Rockafellas and Me, Part 6: Friends and Favorites

One of the things Rockafellas always seemed to allow was a close-up relationship between the bands and the audiences, whether it was hanging out in the parking lot before and after the show, or sticking around for all-night drinks in the Purple Pit, the level of access was always on a personal level.

Two of my favorite bands during the 80s were the Silos and The Reivers, and there was a week when both of them played at Rockafellas within a couple days of each other. The Reivers played first, on tour supporting their first Capitol Records album, Saturday. The Austin, Texas band had a front line consisting of the powerful voice of Kim Longacre and the deeper, more grounded vocals of John Croslin, which gave them a unique sound that really has no counterpart in current music that I can think of, other than the interplay between Caitlin Cary and Ryan Adams in the early days of Whiskeytown.
They had an off day or two after their show and decided to stick around to hang out with their friends in the Silos. Before the Silos show, I had the opportunity to spend an hour or two talking with Cindy Toth, the bass player for the Reivers, and we hit it off enough that we traded a couple of postcards in the mail that year.
The Silos had just released what has become their classic album, Cuba, and they were sporting the classic lineup of the band, which included Bob Rupe ( Who later joined David Lowery’s new band, Cracker) as well as the lone remaining original member in the current version of the band, Walter Salas-Humara. These guys were alt-country before there was a term for it, and songs like, “Tennessee Fire,” still hold up well today. Walter even played a special request for me that night—I had cornered him before their set and asked for a song off the Silos debut album, “A Few Hundred Thank You’s,” Which Walter apologetically said they didn’t really play live any more, but he’d see if he could remember it. He did, and to this day I can still hear the song and sing all the words without the lyrics in front of me.

Poi Dog Pondering came through Columbia for the first time with only an EP available, and they busked on campus at USC before talking Rockafellas into a show. Their shiny, happy acoustic pop collective had one guy who was touring with them only until they got to New York City (they started in Austin, Texas), where he would join up with another band, Javelin Boot.

Another similar band was Tiny Lights, who hung out before their show on the picnic table that was out in front of the club, kind of between it and the Subway shop next door. They played funky, acoustic pop/rock and released several really good albums, but their biggest contribution to music is probably their cello player, Jane Scarpantoni, who has gone on to play with everyone either in studio sessions or touring. Google her name, or look her up on Allmusic.com.

House of Freaks, somebody reminded me, blew the roof off the place with their two-man band, years before White Stripes popularized the lineup. Drummer Johnny Hott was an unconventional percussionist, with a 55-gallon barrel for an upright bass drum, and his ‘sticks’ were baseball-bat sized wooden rods with what looked like actual baseball bat donut weights on them. “Bottom Of the Ocean,” is still a great song, as is, “40 Years.”

Another personal favorite was Thin White Rope, a California band whose music was an unclassifiable blues/metal/prog rock blend. Guy Kyzer, the singer, had a gravelly, guttural voice that fit the rhythmic tension of the band’s Can-influenced tunes perfectly. Their one show at Rockafellas was loud, fast, and kind of a blur, to be honest.

Most of the rest of my Rockafellas memories are also much like a blur. I’m as surprised as anyone else that I’ve remembered as much as I have this past week—thanks for the comments and emailed memories you’ve passed along, too.

I’ll close by noting a couple of shows that didn’t happen, for one reason or another. As one reader commented, Skinny Puppy was scheduled to play the club, a show booked by Carl Singmaster of Manifest. The part of the story I’ve been told over the years was that the band arrived at the club and said they couldn’t do the show because the stage was too small for their full lights/smoke/etc. production. They then left. Carl reacted by pulling their albums from his stores for years afterwards.

The night Hurricane Hugo came to town, or maybe the night after, there was a band called the Sea Hags scheduled to play, an L.A. group that was being touted at the time as the “next Guns N’ Roses,” or something like that. They even made it to town, but the show could not go on due to lack of electricity, of course.

This weekend’s shows will have plenty of power, I’m certain, and I’m looking most forward to the reunions of Treadmill Trackstar and 49 Reasons, as well as the set from Sourwood Honey. In the words of another veteran of Rockafellas’ stage, Webb Wilder, “Work hard, play hard, eat hard, sleep hard, Rock hard, grow big, wear glasses if you need ‘em.”

Rockafellas and Me, Part 5: The Shows Must Go On (and on, and on, and…)

Only a few more days until the Rockafellas Reunion and I keep remembering stuff. Here, then, are some more great shows I’ve dredged up from my admittedly spotty memory.

Hoodoo Gurus were a hugely popular band on the airwaves of WUSC, so when they played Rockafellas the place was packed. “Bittersweet,”
Leilani,” “Kamikaze Pilot,” they played them all, even their current MTV song of that particular time, “Good Times.” The Bangles sang backup on the recorded version, too bad they didn’t make the tour. The refrain is particularly fitting for the Rockafellas Reunion, however—“All the good times we’ve had, we’ll have again.”

Roger Manning was another WUSC-created phenomenon, and he’s played Columbia a few times over the years—first, however, at Rockafellas. His first album, on SST, is still his best, showcasing the anti-folk, punk blues acoustic music he helped create in New York City, along with Kirk Kelly, Cindy Lee Berryhill, and others in the 80s. All of his songs had “Blues” in the title, and most were numbered, too, like, “Train Blues #4,” or something like that. To this day, I couldn’t tell you the name of any of the songs on that debut, but I could probably still sing along with them.

The O’Kanes are kind of a lost name in country music circles, but they played Rockafellas on what I think was my 20th birthday. Their album, Tired Of the Runnin’, was pretty good, if a bit commercial, I thought, so I went to hear them that night. The duo consisted of Jamie O’Hara and Kieran Kane, an arranged marriage of sorts for two Nashville songwriters that worked for a few years. Kane, has gone on to more indie-country ways with his stake in the Dead Reckoning label and a string of albums with folks like Kevin Welch, O’Hara as far as I know is still writing songs in Music City.

I first saw and heard Angie Aparo at Rockafellas, on the back deck if I remember correctly. His 1997 album Out Of the Everywhere included a minimal, acoustic band, and that’s what he had with him the numerous times he played on the deck. His bald egghead look came later, back then Angie sported a pretty substantial goatee and usually a knit cap on his head. His percussion player had originally been in Edwin McCain’s first band, and if you ever find a copy of Edwin’s first demo tape, that guy’s on it. Angie was the kind of guy who inspired a rabid following, I still listen to that first album a lot.

Uncle Green was another Atlanta act that played Rockafellas a bunch. The first time I saw them was after they’d released their first DB Records album, the one with, “Chemical Way,” on it. They played a great cover of T Rex’s “Jeepster” that night, as I recall, but the funniest thing that happened was actually before the show, in the men’s room. I was tending to my business when someone else about to do the same came in, talking to his buddy about whether they were going to pay to see the band or head somewhere else. I said something complimentary about the band, I don’t remember what, and convinced them to stay for the show. Well, out of the ‘stall’ section of the mens room comes Matt, Uncle Green’s lead singer/guitarist, who had heard the whole exchange, and he thanked me for the plug and introduced himself. Later, he gave me a copy of their new LP, which I still have.

More to come….

Rockafellas and Me, Part 4: Big Names, Small Names

With the responses I’ve received from the previous installments of these musical memoirs relating to the many great shows I saw at Rockafellas, my memory was jogged about a few that I have so far left out, so here they are in no particular order.

Some of the artists I was lucky enough to have seen at Rockafellas were pretty big names already, while some went on to become bigger names. One of my favorite shows there ever was when Roger McGuinn played a solo acoustic show—I’m drawing a blank on the year but I think it was around 1988 (He played twice, the second show a year or so later he played solo but with his electric Rickenbacker guitar, not the twelve-string acoustic.), and around a hundred or so people showed up for what was a pretty pricey show for the venue—I think it was fifteen dollars to get in. McGuinn, of course, was the voice of The Byrds, the classic California folk-rock band, and this show was at a time when McGuinn really wasn’t making albums (His first “comeback” album, 1990’s, Back From Rio, was still a couple of years off.).
The best way to describe the cozy, communal vibe at this show is to compare it to a campfire sing-along, where everyone knows the words to all of the songs. McGuinn played the hits, from, “Eight Miles High,” to, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and he played slightly lesser-known songs like, “Chestnut Mare.” That song he included in a little mini-set within the show where he told a story about aliens landing and all sorts of odd thing happening—“Hey, Mr. Spaceman,” was in this portion of the show, also.
The most memorable thing about this particular night, however, may have been how it ended. McGuinn stood outside the front of the club signing anything anyone had in their hands, from old Byrds album covers to the back of my torn yellow ticket stub. When the last person had finally wandered off to find their car, McGuinn himself put his guitar in the back of his Volkswagen Van and drove up Devine Street, all by himself, presumably to the next town and his next gig. I can’t recall another major rock musician I’ve ever been that close to who had absolutely no entourage, no pretentiousness, and just an utterly disarming thankfulness that people still came out to hear him play and sing.

My 21st birthday was spent inside Rockafellas, though I don’t remember much of the band playing that night. I remember who it was—Matt “Guitar” Murphy of the Blues Brothers Band fame—I just don’t remember much because it was 10 cent draft night before 10 pm those days, and my girlfriend at the time bought me enough cups of draft to last me until I puked or passed out, whichever came first. (For the record, I don’t recall doing either.) My parents actually came to town, bought me a birthday dinner down the hill at Yesterday’s, then walked up to Rockafellas with me to buy me my first legal drink. We walked inside, they looked around for a few minutes, bought my drink, and left me there. To this day, the only thing my mother remembers about it was that the floor was sticky.

Faith No More played Rockafellas a couple of times, including one show just as their song, “Epic,” was starting to get some major airplay nationwide. The crowd was a sweaty, over-capacity mass of people, with a mosh pit up front throughout the show. At one point, the pit consisted of a half-dozen girls (Including my future wife, wearing Army boots) and the guys they were with were all positioned around the edge of the pit slackjawed, watching the ladies rocking out.

The grunge epidemic didn’t leave Rockafellas unscathed, with several major figures in the flannel nation playing in the early 1990s. One memorable show included Mudhoney and the Fluid, which was a Sub Pop Records band that for my money was the best live band that label ever had. Another show included Das Damen, Firehose, and Screaming Trees. The Trees went on to fairly big things for a few years, while former Minuteman Mike Watt’s band Firehose didn’t last too long either. Das Damen is the one on that bill that nobody today remembers, yet they were a pretty intense, psychedelic band—not grunge in the least, though.

North Carolinian Don Dixon is best known these days for his reputation as a record producer, but even though he was already producing back in the 1980s, he was also putting out his own albums. One night at Rockafellas, Dixon played with a backing band that included Robert Crenshaw (Marshall’s brother) on drums, Angie Carlson (Let’s Active) on keyboard, Dixon himself on bass, and Spongetone Jamie Hoover on guitar. For the encore, Dixon got back on stage and looked behind him at the paintings of rock icons that hung on the wall above the original stage—pictures of John Lennon, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. He then proceeded to announce that for the encore the band would play a song from each of the artists in those paintings. With Hoover in the band, “Revolution,” satisfied the Lennon requirement, while “Roll Over Beethoven,” took care of Chuck. I can’t remember what Elvis song they played, but when it came around to Dylan the band was almost stumped. Carlson made the mistake of claiming to know the chorus and melody to “Like a Rolling Stone,” and so Dixon made her play it—she only got through a chorus or two before the band collapsed into, “Hey, we don’t know the rest of this song,” territory.

Lava Love was a cute, poppy little retro band from Atlanta, all Beach Blanket Bingo attitude and Jan & Dean guitar riffs. The best time I saw them at Rockafellas was when they were playing to a small crowd one evening and a drunk patron kept yelling for various Bon Jovi song requests. Rather than play an actual Bon Jovi song, Esta, the singer, just introduced every song, “This is a Bon Jovi song,” even though it was actually one of their own originals.

More to come….keep the responses coming

Album of the Week: Give Us Your Poor–17 New Recordings to Help End Homelessness

Various Artists
Give Us Your Poor
Appleseed Recordings

“Maybe they’ll go away if you don’t see them,” says the unnamed narrator in the opening track of this eye-opening, heart wrenching collection dedicated to raising awareness of the ongoing homelessness problem in the United States. An issue that seems to have been shuffled to the back of the social agenda in recent years, homeless people are still all around us, and the statistics are a sobering reality. As one of those in a family that’s one or two missed paychecks away from being out on the street myself, these recordings raise both fear and hope. Fear, that any of these stories could be about me someday, and hope that millions more can be lifted out of the cycle of poverty and homelessness by opportunities offered through people and organizations that care.

The concept of this compilation is built around the homeless issue, with many of the contributing artists either currently or formerly homeless themselves. There are famous homeless people here, like Jewel, whose, “1,000 Miles,” was written when she was living in her Datsun hatchback. The unknowns, however, are the ones who give the most surprising performances.

Eagle Park Slim, an on-again, off-again homeless blues musician, recorded his own, “Baby, Don’t Let Me Go Homeless,” with the urbane blues singer Keb’ Mo’, going voice to voice with him in an impassioned performance that belies the desperate need expressed in the song’s plea for a place to stay for the night.

Natalie Merchant takes the Mighty Sam McClain and a cast of other unknowns on the Tracy Chapman-like blues riff, “There Is No Good Reason,” written by then 15-year old homeless Minnesotan Nichole Cooper.

Michelle Shocked and formerly homeless musician friend Michael Sullivan pick gently around his song, “Becky’s Tune.” Sullivan is now a homeless activist in Massachusetts, coming full circle in helping those in a similar situation to his own. It’s a simplistic, yet beautifully rendered ballad decrying the rich and powerful oppressing the poor and weak, made even more poignant with the presence of a 13 year old fan Shocked brought to the session to sing backing vocals on lines like, “Open your eyes, don’t tell me no lies, that you can’t feel the children’s pain.”

The one track here that could be a rock radio hit if you heard it sandwiched between Will Hoge and Tom Petty is actually a poem set to music by the re-formed Buffalo Tom. “Father Outside,” a poem by Nick Flynn, a Boston volunteer who worked with that city’s homeless population, in Bill Janovitz’ hands became, “Ink Falling (Father Outside).” It’s equally as rocking as any of the band’s early material with the musical accompaniment granted to the surprisingly lyrical verse, and it’s easily the best song here.

Family musician and former Del Fuego Dan Zanes contributes a typically bouncy tune, his take on Leadbelly’s “Boll Weevil,” which with its’ “They’re looking for a home,” refrain, somehow fits this collection’s theme. Add the sweet voice of eleven-year-old former homeless child Kyla Middleton, and the differences between “Us” and “Them,” become meaningless in they way they ought to be, with two people, formerly strangers but now fast friends and musical collaborators, connecting through the music.

It’s that hope of connecting through the music that the producers of this compilation must have, the outside chance that hearing these songs and the stories intertwined between and inside them will open up someone’s heart or mind to, as the liner notes state, “The assumption that homelessness is solvable and that we are all in this together.”
For more information see the following links:

http://www.shootingback.org
http://www.findinggracehomeless.org
http://www.giveusyourpoor.org
Appleseed Recordings

A much shorter version of this review was first published in Country Standard Time

Rockafellas and Me: Part 3, The Locals

Rockafellas and Me, Part 3: The Locals

Rockafellas played host to many national acts, but its most important function in the Columbia music scene was as the home base for a host of local musicians. The club was a magnet for them, and on nights they weren’t playing somewhere else you could count on seeing at least a dozen or more members of other bands in the crowd, especially if it was another local act on stage. Here’s a few random remembrances about several local bands that played Rockafellas frequently.

One of my earliest memories of seeing Danielle Howle was with the Blue Laws at Rockafellas. An acoustic group that played a recurring Sunday night gig there for a while, I only saw them once or twice. “Sitting On A Big Front Porch,” still one of my favorite songs of hers, dates back to repertoire of this band (and even earlier than that, really, as she’s referred to it as the first song she ever wrote), and her first recorded output is a version of it that appears on a 1987 compilation of local bands, Another Pesky Compilation Album. That particular take is just her singing and David Conway of the Blue Laws on guitar, recorded in his living room, but it’s still a powerful listen even now.

If you ever find a copy of this album, by the way, you might notice that my name is in the “thank you” section on the back cover. I’ll admit here, for the record, that it wasn’t from anything special that I did for the three WUSC DJs that put the comp together—it was because they held a fundraiser show at Rockafellas to pay for the pressing of the albums, and they took cash donations at the door, in addition to the cover charge that night, for “benefactors” of the project. The four or five names that are listed there are all people who gave five dollars or more to the cause that night, including me.

After Danielle hooked up with Phil and Dan Cook in Lay Quiet Awhile, they played Rockafellas numerous times. The most memorable may have been the 1994 album release show for their Delicate Wire CD on Daemon Records, where they were selling vinyl copies with individually hand-painted covers, and hand stenciled T-shirts (I still have my shirt, but no album). For some reason, the most vivid scene I can recall from a LQA show is the band ripping into, “Trees,” the one song of theirs written by guitarist Phil Cook. For a while, he and Danielle were an item, and watching them sing this one together—Phil took a big chunk of the vocals, an unusual thing for them—was sweet and inspiring at the same time.

The scariest local band I can remember playing Rockafellas was the Grease Guns, especially in the days when the Rev. Billy Ray Snakehandler was still introducing the shows. Ray Jicha, as the right reverend, was not a band member but an imposing, over-the-top emcee. He did his gothic preacher bit at the beginning of the band’s set, then they lit into their Stooges/Chuck Berry garage punk like they were late for a fix and needed to play to keep from getting the shakes from withdrawal. The two legacies of the Greaseguns came from Jicha, who went on to form the equally raunchy Glam Dogs, then the New Jack Rubies, and from Gregory Dean Smalley, the Greaseguns guitarist who moved to Atlanta and started the Redneck Underground. Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers wrote the classic, “Living Bubba,” about Smalley’s contracting AIDS from a combination of unclean drug use and unprotected sex, but still playing over a hundred shows the year before he passed away, fighting until the end. It’s a great song—look it up. Very few of the stories about Smalley even mention his Columbia roots, however, or the Greaseguns.
As for Jicha’s later bands, the Glam Dogs were especially entertaining. One night they were playing and a guy in the front who had obviously wandered in unaware of what he was getting into started making loud cracks about Jicha, who was wearing his usual makeup–eyeliner, lipstick, etc.–on stage. After one too many “Hey, are you a fag?” catcalls, Jicha came off the stage and hit the guy in the head with the microphone, before dropping the mike and going after him for real. I think the band actually got banned from the club for a while for that incident, too.

Bachelors Of Art were another band that practically lived at Rockafellas, and played so many shows they all kind of run together for me. The band was at its best around 88-89, before they started becoming too heavy and lost some of the gothic-dance vibe that made them so cool in the first place. Tom Alewine was the first guitarist I remember seeing in person using a delay pedal, like the Edge from U2, and his foot rarely left that pedal for the majority of BOA’s songs. Somebody once commented to me that Tom didn’t play a guitar, he played an effects pedal that just happened to be hooked up to a guitar.

The Vectors are one of those local bands kind of lost in the shuffle for most people. They played Rockafellas numerous times, but I don’t remember them ever having an official album out despite some pretty cool original tunes. They played a bunch of cover tunes between their own songs, with a heavy emphasis on classic rock from the Stones, the Dead, and others. The first time I heard a band cover, “Dead Flowers,” it was the Vectors.

Isabelle’s Gift were just getting started the fall I finished up at USC, but I remember seeing one of their first few shows, with Chris Sutton dressed up in a nun’s habit singing this freaky, swaggering hard rock. By the time I moved back to town in 1993, the band was a monster live act, a level they have somehow managed to maintain to this day.

More To Come…

Rockafellas and Me: part II

(This is the second in a series of posts sharing some memories of the late, great Columbia SC live music club Rockafellas, which is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its closing with two nights of shows next weekend featuring many of the local bands that played there)

Rockafellas’ size was in almost opposite proportion to its reputation—the club only held 225 legal capacity, and the original stage was a 10 x 12 platform at one end of the narrow building, with a cutaway into the outside windowsill where they usually stuck the drummer, who had to be careful not to bump his head, either while playing or when he got up to get off stage. In the later years the stage was expanded forward and the cutaway was eliminated, but it was still no wider than the room between the two exit doors on either side.

The most people I ever saw on the original stage was at a show with the Australian band Hunters & Collectors in the spring of 1987. The band had a full horn section among their 8 or nine members, and one or two of them actually had to stand on the floor beside the stage during the show. One of my favorite bands at the time, with a full-bodied rock sound that’s both bass and horn- heavy, it was an incredible show, with Mark Seymour (brother of Crowded House/Split Enz member Paul Seymour) an intense presence up front. So intense, in fact, that at one point in the show when a couple drunks up front were getting into an altercation right in front of Seymour in the middle of a song, he reached out and grabbed one of them by the t-shirt, yelling at him to stop or get the hell out of his show. Yes, the stage and the fans were that close together.

To illustrate how small the stage was and how close the fan-band connection could be, I have to mention the loudest show I ever heard at Rockafellas—The Flaming Lips. They played there twice, once as an opener and then a headliner. It was that second show I attended, around the time right after their Oh My Gawd! Album was released ( a cool clear vinyl platter I wish I still had a copy of—at WUSC we had to mark the places where the tracks changed with a Sharpie so we could cue the thing up easier). I got a spot right up front, with my knees touching the original, low stage. The drum kit was so big that the kick drum was only about four feet from me, and when the band started playing it felt like every whack of the kick pedal went right through me, like a sonic sledgehammer. The only other thing I remember about this show was the funny-tasting bubble machine they were using that we all later joked about having LSD in it or something, and the fact that this was the last rock show I attended without earplugs—a mistake on my part at the time, I’m sure, and any hearing loss I’ve suffered probably started here.

One of my favorite things to tell people about Rockafellas is the big-name bands who played there first, early in their careers. Dave Matthews made so many stops at the club most of the regulars didn’t even bother to go in when he was playing, choosing instead to hang out in the Purple Pit or outside. Hootie & the Blowfish played there, too, though Greenstreets tended to be a more common venue for them. Warrant, Skid Row, and a host of metal bands played there, too.

Edwin McCain was a frequent visitor in his pre-label days, too, with the Edwin McCain Band, as they were called at the time. I vividly remember one show, with Edwin wearing John Lennon shades and a paisley vest, looking like a young Van Morrison, and playing one of the best live versions of, “All Along the Watchtower,” I’ve ever heard—it was a slower, groovier take on the tune that most guitarists use to imitate the Jimi Hendrix rendition.

The last time, I think, that McCain played Rockafellas was after the first Atlantic album was released, which would make it about 1996? Anyway, he had the big Greyhound tour bus already at that point, and “Solitude,” was getting some good airplay, so the line to get in the place was a block up the street. My wife and I were crazy enough to go, so we went early and got in in time to see the opening act, a waif-ish little blonde girl with a guitar who said her name was “Jewel.” The poor kid was quite literally heckled off the stage after about twenty minutes by an over-capacity crowd who’d come to see their latest favorite son play his ‘hit.’
Somebody told me later that they put around 400 into the bar for that show, which is way, way over the legal capacity I listed above. Amy and I were sandwiched into the crowd at about the point where the bar had a lift-up door in it for the bar staff, which was lucky because after Jewel’s aborted opening set, Amy proceeded to have an asthma attack, brought on by the smoke and claustrophobia, probably. Equally lucky for us, one of the bartenders or bar backs, I don’t remember who but I’m grateful to this day for them, saw what was going on and opened up the lift-up door, allowing us to exit through the emergency exit door right behind it, into clean air. We never did go back inside, so I actually didn’t even see Edwin play that show.

My other favorite “I saw them when” story about Rockafellas concerns a band from the Athens/Atlanta area called Mr. Crowe’s Garden. They played the club on a Sunday night in the fall of 1989, a slow time at any bar, and only about ten people were there, including the bar staff. When they got up to play, the singer said they were just going to have some fun, and the band proceeded to play a 90 minute set of every classic 70’s rock song you can name, from “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo,” to, “Strutter,” and, “Deuce.” It was an amazing display and a great show, for almost nobody. I talked to the singer after the show, and he said they were releasing an album the next spring on Def American, a new label from Def Jam founder Rick Rubin. I didn’t think much more about it until January of 1990, I was fresh out of USC and working a record store job in Charleston when an elderly couple came in and bought two copies of a new album we’d just gotten in from a band called the Black Crowes. After looking closer at the album I realized this was the same band I’d seen at Rockafellas back in the fall. I had even been playing it in the store for several weeks without making the connection, but it clicked then. The couple who came in were an aunt and uncle of Chris and Rich Robinson, the two brothers in the band’s original lineup.

(More to come, including local band lore…)

Rockafellas and Me: A Musical Memoir

(This is the first of several posts I’ll be putting up this week and next, in preparation for the Rockafellas Reunion coming up November 16-17 in Columbia, SC, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the closing of the best little live music club this town’s ever seen.)

When I arrived at USC in the fall of 1985, Rockafellas was already becoming the place to be for great music. Unfortunately that freshman year, the legal age to enter was 19, so I missed out on shows like Black Flag because I was only 18 and couldn’t get in. The next year when the drinking age rose to 21, all the bars with live music instituted an 18-and-up entrance policy, no drinking allowed if you were under 21 of course. This was my chance, finally, and boy did I take it. For the next three and a half years I probably averaged three or four nights a week at Rockafellas, sometimes more, and the sheer number of bands I saw there still amazes me. There were hundreds of good shows, but back then I wasn’t taking notes, or pictures even, so what follows is a ‘highlights’ reel of sorts, with my best recollection of some select shows and other memories surrounding the storied club.

There were many bands I saw multiple times at Rockafellas, and not just the local bands. Regional touring acts were frequent visitors to the tiny stage, and repeat viewings were unavoidable even if I had wanted to not see them again.
I saw Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ for the first of dozens of times at Rockafellas around 1986 or so. They had just released their debut, Scarred But Smarter, and they were featured on a great compilation album from Atlanta’s 688 Club alongside bands like Dash Rip Rock, Arms Akimbo, and a few others I don’t remember. All I remember from the show was Kevn Kinney’s bleached blond long hair and the then-trio’s rapid shifts from energetic punk-infused hard rock songs like the debut’s title tune and, “Another Scarlet Butterfly,” and some cornpone honkytonk songs like, “Bring Home The Bacon.” I was hooked, and they have been a favorite of mine ever since.

WUSC was in its prime back then, and plenty of the bands played on the USC station made their way to the Rockafellas stage. An early favorite of mine, the Boston band Scruffy the Cat, were scheduled to play as the opening act for Dreams So Real the same night that R.E.M. played the Township Auditorium on their Life’s Rich Pageant tour, I think it was the spring of 1987. There were a group of WUSC DJs that went to see R.E.M., but left the show early because Scruffy was playing before the Township show would be over and we didn’t want to miss them. Dreams So Real were an Athens band that created a sound similar to R.E.M. and actually made a decent album or two, but that night we weren’t interested in anything but seeing Scruffy the Cat, who were an incredible live band.

There was something about those bands from Boston back then, so many of them came to Rockafellas and they were all good. In addition to Scruffy, the others included the Dogmatics, Dumptruck, The Bags, Bullet Lavolta, and the Neighborhoods. The Dogmatics only played there once that I remember, they were fun punk-ish rock. Dumptruck came through a couple times, they had a more REM/Feelies kind of atmospheric rock/pop groove going. The Bags were a great hard rock band with some insane, hook-filled tunes like, “What Do You Want,” and, “Tailbone,” both off of their Rock Starve album—if you ever see a copy of this record, buy it. Bullet Lavolta were on the borderline of the grunge era but I actually liked them better than most of what came out of the Seattle/Sub Pop scene a couple years later. They even put out a few releases on RCA records which are worth finding, but I don’t remember much from their shows at Rockafellas.
The Neighborhoods were one of, if not the best, bands to ever play Rockafellas, and I know that’s saying a lot but it’s the truth. Only a trio, the band took Aerosmith riffs and played them with what we’d probably call punk-pop abandon now. They were a dynamite live band, with an always unpredictable show. Singer and guitarist Dave Minehan had some interesting ideas about playing live, one of which was the band’s lighting. Instead of using colored gels over the light cans shining on them, they insisted on removing the gels to produce a nearly blinding white light on the band. The intensity of the lights matched the intensity of their playing, and the amount of sweat rolling off Minehan especially was so great he had clear plastic sheeting laid over his effects pedals. Their shows almost always included a covers portion, which they even had a name for, like, “Fun time,’ or something, and it was this portion of the set where they would play nearly anything they could think of, and even take requests from the audience for songs—everything from Cheap Trick, to Bon Jovi and more, and they always sounded better than the originals.
Dash Rip Rock, from New Orleans, were frequent visitors to Rockafellas also, and they put on such a great show that for a while they were billed as the best bar band in the country, or something like that. Of the times I saw them, nothing beats the show when Hoaky, the bass player, was doing a minibottle shot of Jack Daniels that someone reached up to him while he was playing. Taking it in his teeth, he proceeded to upend it, emptying the contents into his throat. Since this wasn’t the first one of these he’d had that night, this one decided to come back up, and while he continued to play whatever song it was they were doing at the time, he leaned forward off the side of the stage, where there was a walkway of sorts leading to an exit door on each side of the small stage, and proceeded to puke without missing a note. Now THAT’s rock ‘n’ roll.

More to come: seeing them “before they were big,” and memorable local bands and shows.

Rockafellas Reunion Myspace

Next Great American Band, Episode Three

After missing last week’s show, curiosity got the best of me and I tuned in to take some more punishment in the form of the Next Great American Band show’s third episode. It seems to have settled down into a kind of routine mediocrity, with nobody really standing out as the band to beat. Here are my observations on tonight’s performances, which included the bands doing one original song and one from Elton John and Bernie Taupin—bonus points to the show for acknowledging both John and Taupin, btw.

Sixwire—Their original, “Gotta Get Away,” was nothing special, and it didn’t even come across as particularly country, their chosen genre. Their Elton John song, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” was a nice choice for their harmony vocals, but there was no real subtlety to their version. Judges loved them, though. They’re the most “professional” sounding band on the show, which helps them both with the judges and the audience, who are the ones with the votes.

Tres Bien.—This was funny—I sat there while they played, “How I Feel,” their original song, thinking how much of a total Yardbirds rip-off it was, and then Dicko observed the same thing in his comments. I like their energy and enthusiasm, no matter how derivative they are–they remind me a lot of another very derivative, yet fun band, the Woggles. “Love Lies Bleeding” was a gutsy choice for a cover, if they indeed picked it themselves—it’s not often you hear this without its lengthy instrumental intro, “Funeral For a Friend.”

Franklin Bridge—“Love’s Fool,” their original song, had a lot of ideas that went nowhere –Not much to this tune, unfortunately. “Philadelphia Freedom” was the obvious choice for these Philly guys, but an overly busy arrangement ruined a great pop song. These guys need a good producer to beat some discipline into their song arrangements—again, Dicko and I agree.

Clark Brothers –“Country Time” was more of their fast picking, upbeat signature style, but
“Country Comfort,” was the most off the beaten path song choice of the night. That will probably hurt them because people don’t know it very well, but they sounded really good doing it. More country than Sixwire with half the band.

Light Of Doom—no good answer to the “how’d you get your name” question. Original song was “Light of Doom”, same as the band name, a sure sign of lameness in any band. These guys belong at the high school battle of the bands, where they’d kill, not on a national TV show competition where the judges can call them a ‘gimmick’. Points off for not knowing Bernie Taupin’s last name, then mispronouncing it when it’s stage-whispered to you.
Their take on, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” shows what a good song can do for a band that’s adequate musically but lacking in their own songs—this was the best they’ve sounded yet.

Dot Dot Dot–I think I liked this band better when they were called the Thompson Twins. Actually kind of a cool 80s retro sound on the original, “Stay.” “Your Song,” was probably the most faithful, note-for-note cover of the night for the first and last line, then they tart it up with their 80s retro style in the middle section–Makes me wish they’d done the whole song like they started and ended it, his voice actually sounded pretty good on those parts.

Cliff Wagner & the Old NO. 7 –“The Little White Chapel On The Strip” was another solid bluegrass tune, and “Honky Cat” was a nice choice, given a slippery, Leon Redbone-style Dixieland vibe.

The Muggs – I started out liking this band but tonight’s performances were awful. “Should’ve Learned My Lesson,” their original song, was simple, derivative blues riffage, and “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues,” well, for a heavy blues band, I guess a song with “blues” in the title is appropriate, but it really showcased the limitations of the lead singer’s voice. These guys will be gone next week, I’d bet.

Rocket—“Future Ex-Boyfriend” is more of their bratty girl punk-pop? I like these girls a lot more than some of the other bands in this competition, fun stuff. Even “Rocket Man was a respectable version, with an arrangement that fit the band’s sound. Gotta agree with the judges that the singer’s voice doesn’t fit the intensity of the songs—too cutesy.

Denver and the Mile High Orchestra – “All Night” sounded like a Barry Manilow song, not necessarily an insult from me but it was way too lounge-y, like something you’d hear in a hotel ballroom on New Year’s Eve. Ditto for “I’m Still Standing.” I’d dig these guys if I was drinking champagne at an open bar party, but can’t say they do much for me in this venue.

The Hatch and The Likes Of You were cut, and rightfully so—they were generic modern rock/pop with nothing to distinguish them from any other band.

I’m still waiting for a reason to keep watching this show, like a band that steps up and makes it worth rooting for them, but it hasn’t happened yet.