Photograph by Mark Gilliland
When Mississippi Nights hosted its last night of live music, on Friday, January 19, there was a flurry of heartfelt eulogies to the club, which had featured a who’s who of national touring acts over more than 25 years of operation. Missing in these mournful praises was an important historical note: With Mississippi Nights vanished the last trace of the original map of indie rock in St. Louis.
It had mapped, to some extent, a battlefield. The Delmar Loop, a shadow then of its current shiny self, was the plucky David of no-name indie rockers, and Laclede’s Landing was the Goliath of cover bands and “original” groups that tended to sound exactly like some name national act. Cicero’s Basement Bar epitomized the underground scene of the Loop, and Mississippi Nights was the big broad face of the Landing.
The types of bands that thrived in these two distinct realms could have come from different planets. The indie kids at the old Cicero’s—most famously Uncle Tupelo—had hair in their eyes and baggy T-shirts advertising something obscure on their chests. The cover bands and sound-alikes at Mississippi Nights—most famously the Eyes—had their hair teased up in the air and tight leather or spandex on their chests.
The music editor of the Riverfront Times, Annie Zaleski, wrote that it was “fitting” for the Bottle Rockets to headline one of Mississippi Nights’ last gigs. Not really. She was referring to the fact that lead singer Brian Henneman’s first bands had played there, but for people with a longer memory of this music scene, it was deeply ironic and a sign of how much things have changed: The Bottle Rockets grew out of the indie scene on the Loop and were for a long time unknown and unloved strangers in the cavernous clubs of the Landing.
Cicero’s Basement Bar bit the dust in 1997, moving down the Loop and up the food chain, and now the other pole of this classic St. Louis musical polarity, Mississippi Nights, is gone as well. There is a profound truth about the culture of St. Louis—not only its musical culture—to be found in the vanishing of this dichotomy. It relates to the rise of the Internet and then the explosion of user-generated content. You know, that ongoing cultural transformation that inspired Time magazine to declare that “you” were the Person of the Year in 2006 because you (we) now create our own world, or at least our own media environments.
The conceptual divide between the Loop and the Landing dates from an era when the idea of “alternative” music and culture still had some meaning in St. Louis. It signified a relatively small group of people—citizens, fans, consumers—who made an effort (and you had to make an effort, in those days) to escape mainstream radio, television and film and create for themselves and their small peer group something different. Indeed, those of us who were creating in this subculture were often told just that by people in the mainstream when they heard our efforts: “That’s … different.”
The local writer and producer Roy Kasten once observed that the Internet “made it easier to be cool.” That is what strikes me now, in a St. Louis music scene that has outlived and outgrown the David-and-Goliath days of the Loop versus the Landing. Just about any aspect of what used to be called “alternative” culture is now readily accessible, with its own MySpace forum and underground hangout. However much we may miss Mississippi Nights or the old Cicero’s, it is indeed a different world—and I think that’s pretty cool.
Chris King was a founding member of Enormous Richard, contemporary of Uncle Tupelo. Now he is a local editor and arts producer.
