members on the bar and tuck horns into balconies so the sound rains down. Pirro recalls these contortions fondly, believing that at a venue this size, the spectacle wraps around the audience instead of staying politely in front of it.
Both bands keep finding new ears, too. Pirro marvels at younger fans discovering the Spree and Tripping Daisy through Spotify playlists, vinyls and TikTok. Nostalgia, it turns out, has a future.
Austin alternative-pop outfit Club Coma will open the night with their own dreamy, off-kilter shimmer for a smart warm-up ahead of the sunrise to come. You’ll want to get to this one early, because closeness is the entire point.
One more reason to show up: the band is hosting a raffle/auction for an authentic “lifeline” robe from the 2005–2007 era. It’s a mint-aqua piece with a red line that forms a sound wave when the members line up shoulder to shoulder. Every dollar goes to Owenwood Farm and Neighbor Space, a Dallas charity that supports families in need of food, clothing, diapers and a community built to help them put down roots. And if you can’t get enough North Texas magic, mark your calendar: Tripping Daisy plays the State Fair of Texas on October 11 — free with fair admission.
The Polyphonic Spree will perform on Saturday, July 11, at Tulips FTW (112 St Louis Ave., Fort Worth). Doors open at 7 p.m., and the show kicks off at 8 p.m. Tickets are $26.34.
Preston Barta
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