Today we’d like to introduce you to Brooke Wilton.
Brooke, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I have many endeavors I have been and am still involved in, constantly evolving in order to realize creative ideas.
I attended the High School For The Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, majoring in Visual Arts, and had a widely ranging liberal arts education at The University of Texas at Austin; full of classes in visual arts, audio production, film, photography, and creative writing. Then I started playing in a number of bands here in Austin while I fostered a technical career at Apple and a number of other tech companies from the early 90’s-on. But something was always missing. I felt that my creative potential was going largely untapped while I was surrounded by grey cubicle walls, so I got back into doing art and photography a bit and started doing some local art shows.
Then the econopocalypse of 2008 happened and suddenly NO ONE was buying art. While I took another full-time tech gig, I dreamed of doing just about anything else. I felt I had had a number of viable ideas, but had never quite figured out how to get any traction on any of them. So I decided that the next good idea that came to me I was going to all-in to realize it. In taking that IT job I had made the decision that I should upgrade my wardrobe from just concert t-shirts to collared, button-front shirts. But I didn’t like a lot of what I was finding in that cut – the typical floral design or the Hawaiian landscapes were just not doing it for me. And I was dating a seamstress at the time. She suggested we just go get a pattern, some fabric, and some buttons and she could make some shirts for me. My first foray into the fabric store was an eye-opening experience for me, and I selected enough material to make 5 shirts. By the time she had made the first couple of shirts, they quickly became my favorites ever!
But then we broke up. And I felt that I had too much sentimental attachment to these shirts and I could not bring myself to wear them. Cut to a year later. I still had the materials to make 3 more shirts tucked away in a closet, and I still had the need. So I put an ad in Craigslist. The first person I interviewed had been a seamstress for 55 years . The samples she brought in of her work were impeccable. I decided on the spot to not only hire her, but to pay her half-again more than she had bid -with the stipulation that they would be of the highest quality with no corners cut (no pun intended).
That’s how it began. After the first shirt, we worked together to customize the pattern and I borrowed elements from my favorite shirts to incorporate. When she had completed the other two, I realized this was really hitting the mark. So I continued to get more and more materials and she kept making shirts. Eventually I had 38 tailored shirts and people started asking me where they could get one. This was the light-bulb moment: Flameless Shirt was born. (How it got it’s name is also an interesting story, for another time).
The original seamstress ended up working for me full-time for the next three years until she decided to retire from being a seamstress altogether. But she set the bar very high for anyone else to follow. I left my day job and for the next 13 years I worked full time at designing, producing, and selling these custom hand-made shirts. In that time and since, I have hired over 25 seamstresses to produce work for me in the Greater Austin area.
After a few years, I decided to create new market opportunities to sell directly to the public because I found that, though my shirts sell themselves, you have to see them first. So I founded the East Austin Handmade Arts Market in February of 2014. For 3 years I had been mostly selling my wares online and at various pop-up arts markets/art fairs around town and mostly in the trendy SoCo area. But I decided that (even then) SoCo was getting too dense with too much difficulty in terms of traffic, parking, etc. And I could see that East Austin was much more supportive of the arts in general (with the East Austin Studio Tour, tons of murals, lots of “lawn art” in residential neighborhoods, etc). At that time, in areas like along Manor Road just East of IH35, a lot of bars and restaurants were starting to sprout up, bringing foot traffic with them.
So I started setting up our pop-up market in the parking lot of a local bar every weekend. But the venue wasn’t selling enough beverages to our customers inside the fenced-in bar area. So I sacrificed our visibility to the street traffic, hoping banners would let people know a market was happening and when, and moved inside the venue gate. This is when I started to do our events monthly instead of weekly so that I could promote them effectively and not just rely on walk-up traffic.
Being a musician active within the Austin music scene, I started booking bands to be a draw for these events, and also to provide entertainment for everyone of course. And this quickly grew to where I was producing a number of fairly large art and music events around town. All of these events remained free admission to the public and featured acts that had typically been under-recognized within the Austin music community. The goal was to create a regular art and music scene to help people make a living through their art, and this ran on a break-even basis for over 10 years.
This is how I began the annual event Surf By Surf East, which has become one of the largest Surf Rock festivals in the world, and certainly the largest in the US anywhere outside of California (where they do a festival galled Surf Guitar 101 each year, which has become a sister event to ours). It now features bands from all over the world, occurring every 1st weekend of March. It will be at Drinks Backyard for the third year there (and our 13th anniversary) on Mar 6-7 2027. We started charging a modest admission to bring in bigger acts from further way, but we always also feature mostly Texas Surf Rock bands.
Concurrently, I began to produce a lot of Progressive Rock oriented events around town as well, because my band Dwarf Nebula is rooted in that genre. These events became a monthly thing called Third Sat From The Sun because they were every third Saturday. This culminated in a Prog Rock festival called Voyager Fest during SXSW one year.
Around this time I got recruited into KOOP Radio (91.7 FM) to join the Prog Rock show Virtual Noise. I was there for 5 years as a host / programmer and birthed two radio shows of my own: The Hippy Campus, and Here Comes Sunshine (which I still release straight to the internet on my own time-table). I left KOOP Radio when my cost of living tripled in 2022 and I had to move from North Central Austin to South Austin (away from the Radio Station). I dusted off my tech resume, and go back to work for computer companies again. My full-time gigs with the arts market and Flameless Shirt had to become side-gigs, and my side gigs (outsource IT work mostly in the summer when it’s too hot for pop-up markets) had to come to the fore. I continued to produce the two main events I had been doing every year (the Yule Bazaar holiday market and Surf By Surf East) and I even went back to work for Apple for a bit.
And now I am working to realize another dream I have had on the back-burner for decades. With a couple of partners, I have formed a table-top role-playing gaming company and we are producing the first rule-book of our gaming system (like DnD). It is called Myriad Realms! I’m working full time as the principal writer, art director, senior editor and CEO of this fledgling company. I have hired a number of local visual artists to produce art for our first rule book. (We do not use AI to create any of our content). This will be the first of a series of these rule books we have planned, to be released in 2027 if all goes well.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s been quite a bumpy road actually, on each front.
For Flameless Shirt it has always been challenging to garner enough customers to make a living. I’ve always striven to make these shirts the highest quality, because to me, that’s the only reason to be in business. Though this works well for my existing customers, many of whom collect a number of my designs, it is a struggle with each sale to show new potential customers that you get what you pay for. It flies in the face of cheap sweatshop goods from overseas that most Americans have become accustomed to.
With the closing of the two main fabric retail shops in the US, it became more and more challenging to source materials. And now with all the tariffs and the skyrocketing of food and gas prices, this business is limping along on life-support.
For the arts market, venues (typically bars and restaurants, but also art warehouses and such) come and go in this town all the time, and this has changed our location and availability. Sometimes a venue relocates to a place that doesn’t work for us or goes under completely! And sometimes a venue becomes too successful and they don’t have room or the need for us any longer. And though we have over 700 artists on our list who may participate in any of our events, we have to work within their schedule as well. Additionally, I always face challenges in promoting each event to make sure that enough folks come out to make it successful.
Each event has 3 main goals. For it to be successful, it needs to fire on all cylinders for a win-win: It needs to be successful for the venue, which is usually in bar/food sales. It needs to be successful for the bands. They need to have an audience to play for and need to get paid for entertaining our guests. And the hand-made artists who participate (of which I am one) need to have enough sales to make it worthwhile because this is how we make our living. And again, now that gas and food are so expensive, artists and musicians have been very hard-hit because people have less available income for things that are not seen as necessities. Attendance at a lot of events has gone down considerably unless you are a large touring act, and even so, those acts have become more and more dependent on merch sales to make touring feasible.
We are also subject to unforeseen circumstances as well. The weather is a major factor, since we are often outside, and even if we are not, any kind of iffy weather can deter people from leaving their house. I have personally had high wind conditions kill a number of my pop-up tents, sometimes with me in it. Luckily, my wares are pretty resilient and no one has been injured by this kind of catastrophe, but it happens. I haven’t had any tents go Mary Poppins on me, because I insist that all my artists use weights and/or stakes, but I’ve seen it happen at other events.
But the table-top role-playing games have become mainstream, and not just something that geeks like me are into. So I am confident that this new gaming system we have been developing for over 46 years will take off once it is released, allowing me to continue to make shirts and create concert events with hand-made art vendors going forward, even with writing these books becoming my primary vocation. The good thing about these games is that all you need are the rule books and some dice, and then you and your friends can have hours of fun every week doing a kind of communal storytelling while you hang out. The only continuing cost is the beverages. You can get into it on any level you want to, and it’s great to have a focus for the interaction.
With the way that all the tech companies are embracing AI, I don’t feel I can continue to work in that field to support my own obsolescence, so I continue to try to forge a path outside of the cubicle.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
For Flameless Shirt: Unique designs in very limited editions, with impeccable quality -designed to last a lifetime. I have people all the time who tell me stories like how they have had a shirt for over ten years; been canoeing in it, etc. and it still looks brand new. A guy who was a National Geographical photographer bought 10 shirts from me one year, saying he’d be wearing them all over Africa (so he was glad they are in bright colors) and he’d be back the next year to buy 10 more because they “would be shredded”. He didn’t return for 3 years! And when he did, he only wanted to buy more of a certain shirt he said people were offering him something like $500 to buy off his back at airports. I recently down-sided a bunch of his shirts because he’d lost a lot of weight (something I am happy to do because it keeps people able to continue to wear and look good in the shirts).
For the shows that I produce, it makes me very happy when people tell me that I am bringing back something that Austin used to have that seems to be largely gone now with each event.
A very proud moment for Surf By Surf East was last year when Betty Benedeadly of Sheverb told me that I was the reason the band had gotten back together (they had been broken up for a few years) when I invited them to be a headliner for the festival again.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs or other resources you think our readers should check out?
I tend to like mind-bending science fiction kind of stuff. I love just about anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison…
I don’t follow any podcasts really, but I do produce them. I am an avid music collector. Everything I play of my commercial-free internet radio shows is from my own collection. There are too many artists I love to list here, but I’ll say that a good chunk of my collection is David Bowie, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, and The Grateful Dead. I like music that is transportational; that takes you somewhere. You can find my shows on my website.
Most of my reading for the past 20 years or so has been biographies and autobiographies by or about musicians I’m into, and I occasionally drop nuggets of history into the radio shows.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://baronmind.net
- Instagram: djbaronmind
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EastAustinHandmade/
- Other: https://flamelessshirt.com
Image Credits
The one where I’m in front of the curtains is the one most people are familiar with from my Flameless Shirt business cards, wearing Shirt No 1 (On Fire). The next is one of my works entitled “Astral Portrait” and it was abstracted from a selfie from a very early digital camera that had to be connected to a Mac via a serial port. The next is a self portrait mirror shot. The one that looks like fireworks are going off is one of me I modified from a band photo (taken by my good friend Lowell Rice). Next is one I took of my kitty Echo in my backyard. It was published in a book on cat breeds. The abstract one that looks like it might be computer art is actually analogue. It’s a long exposure shot of my good friend Cedar Stevens who is hula-hooping with an LED hoop. I used that as the logo for the East Austin Handmade Arts Market. The one on stage is at Surf By Surf East with the central Texas band Los SuperAvengers, taken by KOOP’s Darkside Daddy. The one where I’m standing in front of a fridge at a party was taken of me when I was 17. And the last one is from Surf By Surf East 2026 with Betty Benedeadly and me.
