Dreaming about Rock Clubs
Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash
I don’t often remember my dreams. But when I woke up (way too early) this morning, I vividly remembered dreaming about being in a live music club, watching a band I didn’t know, feeling right at home. The venue changed a couple of times (one version was mostly outdoors) but the band stayed the same and the crowd did as well.
I even spoke to the guy standing next to me in the dream about how it doesn’t matter where or when you are, most clubs look very much the same. There’s comfort in that, I think. The matte black walls, cheap paneling, smell of industrial disinfectant along with stale beer are almost ubiquitous. Thankfully the accompanying odor of stale cigarette smoke is not anymore.
I started going to the Cat's Cradle in the very early ‘80s when it was still behind Dips on Rosemary – a location that I was to become intimately familiar with. When Dave moved it to Franklin Street and Judy opened Rhythm Alley there, I hung out there too (and met Jeannette there and got married there and eventually bought it, but that’s a different story).
There are tons of iconic clubs that I never made it to, particularly the NYC-area stalwarts like CBGB’s, and Maxwell’s across the river, but I spent many nights in the old 9:30 Club in DC and I can’t imagine that the famed stench of the bathrooms at CBGB’s was any worse than that of that basement pisshole at 930 F Street.
Back before the Interwebs, J and I used to joke about how to find our way around an unfamiliar city. There was always a web of health food stores, vegetarian restaurants, independent record stores and music clubs, most of which would have bulletin boards with flyers for the others. So you only had to find one. That’s how we found 12th and Porter under the Interstate, next to a repo lot in Nashville a few decades ago.
Certainly not all clubs share that black-walled paneled-bar aesthetic. I stumbled across Zaphod Beeblebrox in By Ward Market in Ottawa many years ago (I think it closed a few years ago) and while I may be misremembering, it seemed like it had white walls, which was quite the novelty.
On the other hand, The Milestone in Charlotte has been an exemplary of a place you’d never step foot into if it wasn’t for the awesome bands you knew you’d hear and see. Bill Flowers bought the building and started booking music there in 1969, around the same time as Cat's Cradle opened its doors. It is astounding to me that both of them are still going after 55 years.
I don’t go nearly as often as I once did. The aches and pains of aging make it hard to stand around for hours anymore (that’s why at the Cat's Cradle Back Room, you’ll likely find me on a bar stool leaning against the back wall). But I’ll never stop going altogether.
“Clubs” are a good name for music venues like these – like the Brewery or Culture Club or Secret Garden were back in their day and like Local 506 and the Pour House and the rest of them are today. They’re like clubs for people that dig live music, but they’re not exclusive – I've never walked into a music club in any city in North America and felt like I was out of place.
Maybe that was the point of the dream – the shifting of the club but with the same folks and the same bands. There’s a comfort in knowing that there’s a network of places across the country (and I’m sure across the world) where folks like me can go and hear music and share it with friends that we haven’t yet met. It’s a good thing.
Labels: Life, Music, Travel
Pandemic Thoughts
It hit me this morning that one year ago today, I was in Bangalore accompanying a new customer on a tour. The night of the 29th, we were sitting in a gorgeous outdoor restaurant, drinking craft beer (a new concept in India) and talking about coronavirus.Yes, it was still January and we were fully aware of the potential danger and already talking about the potential for sending people to work from home (in the US) for a period of time.
My customer had routed their flights through Hong Kong to get the airline and schedule they wanted and by the end of the trip, their travel department had changed their flights home to go through London. We laughed about them having come in via China, but it was nervous laughter.
It has never been unusual in international airports to see people wearing facemasks.It has been a common practice in a number of Asian countries. But as I was going through customs in Mumbai on the way home, I saw a definite increase in mask wearing. This was still the first week of February.
When I landed in New York, I zipped through customs in no time at all (Thank you, Global Entry Program!) but I did see people being pulled out for questioning and their temperature taking by TSA. I assumed it was people coming in from China. I was surprised even then that the TSA folks were not masked. Again, this was still the first week of February.
All this is to say that this was not a goddamn surprise. Even an uninformed rube like me saw the potential for this creating serious problems in the US all the way back in January. And as we know, our government officials, including the President, knew as well and while some profited from it, they chose to hide it from the US public and continued to not only downplay it, they actively worked to discourage people from taking precautions. We don't talk about that much any more but we should. Over 400,000 (and counting) American deaths later, those deaths are on their heads.
Without looking it up on a calendar, I can tell you that the last live performance I saw was Destroyer at the Cradle on the second Wednesday of March. That Friday was the last time I went out for a beer after work, sitting down at Gizmos (the old Rathskeller) and chatting with the manager about the lockdown that was starting on Monday. The last time I ate inside a restaurant was that Saturday, when we stopped off at Sushi Bomb and sat at a bar table after stocking up on groceries, thinking that we'd keep our heads down for a few weeks and stop this thing early. Those small, normal events stand out sharply in my memory almost a year later.
Everything since then has pretty much been a blur. I tracked my grocery store visits for awhile, in case contact tracing was needed. But I've stopped being very good about that. We've gotten away for a couple of short hotel stays (room service only, wipe everything down, masks everywhere) and one glorious week at a condo in OBX last fall, but everything else has been pretty much an undifferentiated fuzz of work and... well... work.
I used to try to imagine how we would come out the other side of this. Now I frankly have no idea. It's been clear for almost a year that what was normal will likely not be normal again. What that *new* normal will look like, I haven't a clue. I realized yesterday while out for a walk that the thought of being in a crowded space anymore fills me with loathing. "Social distancing" has become the new norm and I'm not sure that, even when Covid winds down, I'm going to be in a hurry to be in close proximity to a bunch of strangers. I was usually more inclined to stay to the side or in the back at the Cradle and other clubs anyway (that stool at the back of the bar in the Cradle Back Room is MINE, dammit!). I have no idea how I'll deal next time (and there will be a next time, hopefully soon).
All of this being said, I realize how incredibly fortunate we are. We're not worried about where we're going to sleep tonight. We're not having trouble making ends meet. We're not having to go out and put ourselves at risk in order to keep working. Hell, I was mostly working from home anyway. I also recognize that all of that could change in an instant. So many people are hurting so badly from this and will continue to do so long after it is over.
So get your vaccinations. Keep your distance. Wear a fucking mask (a good one or at least 2 less-good ones doubled up). Wash those paws. And let's try to create a new normal after this that is safer, saner and more honest.
Labels: Health, Life
RIP, Reverend Vivian
I learned this morning that Reverend C. T. Vivian passed away last night at 95 years old. He never got (nor I suspect craved) the public acknowledgement (from white America, at least) that John Lewis or other leaders of the civil rights movement in the late '50s and early '60s got, but he was a towering influence in many ways and a remarkable human being.
In the late '90s, I was working for Nortel Networks, a Canadian-based high tech company responsible for the digital switching revolution that really allowed for the growth of the internet. We had a distribution plant up in Creedmoor, NC, between RTP and the Virginia state line. The plant director realized there were racial tensions on the floor that were disrupting operations and he brought in Rev. Vivian's consulting company to hold a handful of two-day seminars that proved to be so successful, management extended them to the main offices/manufacturing floor in Research Triangle Park.
I grew up in about as un-bigoted a household as you could find in Nashville in the '60. My elementary school was over 60% African-American - when they instituted busing after my 5th grade year, I got bused to a whiter school. There's nothing about that that ensures that I would not be prejudiced of course, but I was sure that I was not.
I got signed up for the seminar and viewed it as a couple of days off of work (and maybe a chance to feel a little superior to my fellow white folks who would undoubtedly learn some painful lessons). Yeah, not so much.
Rev. Vivian gently and insistently led us toward truths we hadn't considered and that I think a lot of people are only now starting to understand. That the problems of being black in America didn't end with the Civil War or with the Civil Rights Act or with the end of Jim Crow (or now, later, after having a black President). That "I don't see color" is a bullshit statement.
The seminar was personal, not about societal problems like red-lining and hiring preferences etc. It was about *me* - each of us as individuals and how we feel in our heart of hearts and what we could do about it. It was intensely personal. That's a long, arduous path to take to change the world, but he spent decades doing it one small group at a time and doing it well.
After the first day, I called my dad. My grandfather (an unfortunately racist man) drove a Nashville city bus during the formation of the SCLC and NCLC and the sit-in movement with students from Fisk University and American Baptist College, where Rev, Vivian was an older seminary student. Dad was right out of high school and driving a bread truck and while John Lewis and others were sitting in at a restaurant (while the manager turned the heat on full blast or sprayed them with bug spray), Dad might have been in the back, pulling bread back onto the truck because there wasn't going to be anything sold that day.
I made sure I sat with Rev. Vivian at lunch the second day, to share a little background and get his take on, well, those days I guess. He was gracious, engaging and funny. At the end of the second day, he had us line up and he went down the line, shaking hands and having a quiet word with each of us.
In the days and weeks that followed, I fought back internally against some of what I learned about myself during those two days. Thankfully I mostly lost that fight and realized that there were unlearnings that I had to do. Some of that continues to this day and I hope that the past few months of racial reckoning is doing the same for others.
It's ok to consider yourself to be not a racist. I still do (but I'm more not a racist today than I was before that seminar, if that makes sense). It is probably not ok to consider yourself "not a racist" without some ongoing self-reflection and self-assessment.
All of this is to say that I am a better person for having met Rev. Vivian. I think about him and the seminar often and the world will miss his grace, his wit, his compassion, his love and his strength. Rest in Peace. Labels: Life
Glasses Half Empty
Well, *yesterday* was a mixed bag! The morning started with an early flight to JAX via ATL and was the first time I've had the full benefit of spending craploads of money to make air travel less shitty. TSA Precheck made security a breeze, an upgraded seat via Skymiles points made it quicker to deplane in Atlanta and access to the Sky Lounge meant I could park my bags, hit an uncrowded restroom, grab a cup of coffee and catch up on a couple of emails - all in about 15 minutes. Budget Fastbreak meant picking up the car was a breeze. All in all, the way travel is supposed to be.
Then while at the hotel before meeting my customer for dinner, I broke my glasses. Not a lens - I broke the frames, right at the bridge. They're effectively wire-rims, so a nerd repair with tape or a bandaid wasn't possible.
So I found myself driving a strange car on strange roads in a downpour in the dark in heavy traffic wearing my prescription Ray-Bans. Probably not the safest choice but I was already running late and didn't have time to try to get a Lyft.
It is likely that none of you other than my family have seen me without my glasses on, unless we've gone swimming or had sex together. I've been wearing glasses since I was in first grade, which was @^#%%@@% years ago. I do not look like *me* without my glasses, even to me, since I can't really see myself clearly without them.
So I'll navigate through the day today looking either like I'm nursing the mother of all hangovers or trying to be incognito. I'm curious to see if anyone asks me for a selfie at the airport, thinking I must be SOMEbody they know. (The last time anyone seemed truly convinced that I was someone else was in 1983 in a bar in Georgetown, when some drunk young thing was sure I was Max Weinberg. Springsteen was in town the next night, I think, and she was absolutely sure despite my protestations that I was the E Street Band drummer, despite the fact that he's ten years older).
Wish me luck!
Labels: Life, Travel, Work
Happy Blogiversary to Me
I started Half-Life and Times 14 years ago this week, as UConn was beating Dook then Georgia Tech for the nattie championship behind Emeka Okafor and as we were mired in the early stages of two Middle Eastern wars with a preznit that we were sure was the worst we'd ever see in our lifetimes. Ugh.
This actually wasn't my first blog, though. In '99 and '00, I maintained a static webpage that I updated every couple of weeks with bloggie thoughts. I also maintained a very subjective restaurant guide of Chapel Hill/Carrboro and a bit of Durham, primarily for the folks that I worked with that traveled here for meetings (my boss at the time was an Ann Arbor-turned-Chapel Hill guy and used to insist that we meet in CH rather than out in RTP). I've looked but I'm not finding any of those old pages, despite the idea that nothing on the web ever disappears.
After starting this blog on Blogger, I actually hand-built pages for it for a couple of years until Blogger got better and stopped eating my posts. Those are archived as well (there's a link).
If there is a highlight of this thing for me, it was the series of posts I published in August 2014 about our time with Rhythm Alley (actually a thinly-disguised love letter to Jeannette) - they're still out there if anyone's interested.
Given the way FB is going, it's quite possible that Half-Life and Times will outlive my FB presence, so here's to another few years at least.
Labels: Blogging, Life, Rhythm Alley
The Last Real Chapel Hill Summer
A warning last week from a Facebook friend that the students would be coming back in a couple of weeks to interrupt our summer-sleepy town once again reminded me of how much summers have changed around here since I got to town.
Okay, before I go any further, I do realize how cliche that sort of backward-looking is. When I arrived as an incoming freshman in 1978 (interrupting someone else's sleepy summer), the following joke was already well-worn:
Q: How many Chapel Hillians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to reminisce about when Chapel Hill was still a village (alternately, four to talk about how great the old light bulb was).
So I know that any backwards look like this is inherently fraught with danger, but what the hell. While it's true that summers do still slow down a bit around here, Chapel Hill has over the past 40+ years become more and more a bedroom and retirement community with the influence of the university waning as a result. That doesn't mean that it is not still a college town by any means, but the percentage of residents that are directly associated with the U has dropped significantly. As a result, the tides of the town don't ebb and flow as strongly as they once did. The academic year of the U also seems to have fewer gaps than it once did, so there're no longer those nice long slow weeks between graduation and 1st summer school session, for example, where the town approached empty.
For me, the last real Chapel Hill summer was 1981. The previous two summers I had spent back home in Charlotte, working for a custom cabinet maker in Mint Hill and sometimes working at the movie theater at Eastland Mall. As I finished my junior year, I found a couple of campus jobs that would allow me to stay in town (we were paying for our apartment out at what was then Tar Heel Manor anyway). My friend Lex, who was in the same year at Davidson, was going to come up as well and we planned to spend the summer getting up to no good.
I had managed to find a couple of jobs that basically allowed me to sit on my ass in air-conditioned comfort. One was working the desk at Summer Conference Housing, which was at Morrison Dorm that year. Every summer, groups would schedule various conferences in town to take advantage of the campus downtime and one of the dorms would be made available for cheap stays (there were VERY few hotel/motel rooms in Chapel Hill those days and the Carolina Inn was pretty much a dump). I worked 3 nights a week from midnight to 7am, "working" primarily consisting of unlocking the door for late night revelers that had been wandering around looking for "the party" on Franklin Street (dude, it's summer - there is no "party". Just you and your drunk JayCee buddies looking for the co-eds that are all back home in Wilson or Bryson City for the summer). That was over by 2am and I spent the rest of the night reading the Playboys that the dorm subscribers had forgotten to stop or the romance novels that the day shift had left at the desk (that was my one and only experience reading Jackie Collins. I still have the scars.).
The other job was sitting (again) at the remote computer room at Cobb Dorm. There was a card reader for one of the campus mainframes (pretty sure it was an IBM 360/75 but could have been an IBM 370 by then) and three or four green-screen terminals that accessed the campus computers as well as TUCC (Triangle University Computing Center) that was shared by UNC, NCSU and Duke. I was there to help folks with JCL (Job Control Language), make sure the card reader didn't get stuck, and not much else.
I was a bit transportation-challenged at the time. I had an old Suzuki 185 that was stolen just before the start of summer, so a typical day was me busing in for a noon to 5pm shift at the computer room, busing back out to the apartment for a couple of hours of sleep, riding my bicycle back into town for my night shift at the dorm then riding back out at 7am past the cheerleading campers starting their early morning barking exercises in the Granville Towers parking lot. Some days I'd be back on campus by noon the next day.
That kind of schedule also made for some long stretches of downtime, much of which was spent at what was then the brand-new Henderson Street Bar. Tim Kirkpatrick (owner of the eponymous Kirkpatrick's) had just opened the place in the old Record Bar location and it still smelled of new wood rather than stale beer and old pee like other bars I frequented. Those entering were greeted with the 8-Ball Deluxe pinball table admonishing them to "stop talking and start chalking" usually followed by someone hitting the jukebox for the 37th playing that day of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" (I was probably responsible for a dozen of them most days). Side note: I didn't know Tim Kirkpatrick at the time but he sold us our Honda Fit at Crown Honda a couple of years ago. Very nice guy.
There was also plenty of time to sleep during those 2-3 day periods where I didn't have a shift at either job or to go down to Sugar Lake and float around with a cooler full of cheap beer, catch movies, grab a dinner at Tijuana Fats and generally not worry about much of anything. There wasn't a jug of cheap-ass red wine that was safe from us (or a restaurant menu that didn't have Lex' teeth marks on it). I'm pretty sure that was the summer when I set my personal record of eating pizza for 7 straight meals. Greg Humphreys/Hobex captured that type of summer perfectly with their song "Windows" - all you really needed was a friend with a car that had a working radio and windows that rolled down all the way.
Lex only lasted about a month, as I recall. Day laborer was not in his make-up (mine either). But one loss was made up for by a gain, when one of the daytime folks working the desk at Morrison said some guys coming in that afternoon mentioned seeing a motorcycle off in the woods beside the path behind the dorm. Sure enough, someone had ripped the ignition wires out of my bike and had tried to start it pushing it down the hill. A couple of days over at Motorcycle Supply and I had motorized independent transportation again.
Hell, looking back on it I might have thought I was bored at the time. But in retrospect I was relaxed, for probably the last prolonged period of my life. By the next summer I was working full-time at IBM while finishing up a last class during summer session and that was all she wrote. For the next 35 years.
So I think we all ought to take a month each year and do Chapel Hill summer old school. Take a sabbatical from our real job, hang out in the shade during the day, get lively when the sun goes down and it starts to cool off a bit, go hang out at He's Not Here all night and take a drive out into the county some afternoon with the windows down and the radio on.
Labels: Life
Bubbles and Echo Chambers
I started writing this in my head a couple of days ago and many folks that write much better than I do have already captured a lot of what I'm thinking better than I will, but I still feel the need to work through this - and it doesn't count if I don't put it out there for others to argue with or agree with or ignore. This is long and rambling because I've been pretty rambling since Tuesday night. So read at your own risk and feel comfortable with ignoring.
There have been a lot of accusations that the Dem leadership and/or the "liberal elite" (whatever the fuck is meant by that) live in their bubbles in San Francisco and New York and Portland (and I would assume my college town of Chapel Hill) and they've lost touch with "real America" whatever the hell that is. I'm also reading a counter to that, that it's Billy Bob Joe Bubba in Podunkville, Kansas that is the one in the bubble, unknowing (and uncaring) of anything much that goes on beyond the next corn field.
Look, we ALL live in not one but many bubbles. Think of it as a big-ass series of Venn diagrams (I know, I just lost the Billy Bobs) with overlaps, intersections and in some cases completely separate bubbles. As I said, I live in a college town in a Southern state that defies categorization as blue or red but I also don't believe that it is purple. Chapel Hill is such a bubble that the late unlamented Senator Jesse Helms suggested we save some money on building a zoo and just build a fence around the town. As it has become more of a bedroom community for Research Triangle Park, it may not be quite as librul, but it is still definitely an outlier.
At the same time, I've spent most of my 35 year professional career working in the aforementioned RTP, which is dominated by large multi-national technology and pharmaceutical companies. Big on open borders and loving their H-1B visas and generally fiscally conservative/free-market but fairly tolerant on social issues. With the exception of a couple of my neighbors, I'd wager that not a single person that I have a social connection with in Chapel Hill voted for The Trumpster. But I know for a fact that there are people that I have a work relationship with that voted for him, whether or not they held their nose when they did.
I also have a relationship with the western part of the state, where the textile mills have shut down and the mining operations have mostly moved out and logging has died down and the damn hippies have taken over Asheville and are starting to encroach on many of the smaller towns. The natives vote heavily GOP and every damn one of them had a Trump sign on their lawn - but they also have Confederate battleflags on their pickup trucks and voted hard for the state amendment banning gay marriage before the SCOTUS weighed in. I'll come back to this point in my next post. Yes, their lives are tough and in many cases ruled by opioid addiction and diabetes (go to Walmart in some of these towns and look at all the guys younger than me scooting around in the electric shopping carts). But their older siblings were meth addicts and their parents were potheads and alcoholics and their grandparents were 'shiners - things have sucked for them for generations. I really don't mean to be unsympathetic - I do get that they're in a tough place that has gotten progressively tougher due to a number of factors beyond their control.
I have no doubt that millennials living in Cambridge live in a different bubble and people living in Bugfuck, Mississippi live in another bubble still. Where I have issue is this idea that one bubble is more important or more real or more "American" than another. This idea that "the heartland" is the real America and the cities (in particular the coastal cities like NY and Boston and LA and San Fran) are "the other" and somehow less American. The map that shows the concentration of 50% of the US population in a fairly small footprint that is being used to justify the Electoral College says something very different to me - it says that we're undervaluing the votes of a large number of American citizens just because they live near their neighbors.
I (and many like me) have been accused of living in an echo chamber. Yeah, maybe. But we all do - that's the nature of social media as we tend to "friend", "follow" and listen to people that share our views. But we also have had a fundamental shift in the way news is sourced over the past 50 years that we are still coming to grips with. When I was a kid, it didn't matter where you lived - you got your news from a limited numbers of sources. Walter Cronkite or Howard K Smith or a couple of other national news anchors, your local newspaper (or two, depending on how large a town you lived in) and maybe a news magazine like Time or Newsweek. That was pretty much it as local TV news tended (and still tends) to focus on local crime, feel-good stuff and not much else.
Today there are 1000s of news (and "news") sources to choose from and we have access to an amazing number of information (and misinformation) sources. And therein lies both our path forward and our biggest challenge. I'll fully admit that I get much of my political news from Vox, TalkingPointsMemo and a handful of other progressive-leaning sourced. I also scan the Washington Post and NY Times and Raleigh N&O headlines and other more mainstream news sources. And I hit Twitter for posts from people that I think have good ideas and a good handle on what's going on. I like to think that I do some due dlilgence and check out sources and demand attribution and try to ensure that what I'm reading has a basis in objective truth. The wingnuts will deride you for depending on the NY Times as the defining source of your bubble - so will I as they've fallen well-short of what I expect a real investigative news source to do the past 18 months. Use multiple sources and question if they seem to be repeating each other.
I have friends though that get their information from Breitbart and Fox News and Hannity and Laura Ingraham and I just smh. I do read the stuff they post from time to time and it creates a fictional reality where elections are stolen from them and the only racism is reverse racism and Hillary killed Vince Foster and and and and I just can't read anymore. The point being, I guess, that there are echo chambers and there are echo chambers and we continue to struggle to figure out how to deal with outright, demonstrable lies that other have no issue completely believing and repeating ad nauseum.
So where we used to all get our news from kind of the same sources - at least everyone in Nashville when I was growing up had the Tennessean (morning paper), the Banner (evening paper) and three major network newscasts and not much else. Whether those news sources were impartial nor not, good or bad or whatever, we all got pretty much the same info. Now as part of our bubble choices, we also make news source choices that further focus us on our own bubble/echo chamber.
Where am I going with this? Hell, I don't know - I told you I was going to be rambling. But I guess I'm going a couple of places. One is that with the proliferation of news sources (and more importantly, access to them), there really is no excuse to NOT find better sources for your information than propaganda sites run by Trump's Goebbels. I get that they may tell you what you want to hear but that isn't necessarily the truth. When I read crap that people post from Breitbart, it is often almost always unattributed, patently false bullshit that assumes you've read the rest of their crap and believed it so it forms the foundation for the next layer of bullshit. I'm not saying that because it is reactionary, racist, sexist horse manure - I'm saying it because it is easily-researched and easily-refuted horse manure if anyone even half tried.
So yes, we're all in a series of sometimes-overlapping bubbles but so what? It is YOUR responsibility as a thinking, vote-having adult human to figure this shit out. Figure out who you can really listen to - not because they're telling you what you want to hear, but instead what you need to know. Labels: Life, Politics
Rhythm Alley Redux - 17 - Acknowledgements
I hope you guys have enjoyed this - it was a painful joy to put together.
Here’s a shout-out to the people and places that made our owning Rhythm Alley not only possible, but necessary...
Those that have gone on before:
David Enloe, Faye Hunter, Gil Templeton, Dan Cowett, Stephen Akin, Stacy Guess, Carey Floyd, Sally Dunning and one of my dearest friends, Kevin Bruce, who introduced me to much good music, to home brewing and to how to appropriately use “party” as a verb - I miss you, KeeBee.
The clubs and bars of the first half of the 80s:
The 9:30 Club, Friendship Station, Psychodeli, Cagney’s (DC area)
Culture Club, The Pier, Cafe Deja Vu, The Bear's Den, Fallout Shelter, The Brewery (Raleigh)
Milestone, Viceroy Park (Charlotte)
The Riff (Winston-Salem)
Secret Garden (Greensboro)
The Cave, Cat's Cradle (Chapel Hill)
The Bands:
The Fabulous Knobs, Fetchin' Bones, The Bad Checks, UV Prom, Snatches of Pink, The Connells, Johnny Quest, Don Dixon, Shakin' Sherman and the Blazers, Flat Duo-Jets, Foreign Bodies, Terminal Mouse, Let's Active, the dB's, Chris Stamey, Mike Cross, Touchstone, New Grass Revival, Bluegrass Experience, Red Clay Ramblers, A Number of Things, The Veldt, The Othermothers, Right Profile, SCOTS, Three Hits, The Graphic, The Wood(pecker)s, Hege V and the Bijous, Gumbo Ya-Ya, Rod Dash, The Dayroom Monitors, The Accelerators, The Phantoms, all the other bands that I’m forgetting or that we saw but were never able to book and most of all, The Pressure Boys
All the other peeps that helped us along the way, like Mike Beard, Matt Matthews, Tim and Mark Harper, Bond Kenneth Bond, Kelly Dalton, Jeff and Tracy, Zingo, Dan (the one that wasn’t Zingo), Diane Smith, Bryan Milosky, Barney Pilgrim and the countless other folks that helped behind the bar, in front of the bar, on the stage or on the dance floor.
Incredibly many thanks to Hooper “Lex” Alexander IV - the best friend this boy’s ever had or ever hope to have.
Finally, it feels weird to thank Jeannette, since we were (and remain) partners in every sense of the word but thanks, hon, for putting up with me for the last 30 years, including my (not-so-) ridiculous fantasy of owning a rock and roll club.
Labels: Life, Music, Rhythm Alley
Rhythm Alley Redux - 16 - August 1986
"Watch the flesh on your hand go transparent waving your last goodbye" - Fetchin' Bones, "All Clocks"
Schedule
01 - Shakin' Sherman and the Blazers
02 - Southern Culture on the Skids
I couldn’t have scripted a more anti-climactic ending to it all, for me at least. After rarely missing a show since we bought the club, I wasn’t even in the state for our last weekend. I was still desperately hanging on to my job in Greensboro so when the opportunity for training came up, I really didn’t have the option of turning it down. So I spent our last week of club ownership in a hotel in Columbia, Maryland while Jeannette was left to finish up.
The last couple of shows feel like they were just right for our last weekend. Our friends Shakin’ Sherman and the Blazers played for us one last time - somewhere I’ve still got a t-shirt that Sherman, Ronnie, Brian and Lee signed for me. I know I called the payphone next to the door during a break to say goodbye to the guys.
Photo of the infamous Blazers LP, still in shrinkwrap
Saturday was our first and only show with Southern Culture on the Skids, back when Stan, Leslie and Chip were playing with Rick (you know, that Rick, not the other Rick). We’d been flirting with dates for months - me trying to talk them into playing back when they were more associated with DR’s Cat's Cradle and then them trying to work something out with us after the Cradle closed. By all accounts (why the ^$%@@%^@ wasn’t I there!?!), it was an excellent wake, which included Jeannette and the gang giving away mementos from the backbar (thankfully saving the bar monkey for me).
The next day Jeannette got on a plane and flew up to BWI to meet me, where we spent the week with me at an IBM mainframe class and Jeannette resting and recovering at the Columbia Place Mall.
Just like that it was over, and a couple of months later we were gone, heading down to Charlotte for my new day job. I went down first to sign the lease on an apartment down at the end of Park Road near Pineville. Fetchin’ Bones was at the Milestone that night so naturally I went - somehow my friend Tom Beckett ended up crashing on the floor of the apartment with me (I honestly don’t remember whether that was planned or if it just happened). I worked for a company down in Rock Hill until they consolidated the data center with one in Lancaster, which was a bit of a drive but at least it was against traffic. In the meantime we spent our time learning Charlotte from a different part of town than I’d grown up in, seeing the occasional show at the Milestone or going dancing at the Pterodactyl Club. Another year and we were back in Chapel Hill, but it was obviously not the same.
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30 years later, it’s not Bo Diddley or King Mackerel or New Grass Revival that I usually think about when I’m reminded of the Alley.
It’s Sonar Strange filling the room with her incredible voice before a sound check - just warming up with no one there other than me and Jeannette getting the place ready for the night.
It’s the first time I heard a 17 year old Dexter Romweber ripping “Riiiioooooottttt” from somewhere around his groin as he and Crow launched into “Riot on Cell Block Number 9” at a Flat Duo-Jets all-ages show. (That one still gives me chills.)
It’s the smell of Obsession that mixed with the smell of sweat and stale beer for days after a Connells show.
It’s the intense focus on the face of Andy McMillan of Snatches of Pink sitting on the front row and watching the players in Lo Jai after winning tickets from WXYC.
It's the Othermothers going from an excruciating sound check to one of the tightest, most spot-on sets I ever witnessed.
It's guys like After Hours and Uncle Bonsai and Antic Hay and others playing their best for an almost-empty room because that's what you do.
Most of all, it’s the huge grins on the faces of the crowd on those nights when the band was cooking, the beer was flowing, the feet were moving and there wasn’t a damn thing wrong in the world. Luckily, that’s something I can still get at Frank's Cradle or the Haw River Ballroom or the Artscenter or any of the other venues that have taken the place of the Alley.
Go listen to live music, people! And support your local rock club.
Labels: Life, Music, Rhythm Alley
Rhythm Alley Redux - 15 - July 1986
“So shut your mouth - how can you say I go about things the wrong way?” - The Smiths, “How Soon Is Now?”
July:
05 - Touchstone
06 - Touchstone
11 - The Connells with Light in August
12 - The Woods with Diminshing Returnz
17 - Mojo Nixon with the Naked Ramblers
18 - Dash Rip Rock with the Flat Duo-Jets
19 - The Pressure Boys with A Number of Things
24 - Rod Dash with the Graphic
?????????????
On the 2nd of July, John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China” hit the theaters. We didn’t see it then but a few years later it became one of our favorite movies. It was always a mess of a movie, but it made a hell of a lot more sense when it was finally pointed out that Kurt Russell’s character - Jack Burton - is not the hero of the piece. He’s the bumbling sidekick - the comic relief that always has the best intentions but rushes headlong from one dumb move to another. Sometimes those dumb moves work out, sometimes they don’t. It ought to be clear by now that I’m the Jack Burton of this story and Jeannette is Wang Chi, the real hero. I’d pushed us to jump on the opportunity when Judy decided to sell, over the objections of the person who’d studied and trained and prepared for this and knew it wasn’t the right time and it wasn’t the right situation, as much as we wanted it to be. She’d done an incredible job of holding everything together to this point and now despite working her ass of to make it a success, we were going to have to get out.
I’ve somehow lost the June and July pages of my booking calendar and our bookkeeping was getting a little sloppy by this point, so I’m sure I’m missing a few dates. What information I’ve got is from the closing sheets that are left but I’m sure a couple are missing.
I’ve been trying to give everyone some insight into what was going on behind the scenes but I’m not going to talk much about the sale of the Alley later in the month. It was sad and tragic and awful and heartbreaking and still makes us angry on a number of levels for a number of reasons to this day. I’d rather focus on the last few shows we did, as much as I can piece the schedule together. The only thing I’ll say is that Jeannette is quite justly proud of the fact that we didn’t go under, we didn’t walk away from it - we sold it as a viable business and a going concern.
While I’m missing some some dates from July, what I do have includes some pretty damn good shows. The 4th of July was on a Friday so we didn’t try to book anyone that night.but our friends from Touchstone were back in town and did shows Saturday and Sunday. They weren’t badly attended for a holiday weekend (around 100 folks each night) so it kept the weekend from being a washout - and we got to see our friends.
Photo of the cover of Touchstone’s “Jealousy” LP
The Connells show the next Friday with Light in August was one of their biggest yet and might have yielded our highest beer sales total for a show that wasn’t an all-day affair, although that might be a little misleading as their crowd was much more apt to hit the imports than the PBRs.
I’ve got the Woods playing with a band called Diminishing Returnz on Saturday. I’m wondering if this is the night I remember when a bunch of college-age folks showed up for the opening band and then left soon after their set. It felt a little bit like a changing of the guard, except that I don’t remember the opening band ever doing anything after that.
That might also have been the Saturday afternoon when I was putting up posters on the west end of Franklin Street and ran into Richard Fox, who owned a mobile recording studio and had recorded a couple of shows at the Alley. He introduced me to the two guys he was going in with to buy Cat’s Cradle. One was former UNC fullback Billy Johnson, who I’d met a couple of times before through mutual friends. The other guy was a skinny dude I’d never met before, name of Frank.
If that was some sort of passing of the torch, I didn’t recognize it at the time. In retrospect, if we handed a torch to Frank, he turned it into a bonfire. With all of the club owner turnover in Chapel Hill since the early ‘70s, it’s remarkable that Frank has owned the Cradle for almost 30 years. What’s even more remarkable is what he’s done with it and what he’s done for live music in the Triangle. What might even be the most remarkable thing is that by all accounts, he’s done everything in the right way and been willing to help everyone else out along the way. If I wore a hat, it would be off to him.
I realize that Mojo Nixon isn’t everybody’s cup of beer but I liked him and was pretty happy to book him. Mojo counted as near-local - he was actually born in Chapel Hill but his family moved to Danville when he was a kid. His second release came out sometime around when he played our place and was getting some attention (both good and bad) from MTV. We put him with the Naked Ramblers and got a damn nice turnout, especially for a Thursday.
There was a guy that played sax some with Dex and Crow (Derrick, maybe?) that used to come in all the time and bug me to book Dash Rip Rock, a cow-punk-billy band from New Orleans. They were doing a Southeast tour so we brought them in on Saturday to play with the Jets in a double-bill. I love their cassette and wished I remembered more about the show but I may have to admit that I was beginning to fade a bit by that time.
Dash Rip Rock cassette insert
While I might have started to fade, I’ll never forget the last Pressure Boys show we did, for a bunch of reasons. We needed a good show in order to pay off our final bills for one thing, and A Number of Things and the P-Boys definitely delivered. But in their tradition of starting shows late, they were still on-stage when last call came around. I was at the door when an over-dressed middle-aged woman who looked completely out of place came in after last call and sat at the bar and tried to order a beer. Lex and Kenneth both turned her down and she was still at the bar a couple of minutes later when a guy in a badly-fitting suit brushed past me and started behind the bar. Lex started over... oh, hell, let me let Lex tell it.
"I'd had my usual six or seven cups of coffee that evening while tending bar, so I was wired so tightly I was hearing with my hair.
You'd always told me not to let anyone behind the bar, ever, for any reason. And so, when this unassuming guy (and that's all I remember about him) let himself behind the bar, I did what you'd told me to do: I reached under the bar for the baseball bat and headed toward the guy.
He pulled out a badge, and I pulled up so short I'm surprised I didn't tear a hamstring. He identified himself as an ALE agent, and all I could think in that moment was that I was incredibly lucky not to have been shot. (I don't even know if the guy was carrying; I assume he was, but, to his credit, he never came close to going for the weapon.) At that point, I went in the back and found you, and I really don't remember much about what happened after that, other than that I was never so happy in my life to pour myself a Harp draft after the agent had left and we'd locked the doors for the night.
I have come closer to dying in my life, but never so close to dying stupidly. Fark wasn't around then, but "please do not let me die a Fark headline" seems a reasonable request. Fortunately, the ALE agent that evening was a reasonable guy."
I'm not sure I agree with Lex' "reasonable" comment but he's nicer than me. After the little attempt at entrapment failed, our next challenge was to clear the room of beer in about 20 minutes, while the Pressure Boys were still finishing up their encore. Jeannette kept the ALE officer busy while Lex, Kenneth and I started going through the crowd, snatching near-full beers out of people’s hands and slam-dunking them into the garbage bins. We made it, but only barely. And Lex had a story that he’ll tell the rest of his life.
Cover of the Pressure Boys “Rangledoon” EP - complete with slip cover advertising the completely free blank side of vinyl!
There’s a scene near the end of “24 Hour Party People” portraying the last night The Hacienda was open. Tony Wilson had made his way to the balcony after meeting and greeting his way through the crowd but hadn’t yet brought up the house lights and sent everyone out while exhorting them all to riot and pillage and steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. He’s actually got a moment alone on the balcony overlooking the packed dance floor and for the first time his expression, seen through the strobing lights, is completely relaxed (or blank, depending on your viewpoint). Jeannette and I recognized that look in each other when we first saw the movie - for me, I equate it with that last night with the Pressure Boys. I knew it was all about to come crashing down but stepping from my post at the door into the main room and standing by the soundboard watching the heaving dancefloor, I also knew we’d been a part of something special - something that had meaning even if I wasn’t sure what that meaning was.
I have no recollection of the last weekend in July. Hell, I don’t even know for sure we were open, other than I have a closing sheet for Rod Dash and the Graphic (odd pairing) for that Thursday night. But we weren’t quite done yet.
“When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: ‘Have ya paid your dues, Jack?’ ‘Yessir, the check is in the mail.’” - Kurt Russell, “Big Trouble in Little China”
Labels: Life, Music, Rhythm Alley
