Jack Calmes: Founding Showco and the Sound of the Revue

Jack Calmes

Showco Co-Founder • Live Music Producer • Guitarist • Founder, Forever Fabulous Chickenhawks Showband & All-Star RevueOriginal promotion business: mid-1960s • Touring sound company: 1970–1980

Who Was Jack Calmes?

Jack Calmes was a Dallas-based musician, entrepreneur, and producer whose work helped shape the modern concert experience. Before Showco, he performed professionally in Dallas and played guitar with the Jades. He studied engineering at Southern Methodist University before graduating with a degree in accounting.

Showco’s history includes two connected beginnings. In the mid-1960s, Calmes and Angus G. Wynne III established the original concert-promotion business, bringing major acts to Dallas. They also helped organize the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville over Labor Day weekend in 1969, with promoter Alex Cooley.

The festival demonstrated both the growing audience for rock concerts and the need for dependable sound. Financial losses brought the original promotion venture to an end. In 1970, Calmes launched Showco as a touring sound company with Rusty Brutsche and Jack Maxson. David Alley was also an important early principal, helping with finance and backing.

Calmes brought artist relationships and the drive to build a business around the emerging concert market. Brutsche, Maxson, and the engineers and crews they recruited developed and operated equipment that could meet the demands of the road.

Showco’s early touring clients included Three Dog Night, Led Zeppelin, and Steppenwolf, and it later expanded into lighting, staging, and video.

By September 1973, Billboard portrayed the company Calmes led as far more than a touring-sound operation. From an expanding 33,000-square-foot Dallas facility, Showco employed about 70 people and fielded ten sound systems plus four lighting-and-staging units. Its connected operations reached into sets, special effects, equipment manufacturing, artist management, booking, publishing, and record production. The profile shows Calmes connecting artists, business, production, and technology inside one rapidly expanding organization.

His Dallas story also included a marriage to actress Morgan Fairchild from 1967 to 1973.

In 1967, Calmes and Wynne opened Soul City, a Dallas nightclub that hosted artists including Stevie Wonder, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, and Jerry Lee Lewis. During the 1970s, Showco’s production work expanded to include lasers, lighting towers, trussing, staging, and video. Calmes left Showco in 1980; the automated lighting system that became Vari-Lite made its public debut with Genesis in 1981.

The Producer Behind the Production

Calmes understood that live music was more than equipment. It was timing, trust, artists, crews, and the shared responsibility of making a performance reach the people in the seats.

He also worked across broadcast, film, and artist management. In 1982, he produced a global satellite broadcast of The Who for 20th Century Fox and HBO, later released as The Who Rocks America. He also co-produced the Rolling Stones concert film Some Girls: Live in Texas '78.

Through Showco’s artist-management division, he worked with artists including Freddie King and Bloodrock.

In 1980, Calmes founded the 16-piece Forever Fabulous Chickenhawks Showband & All-Star Revue and played lead guitar. The band released five albums, including three live recordings and two studio albums.

After leaving Showco, Calmes founded Syncrolite in 1984, extending his work in live-event technology into entertainment and architectural lighting. His legacy spans concert sound, lighting, touring production, broadcast, artist management, and performance. As an inventor, he held two U.S. patents related to pattern generators and scrollable modifiers for lighting fixtures.

Calmes’s management work also included John Nitzinger, Jim Rutledge, and The Lee Pickens Group, which appears in a Calmes Management promotional photo in the archive. A separate Showco Management promo identifies Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, documenting another connection to the Showco management operation.

Sources and related histories

Read the Mix remembrance and Jim Bornhorst’s 2018 account. Explore Angus Wynne’s story, Rusty Brutsche’s biography, Jack Maxson’s biography, David Alley’s biography, and the Alumni Directory.