The Next Seattle: Memoir of a Music Scene Page 3

go into, say, a pizza joint, and you see a big sign offering ‘student discounts with ID.’ It makes you kind of feel like scum. So that’s why I created Hautean Night at Seattle. If you’ve got a Terre Haute address on your driver’s license, well look, it says right here on the poster ‘Show a driver’s license with a Terre Haute address, get in for $1 every Wednesday.”

  “That sounds fair to me,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s pretty childish. But I still think it’s funny. Plus a lot of people show up.”

  "So," she continued, "what famous people do you know?"

  "Famous people? Oh, I’ve met a few. No big deal.”

  “No big deal? How many famous people have you interviewed?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  “That many, huh? That sounds like a bunch to me.”

  “Yeah, I guess that ‘a bunch’ would be a fair approximation.”

  “You make it sound boring. I mean, with all the people that you’ve interviewed, no one has ever impressed you?... Jesus, and I thought I was bad...You mean not one person has impressed you?”

  I glanced down at my shoes and smiled sheepishly. “O.K.,” I admitted, “there was one person.”

  “Who?”

  “James Brown,” I said admiringly, “Jesus, I could have sat and listened to that man talk for weeks. Nothing like what you would expect. And one hell of an interesting guy.”

  I set my glue-covered brush down by the side of the road. I was sure that it would pick up loads of dirt which would then be transferred to whatever surface I slopped with glue, but I wasn’t particularly concerned about it. After all, what were a few little pebbles on a poster advertising Hautean Night? I reached into my breast pocket with careful fingers in an attempt to minimize the amount of glue adhering to my shirt, and pulled out my cigarettes.

  As I pulled the sticky cigarette up to my mouth, Samantha laughed at me. “Don’t you think that’s pretty desperate? I mean, look at what you’re going through there for that thing.”

  “Addiction is a powerful thing my dear,” I said as I rolled the flint of my now equally sticky lighter. Somehow, despite the layer of goop caked upon it, the lighter managed to fire up.

  “You know,” said Samantha, “this glue’s fairly flammable stuff, and you’re covered in it. You could be making yourself into a pretty good bonfire there.”

  “Them’s the risks you’ve gotta take,” I replied as I drew a deep drag from the cigarette. “If I were covered in gasoline I would probably still feel inclined to light that sucker up. It’s the old question of ‘are you riding the horse, or is the horse riding you?’ Well, I can tell you that horsey’s got the definite upper hand with me.”

  As I stood smoking, she picked up her can of glue and stack of posters and moved down to the next telephone pole.

  “Are you doing this for my benefit?” I asked as I dipped my brush into a thick glob of glue.

  “Doing what for your benefit?”

  “This.”

  “‘This’ what?”

  “This. The whole poster thing. Do you usually go out and do this thrilling work yourself? Or are you doing it for my benefit? I mean, you are the owner of the club aren’t you?”

  “Yeah”

  “Well common wisdom would have it that club owners don’t usually go out and get themselves covered in glue promoting their clubs.”

  She smiled. It was a smile of patience. A smile that said “I will take the time to explain to you that which should be perfectly obvious.” As she slapped up another poster with that smooth, expert motion she said, “Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t LA or New York. This is Terre Haute. Things are a little different here.” She stepped back from the wall in order to check her handiwork, “Besides, I enjoy doing all my own dirty work.”

  “Like making phone calls to the editors of music magazines?”

  There was that flash again. That look upon her face that told me that she was smart enough to know that she had won the important early rounds but that the fight was far from over. For a moment she made no reply. Just looked at me. She seemed to be sizing me up, trying to decide what sort of person I was, what I was “made of” as they say. After a moment she smirked and pointed a gluey brush at me, “They told you about the phone calls huh?”

  “Yeah. I think that everybody in the industry has heard about your phone calls. You’ve become a bit of well-circulated gossip. How many times did you call?”

  “Four hundred thirty seven,” she replied, “I counted. Four hundred thirty seven times. It’s my new lucky number. 4 - 3 -7...I should go buy a lottery ticket today and say gimme 4 - 3 - 7.”

  “Yeah, well rumor also has it that they got a little tired of you calling.”

  “Yeah, they mentioned that a few times. They also mentioned lawyers...But hey, you’re here aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I suppose that I am."

  “You industry people need to realize what’s going on here. Every day we get new bands being formed. You’ve got people who’ve played in cover bands trying to write their own stuff. You’ve got people whose parents made them learn an instrument now deciding that they really do want to play that instrument. You’ve got people who’ve never picked up an instrument in their lives picking up instruments. It’s amazing. And I know that at some point this whole town is just gonna explode in music. That Terre Haute’s gonna be the next Seattle.”

  I smiled and laughed. "Well," I said, “that was even sooner than your dad predicted.”

  “What?”

  “He said that if I stuck around for a few days, I’d hear you say that Terre Haute will be the next Seattle. That took less than an hour.”

  An interesting bar...

  The term “nightclub” really is one of the most accurate word usages in the English language. The nightclub is a place where you come together with a bunch of other people and form, for a limited time anyway, a like-minded tribe of people—a club. And the “night” part, well, I have always believed that a nightclub can only really exist at night. Sure, the physical space which it inhabits exists during the daytime. Sure, a person can enter that space from the sunshine of the outside world just as I had done earlier today. But only at night can that space exist in that dimension known as a nightclub. During the daytime it is just a dingy, black-walled room. The magic trickles away to that faraway realm where magic goes when not in use. But once the daylight melts away, that little room becomes that sacred place: the nightclub. So into this splendidly transformed space stepped I, David Martinez, and looked around the room for the first time.

  I must have arrived between sets. The music blaring from the speakers was Nirvana. And I’m sure that what with Kurt Cobain being dead and all they weren’t playing at this club tonight. On-stage, five young men criss-crossed the little area, pulling cables to the different microphones and instruments. These guys were setting up their equipment as simultaneously another group of young men removed their equipment. It was a sweet moment of chaos that I had seen a million times before. It was somewhat amazing that all of these people had been able to fit into that dinky stage area. But somehow they had. The transfer of equipment resembled a trail of ants passing crumbs down the line from one comrade to the next.

  The stage area was only slightly raised, I would say maybe two feet above the rest of the floor. So it was quite easy for those transferring the equipment to step onto and off of the stage. Personally, I believe that the best height for a stage is about four feet. I have seen many clubs where the stage area wasn’t even elevated, it was just another section of the floor. I have also seen one stage in a bar in L.A. which had to have been, I swear, twelve feet off the ground for a room that probably held, at max, 50 people—now that was a bizarre sight. But I think that four feet is the optimum stage height.

  I had to admit that it was a pretty good crowd for a weeknight. I’ve been to clubs where only 4 or 5 people show up to see a band—which must be discouraging for the band even though it happens al
l the time. But here were, I would guess close to a hundred people scattered throughout this monstrous room. The place could obviously hold a lot more, but still for a weeknight in the middle of nowhere this was damned impressive. The majority of the crowd members appeared to most certainly be college kids, just as Samantha had said. Although a fair number of people I estimated to be in their mid- to late-twenties—that group which felt much more comfortable hanging out with the college crowd than with the ‘dinner-and-cards’ set from the office. The remaining handful consisted of straggling thirty and over types as well as one man in the corner who I would swear couldn’t have been a day younger than eighty.

  In one corner near the stage I noticed a small cluster of kids who looked as if they had stepped out of London, circa 1975. They all had “punky” hair styles of every imaginable color and each one was dressed more wildly than the next. I had to wonder how that kind of look went down in a small city in Indiana.

  I checked them out more closely. Now, being a journalist—or at least being perceived as such—does offer a person certain license that others do not have. The most important of which I think I’ve already mentioned: you feel completely well within your right to ask complete strangers the most unbelievably personal questions. Another is that you feel absolutely no guilt about staring at people. After all, you’re observing. So I observed the kids in the punk outfits. Each had the