Plugged In

No person is a more unlikely local music superfan than Chaffin, a fact she proudly admits. For most of the Richardson native's life, music was only a passing fancy, and she attests to seeing only two concerts in the '80s and '90s while she worked as a Southwest Airlines flight attendant. "I was one of the Dallas people I'm trying to change right now," she says. "I was hanging at Beau Nash, Highland Park Yacht Club, Nostromo, all those places to see and be seen...That's what I fight against now."

In 2000, Chaffin's life changed with the least rock 'n' roll event possible--the purchase of land in Glen Rose near the Brazos River. Husband Scott bought up land that just happened to house a little music festival, Raz on the Braz, thrown by Fort Worth's Terry Rasor. Since the Chaffins allowed the fest to go on, Cindy was forced to attend and listen to acts such as Billy Joe Shaver, Rusty Weir...what she called "Texas country red dirt stuff."

At that 2000 fest, Chaffin was tired and ready to leave the festival when Denton's Doug Burr and the Lonelies took the stage. Their country-tinged pop-rock was nothing like the rest of the schedule, and Chaffin was so moved and inspired by the notion of an indie-rock band that she introduced herself.

"They were young and hip-looking and they caught my attention," Chaffin says. "I'd had just enough to drink to go up and say, 'Man, if y'all ever need any help with booking...' I had no idea what I was talking about. And they took me up on it! What were they thinking? And what was I thinking?"

But Chaffin stuck to her offer, even though she didn't even know about a single live music club in town, and learned about local music entirely by booking the band for more than a year and attending every Lonelies concert. During her trial by fire, she saw a void. Information was out there for struggling DFW/Denton bands that wanted to enter songwriting contests, contact record labels, promote shows and book their own gigs, but why not collect that information on a single Web site and give music fans some CD and concert information along the way?

Chaffin's husband, who runs his own lifestyle blog (thefatguy.com), encouraged his wife to do the same; blogs, after all, are easy enough to manage for even the most computer-illiterate (and after failing a CompUSA training course, she needed all the help she could get). Thanks to his help, in October 2002, Texas Gigs went live.

The site began with a specific niche, as Chaffin's coverage tended to favor singer-songwriters and alt-country musicians, certainly the ones she fell for while booking the Lonelies. But as the years passed, Chaffin's labor of love became a safe haven for just about any band around town. And with the Observer being notorious for its crushing criticisms (former music editor Zac Crain's "Sack of Kittens" column about the worst in local music peaked during Texas Gigs' lifespan), Chaffin's open, most-anything-goes attitude was warmly received by bands and fans alike.

For years the site was run on little more than goodwill and PayPal donations from readers (a chance appearance on the Food Network's Food Nation a few years back didn't hurt). Chaffin never draped the site in ads and pop-ups or hawked Texas Gigs merch, yet somehow, her site persisted in possibly the roughest period of time after the dot-com crash: "People would donate every once in a while. Not a lot, but that was incentive enough--somebody cares about this."

Over time, Chaffin was doing more and more for the site--interviews, bootlegged concerts, on-site podcasts--to continue her mission of giving local music novices (and other 40-something women) access to concerts and bands that they may never otherwise have seen. The mission was noble, but the amount of work was finally outpacing the PayPal donations. In November 2005, a lucrative offer popped up. Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News (pegasusnews.com), was getting closer to launching his Dallas-centric Web portal, complete with news and entertainment resources that, unlike those offered by traditional papers and Web sites in town, would be open to public comment and user feedback. Orren's a poker buddy of Scott Chaffin, so he soon met Cindy.

"They asked me to join them, put all my content on the site and help them build the site," she says. "They're not in the business of supporting a local music scene; they're in the business of launching a hyper-local media site, but they needed a product to show off the bells and whistles so they could attract investors."

In exchange, Chaffin would benefit from a huge, free overhaul--new design, more bandwidth, more resources for audio and video recording and a team of interns to assist with the site's concert calendar. "Maybe it's the first chance to make some money too," she admits. Texas Gigs merged with Pegasus News, and Chaffin's labor expanded almost immediately.

Orren and the rest of the Pegasus staff lined up some fantastic promotions--in particular, their Mavericks Playoff Theme Song Competition has attached their name to the team's most successful run in franchise history--and the listings section became a local music Wikipedia of sorts, full of profiles for every venue, concert and band in town. Last month, the site received awards from the Dallas Observer and Editor & Publisher and celebrated getting more than 200,000 hits in a month--quite a load of traffic for a site whose scope is incredibly narrow.