Thomas Crone on slowing down, growing up and mellowing out to mix tapes of yore
On a random weeknight, sometime in the early 1990s, friends of mine tracked me down at Cicero’s Basement Bar. We got a laugh out of it, because in those dark days before email, pagers and cells, you had to do a little detective work to keep track of your pals, ideally undertaken with a handful of quarters for the inevitable pay-phone usage.
In retrospect, their guess wasn’t that much of a risk. There were probably some weeks when I hit the dark, drippy Basement four times a week, with no fewer than two visits on a given Sunday-to-Saturday music calendar. The rest of the week, I’d split up between the Wabash Triangle Café, the Bernard Pub, Furst Rock, Kennedy’s, Mississippi Nights, the first Way Out, the first and second Cummel’s, countless bars long since abandoned, a few more outright forgotten and plenty of VFW halls tossed in for added color. Cheap covers, knockout bartenders and a wealth of people to kvetch with about the latest copy of Jet Lag or Spotlight … those were appeals, sure. But the bands were at the heart of those club-crawling days of yore.
And what bands!
Although only a few of the groups wound up achieving commercial success, the St. Louis rock scene of that time had a remarkable depth of talent and breadth of styles from the late ’80s to mid-’90s, everything on display from ska and Goth to mod and metal. Heady days, really, for fans of rock music. There were nights when 10 people were at a weeknight show at a venue where live music wasn’t normally featured. (Anyone remember Catch a Rising Star?) There were other nights, though, when you couldn’t move, as Uncle Tupelo or Three Merry Widows played to a packed house for a CD release party or tour closing set.
OK, gramps. All of that’s well and good. But someone doing the rounds today could write the same words in 15 or 20 years. There’s plenty happening today. Lots of good, local talent. Lots of options.
MySpace has made it easier than ever to spot talent. Even with inflation, covers haven’t really gone up all that much. The bartenders are still pretty, and the rooms sound better than ever. But when I’m out to hear local music, I find myself perilously walking that tightrope of nostalgia. Sure, I still go to see bands, I still buy CDs, but all my money and all my attention seem aimed toward groups that are firmly grounded in the STL rock scene of the last 10 to 15 years: Finn’s Motel, Ded Bugs, the Incurables, Walkie Talkie U.S.A., the Deserters, LucaBrasi. No offense to any of those good folks listed, but there aren’t a lot of twentysomethings in those groups or, at times, in the audience.
New bands? New blood? The youngsters? Oh, they’re out there.
They’re at the Cavern on a Wednesday, Carl’s 2 Cents Plain on a Thursday, the Billiken Club on a Friday or the Bluebird on a Saturday. Places that I seem to need a map to find these days.
And so the names continue to pile up. I haven’t gone to see and hear Berlin Whale, Say Panther or Victoria. Or Jumbling Towers. Or So Many Dynamos. Or .e. Or Target Market. Or, come to think of it, bands that I don’t even know exist. (I mean, really, how could I see them, then?)
A younger version of me would faint at the thought, but … most nostalgia-mongering is OK with me.
We’re all in transition, aren’t we? Traditions that once nourished us, we leave behind. The habits we develop are replaced by new ones. Once, I could almost trace my footsteps from the Red Sea to Cicero’s to the Elvis Room to the Wabash, way over on the other side of Delmar. A four-venue stop today? Not likely to happen. The need to pick up the latest CD by a group on the rise has been replaced by the thrill of digging into a dusty box and finding a cassette tape I’ve not heard since 1999.
New habits are being spotted, new patterns emerge. Seeing Fragile Porcelain Mice at an outta-the-way club like Top Shooters in Monroe, Ill.? I’m there, wouldn’t miss it. Listening to a mix CD of Judge Nothing, curated with care by Vintage Vinyl’s Jim Utz? What a gift. Finding an Urge cassette in the discount bin of Record Exchange? That’s a good day.
At moments, I wish a new group—maybe one of the ones listed above, the cats from the Jumbling Berlin Dynamos generation—will somehow connect with me, and the band’s sound will drag me into a new phase of listening and venue creep. But if not, I’m going to enjoy my contemporaries as they play and record their ways through adulthood. They’ll provide the soundtrack that I suddenly find so deliciously comforting.
