On a fateful day in New York, a teenage Sergio Elizondo roamed the halls of the Museum of Modern Art in search of enlightenment. His eyes landed on a display of graffitied bricks and concert posters, attributed to the famed music club CBGB. The exhibit planted a seed in Elizondo that lay dormant until 2023, and is now fully blossomed as CC Riffs, a project documenting the vivid history of hardcore music in the Coastal Bend.
“That exhibit got me thinking, ‘This is really cool; I wonder if there’s anything in Texas like that,’” Elizondo recalled. “The thought stayed in the back of my head until [October 2023], six or seven years later.”
A shy theater kid from Alice, Texas, Elizondo’s metalhead tíos raised him on stories of their visits to the city shows. Not only of the bigshots they saw at Concrete Street and Brewster’s, but of those in since-shuttered venues: the now demolished Memorial Coliseum, Executive’s defunct neighbor Buckets, now El Camino, and Elizondo’s most meaningful loss, Johnny Canales’ festival grounds, formerly known as Johnnyland.
“Johnnyland is the whole reason I started doing this. I wanted to learn more about it,” he said. “I helped people organize their [memorabilia] and talked to them, hoping they had stories about Johnnyland. That was my end goal, but I’ve found way more stuff than I ever would have.”
With help from the music community itself, Elizondo has struck gold—a rich history captured in the form of handmade posters, personal VHS recordings and old self-released records. From local legends like Technobrats to then-small touring bands like Slipknot and Green Day, Elizondo’s collection of memorabilia, both personal and borrowed, has reached a size worthy of its own museum space. Seemingly overnight, Elizondo became an amateur historian.
Relying on social media to share his findings, he runs a community Facebook group, posts photos to the CCRiffs Instagram account and uploads longform video and audio content onto YouTube. Over the last year, he has also set up exhibits inside Produce Gallery with the help of Hybrid Records, and at House of Rock. Gallery-style displays have become his preferred method of showcasing the archive, and he plans to continue with them. Through his concerted efforts, Elizondo has not only introduced a whole new generation of music lovers to this history, but helped resurface old memories once lying forgotten in a cardboard box in someone’s garage.
When he did the exhibit at House of Rock, “People were getting emotional seeing posters they made, or photos of their friends and family who had passed on,” he said. “The Corpus community is filled with very passionate people. They hold onto their memories. A lot of these musicians didn’t keep their stuff, so another part of my journey is to keep that memory alive. Because without memory, who are we?”
Stop by House of Rock on Apr. 12 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. to catch CC Riffs’ pop-up exhibition at the Rock & Roll Flea Market.
