Crystal Wise
It took a few years for aspiring musician Matthew Avila to realize there was a better platform.
He was 20ish, playing guitar, and touring with a Dallas-based avant-garde rock band, complemented fully with all the new and unusual or experimental ideas of, well, an avant-garde rock band. It was, he recalls, a “semiprofessional run at the music industry.”
“At that time, I’d say I was an OK musician. The guys I was playing with were phenomenally talented musicians, but they were disasters as human beings otherwise,” he says over the phone as a humorist would before getting to the crux. “They put up with my mediocre musicianship because I was the one who basically served as the tour manager, the business manager, the booking agent; got their instruments out of pawn when they did stupid things; made sure the rehearsal space rent got paid, made sure we showed up in the right cities on the right dates. I had a car that actually worked. Things like that.”
I sense he could have gone on and on.
“It was a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong, but after two or three years of that, I was like, ‘This is a lot of work. Maybe, I’ll go to college.’”
That gig was the foundation for the first of a what is now a planned three careers for Avila.
Crystal Wise
Inside his commercial studio, Matthew Avila plays. Here, the two bands he's a part of rehearse, but he also does some engineering and producing. One day, he plans on doing that full time.
Today, he is the CEO of Byrne Construction, the firm his father John Avila purchased in the mid-1990s. His brother Paul is the chief operating officer.
But from that centerstage as a very early 20-something, Avila headed to the University of Texas for undergrad and then a master’s in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in behavioral medicine. He had a faculty position at the University of Maryland in Baltimore doing psychiatric genetics research when he was lured home to join the family business.
He jokingly says of his career transition, “When I bumped my head and decided to join the family construction firm.”
Crystal Wise
Matthew Avila's music playing is a more than a minor occupation. Seen here are three of the 18 guitars in his stage arsenal.
Off the clock, however, you might find Avila at his recording studio because he’s still playing a little music. You might be able to take the kid out of the band, but you can’t take the guitar out of the hands of the kid. Just go with it. I’m on a roll.
“I always kept it up as a hobby,” he says of music, “and would goof. I really didn’t pick it back up in any kind of serious way until about six years ago.”
Today, he is part of two bands, including Kyser, a rock band led by a guy we know well, Robby Kyser, who is director of digital at Fort Worth Inc. Sol Kanthack — the president of Andrews Aerospace — and Andrew Harris are also members. Currently, they are in rebuild mode.
With the Ph.D. and juris doctorate from Texas A&M, his band mates have aptly nicknamed him "Doc."
“Sol and I are in YPO [Young Presidents' Organization] and we were talking, and he says something to me about playing guitar and that they were looking for a guitar player,” Avila says. “And he says, ‘Come jam with us.’ I blew it off as whiskey talk, but he followed up the next week.”
They invited him to join the band and at the encouragement of his wife. “She said, ‘You should do it. It’ll be fun.’” He cracks that she regrets that, now that “I’m neck deep in it.”
Kyser with Avila in the band has cut two studio albums.
“It’s been an absolute ton of fun,” says Avila, who with his law degree makes him, he says, an Aggie and Longhorn. His Aggie employees have protested this claim, he says, adding that he tells them, “I’ll drink a pitcher of beer if you give me a ring.”
Both of the bands he plays in rehearse at the commercial studio he constructed at the Byrne Construction campus. When the company took over the property on East Berry, it had a building that wasn’t practical for the firm.
He has a third career envisioned as a music engineer and producer. He already does that for a few bands — more of a hobby at this point — but he’s not where he wants to be as far as “delivering a fantastic product, but I’m getting there.”
“It’s been super, super fun,” he says. “I almost enjoy it as much as the live play. Live play is all technique and music and creativity. The engineering and producing piece is all of that, plus all the awesome technical, computer programming. I don’t actively seek out a bunch of clients at this point. It’s a difficult profession and takes years to get really, really good at it.”
But a third career, his last career, he plans it to be.
“That’s the goal. Unless I get hit by a bus. I can’t plan around that.”