Skully’s is such a unique place because, for starters, it has occupied three wildly different locations, all of them along North High Street, each of them so dissimilar from one another that even I tend to forget about those earlier homes. Its current incarnation in the Short North has outlasted both of the other ones combined, however, and is legions more iconic, so this will naturally occupy the bulk of what we’re discussing here.
But first, a brief overview of its history, prior to arrival at this particular address. Skully’s started out as an underground (as in literally, below ground) dive bar on the OSU campus, which you accessed via some stairs along the sidewalk on High Street. In those days it was pretty much just a dank pool hall with four or five couches and an all-German Metallica tribute album on the jukebox. Then, in the late 1990s, when Campus Partners started buying up all the properties and knocking them down, owners Skully and Michele Webb were given a handsome payout of $172,605 to relocate – it was either that or hold out for the inevitable eminent domain proceedings. So for a short spell, they were then up in the Clintonville area, at the Graceland Shopping Center, although in this instance it was more of a restaurant than anything else. Finally, in November 2001, they opened up shop the current digs at 1151 North High, this expansion and refinement into the business’s greatest ever incarnation. Kind of like with Used Kids Records, who are also on their third home, you might say this is a “greatest hits” package of everything that worked in previous incarnations…except in this case, with the addition of a few brand new “tracks” which became more popular than anything else they tried before.
The first calendar listing I can find for them is Miss Kitty’s Hot Box, a burlesque show running from February 14 to 16, 2002. From day one, they’ve always featured that sizable stage, plenty of elbow room in front of it on the floor, and offerings centered around either live music or dance parties. Technically speaking, there’s a dash in the name: Skully’s Music-Diner. Most people do not trifle with the dash, but it dates clear back to their “coming soon” sign, before opening, and persists on their website logo, not to mention in plain sight on the official, somewhat famous and definitely glorious marquee to this day – in yellow, all caps font, below the cursive Skully’s and the stars which light up at night.
Foodwise, their menu is much better than you would expect at a venue like this, in fact would justify coming here just for that reason alone. Breakfast is available all day, there’s a decent selection of sandwiches, pizza, other pub grub, vegetarian/vegan options, even a children’s menu. Currently I’m on this run unearthing every detail I can find about 2006, though, so I’m going to start there, and expand outward to other years from this point. Expect much more detail as I work on the page. Presumably you know the drill by now – a little on the thin side at the moment, but bound to become as beefy and juicy as a Skully Burger by the time I’m finished.
Circa ’06, SoulGlo Sundays is a hiphop/funk/soul party with half off drinks for students; Monday nights from 7-10pm brought free pizza for everyone; Tuesdays were Service Industry Night, meaning half price drinks and no cover charge for everyone this applied to. Which seems like it must have been…half the constituent base, during that era; Thursdays were 80s Ladies night, playing the hit songs of that decade, whereby women got in free, also were given a free flower. There was free parking in a lot on the north side of the building, though I’m unsure if this is still true. As far as food went, they were quite proud of some deep fried Cajun calamari, which doesn’t seem to have survived to the current menu, but also their quesadillas, which do live on. Outdoor seating, and serving to 11 Mon-Wed, midnight Thu-Sat.
March 8 – The Walkmen. Their set list is known and runs as follows:
Don’t Get Me Down (Come on Over Here) This Job Is Killing Me Little House of Savages Emma, Get Me a Lemon Louisiana Danny’s at the Wedding Thinking of a Dream I Had Good for You’s Good for Me Rue the Day All Hands and the Cook Always After You (‘Til You Started After Me) Another One Goes By
April 5 – The Black Coin
April 7 – Jamnesia, The G.R.I.T.S, DJ Numeric
April 8 – it’s listed as a Dresden Dolls afterparty, but I don’t believe the Dresden Dolls themselves are taking the stage – instead, Zachery Allen Starkey, DJ True Skills, and Ocean Ghosts are, and I also see The Loyal Divide mentioned in one listing.
April 10 – Only Flesh play a CD release party
April 12 – Something for Rockets play. I also see mention of South and yet another one of Alpha Zentradi playing on this night. So I’m not sure if any of these are typos or if all in fact graced the stage here.
April 15 – Kill Hannah. They played Nerve Gas at the very least that night, and it sounds great, you can tell as much even through a so-so recording:
Shiny Toy Guns are also on the bill this night.
April 24 – Gil Mantera’s Party Dream, Shuttlecock, Black Cloud, Stylex. There’s at least one small clip of the very last bit from Shuttlecock’s set. They went on right before Gil Mantera:
April 28 – a CD release party from The Receiver.
April 29 – Sheldon Marsh
June 23 – Tough & Lovely play at 11pm. This is billed as their “Comfest” show but I’m not sure what that means, really. Other than occurring the same night as the beginning of Comfest.
July 6 – DJ Chuckstar oversees Ladies Eighties night, as is the case every Thursday during this stretch
July 9 – DJs Kenny Kim & Carma running Soul Glo Sundays – again, this is their standard weekly gig
July 10 – Mixed Tape Monday starring DJs Pegasi and Gypsy Rider.
July 22 – The Slide Machine, Melty Melty, Kristi Strauss & The Blue Medusa, Moonlight Chemist
July 26 – Obus, Lunarium
August 25 – Weightless Records Presents an “official beatdown” hosted by Blueprint. Whatever that means, although it is an all-ages show so maybe I shouldn’t ask too many questions. DJ Abilities (gotta admit I like that name – almost like he’s saying, “eh, you know, I’m pretty good at some things, maybe not so great at others, but who cares”), Maker (of Clue) and Pompeii This Morning are listed as performers.
August 26 – Ocean Ghosts, Vietnam II, Blood Violets
Sept 23 – Craftin Outlaws ( an “alt craft show”) until 8pm, featuring Cinema Eye. As well as over 50 handcrafted works from local artists.
Then there’s something called Jetgirl Dance Party – according to one listing. According to another, it’s Bustown Beatdown with Bottom Brick, Envy Records, Kadiz and 3, Kim Wilburn, Interchemistry, Alphabetics, Hold Em High, Ayce the Prophit and DJ Carma. Which, although it shows a Buckeye football helmet in the ad for some reason, is apparently some kind of Urban Music Showcase. I don’t get the connection. So please allow this reporter additional time to investigate such a gripping piece of intrigue. Whatever the case, ladies get in free, and there’s a VIP balcony.
September 24 – Soul Glo Sunday features not only DJ Kenny Kim and Carma but this time also Wild Kyle
September 26 – S.I.N. Service Industry Night with a live DJ playing Britpop, soul, shoegaze, and postpunk classics.
September 27 – The Marble Faun, Mainstreet Gospel, and Demander play
September 29 – Postcard, Proximity Grey
September 30 – The Slide Machine
October 2 – Brother Ali, BK One, DJ Bombay n’ Manwell, Dub Watson, Red Sun
October 4 – Templeton, The Prids
October 6 – The Lab Rats CD release party
October 11 – Hansel und Gretyl, Crud w/ Bella Morte
October 23 – Kid Congo Powers
November 9 – a 1980s themed Five Year Anniversary Party, with a best-dressed contest paying a cool $500 for first prize. And $25 runner up giveaways all night. There are also free massages thanks to Open Sky Bodyworks, and this being an 80s themed bash and all, I can only wonder at the nature of said massages.
November 10 – a potent bill consisting of Embassy, Novada, Marking Twain, and Sean Benjamin. $1 PBRs may get you in the door as well, in case you weren’t already enticed.
November 11 – a Hip Hop Beat Battle. Never let it be said they aren’t mighty diverse with their offerings. The Green Brothers, Lord 360, and more of that ballyhooed dollar Pabst Blue Ribbon are among the listed attractions.
November 14 – features $3 Skully Burgers, a live DJ, and half off drinks for service industry personnel
November 15 – Leah-Carla Gordone is playing at Skully’s. Not on this specific night, but on some other occasion, Brandon and I were at some other bar and saw a poster advertising an upcoming Gordone performance. He joked that this sounded like some mobster’s daughter, and that if you ever happened to bump into that crew at some bar, her mafia don dad would hint around about wacking you if you didn’t go see her show. You wanna be catchin’ her show, now, sonnyboy, if you get my drift. Got it? Not that we ever did.
November 17 – Band: Mickey Avalon, whatever that means.
November 18 – A leukemia benefit featuring 4 bands: The Judas Cow, Earwig, Celebrity Pilots, The Proper Nouns. There is at least one short video taken from this show, but the recording’s audio is very bad. This was apparently shot by Joel Treadway from cringe.com, and let’s just say we should maybe all be thankful the iPhones came along. Worth viewing so you can get a decent shot of the stage setup, and these guys playing, but I would recommend turning the sound off. The Judas Cow are excellent, though, so this is no fault of their own – and definitely not the venue itself, either. Merely indicative of the video limitations and technical difficulties we were facing back then:
November 25 – “The Return of…The Flying Saucers.” Although I’m not sure if this is a movie, some other band, or else the return of local group Th’ Flyin’ Saucers, who disbanded I think in the late 90s.
November 29 – Miss Molly and Hope Vitellas
December 1 – Red Dahlia and Evil Queens on the bill.
and…
Clash-a-Thon: exact date unknown. The Moops play four songs, but rate it one of their best shows.
2011
January 19 – mgk
January 31 – Hawthorne Heights
February 19 – Cadaver Dogs
February 21 – Baths
February 28 – Say Hi
March 18 – The Wet Darlings
March 27 – The Beat
April 4 – Gogol Bordello. Their set list is known and runs as follows:
Tribal Connection Not a Crime Wonderlust King My Companjera Last One Goes the Hope Trans-Continental Hustle Immigraniada (We Comin’ Rougher) Break the Spell Raise the Knowledge American Wedding When Universes Collide Pala Tute Start Wearing Purple Sun Is On My Side Mishto! Sacred Darling Dirty Old Town
2012
January 25 – Parenthetical Girls play, also Los Campesinos! The latter’s set has been documented:
By Your Hand Romance Is Boring Death to Los Campesinos! You’ll Need Those Fingers for Crossing A Heat Rash in the Shape of the Show Me State; or, Letters from Me to Charlotte Songs About Your Girlfriend Life Is a Long Time We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed There Are Listed Buildings Straight In at 101 To Tundra You! Me! Dancing!
February 11 – Ekoostik Hookah
February 20 – Zola Jesus
March 10 – Loyal Divide
March 23 – Phantods, Indigo Wild
April 22 – The Beat. Set list:
Twist & Crawl Save It for Later Mirror in the Bathroom The Tears of a Clown Ranking Full Stop Hands Off…She’s Mine Sole Salvation
April 25 – Touché Amoré, Defeater, Code Orange, Birds In Row
April 28 – The Town Monster, Mr. Gnome
May 19 – NastyNasty
July 21 – Phantods. Set list:
Raise The Dead The Promising Just Like You Missed the Boat The Blood of Kings One Hundred Years Revival Music Is Dead American Girl All That Glitters Lone Highway Our Last Goodbye
July 27 – Bonneville
September 7 – Hoodie Allen, G-Eazy
September 28 – Karate Coyote. Set list as follows:
Underwater Mouthbreather Cat-O-Pillar Wookie Ride On, Pegasus! When In Rome Icu2(Rn4a187) You’re So Cruel Front Door So Far So Good Zombibabi Lupercalia Pt II
October 14 – House Of Heroes. Set list:
Remember the Empire Comfort Trap Touch This Light Friday Night God Save the Foolish Kings Serial Sleepers Code Name: Raven If
October 15 – Torche, Kvelertak, KEN mode, Converge
After that to Goodwill, buy badly needed work shoes and a 99 cent old answering machine – thinking it might play my old micro tapes. Doesn’t work, but oddly enough, in desperation I try my old microplayer again, and two years after it last worked, today it miraculously does again! Kick ass! I can now transcribe some of those old tapes before it’s too late.
Record some vocals on computer, too, and mix down one song, burn to disc track by track, then delete the files to free up memory on there.
Then it’s time to assemble the troops for our big outing to Marshall’s, for Shauna’s 21st birthday. Our lives sure have taken some weird twists and turns, and this year is already shaping up as possibly one of the strangest ever. Seemingly at a time where things were kind of winding down (I mean, I’m living in freaking Hilliard these days, to cite just my own example), which makes it doubly odd. For example in the early going, our group at the outset is Shauna, Norman, Jay Taylor, Hostetler, Kyle, Amy, Elissa, me…but also this one peculiar middle aged couple who shop at our store. Somebody invited them, I’m not sure who. The other 8 of us are all Wild Oats employees, these are Wild Oats shoppers. But it’s cool, we pull together some chairs and tables for this huge conglomeration in the middle of the room, game on. That hot new Buckcherry song, Crazy Bitch, is spewing forth from the jukebox. Apart from that one couple, our troop is four dudes in their thirties…Kyle, the “young lad” here in his mid-late twenties…and then three chicks who are all exactly 21. At the age of 19, Shauna was my roommate, then began hooking up with a friend of mine (Norman). These other two girls are much more recent, ahem, additions to the entourage.
Hilariously enough, Tim just happens to be wandering around here for some strange reason. He had no idea any of this was going on, is literally meandering about the bar aimlessly. “Every time I come here I see someone I know,” he mumbles and pulls up a chair next to me. Then as we seem to be the only two actually listening to Shauna’s stories, she gets up, sits in between us now. Doing a good job pacing herself, though, I must say, which is difficult for most folks on their 21st, and definitely a struggle for most chicks on their 21st.
Tiffany shows up, then Jim Marshall, Suzie. We pull up a third section to add to our table. Tim’s telling me he quit Bob The Fish Guy and is now repairing bicycles at this mom & pop shop in Westerville. Fitting because he’s not driving these days and is instead riding a bicycle everywhere himself. Jay buys Shauna some minty shot, not knowing that she’s actually allergic to mint. He is the first person to leave, too.
Elissa is desperate for my attention. Tonight she tells me the same thing Amber G. said when I was dating her, almost verbatim, in that I remind her of a “little boy.” But the funniest aspect about that, or should we say one of the funniest, is that while possibly possessing somewhat of a baby face and definitely youthful with my energy at this age, I feel like I’m actually pretty decent at playing these girls at this point. It just seems like there’s no way some of us guys cannot have the upper hand with a lot of these females, and certainly younger females, at his stage in the game, after the past 10-12-14 years of…man, I’m not even sure what you would call it, but it’s certainly been an epically wild ride, somewhat all over the map, but a definite learning experience. You’re almost on autopilot at this point, if you choose to be.
For example, I fall into this off the wall conundrum. I know by now that ignoring Elissa to some extent, and treating her somewhat dismissively, is the paradoxical best way to keep her around. But then you tell yourself, well, no, I actually like this one, I should treat her better. Except THEN there’s actually another level above that where you almost have to tell yourself, and force yourself to stick to it, of, okay then but if you do actually like this girl quite a bit, and want her to stick around…then the best way to accomplish that, nonetheless, is to…ignore her, and treat her somewhat dismissively. Or you can be nice, watch her scamper away, kick yourself for being an idiot and not doing what you actually knew would work and wanted to do on top of it, anyway, all because you were on some big nobility kick or something. This is the minefield you’re negotiating right now as a guy.
At least until the drinks start a-flowin’, at which point it maybe doesn’t matter as much. But then let’s look at things from her point of view, or maybe what we should say I feel like must be going through these girls’ heads, at least on the oddball occasions where they are actually maybe into me, and are picking up on what I’m throwing down. It must run something like this: okay, he’s distant and kind of a smartass, but he’s not actually a mean personwith any of this stuff. He’s got some wacky theories on life, yet at the same time seems to possess some peculiar confidence in them anyway, like he believes he knows what he’s talking about. I mean, Elissa did after all tell me one night here recently, “there’s no reason I would ever say, wow, this Jason guy’s an asshole,” when I was explaining others were often not quite so amused by my antics. Beyond that, she’s already worried she might not have anywhere else to stay after fighting with her roommate last night. Is a chick in this situation going to waste her time with, like, some normal, nervous acting but really nice guy who is jumping through the proper hoops and timelines and so on of trying to be serious and date her? Or would they prefer some dude who, even if a weirdo, does appear to have his life together and tends to muddle forward with a kind of unflappable shrug no matter how chaotic things become? Well, whatever the case, this is my take on everything. Plus one other additional consideration: is this somebody you would want to get serious about, anyway? So that’s why I tend to think being distant is typically not an issue.
Tim and I are discussing Sequoia Lanes, Capri Lanes. Elissa chimes in, then somehow this morphs into a discussion of “crustache rock” as she calls it. She’s brought with her of course her cute little backpack with the red strap and the buttons pinned everywhere.
Come to think of it, this must have been before Jim Marshall even showed up. Elissa tells me, “Amy says you look like Steve Buscemi, but I disagree.”
“That’s good. I mean I know my teeth are fucked up, but come on,” I joke.
Anyway, Chris, Tiffany, Shauna, and Amy are all outside, smoking a joint. Amy is wearing this red dress with heavy material, like denim, with a button up blouse part, short skirt, but vaguely I must admit cottage cheese thighs. Shauna calls Jim, to try and talk him into joining us, and Amy slurs, “if Jim comes here, tell him I’ll fuck him!” into the phone.
“He was there about a minute and a half later,” I will joke, after the fact, “his tires were still smokin when we left the bar.”
So soon enough, they’re all over each other. Jim has shown up in this thinly vertically striped, blue and white, button up shirt, in other words his classic attire. The middle aged couple split, and so does Tim – it turns out he’s actually driving his boss’s van for some reason tonight. Tiffany has the right idea, too: a couple of drinks and then bye-bye. Shauna’s wearing a black sleeveless dress, low cut neckline and cleavage. Suzie a black sleeveless blouse also, looking sharp, but no cleavage.
Funny, the first time I ever saw her, I thought, “now there’s a chick that’s right up my alley,” without any specific explanation why. Tonight’s the first time we’ve actually spoken, but I think I was right, maybe subconsciously picking up on something (then again it ties into these massive rivers of water under the bridge I was alluding to earlier).
Forgot to mention that also much earlier, before Jim showed up, Amy was reading an Other Paper at our table, and I said, “don’t read at the bar – that’s lame,” and threw it across the room. Totally unfazed, she reaches down and pulls a book from her own backpack, holds it aloft with both hands like one of the girls from The Price Is Right.
“The Sun Also Rises?” she says, and I nod approvingly.
-Elissa (to me): You’ve got a great laugh. It reminds me of my uncle (Tim) (not our friend Tim who is here) (this is actually the second time she’s told me this, but she doesn’t remember).
By now we’re progressing to the middle-later stages of our outing. She comes over and plops down in an effort to disrupt my conversation with others. Flips me off, other standard shenanigans, and so on.
-And this is all before Shauna’s whole Xenos crowd shows up – fellow practitioners of her somewhat controversial religion. This seems to me as the moment where matters escalate into exponentially even greater weirdness (but not necessarily wildness), somehow. I remember there’s a black chick (cute!), and Elizabeth (Shauna’s current roommate, with brown hair and preternaturally, possibly fake, blue eyes), some John guy (curly red hair, extremely talkative) from the Xenos crew. Meanwhile Pitt is here now too and trying to work his magic with the black chick. I’m locked into an extensive conversation with Suzie – telling her about my writing, some nonsense estimating I make “sixteen” bucks an hour, just total gibberish. It doesn’t matter provided you stay in character and just keep going.
It’s all meaningless, up to a point. She does throw me for a loop, though, asking why I don’t hook up with Amy, who plainly appears ripe for the plucking. But I say no, “I gotta be good to my girl.”
Then there’s another moment where she, Jim, Chris, and I are having a highly involved discussion about our collective war stories. One extremely peculiar tragedy those two guys share is that they have both been shot at and lived to tell the tale – as in not just shot at, but the bullets actually hit them. For Jim it’s still lodged in the small of his back, and he shows us his wound; Hostetler of course was attacked by some stranger at a park when he was five, and still walks with a limp. “I would’ve died if it went out the other side,” he says, as it’s resting to this day against his spinal column. When it comes to my history I’m estimating, “I know I’ve used up 4 of my 9 lives,” with reference to two serious car wrecks, this time that idiot at Jamie’s apartment was playing with a gun and it went off (everyone says it missed my head by about an inch) and then also at least possibly the strangest occurrence, if not necessarily the closest brush with death, of having survived a plane crash.
“I work for NewsCenter,” Suzie marvels, “I’m surprised I never heard about it.” (I have no idea what this is, am merely guessing at the spelling/styling).
“Check the London paper, early March 2001,” I tell her.
-Jim insists upon buying himself, Chris, and me this “oil slick” shot: it’s 151 and Jager. Never heard of such, but it is about as nasty as it sounds. Hostetler slugs his, while I sip mine, feel like I’m obligated to at least finish it.
-Shauna goes outside and forces herself to stick her finger down her throat and puke up some of the alcohol. I know a lot of the guys consider her annoying, that she tells outrageous tales sometimes, but I don’t care what anyone says or how much they bitch about her – I think she’s a pretty cool person, overall.
-Kyle’s trying to rustle an afterhours coalition. But no. It’s time for most of us to get out of here.
-one guy I know pissed in someone else’s bed tonight, though, at said afterhours. I’ll be a real chum and omit his name. It sounds like some of us made the right call in skipping this puppy, however.
-then again I’m saying that despite, never mind my “early” exit, getting up just a handful of hours later and calling off at Target anyway.
Epilogue: I seem to recall writing about other 21st birthdays and/or similar occasions in the past, and that there used to be much more detail, a more coherent narrative. But I think those were the absurd outliers. It’s borderline insane to have even this much scattershot detail about a night such as this one, and after awhile you recognize that there is no overarching narrative to anything. It’s just a bunch of random, intersecting nonsense. By extension those other nights were freakish to the extreme, in holding together as some sort of actual story, with somewhat of a real semi-point. But endlessly fascinating, in any case, whatever way you wish to slice it.
In summary I would say this was a somewhat arbitrarily chosen, but fun and representative day, for this little sliver of our collective personal lives. It was also sunny, and warmer than expected, with temperatures topping out in the high 60s. But what else was happening around this fair city, on this date? It turns out there weren’t a ton of newsworthy developments, at least not that I’ve unearthed so far. Yet here are a few of the highlights:
Columbus Symphony Orchestra backs vocalist Barbara Cook at Palace Theatre. The CSO plays an instrumental first act of old standards, before Cook joins them onstage.
Comedian Kathy Griffin performs a 90 minute set at Southern Theatre, her first of two nights in town.
The OSU Medical Center emergency room treats 84 year old Leo LeVan for minor injuries, before releasing him – he was helicoptered in after a badly driven dump truck plowed into his living room.
Pitcher Aaron Small, making a rehab start for the Yankees, leads the Clippers to a 7-2 win over Louisville, at Cooper Stadium. Kevin Thompson keys the offense, with a 3 run homer in the 6th.
Harper are playing at Blues Station.
Park Street Tavern has an open stage jam with Jimmy McGee.
Andyman’s was such a crucial C-bus institution that it’s still shocking to me that it’s no longer around. You’d have thought at the very least that, like, some arts council would have come up with a grant or something, to keep it afloat, or maybe an executive order would have drifted across the governor’s desk at the 11th hour, demanding that it remain in operation – this place was seriously on that level, it seemed, in our minds and hearts.
Andyman’s sprang to life in the late 1990s when veteran bar manager/bartender Quinn Fallon agreed to join forces with his best friend, local DJ Andy “Andyman” Davis (of CD101 fame) in purchasing the place. At the time, this bar was a major dive named Hidden Cove, had changed hands often, wasn’t making any money. Fallon and Davis bought this place for a mere $30,000 or so, decorated it exactly as you might expect some indie and especially homegrown rock fanatics to do so, and flung this teensy door open wide. Let’s just say they struck gold with this whole treehouse concept, the loose, shambolic, ultra cozy aesthetic – it seriously felt like hanging out in your living room, or maybe more accurately a friend’s slightly spruced up, basement rec room – and booking a wide array of mostly local talent. It officially opened its doors to the public on May 26, 1999.
In many respects, it’s surprising that I haven’t created a page for the Treehouse until just now. After all, this eventually became such a predictable second home for me that I started getting personal phone calls here, during that whole era where I wouldn’t answer the landline at my actual home and refused to acquire a cell. Which became its own separate problem – the phone calls, that is, not the part about not having a cell.
But, although this site might seem like complete chaos, there is a certain strategy in place, as far as the order of topics I’m tackling. It’s just that this pattern would make no sense to anyone but me. And now is that time. Regarding that first phone call received here (hard to even accurately depict now, if you’re not of a certain age and weren’t around for that ancient epoch; many businesses probably don’t even have a dedicated phone, aside from the an owner/manager’s cell, and it’s even unlikelier still that you would call them nowadays asking if a certain customer was there), this was understandably an eye-opening moment. The bartender, Brandon, answering the ring behind that bar, then handing the phone off to me. This is when it first sinks in, okay, I guess I do spend quite a bit of time here…
Though I would eventually work the door a time or two (I think exactly twice, if memory serves), I was never an official employee in any way, shape, or form. At least in my experience, the bands themselves had to perform the dirty work of lining up their own doorman here, although you would be paid in some cash and unlimited beer for your services. And while I had been here a fair amount of occasions, would slide through a respectable amount afterwards, the real wheelhouse of my haunting these grounds would occur the three years where I owned a house in the same neighborhood, well within stumbling distance. Hilariously enough, if I’m not mistaken, however, that initial phone call of someone tracking me down here via clever detective work (my good friend Matt Montanya), that occurred before I moved over thisaway. Only after which, it’s safe to say, my attendance truly exploded.
But what made Andyman’s Treehouse so special? Well, for starters, to state the obvious, yes there is that tree. My stepdad is still talking about that tree, twenty years after I brought him here. On that occasion, he somehow wound up doing shots with Andyman, who apparently recognized me well enough at that point to tell my stepdad I was “a good kid.” One other side note is that Andyman’s wife worked in the customer service department at various Kroger stores around town, including for quite some time the same one as my ex-girlfriend Jill. So we got a little bit of intel about the inner workings of this place via that route as well.
That’s me on the far left in the photo above, from Halloween of 2005, in the long frilly blonde wig. I cobbled this outfit together in a last minute burst of inspiration and, just before leaving the house, decided it would be funnier to shave off every bit of my goatee except for the mustache – to date, the only night of my life I have ever rocked a solo ‘stache. The light’s hitting it kind of funny in this photo, but rest assured, it looked the same on the right as on the left, though quite clearly nowhere near as rad as the Thomas Magnum edition a couple spots down from me.
This window made for a popular photo op spot. In the 12/31/01 issue of The Other Paper, there’s a review of owner/bartender Quinn’s band X-Rated Cowboys and their debut CD, Honor Among Thieves, where they are posing on the other side of it, i.e. the small middle room with the pool table. I know enough about this place that I can tell you, just to the right of the dude who appears to be smoking in their group photo, there was some old movie poster hanging which had Norman Fell listed as one of the actors. And actually, there’s also an Early Empire article in one of those weeklies where they too pose in front of this window, albeit (if I recall correctly), on the side we assorted dorks are in this Halloween classic.
The main entrance, located on what was technically the backside of the building, basically poured in from the direction of whoever’s holding this ray gun. The photographer must have been more or less blocking the men’s room door. And the jukebox was located right beside Darth Vader here. As one might suppose, this puppy was stocked with an impressive arsenal of prime slabs, some obvious and others not so much. I can remember at least a couple specifics about it, like how on 2-3 separate occasions I tried to play Beck’s Lost Cause, but there was evidently some glitch and it would spin a totally different track instead. Which I forgot about until it happened again. Also, in the way it’s oddly majorly gratifying, like you were somehow personally involved with their creation or something, a night where I was somewhat aglow after picking out a handful of cuts, and different random people came up to me to rave about the choices. One of these I know was Jesus and Mary Chain’s Sometimes Always, which I’d never heard anyone else pick before, wasn’t even aware of anyone knowing much less liking this song…but would subsequently hear in here on a semi-regular basis, including a night where it was blaring when I entered the bar. Funny how that can almost make you feel like a band’s producer, or at least their publicist. If nothing else, it became a small sliver of the soundtrack.
But anyway. With this photo as again our reference point, to the left of me would be the bar. Behind us, you took a single step down into the pool room, and could continue more or less straight on out of it, to the obscured patio area which faced Chambers Road. To the left, also accessible and fanning out as a wide open space from the bar, a sort of living room-esque chill space with couches, an Elvis lamp, odd trinkets like these Kiss figurines with giant hands in a glass memorabilia case. Shooting off to the right of the pool room, meanwhile, a single step back up into the performance area, which also featured that infamous oak tree in the middle of the room, standing 3 and a half feet wide, tall enough to extend outside and tower over this local music mecca.
Sometimes, national acts would even grace the “stage” here, the most prominent of which that I can recall is possibly Cracker. More commonly, though, it was instead a secret handshake type place, which visiting musicians might attend on the down low, to hang and soak up some suds along with supremely homespun vibes. If you were lucky (ish)(maybe?), you might even rub elbows with them. Like for instance I remember some friends telling me Nash Kato of Urge Overkill was in here once, standing beside the bar in his ridiculously oversized shades, a scarf so long it touched the ground on both ends, basically acting like a pretentious dick. Also, in one interview I recall Quinn was guffawing about how Creed tried to book an afterhours party here once, when they were relatively new, and he declined – on the grounds that, as he explained it to Andyman later, they were “some assholes I’ve never heard of.” In between these two extremes, the local and the internationally famous, I might offer the example of Columbus Crew player Kyle Martino, who circa 2004 was just learning the guitar, and came here to polish up his act on open mic night.
If you were in search of the most pristine audio sound imaginable, then this was not your place. For example there was a night I brought some friends here and Paul Radick considered the sound so shitty he claimed he couldn’t even watch the otherwise decent band. And did not, as he dipped out to go sit on a couch instead. But, I don’t know, it wasn’t really that bad, and like the establishment as a whole, the vibe was tremendously warm. A little wooden rail even wrapped around that massive tree, in the middle of the room, for some extremely intimate seating options. Plus, if you were in here on a night where it was snowing, that giant hole cut through the ceiling meant the flakes would often be swirling around inside this space. Totally awesome. Basement-esque paneling in most of the rooms, if I recall correctly, and carpeted just about everywhere.
Andy was a big dude with an ever bigger personality, a person you basically couldn’t miss if he was anywhere inside this building – or any other, I’m sure. He would tragically die in a drowning accident, in the summer of 2010, at the age of just 42. Quinn, eh, I can see where others have found him maybe a bit smarmy, but all I can tell you is he was always cool to me, and I also thought he was quite hilarious. He would go on to, though protesting his bar-owning days were behind him, eventually open another music club years later, called Little Rock – it is now the permament home for that backdrop sign, from the Andyman’s performance area, the one with the earth image and all those signatures everywhere.
I don’t remember exactly when the bar closed. Davis and Fallon sold it in 2008, but it limped on for a while under new owners, I think as just “The Treehouse.” My last visit must have occurred in 2010, which would have been during that era, though I guess it’s telling that I couldn’t even say for sure what the place was called then. But when I research this matter online now, it seems that by early 2009, it had indeed dropped the “Andyman’s” portion of its name. And was just known as the Treehouse, then later, apparently, as the Tree Bar (complicating matters still further: even back when it was Andyman’s Treehouse, if you used your debit card here, it would show up on bank statements as simply TREEBAR) before giving up the ghost entirely.
I’m somewhat torn on whether to include the show dates and Youtube videos et cetera from 2009 onward, because it’s sort of the same thing, except not really. To me, it’s a completely different enterprise. You might stumble across videos as late as 2015 where these musicians are still saying they played “Andyman’s Treehouse,” and not to be a purist snob or whatever, but the two guys who began that who concept are long since out of the picture by that point. The bar might look the same, except it’s changed names once or twice by then, too, so no, you didn’t play Andyman’s.
Other businesses have since called 887 Chambers Road home, yet if I’m not mistaken, it is at present just an empty shell. The magic, I feel confident in saying, you will never reclaim here – but I wouldn’t exactly be opposed if some enterprising soul decided to open these doors again and give it another shot.
Click on the year below to jump ahead. Otherwise just keep a-scrollin’. By the way, when viewing this page myself for errors, occasionally the videos are showing up even to me as “not available.” As far as I can tell, this just means the page is taking a long time to load. It’s possible I am “breaking the internet,” so to speak, with these ridiculously long posts. But, eh, what can you do? I can’t think of any better way to organize things than this. So you can either wait for the page to load or maybe try to refresh or something. Or perhaps buy one of my books, in which case I might be able to afford an upgrade.
September 11 – Fred Haring and Dan Baird show (Baird, the former Georgia Satellites frontman, produced Haring’s forthcoming album); Andy Harrison, Watershed, Franklin County All-Stars, and Quinn Fallon also play.
October 29 – an Andyman-a-thon benefit for local children’s charities, this one features Lucid’s Dream, Fletch, Jamie Walker, Ron Arps, Born Digital, Jason Clayton, Elliot 12 Trees, Rod Paulette, Anna Paolucci, Bobby Cloyd, Jim Rico. Oh yeah and also Quinn dressed as Gene Simmons, playing a few Kiss numbers.
November 6 – The Stepford Five play and according to one band member (see comments below), he thinks they closed with an Afghan Whigs tune. Miranda Sound and The Vague play also.
December 15 – charity event featuring Keith Jenkins, Colin Gawel, Hope Vitellas, Jason Clayton, Quinn Fallon, and Jim Rico
December 16 – Benefit show on behalf of Columbus Coalition for the Homeless.
2000
January 15 – Willie Phoenix, Jason Clayton
January 29 – The Stepford Five. Billy Peake, Christian Hurd, and John Riccardi open
March 25 – Fletch
April 1 – At 4pm, Rhinocerous play a free show for bartender Chey’s birthday. Then there’s a later show called “Attention Deficit Disorder Night” featuring Quinn Fallon, Christian Hurd, Keith Jenkins, and Jason Clayton – the joke being that their sets only last one or two songs.
May 26 – Willie Phoenix plays again, this time in honor of his own birthday
June 9 – a second Attention Deficit Disorder Night. This time around, the musicians play two songs before leaving the stage, but there are approximately eight rounds of this (not sure how it worked the first time around). Chuck Oney, Joe Oestreich, Keith Jenkins, and Josh Kayser are the performers.
June 16 – Prevent Blindness Ohio Benefit with Billy Peake, John Riccardi, Christian Hurd, Rick Kissinger, Bobby Cloyd, Jon Chinn (of Pretty Mighty Mighty). Also each member of The Stepford Five doing one song solo.
August 29 – Acoustic Stonebyrd
September 8 – Sin-o-Matic play a loud show, at a time where this bar is still mostly known for acoustic nights. Wolfgang Parker opens.
October 23 – Andyman-a-thon show with local musicians dressed as their favorite rock stars, performing covers.
November 11 – another Andyman-a-thon. The first of the ’80s Power Ballad Nights. The Stepford Five play as a complete unit for the only time at one of these. Also features Billy Peake, Chuck Oney, Quinn Fallon, Wolfgang Parker, Bobby Cloyd, Rick Kissinger, and Rhonda Everitt.
November 30 – Mamontovas plays an acoustic set, followed by a normal one from Willie Phoenix
December 9 – latest Andyman-a-thon show, this one features The Vague, Watershed, X-Rated Cowboys, Jack Neat, Emperors of Bad Luck
2001
As of January 2001, Quantum Parker was here every Tuesday. Colin Gawel played every Wednesday from 7-11pm. Their Friday and Saturday night shows start at 10 and have a $2 cover charge.
January 5 – Columbusmusic.com’s Showcase Weekend kicks off at Andyman’s Tree House. Watershed, Detroit All-Stars, Scott Gorsuch, Jon Chinn and The Ryan Horns Band perform. Entry is just $5 at the door, for tonight and tomorrow each. According to Rob Harvilla of The Other Paper, Chinn played a straightforward but solid set, Watershed went over extremely well (crowd members sing along, keep time on beer bottles, etc) and Gorsuch rocked. Accompanied sometimes by second guitarist Andy Harrison, he blew through some originals and a Jeff Buckley cover in sloppy yet compelling fashion, beatboxed on one song, and in another instance had this dude in a black leather looking coat (can’t tell for sure, but this might actually be co-owner Quinn) hold up a lyric sheet. Then Joe Oestreich of Watershed returned for some reason to play a Cheap Trick cover (I’ll Be With You Tonight) before Gorsuch encored himself, playing his own tune Popular. Finally, Ryan Horns Band closed things out on a mellow note, strumming some decent but not especially memorable modern folk music.
January 6 – Showcase Weekend continues at Andyman’s. Fletch, Clayton Band, The X-Rated Cowboys, and John Morgan are tonight’s scheduled musicians. Harvilla’s Other Paper piece explains that tonight’s crowd is fuller and rowdier, though John Morgan kicks things off as if continuing the Ryan Horns Band vibe of last night – more of an old fashioned sound, albeit in this instance Morgan is ripping through his instumentals with incredible dexterity. He relates that Clayton delivered a credible rock set, replete with numerous guitar solos, and that X-Rated Cowboys (apparently just two guitarists and a drummer at this juncture) were a little shaky initially, though eventually settling into their standard crass groove. Finally, Fletch closed things out with a mighty set, expanded lineup and all, with her on acoustic and two more electric guitar players.
January 12 – Chris Mulvoy, Steve Poulton, and Angelo Palma
January 13 – “Fetch” is listed, although I suspect this may be a typo and was actually Fletch instead.
January 19 – Microphonics, Ukelele Man, and Fred Haring
January 20 – Delyn Christian
January 26 – Harold Chichester, Christian Hurd
January 27 – Billy Peake, Jon Chinn
April 13 – Jack Neat, to promote his Three Way CD coming out the same day.
April 19 – Tim Easton
June 1 – something called Leroy’s Dinner Theatre, which I guess can be described as some kind of variety show: bands Le Petit Hurlemonte and Apocalypso play, but then there’s also a spoken word performance by Julie Otten
June 22 – a night called “I Didn’t Get Invited To The Prom,” featuring five bands who applied to play Comfest, but were denied: Superstar Rookie, Salthorse, The Black Swans, Parker Paul, Ohioanna
October 11 – open stage with Jim Volk
October 12 – League Bowlers
October 13 – Good Kissers, The Randys
October 15 – Jamie Walker’s Keyboard Karnage
October 16 – Poophouse Reilly
October 25 – open stage with Jim Volk
October 27 – CD release party for Parker Paul’s Wingfoot, featuring him, Black Swans, and Christopher Forbes.
October 29 – Jamie Walker’s Keyboard Karnage
October 30 – Poophouse Reilly
October 31 – Colin Gawel
November 1 – open stage with Jim Volk
November 17 – an Andyman-a-thon benefit show, this one themed an “80s Power Ballad” night. Hosted by Keith Jenkins (Stepford Five) and featuring many other local musicians. This is the 2nd of three such planned events for the year.
December 8 – final Andyman-a-thon event of the year. This one is dubbed the “X-Mas Bash” and features Prison Tattoo, Aaron Pauley, Joe Oestreich, Aaron Pickering and Doug Beale (Johnson Brothers), Matt Surgeson and Josh Kayser (Jive Turkeys), Todd May, Jon Chinn, X- Rated Cowboys
December 15 – X-Rated Cowboys play a CD release party for their debut album, Honor Among Thieves. Fletch also peforms.
2002
January 12 – Ben London plays solo just a few hours after his similar show at Used Kids Records. Here, Pat Dull and the Media Whores and Salt Horse also perform.
February 6 – Adam Stokes
April 15 – Adam Marsland, The Vague
May 3 – The Stepford Five acoustic show. Also Twincam.
June 27 – Tim Easton and Kosher Spears
June 29 – just Tim Easton, no Kosher Spears
August 17 – John Mullins and the Citybillies
September 26 – Pee Wee Fist, Moviola
October 24 – Mark Eitzel, The Black Swans.
I wasn’t aware until reading Jerry Dannemiller’s review in the 10/26 Dispatch, though, that Eitzel used to live in Columbus. As far as the show itself, he relates that aside from early volume related troubles, it was mostly a success. I’ve Been A Mess is singled out as the emotional highlight, while later selections such as Theme Show For Any Song on the Discovery Channel were a bit more on the lighthearted and comedic side.
November 9 – another ’80s Power Ballad Night, this time with Rick Kissinger, Chuck Oney, BA Baracus, and The AquaNet All-Stars (Jamie and Ben from The Honeys, Mike Lovins from The Roomful, and Keith Jenkins).
December 21 – next installment of the ever popular Andyman-a-thon shows – leading up the actual stunt itself, which is his 48 continous hours on the air at CD101. All in the name of children’s charities as always. Manda & the Marbles, Scott Gorsuch, Pretty Mighty Mighty, X-Rated Cowboys, The Sun, The Jive Turkeys and The Johnson Brothers play this one.
2003
February 15 – The Caribbean
May 16 – Adrian Crowley, Milan Karcic, The Black Swans
May 23 – Moist Star CD release show
June 2 – Barn Burning, The Black Swans
July 18 – The Damnwells, Mrs. Children
August 16 – Audio Van Gogh
October 22 – Rosa Chance Well
Despite the poor recording quality, you can tell these guys are playing some decent jangle rock. Although even so, I have to admit the background footage of the pool room is nearly as interesting to me.
December 11 – Daryl
December 26 – Christine Costanzo
2004
January 3 – Compiler
March 13 – moveon.org voter fund benefit show. It’s a whole slew of solo performers from local bands on tap: Sue Harsche, Jake Housh, Ron House, Jerry DeCicca, Jerry Dannemiller, Ryan Horns, Chris Forbes, and Lou Poster.
April 6 – The Method And The Result, Dan Gerken, Billy Peake
May 1 – The Whiles, Trapper John, Miranda Sound
May 10 – Chris Brokaw, Hal Hixson, The Black Swans
May 22 – Cavendish
July 15 – Jack Rose, Christina Carter, Jerry DeCicca
September 17 – another moveon.org event, this one in support of the Democratic Party. Whether this is your political bag or not, the lineup is still mighty diverse and jam packed with talent: Columbus Power Squadron, Log Almighty Players, Catalpa Boys, Fort Recovery, 3 Amigos, Barry Hensley, Cassie Jacobs, Ricki C.
October 2 – The Black Swans, Moviola, Sword Heaven, Alwood Sisters
October 8 – AIDS benefit show featuring The Bygones, The Pleasure, The Hoodwinks, Bum Wealthy, Elliott 12 Trees, Olly, Paul Goll, Garnett and the Midnighters
October 29 – Halloween bash where attendees are encouraged to dress like dead rock stars. Admission is $7 and all proceeds benefit the Andyman-a-thon. As far as performers, we have The Black Swans, X-Rated Cowboys, Fletch, $3 Shirt, Ron Arps, BA Baracus, The Shatters, Trapper John, Glare
December 18 – ’80s Power Ballad Night featuring Keith Jenkins, Chuck Oney, Christian Hurd, the irrepressible Quinn Fallon, Jamie Walker, Billy Peake, Brian from Kopaz, Rick Kinzinger, Ian Hummel, and Jamie Cambpell. A CD101 Show For The Kids tying in with the Andyman-a-thon charity drive.
2005
The big city-wide indoor smoking ban goes into effect early this year. Andyman’s Treehouse sits in this weird zoning anomaly called Clinton Township, however, which means they are exempt – for now.
March 19 – Tupalev, Last Hotel, Box
April 8 – The Method & Result
May 5 – Miranda Sound, Tiara
May 6 – The Randys
May 7 – The Midnighters, Stella
May 27 – my buddy Travis Tyo arranges for me to work the door at tonight’s show. I’m paid $30 and all the beer I can drink.
June 22 – Hoy, Lori
July 9 – Nick Castro, The Black Swans, In Gowan Ring
July 14 – Christian Hurd, Keith Jenkins
August 13 – Unfinished Wood CD release show
August 16 – Slow Dazzle, Eric Metronome, Jordan O’Jordan
December 16 – Homeless Families Foundation Benefit show with Colin Gawel and Joe Oestreich of Watershed performing, as well as Joe Peppercorn, Bob Sauls, John Vincent, R.J. Cowdery
December 17 – the latest ’80s Power Ballad Night. This time around we have Keith Jenkins, Chuck Oney, Happy Chichester, Joe Oestreich, Poophouse Reilly, Rick Kinsinger, Evil D., Tom Boyer, Bullet Jones, and Jamie Campbell
December 31 – Trainwreck, which is Kyle Gass’s side project, is listed in one prominent directory. However according to the Dispatch, X-Rated Cowboys and Lab Rats play. Then a couple weeks later they have yet another different listing that mentions Cinema Eye and Lab Rats instead. Although I suppose it’s possible all of these things are true.
2006
January 7 – Coltrane Motion
January 15 – The WMDs
February 20 – Voxtrot
February 28 – Cola Coca Death Squad
March 6 – Mi and L’au, Jerry DeCicca
March 10 – The Black Swans
March 17 – Trapper John
March 18 – The Stepford Five, Jon Chinn, Autumn Under Echoes
April 6 – The Wells, Jason Quicksall, Chris McCoy and the Gospel
April 7 – Bullet Jones, The Doggers, Sarah Asher, Aaron Hibbs
April 8 – Early Empire CD release party
Tonight is the long awaited Early Empire CD release party. A five song EP titled Resolutions and a Gun, it’s the first thing they’ve put out, after 4 years together (and official releases from The Handshake and The Judas Cow are still nowhere in sight, even though they too have both been around since ‘02). Recorded it a long time ago, but money hassles and just general dicking around even after the thing was pressed have kept them from booking this until now. As among the first 15 people in the door, our $5 cover charges mean we get this CD for free – I had no idea, but gladly accept.
Slow at first, talking to Quinn about this article I read recently saying he and Andyman are trying to sell this Treehouse. “Yeah, I’ve been in this business pretty much my whole life – eighteen years – it’s time to try something else,” he says, mentions devoting more time to the X-Rated Cowboys, etc.
Tony Bair comes up and does fake boxing moves, which I match. “Hey, I heard you guys’ stuff, man, you gotta look up this one friend of mine, he goes by Nate Dominion!” Tony enthuses, “his stuff reminds me of yours, like really off the wall, you guys should get together. You can get his email off our MySpace page…..”
Copper asking me about my experience at the Anderson’s, says he couldn’t find the place, was thinking about applying. I tell him about the ultra-precise filets, ridiculous cutting list, etc. He’s mildly discouraged, but intrigued by the potential (top dollar, I tell him, for it is) pay. Talking about how he plays street hockey in the abandoned Big Bear warehouse lot on 3rd, tore up his hamstring, should have taken a few months off, but came back after a month and tore it up again.
Elissa’s wearing this puke green shirt tonight, okay, and when she showed up at the door earlier, she had this red backpack on. Except I didn’t know it was a backpack, not initially, all I could see was this diagonal red strap cutting across the front, which even has buttons all over it. Therefore…it seriously looked to me like a Girl Scouts outfit. “Okay, I want a box of Thin Mints, and two boxes of Do-Si-Dos,” I joke, as she punches me in the arm.
The reason she’s rockin’ the backpack tonight though is that she wanted to bring her new Hi-8 camera to the show. She’s walking around all night filming stuff, pregame footage, then the bands playing, et cetera. She and I are singing along with Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak which somebody played on the jukebox. I think she’s totally awesome and am really into this now. The only downside is I know she slept with Ultimate Donnie over there in the deli, and I’ve heard rumors about Gold as well, but, eh, for some reason I just don’t care when it comes to her. I don’t know, our personalities just seem to click.
Her sidekick Amy meanwhile is admittedly dressed to the nines tonight; Crystal I feel like I bust on repeated occasions checking me out from across the room; talking to Carracher about the motorcycle he recently purchased, he’s sitting at the bar. On opening day, the Indians night game we all watched over at the Glass House (before rainout), everyone (Carracher not present) was sweating this purchase, saying it “was too much bike for him,” and worried because he tends to space out, they were saying. But I don’t know, he seems like about the most straight-laced no nonsense dude in the world to me, and is surely proud enough, confident enough talking about his bike at this moment.
Vena Cava are the opening act tonight. I saw them in ’98 at a Superstar Rookie show at Little Brothers, and remember being considerably unimpressed. I think in my journal I might even have said they were horrible. Tonight, as it turns out, just two of the four members are playing, though I don’t initially know this; I wander back about three songs into their set, and assume they’d suffered a gradual defection of other members.
Whatever the case, I find my attitude concerning this group, aftere all these years, instantly thrown overboard. Who knows, maybe had all four members been present, I wouldn’t have felt the same way. “The other two are on vacation in Florida,” the singer/guitarist explains, a guy I later introduce myself to, after the set, name Keith.
“Really?” the drummer says.
“Well, one of them is, the other one’s stuck closing a Borders bookstore tonight.”
Wearing some kind of archaic plaid sport coat over a white tee shirt, a vertically rectangular goatee spotted mostly with grey and the wildest yet most natural looking bedhead ever – which means it most likely is a genuine bedhead, not some look he’s affecting – Keith’s voice has this husky genuineness to it, and his guitar playing, while not the greatest on the planet, manages to wring out these terrific little passages now and then, from the whole less-is-more camp mostly during these moments, just a line picked out w/ the right kind of mournful effect on it. A cornucopia of effects pedals down by his feet, and most of their songs feature at least one extended, high energy jam, but the aforementioned bits are what impress me more than the latter.
“This means we can play songs we never get a chance to,” Keith adds, in reference to the missing members, “this one here goes waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back, it’s one of the first ones I ever wrote.”
“How far back?” someone in the crowd questions.
Keith’s mouth flies open in a dismayed smile as he ventures, “‘88? ‘89? I don’t know, it was right around then, back when I was still living at my mom’s house.”
“So last year, then,” the drummer jokes.
Wearing a dapper tophat from roughly the same smoking-a-pipe-by-the-fireplace era as Keith’s sport coat, the drummer is nothing short of amazing, armed w/ a steady supply of perfect, original, impressively creative beats, without overplaying. My only complaint is that their songs are often structured as verse-chorus-verse-chorus-extended jam to the finish line, but that’s a minor one. Glad I had a chance to catch them again, here almost a decade later.
“You caught us in our infancy,” Keith laughs, when I track him down by the pool table later, explain my first experience.
“Same four guys?” I question.
“Yep, same four guys,” he says. A pretty nice dude – Travis and Chris were remarking earlier that they’d met him a bazillion times, and he was cool, but they felt bad because they could never remember his name.
Bumping into Tony Allman in the restroom: we both issue near simultaneous sarcastic, “well, well…..”s, and I add, “they’ll let just about anybody into this place, won’t they?”
The Pretty Weapons play second, and are a hard act to classify. Travis tells me beforehand they rock, but need a different singer (“he sounds like a bad Geddy Lee”), whereas Spain swears they’re heavy, but not good. Having watched them now myself, I’m not sure what to think. First off, the bass player does have about the most phenomenal sound I’ve ever heard in such a setting. I honestly had to leave the room at one point because I thought my kneecaps were going to melt. He’s playing some obviously heavy – literally, physically weight-wise – full bodied bass, and his amp has that logo of the little dude wearing, like, an ancient Roman battle helmet. Like a Stratego piece, whatever brand that is. And the guitarist and the drummer – they were a trio – could definitely play, but the songwriting surely needs more work. Like they’ll get on this cool groove, and sure, it takes chops to play it, but they ride out this same groove w/o any changes, and often no vocals, for sometimes up to two minute long stretches, and after awhile you start to figure – yeah, so what. I didn’t mind the vocals so much, actually, but thought the drum chair in particular could use an upgrade – Vena Cava’s was better, for instance.
Dan Bandman’s here w/ this cute brunette he just started dating, really nice. The story of how they met is odd and funny, which makes you think, as the old rule of thumb goes, they’ll stick around. He was buying a guitar off someone and she was the gopher, for whatever reason, bringing it to him at this coffee shop on behalf of the seller, and they hit it off, she stuck around, chatted, the rest is history.
“Good for Dan,” Spain tells me, “she’s gotta be better for him than that other nut he used to date, I hear she was a psycho.”
“Who, Kara?” I laugh.
“Yeah,” Spain nods.
Anyway, talking to Dan & his girl before the Pretty Weapons play, stage right on the other side of the tree. Leaving the room during my kneecap melting episode, I encounter Spain sitting at the bar. He’s told me, earlier, that Matt Miner is all about the Pretty Weapons, which doesn’t surprise me; now he wants to know what I think.
“Well, it’s like, they rock, but are they good? I don’t know. They get on these grooves and ride them forever, it’s like, big deal.”
“Exactly!”
“I wish Miner was here so I could debate him,” I lament.
“Matt Miner tries to come across as being into all this extreme music, but you’ll find he is actually really very conservative in what he listens to,” Spain says, which is funny, because Miner says the same thing to me about him almost verbatim. But Kevin has a point, talking about how Miner claims to be into total noise merchants like Sword Heaven but that he has a hard time believing Matt “gets home after a long day at work, and says to himself, hmm, I think I’ll throw on the Sword Heaven record to wind down to. I just can’t picture him sitting around actually listening to that stuff at home.”
Early Empire play a smoldering set, of course. Chris drunk and commiserating, before one song, that the Dispatch bought out Columbus Alive and are about three weeks away from completely overhauling that weekly, cheesing it out with a format change, et cetera. “Three weeks…three weeks…,” he says repeatedly, into the mic. Copper distressed because someone drew an arrow to him on the flyer above the men’s room urinal, with a caption that read, “fire this man.”
Chris telling me he’s had writer’s block for a year and asking me for advice. “You’ve got to find some way to break up your routines,” I tell him, “you know what really helps me, walk around the library aimlessly and don’t even pay attention to what section you’re in, then if some book catches your eye, whatever it is, pull it out and start reading it. It sounds crazy but it works.”
April 20 – Jonathan Hape, Eric Metronome
May 5 – Mark G. Turns
May 12 – Keith Jenkins and the Moving Parts, Jon Chinn, The 1803
June 23 – Semi-Precious Weapons
July 11 – Willie Phoenix
July 18 – Say Hi To Your Mom, Dirty on Purpose, The Polyatomic
July 21 – Early Empire farewell show
July 22 – Electric Grandmother, The Lindsay, and Greenlawn Abbey
July 23 – Tigersaw, This Is Smoke Signals, Matt Hubbard
September 8 – Los Caminos
September 21 – Yummy Fight, The Stragglers, Slim Red Soul
September 22 – Unkown, Matt Beckler, and Micah Schnabel
September 23 – Chris McCoy CD release event, with The Townsmen
September 26 – Willie Phoenix. Or else/also Ryan Cox, Josh from The Doggers? My notes are conflicting and confusing.
September 27 – open stage night
September 29 – Cracker, The Whiles. Admission was $15, possibly a record for this establishment.
October 5 – Richard Buckner and Doug Gillard, Joe Anderl & The Universal Walkers
October 27 – Halloween bash and benefit in support of the Andyman-a-thon charity drive. The Whiles, Fletch, Elliot 12 Trees, Jamie Campbell, Unit 1, Postcard, Teamtim, The Slang, Pretenders to the Throne, Hells Bells perform, which Andyman himself acting as MC throughout the night.
November 3 – Poop House Jug Band
December 9 – Shapes and Sizes, Eric Metronome, Joe Anderl. There’s at least a small clip of Metronome’s set:
December 16 – this year’s edition of the ’80s Power Ballad Night, to benefit CD101 for the Kids charities.
2007
January 26 – Mark G. Turns CD release(s) party to celebrate his dropping three albums on the same day: Just Like It Is, Stop Spraying Cologne and Perfume on Odor and Funk!!!, and Are You Aware? Can You Accept?
January 27 – Sarah Asher
An artsier approach with this clip, to say the least. But you know, I kind of like it – a lot of these other videos all tend to look the same. Whereas this individual seems to have just set an unfocused camera down and walked away. Plus, more importantly, it allows you to focus more on the actual music.
February 26 – Relay, Lymbyc Systym
March 1 – Little Brazil
March 11 – +/-
March 16 – The Mike McGraner Podcast is this cool series of videos that were filmed at Andyman’s. I’m not going to post all of them here, but this clip here should give you a good idea of what you’re in store for. Quinn Fallon, Nealbot, Twin Cam, and Bullet Jones perform on this particular night, though only those first two make it into this clip:
April 5 – Say Hi To Your Mom
May 1 – Zelazowa
May 4 – another Mark G. Turns CD release event! This time in support of The Message and Hearing Your Words
May 15 – Ole Soap
May 27 – Devilcake
July 6 – Lollipop Factory, Aether, Go Robot Go!, Postcard. Filmed as part of the Mike McGraner Podcast series. Some of Aether’s set was filmed, at least:
July 9 – Weird Paul. His set list is known and runs as follows:
What I’m Gonna Do to You Cold Drinks Pay for Your Tacos Quickly and Securely I Dropped My Almond Joy Bar Bowl Cut Robot Armor Acting Like Mel Torme I Got Drunk at Chuck E. Cheese Human Eye If You Choose Rock ‘n Roll More Time for MySpace Wine Coolers
August 17 – Willie Phoenix, Twin Cam (they have one member from Watershed) play Andyman’s Treehouse
October 21 – Adam Franklin (of Swervedriver fame) & Bolts of Melody, Heavy Mole
October 27 – Darynyck
November 13 – Eric Bachmann
November 15-17 : a unique offering in the form of a 3 night residency from Megan Palmer. Miss Molly opens on the 15th; Joe Kile, Luther Wright, and Chris Brown on the 16th; then Church of the Red Museum, Wright, and Brown again on the 17th.
January 4 – Steve Shank (AKA Timid Blue). Clearly the video footage is becoming a little more plentiful as the years progress. Although still mostly on handheld cams, and uploaded by fans rather than the bands promoting themselves.
And so it is we also have footage, thanks to one dedicated fan, of The Black Swans playing here on this same night:
And then also Megan Palmer – same night:
January 11 – Willie Phoenix, Ryan Cox
August 22 – Hawkline, The Vague, Adam Marsland
November 1 – Hammer Of The Frauds, which is apparently some thrown together Zeppelin cover band, but dressed in costumes for Halloween. Sean Sefcik, Dan Bell, Billy Peake and “Party Steve” Howell are the fearsome foursome involved. Captain Exploder also plays, but I think that’s a whole separate thing.
Zaun Zehner, sitting at a table in a 3 piece, is the first person I see upon entering tonight. This seems poetically fitting. The other guy seated with him turns out to be Chris Bay (from Night Vision, back in the day) but he doesn’t look least bit familiar to me – also in 3 piece.
A former classmate and current friend of who knows how many years’ standing, Zaun has basically always been considered the ultimate musical prodigy of my age bracket, back in our little hometown. But even so, our exposure to his prowess has proven relatively limited. Across the decades we’ve had scattered glimpes of him rocking out on various instruments, and doing so nimbly, with many more additional legends about performances we were not on hand to witness. Playing out with a couple bands here and there, or maybe just jamming in somebody’s basement. Still, one of the more puzzling aspects about his musical “career” to this point is that he really hasn’t done much else that we know about with these talents. For example, nothing that I’m aware of by officially released music – until now. His band Panda & Angel have just released their eponymous, debut EP in July of this year, and they’re in town all the way from Seattle on a tour to support it.
He’s such a tremendously nice guy, though, and in the big scheme I guess it really doesn’t matter – but only if we are making the bold claim that music doesn’t matter, period. I mostly think it does, however, and therefore kind of fall into the same camp as everyone else, not exactly grilling him about his lack of output, but privately wondering what the deal is. But maybe he always intended just to keep music a casual hobby, despite his oversized talents.
“Here’s McGathey,” I hear Josh Wackerly say, as I move deeper into the bar. He’s the guitarist in Panda & Angel, also a longtime friend, and is currently standing with Nate Sautter as well as some chick who turns out to be the singer: Carrie Murphy. Josh tells me Matt Montanya saw them 2x in Chicago; that they stayed with Chris Nicholson in Idaho; and for some reason, the first thing he tells Carrie about me concerns my involvement in the Goofy Guys.
“You guys had some good stuff,” he says, and appears to be serious, incredibly.
“What do you play?” she asks.
“A little bit of everything. It was good fun, though – bedroom recordings, 13, 14, 15 years old, using the two boombox method.”
“What’s that?”
I explain – incredibly, too, she says she’s never heard of anyone else doing this before.
-Andy Carpenter (big ol beard) and Melissa are here right after me: “what’s this I hear about a baby? I never heard nothin about that crap,” he says. Then Damon and Maryland (she’s got OSU attire and buckeyes on a necklace), along with some Carrie Ann chick she works with (tall, brunette hair shellacked sharply, stylishly; a shiny dress w/ decent cleavage, alternately blue and green; tanned; mischievous glint in her eyes) and Maryland’s brothers, Ted and Gary, whom I met once each about 6 years ago. Jason Woods is here, camera dangling from his neck. Jenny Mundy outrageously hot w/ long blonde hair tied back in ponytail – didn’t recognize – and also a black 3 piece suit. She’s talking about her ten year reunion.
“Was it a bust?” Damon asks.
“I wouldn’t say it was a bust, but it was definitely disappointing,” she says.
“That’s about what I’d say about our ten year,” Damon seconds, “it wasn’t quite lame but it was really close.”
“I never bothered going to any reunions because all the people I’d wanna see, I still see them,” I note.
“That’s pretty much how I feel,” Jenny agrees.
-I wanted to introduce Taylor and Damon, and finally have a chance to. Josh loves mentioning the Goofy Guys when introducing me, maybe, but for some reason I can never resist introducing Taylor without bringing up his Recordtown days.
-apparently, Clif sent Damon pictures of himself with Andrea, either before or after wedding. “She’s pretty hot – I’m not sure how he did it,” I praise Clif as we stand beside where he’s sitting.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Damon laughs, tells Clif, “and I agree with you, dude, that’s great: she’s from this white conservative Republican family, you know they gotta be just loving this.”
-I ask Maryland if she had to flash someone to get that necklace.
“I’m not that kind of girl!” she gasps, but laughing.
-I ask Taylor, across room I shout it, for a “Columbus Ohio.”
“I can tell this is gonna be good,” Damon says.
Taylor looks to Lori, then back at me, shakes head. “She says it’s too early. Let me finish my wings first.”
-Brian Schaub rolls in, he’s quit Grant Hospital to go back to school, is now at Cap City but claims he doesn’t need the money; Jeremy Wendling; Matt Wackerly in a sweater, looking totally unchanged.
“You know, there’s only one guy in this room who looks exactly the same as he did 15 years ago,” I tell Angela.
“Matt!” she laughs, “I know, that’s what everyone says.” She resembles the old self, but like many of us I suppose just a little older and with the edges rounded off, or whatever you’d call it. Her hair is longer, reddish now too.
-“Is that Jack Edinger?” Damon gasps
“Yeah; that’s the same reaction I had the first time I saw him after it had been a few years,” I reply.
“Man! He’s lost weight and he’s really shot up!”
“Little Jackie’s all grown up now!” Schaub cracks, “he’s shaving, he likes girls, he’s even gotten his pubes….”
-Jessie Adkins looking rough in yellow hoodie, giant rings in ears, bags under eyes. Insists he’s been off heroin awhile but “now I’m just a really bad alcoholic,” he says.
-Donnie Larck’s here; now, I’ve seen him a couple times in the past year, once shopping at Oats and once at North Market, and he I believe must be clean – both times he was immaculate and dressed to the nines in brand new threads, and I thought both times, this guy is supposed to be a big junkie? But he says it’s been 3 years, actually.
-Dan says he’s most surprised to see Donnie here out of anyone. “He always used to come into the String Shoppe scratchin his nuts, his nose all red…”
“Lookin for something to steal?”
“Well of course. I kept my eye on him.”
-Mr. Enderle is here! Looks the same, only greyer of head
-Ryan Fry and some girl; come to think of it Jack has a girl (Jeremy says it’s been going on a year and they’ve yet to sleep together); Megan Stolfi, looking hot; Dan’s woman Carrie, who waves hi to me from where she stands nearby, along w/ 2-3 other chickees – we talk briefly; the drunken entourage supporting Hostetler’s last hurrah: Travis (up from NC), Tony, Keith, Norman, Yarman, Pitt – I spot Carrie Ann talking to him.
-“There’s something wrong there,” Damon says of Carrie Ann, “she makes a ton of money, she’s good looking, she seems cool but she can’t find a guy? I tell Maryland there’s something wrong, there, and she says no! She’s nice! And I’m like yeah (scoffs, nods knowingly). Like I said, there’s something wrong with her.”
“She’s got an ugly pussy,” I speculate, and we both start cracking up.
-Matt Wackerly is also asking me about Emma. I keep telling Andy and Melissa they’re next – “don’t say that!” she laughs.
-Eric Voss is here in a head to toe St. Louis Cardinals baseball uniform. It’s unclear why, other than his status as a hardcore Redbirds fan. Knowing his Lee Marvin fanatacism, I mention catching an obscure movie of his recently (Gorky Park) and asking him if he’s seen it. He nods, but then realizing he doesn’t have this movie in his collection, actually pulls out a notepad and scribbles this down, a reminder to acquire it. I think this is hilarious, but then again guess I don’t really have much room to talk.
Less defensible are his apparent game-crushing antics. Jeremy Wendling drifts over to a few of us at one point asking who on earth this guy with the “radio announcer voice” is (Eric), wondering why he’s talking like this (always does), and lamenting that this dude was totally fucking up his game in trying to hit on some chicks.
-somehow, don’t ask me how, I end up spending a great deal of time hanging out and chatting with…Andy Thomas’s parents.
-Opening band: Sarah Asher. Damon insists, “eh, if you stand up there close, you can hear there is some cool stuff going on.” But for me, it’s an intriguing idea that needs a lot of tweaking – she whelps a la Bjork and plays violin (dressed in Geisha outfit, as is chick guitar player); aside from that and guitar, there’s a guy playing drums a guy
(*this is what you might call a “fractured narrative.” My notes stop right there, mid-sentence, at the bottom of a page. But I obviously wrote more than this, recall doing so as well, but am simply unable right now to find the page(s) to conclude this tale. So about 2 1/2 reviews are missing here. Actually I feel like there’s at least one more handwritten page, possibly two, and that I had them out not so terribly long ago – so have hopefully just misplaced them for the time being. I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, as a result, was leaning toward shelving it – but recently decided to just publish it as is instead. Why not.)
II.
Carabar (sometimes stylized as Cara Bar) was a former live music venue/bar located at 115 Parsons Avenue. It opens in the summer of 2005, courtesy of wife-husband founders Cara Borkes and Ron Barker, in a spot once occupied by The Dell. They obviously drew the bar’s name, in case you didn’t quite catch that, from a mash-up of their own. Although I must also relate that in the course of my research, I found an unexpected reference in a 1903 edition of the Dispatch, this poem by someone named Margaret Kirby Taylor, whereby she mentions (twice) someone named the “Earl of Carabar.” I’m sure this is just some wacky coincidence, but a great one – and it makes me wonder at opportunities lost, if they couldn’t have held a yearly event or something crowning the current Earl Of Carabar.
Carabar’s unique in that they almost never charge a cover. Instead, they pay the bands a certain percentage based upon sales for that night. It’s an intriguing business model, though I haven’t personally polled any musicians on how this concept worked in practice. But, moving forward about a century to a January 2007 piece for the Dispatch, Sarah Asher’s accordian player, Alana Odenweller, is quoted as saying, “we’ve gotten paid more there than lots of other places we’ve played that had a cover.”
John O’Connor’s a bartender here circa this era, and though we have some mutual friends, he’s always been a dick to me for some reason – although it’s unclear whether he’s a dick to all unfamiliar people, or if it’s something specific that I did. Or didn’t do. One thing I know is that while able to be “cool” in the sense of just hanging out and going with the flow, I’ve certainly never been “cool” in the sense of saying and doing what’s trendy. And it feels like maybe this is the beef: I’m not trendy enough for his tastes. One night for instance some of us ended up at his place somehow for afterhours, and he was positively apoplectic with disbelief over my admittedly dumb but totally harmless jokes – these observations of mine just weren’t cool enough. And ditto a different night at the Glass House.
Well, at least he serves the drinks here without too much drama, so that’s something. Joining forces with him on some nights is Amber, who is also known to sling drinks at Andyman’s Treehouse too, and is Judas Cow bassist Ryan Haye’s girlfriend during this stretch. And as far as highlights for this bar, Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass once played here semi-incognito (sporting a hilariously cheesy fake wig) with his side project, Trainwreck. Otherwise, they have a treasured old pinball machine named High Speed, and Christmas lights hanging year round to spruce up the joint. This bar never trifles with a website, which I somewhat admire, even as it’s made figuring out who played here when a daunting enterprise. They do, however, feature for a spell this regular dance night called Sweatin’, so some may consider this a worthy concession prize. They also have their own little record label going, titled Manup, with the first ever release being Dragged Out by The Lindsay.
As for why Carabar ever closed, all I can find are some references in the early 2010s that the state of Ohio was acquiring the property, just to demolish it for a planned interstate widening project of nearby I-71. While I’m not sure if the proposed acquisition ever took place or not, the demolition clearly did not, for 115 Parsons Avenue still stands – currently, it is occupied by KB Fleet Solutions. There is some dude on Youtube, however, who says he was given Carabar’s former payphone booth. That, some live footage, a couple flyers and mountains of memories are all that remain, it seems, from this once treasured musical oasis.
2005 events:
December 22 – Mark Mallman
2006 events:
As of 2006 (not sure if this is eternally true), Carabar proudly declares that admission is always free at its shows. Taco Ninja, he of Cafe Bourbon Street fame, is running the in-house kitchen here. They also serve hot dogs, though it’s not quite clear who is responsible for such. Vegan options, too, including hot dogs as well as chili.
In the early part of the year, the big smoking ban goes into effect for most of Columbus. Some of the less thrilled bar owners are combating this in extremely creative ways, and here, they hand out Altoids tins to the smokers – I think the strategy here was that, in case of some raid, you could just close up the tin, with the cigarette and ashes, and pitch the thing.
April 8 – The Skilletlickers, Bob Sauls, Mors Ontologica, I’m With Stupid.
The Judas Cow will play here every Saturday in May. The performance area now has its mirrors (left of stage) covered with a giant American flag.
May 4 – Opening night of Columbus Fringe Festival, held at multiple venues around town. There’s a show here, but I’m unsure who plays. It runs for at least 4 consecutive weekends (I think Thu-Sun each week).
May 6 – Wussy, featuring this guy who used to be in Ass Ponys, headlines. The Judas Cow and Kyle Sowash also play.
May 20 – I only “catch” one of these Judas Cow May shows, although even that’s not totally correct, because by the time I show up they’re already finished. But El Jesus De Magico are next, followed by Greenlawn Abbey, neither of which I’ve seen live up to this point. El Jesus sound great, but I feel like their songwriting needs a little work. Tony Allmon plays keyboards for those guys. Ned Hodge is here and runs up to thank me for coming to his get together the previous weekend.
June 21 – Marianne Dissard, Chris McCoy
July 1 – Ocean Ghosts (duo consists of Scotty Boombox and J Rhodes) hold a CD release party for their new release, Stars and Stripes Foreva.
July 22 – The Little Darlings, Drop Dead Sons, Sons of Solomon, Kockasains
August 4 – one year anniversary blowout featuring El Jesus De Magico, Greenlawn Abbey, The Squares, The Outerspacists, Posture Coach
September 2 – New Bomb Turks play a reunion show, with Grafton and Necropolis opening.
September 14 – afterparty for an art exhibition being held across the street, at The Chop Chop Gallery. Featuring artists Chad Gordon and Klutch, that event wraps up at 11pm, so I’m guessing the festivities kick off here around that time.
October 19 – bash held in conjunction with Chop Chop Gallery kicks off at 9, to celebrate co-owner Ron Barker’s birthday. Teeth of the Hydra play on this side of the street (Drop Dead Sons and Welcome Farm are over at the gallery).
October 27 – Church of the Red Museum play. There’s an article in the 10/26 edition of Alive! and “Ultimate” Donnie Roberts, who works in the deli at Wild Oats, is front and foremost, in a black sport jacket and tie, blood red colored shirt, looking quite menacing and serious indeed.
The interview is conducted at Mac’s Cafe. Some of these characters were in Go Evol Shiki but I’m not sure which ones – Brian Travis (singer/primary songwriter), Robby Coleman (I think he plays drums), Tom Butler (guitar), Donnie (bass), Bill Jankowski (organ), Leslie Jankowski (violin/trumpet). In particular they are discussing the tune A Flush Never Felt So Bad, which Coleman describes as “it sounds surgical to me, like you’re standing in a crowd and then – boom! You’re standing there with your guts hanging out.” Here I thought the title was a poker reference.
Butler goes on to say that with Go Evol, they spent five years working on an album that never saw they light of day. But that this Church CD, which just came out, was recorded in a day and a half.
Beat The Devil play tonight also.
October 28 – Panda & Angel show reviewed (well, sort of) at beginning of this piece
October 29 – The Lindsay, Coffenberry
October 31 – Halloween throwdown featuring comedy music duo Pleaseeasaur. This is one rare exception where they are charging admission, which somehow ranges from $3 to $10.
November 10 – The Kyle Sowashes play an album release party. Distribution of this puppy is limited to 300 copies of a vinyl seven inch. Very cool! Miranda Sound, Loretta, and Fine Dining play also.
November 16 – MTV2 is on hand to film Ryan Smith & The Agency, for their internet series On The Rise.
November 19 – Portastatic
December 2 – Buffalo Killers
2007 events:
January 11 – Benjy Ferree
January 13 – Odawas, Jorma Whittaker
March 13 – Hot Cross
March 19 – Sarah Asher
March 28 – The One AM Radio
March 31 – another Ocean Ghosts CD release party – this time with pizza! It’s in support of their latest effort, which is of course titled Pepperoni Lovers.
2008 events:
January 18 – Terribly Empty Pockets/Psychedelic Horseshit/Tree Of Snakes/Rage Against The Cage. In mentioning this show, Alive is complaining that the bar doesn’t post its schedule online.
February 23 – Cheater Slicks
April 18 – Guinea Worms
May 16 – Deadsea
2009 events:
January 25 – Skeletonwitch
May 1 – a benefit show for local musician Bob Sauls, hindered at this moment by a broken leg. Happy Chichester, Megan Palmer, Baby Lindy & The Drugmothers, Nuclear Children, and the compellingly named Rock, Ravage, and Coleman are listed as performers. Chris Ryan and Myke Rock made this event happen, to help pay Sauls’ medical bills.
May 12 – Thrones
August 22 – Rosehips
October 16 – Super Desserts
November 23 – Earthless
December 30 – Swamp Leather
2010 events:
April 2 – Couch Forts
April 6 – La Dispute
July 11 – Plague Mountain. The band could shred and all, but the vocals are more of this Cookie Monster crap that I just don’t get. Songwriting and structures seem pretty, um, cookie cutter as well.
August 12 – Flotation Walls
October 16 – Lifeguard
November 20 – Saintseneca. I’m digging the rustic Appalachian approach – not that I have the first clue where they’re actually from…
2011 events:
As of 2011 (if not sooner), local musician Nick Tolford can be found manning the soundboard here during his free time. However, for some reason I’ve yet to find any listings for him playing Carabar.
February 17 – Steamboat
May 17 – The Whines
May 24 – Daytrader, Hostage Calm, Light Years and Colors
May 27 – Way Yes
August 12 – Carabar Metal Fest featuring Churches Burn, The Pledge Of Cain, Red Sun, Bridesmaid, Locusta
November 11 – Zebulon Pike
November 24 – legendary local (and beyond) rockers The Godz play a Thanksgiving show. As you might expect, they come up the most professional and informative footage of any that I’ve seen shot here:
2012 events:
January 8 – not an event within the bar per se, but on this date a band called Enabler does release a live album recorded here, imaginately titled Live At Carabar.
March 7 – The End Of The Ocean
June 5 – Sun Valley, in their first ever live performance
September 12 – Icon Gallery, who’ve posted this clip online. The sound quality of the recording isn’t the greatest, but man, it certainly sounds as if these fine folks know how to rock! I think another band called Inservibles played here this night as well. Not digging their rather simplistic approach quite as much, but hey, this is just one man’s opinion.
October 4 – Wooden Teeth
2013 events:
February 8 – Liquid Crystal Project
February 17 – MAMA. Here’s another live clip. Some wonderfully funky stuff.
I’m a technology buff as much as the next guy, and love my modern gadgets the same as everyone else. But sometimes it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgia for these earlier eras, when any live footage at all was a rare, rare treat. Though clearly becoming much more widespread, even during these years.
March 9 – If These Trees Could Talk. Here’s a nice long video documenting their set. Not much to see here, but it certainly sounds killer:
March 16 – Modes
August 12 – My Dad, The Para-Medics, SRVVLST, I Mustache You A Question
November 22 – Abazagorgath
2014 events:
February 21 – Henry Passion, Eternally Dizzy, Mr. Morning Sunshine
May 23 – Mugger.
And that’s the last live show I can find, folks. Anybody with a hot tip concerning others, I would love to hear from you.
I’m sitting in an actual Victorian style dinner chair, dark wood, low back, the kind with padded arms and gold beans lining their sides. Circa 2006, I liked sitting in this “living room” section of Victorian’s. Assorted planters on the floor and hanging, all around the bay window. The floor is elevated two steps up here. Scuffed rectangular wooden table, thick (3 or 4 inches I would estimate) and rounded at corners, faded, stained. Cement wall is lavender with a mural painted directly onto it, enclosed by a painted black border: a sleepy town scene and astral bodies overhead – planets, shooting star – the cloud cover separating them. There is carpet up here alone – green, with purple, red, and pastel green squiggle shapes, badly needs swept. Apart from the chair I’m in, there’s also a beige leather armchair up here, huge but dirty. Also a standard kitchen table chair, like we used to have at home for a while when I was growing up – different color, but same shape – which is brass, or chrome or something colored to look like brass, a round blue padded seat, the chair back also made of metal with this vaguely heart shaped interior. Then a relatively new looking couch and loveseat set, which match each other, embroidered in glossy tan feather shapes on a gold, purple, and light green background.
Sarah McLachlan is playing overhead. Elsewhere, a neon blue peace sign hangs above the entrance to the kitchen. A couple is playing pool in the other room. Board games arrayed in bookshelf perpendicular to door. When I asked for some cream to go with my coffee, he handed me a quart of plain half and half. Strongbow, Shiner Bock, Bell’s I see on tap, among others.
Victorian’s Midnight Cafe was a former…well, I don’t even know what you’d call it, but it sure was something. A cafe, yes, I suppose, and definitely located in Victorian Village. And though I was certainly there past midnight on occasion, those times were rare – and yet I still might have classified it, for a few years there, as the most interesting place to visit in all of Columbus. Cafe at some point morphed into this meaningless all-purpose term applied to just about any spot, equally at home on the floor of a dance club as to a quaint diner two seat table that is only open for brunch. And Victorian’s encompassed nearly every plot point between these extremes as well as anywhere ever did.
It wasn’t just the mismatched furniture and similarly inclined artwork, the weatherbeaten floors. Or the patrons you could also often apply some of those modifiers to. It was a certain vibe you couldn’t get anywhere else – in large part because even those running this enterprise kept the borders fuzzy, as far as what Victorian’s was even supposed to be. But then again, they weren’t afraid to draw the line at what they absolutely were NOT: owner Greg Rowe usually told people who were hoping to bring CDs in here and have it cranked over the system to politely forget it, even when other bars would often play ball with such a concept. Or back when, though it’s hard to really fathom this now, you could pretty much smoke cigarettes everywhere (places really only started going smoke free en masse somewhere in the mid aughts, a concept that probably seems as alien to youngsters now as this mysterious “compact disc” music playing medium I just mentioned), Victorian’s was a notable outlier in that it was always forbidden here. They do have at least that one pool table, covering yet another base in that regard.
I once brought my brother in for breakfast, and he is still known to gush about it, specifically the corned beef hash, twenty years later. Connie Harris and Za Hansen are among the cooks who pass through here, during its spirited run under Rowe, and the signature morning offering might actually be a heaping casserole named Mr. Gut Wrencher: eggs, gravy, home fries, cheese, three kinds of meat in one large dish. “That scared the hell out of me the first time I read the ingredients,” Hansen admits, in a May 2008 Dispatch piece, “first I thought, why?, and then I wondered, do we even have a plate big enough for this thing?“
Well before that, in fact before I’d ever set foot inside the place, a coworker once secured some of us a slot to play at their open stage jam night, though I chickened out and failed to show – though assuredly no great loss for anyone involved, whether performer or attendee, I still sometimes regret not following through. Because of course they had live music here, too. This place was a local institution for such, with for example the various members of Cowboy Hillbilly Hippy Folk meeting one another here, after which Victorian’s was only the most natural choice for their CD release party. The Moops played their first show here in 2001. Of course, unlike many “open stage” jam nights I’ve attended over the years, the Victorian’s take on this meant that during the Thursday night edition, poetry readings were totally okay, too, if that’s how one chose to fill his/her slot – Wednesays are reserved for acoustic music alone.
So once again totally fitting the Midnight Cafe aesthetic. But yeah, I would say music mostly prevailed anyway, on balance. When I introduced Damon to Victorian’s, to catch some other random band on an equally random night, he was instantly a fan and remarked that a place like this could only exist in Columbus. As those in charge of the operation are quite aware, considering the top of their website home page describes this cafe, in a dictionary style definition entry, as “an eclectic home for people wanted or unwanted. Loyal patrons refer to her as the “hub of weirdness” where all walks of life come and go. A refreshing gateway from reality, a place to find a warm smile and friendship.” Yep, that pretty much sums it up.
Incidentally, their website offers yet another punctuation plot twist that I didn’t expect. Working on this Love Letter To Columbus project has, however improbably and unwittingly, often thrust me into the role of an apostrophe detective (there’s two words you never thought you’d see together). And so I am presented with another case here. In every single article I referenced online (47 of them) and in my own writings, thoughts, whatever, the name is never spelled as anything but Victorian’s Midnight Cafe. I never even entertained a notion that it could be anything else. However, much like other defunct operations such as Brewmasters Gate and Tommy Keegans, the conflicting truth is hiding in plain sight – either that, or we have to assume that we know what the founders of these operations truly intended, and they just weren’t polished up on their grammar. Because according to the logo at the top of the VMC website, which runs unchanged for years, it’s actually spelled with an apostrophe after the S: Victorians’ Midnight Cafe. Although in this instance these waters are certainly further muddied when you consider the abbreviation, the logo inside the logo, which calls this place Vic’s. And then the “dictionary definition” beside it as spells this as Victorian’s. These three variations are, what, an inch or even less apart. So I’m really not sure what to think. But crafting a logo you would think has to take more time than typing words on a web page – even back in 2004 – so it would seem more thought had to have gone into that as well, and the logo therefore carries more weight.
I guess maybe in the name of keeping a clear conscience, I should refuse to take on this truly baffling case.
II.
Sometimes Vic’s was even open on Thanksgiving, serving a customarily funky meal that had nothing to do with your traditional Turkey Day offerings – and sounding no less inviting because of it. Circa 2006 meanwhile, on most totally normal nights of the week, there was this cute redheaded waitress, her belly swollen and many months along with child, working here, that us guys all agreed was “the hottest pregnant chick ever.” And the reason I’m coming here so often then stems from my greatest stretch of involvement with Victorian’s, strollling through these extremely funky doors roughly once per week, as a central figure in this writer’s club we’d started.
Nathan McKnight (a pen name, BTW), his friend Shannon, our mutual pal Dan Bandman, and I are the four who materialize here for its first ever meeting, in January 2006. Bandman is the one who told me about it, and as I’d been trying in vain the entire time I lived in Columbus – nearly a decade at this point – to catch on with a decent writer’s club, I’m instantly all about it. I guess it somehow never occurred to me to just start one myself. In a hilarious stroke of just about the most predictable cliche ever, three of us bring our copy of The Elements Of Style to this first meeting – and the fourth person almost did, but decided to leave it at home.
Nathan was here every single week, though, and deserves credit for organizing the thing, keeping it together for a solid year (possibly more, as I moved away at end of 2006, and have no idea what happened beyond that point). I made it a good 90% of the time, I would estimate, easily the second most involved. Nathan’s dad, Joe, would eventually become a predictable attendee, and while both Dan and Shannon were only intermittently engaged, moving forward, other highly random figures like Rob, Alison, and Brad would pop in on occasion, in descending order of frequency, culled from whatever rock we could find them under. One or two of them might not even have really been writers, or at least weren’t writing much, but liked to soak up the atmosphere and debate things anyway, possibly take a stab at editing a copy of whatever you brought.
Some of these conversations stick with me to this day. Like a passionate extended group argument one night, in that window seating area section, concerning the use of the word habit, which someone was claiming didn’t fit in such and such scenario. We had just about settled the debate, agreeing that it was basically applicable in situations where a person couldn’t stop doing something often. Until some guy piped up and wondered, “yeah, but would you say robbing banks is a habit?” Which set the argument ablaze all over again. Another time, I brought a then short story where the main character killed himself at the very end. A plot twist which Shannon was quite vocal about not liking.
“I just don’t remember ever reading a story where the main character killed himself at the end, though,” I pointed out.
“There’s a reason you’ve never read a story like that – it pisses people off!”
Well, I ended up using this scene anyway, eventually, in one of my novels. So who knows. These philosophical dustups were always highly entertaining, at least, even if you didn’t take the advice. And some of this stuff was demonstrably helpful. Another occasion, Dan brought a ton of song lyrics to the table, and was lamenting that he kept trying to squeeze in more adjectives, but they never seemed to rhythmically fit into the songs. I suggested in response that instead of adjective cramming, which a lot of people try to do in whatever they’re writing, it’s usually better to come up with stronger verbs instead, like replacing the words go and went et cetera whenever you see them. Nathan’s mouth was open, because he was just about to say the exact same thing, but I beat him to the punch. So he agreed with me, as we elaborated on this point. Then the next week, Dan proudly brought his revised songs to the meeting, and was effusive in praising us, because he felt like that one tip had made a huge improvement on his lyric writing.
I would eventually conclude that although these meetings were a lot of fun, and gave me something to look forward to every week, they were ultimately not that productive for me. And the reason for this was that I felt I’d advanced beyond everyone else on the seriousness front. It might sound a bit pompous to declare, but I wasn’t thinking this from a quality or talent standpoint, because most of them were great writers. They just weren’t doing much, which was the whole issue. Whereas I couldn’t seem to stop, even back then, and was cranking out reams of material, writing something just about every day. I had an endless stockpile of material I could and sometimes did bring for them to dissect, passing copies out to everyone who attended. But then would feel like I was hogging the spotlight, so might skip a week, except then there would be times where nobody brought anything as a result.
Plus, as previously alluded to, would typically not apply any of their notes anyway. I could get into debating philosophies and word usage and so on until the end of time, though in general believed that as a rule you couldn’t really carpet bomb any of these strategies onto every piece of writing, or anything near it, because every piece was different and we all had such diverse styles on top of it. Like I recall that after some of us attended this Kurt Vonnegut speaking appearance, where he was ranting and raving about semi-colons, Nathan showed up at the next meeting and proudly announced that he’d gotten rid of 63 semi-colons in something he was writing. And I was thinking, well, that’s cool, but that’s just never going to be me. Vonnegut might have felt they should be eradicated from the face of the planet, and Nathan might have agreed, but I thought and continued to feel that they are occasionally quite useful.
My fondest memory probably concerns a session where I brought this thinly-veiled “fictional” piece about the Mansfield area music scene, which had Bandman howling with laughter at various points. He loved it so much he was praising it later to people who didn’t even come to these things, like for instance Travis Tyo’s girlfriend Martha. She came up to me somewhere, weeks later I believe it was, and told me that whatever I had written, Bandman thought it was hysterical.
The picture up top, meanwhile, stems from a mix CD Nathan once brought to everyone in attendance. He did this at least twice, because I have another one titled Jug O’ Tunes that I liked so much I made copies of it myself to pass around. Songs For Victiorians as you can see is pretty solid, too, and a number of those tracks have entered my permanent playlist as a result. And on exactly one instance, I cranked out a mix of my own, which I titled J-Mac’s Spring Mix 2000 and 6. Those discs I foisted on this club to start with, though eventually expanding outward and handing them off to the likes of Kevin Spain or my brother, people who had never come to any of these meetings.
Nathan had some experience organizing these things, and in fact a previous club was so organized and serious that they were printing impressively professional looking zines for a while. He brought me a couple-few issues at some point, though I only seem to have one in my possession now. He’s also one of these guys who seems to know everybody in town, to the extent I wasn’t exactly surprised to eventually discover he was working with Damon’s sister, Melissa, at one of her jobs, a short while after I left town and this writing club had ended. When I asked her if she knew Nathan McKnight, she chuckled and said, “well, he might wish his name was Nathan McKnight…but yeah, I know him.”
It was only then that I even learned this was a pen name! You might say I’m bad at asking people questions about themselves. Well, actually, I feel like I’m good at observing some stuff, noting various details about people, and learning a bit of their history – it’s just the material I get down isn’t necessarily important. A kink which this Victorian’s writing club never did straighten out.
A sample of Nathan’s edits (in green) of a short story I brought to the group. I did use some of his suggestions on this one.
III.
I still possess some of the pieces that others brought to this group, but haven’t had much luck getting their blessing to post them here. So the above snippet from one of my short stories will have to suffice, to give you an idea of the work we did here.
The final occasions I came to Victorian’s all occurred in 2008, the absolute last of these a bar-hopping odyssey marking my return to Columbus, during which we wound up here for a spell. That night was also, to date, sadly the last time too that I’ve hung out with such disparate characters as Alan Kline, Ancie and Dan Schmidt, Kevin Spain and others, all of which were among this Victorian’s entourage that night. Though it seems most surreal of all to recall this was the site of my first conversation in 19 years with on old friend who’d moved away, Byron McClurg, because he had called someone, and a few of us were passing around the phone on the back patio here.
From here the picture becomes a little murkier. In March ’09 it’s announced that local musician Andreas Kleinert has bought the place, along with his wife, Kristy Venrick, and that they are renaming it Vic’s Cafe. It is closed a short spell for remodeling, although they maintain many of the same employees, even some menu standouts like weinerschnitzel or the Behemoth Burger. A continued or perhaps slightly elevated devotion to live music, six nights a week, including open stage jams on three of those. Yet they are also switching gears, somewhat, like with a curious focus on a lengthy pina colada list (or is this not playing right into the site’s scattershot, eclectic vibe?) including one that’s served in a coconut shell.
And yet by July, it would appear they’ve reverted back to the former name, Victorian’s Midnight Cafe, though closing right at midnight on every night not named Friday or Saturday. Even so the last event listing I can find occurs in March 2010, a fundraiser in support of and featuring local musician Billy Zenn. Shortly thereafter, those owners sold it to the next, and whoever bought this now not only changed the name but the entire aesthetic as well. One night in 2011, Kyle, Erin, and I drifted through the new establishment, which was like this voodoo rockabilly place called The Shrunken Head. And while cool enough for that sort of thing, it was also just not the same, and none of us ever came back. Nowadays this spot, at 251 W. 5th Avenue, is known as the Vic Village Tavern. This one’s rocking some old school vibe, and I’m sure it has its adherents, but it also looks even more normal and therefore farther removed still from what once made this spot on the map so special.
I said their website was hilariously generic, even by the standards of that time, and this is true. A plain white background, no photos whatsoever, text even more basic than my somewhat vanilla choices here in the year 2025. If visiting that page, you would have no idea what a wacky establishment you were in store for, should you follow up with a physical visit. However one cool feature they did have, which I haven’t quite seen replicated anywhere else, is that they also made a running list of every musician they could think of who graced their stage. So here’s the roll call up through 2006:
Amy Steinberg Andy Germak Andy Shaw Annie Schumm Apocalypso Ariel Godwin Athena Reich Avalon Nine Barrie Z. Beau Bristow Bel Auburn Bill Kurzenberger BlueForms Theatre Group Blue Level Music Brad Yoder Brian Griffin Brian Lisik Bryan Christopher Lee Bumwealthy Cathy Wicks Chad Eric Chief Johnny Lonesome Chris Gough Chris McCoy Cropchecker Dan Gonzalez Dan Vaillancourt Dave Golden Dave Lippman David Nefesh Deep Blue Groove eight foot cactus Elisa Nicholas EN2 Ennui Eric Nassau & Friends Eric Pressler Frisky London Garrin Benfield Gipson & Fitz Greg Klyman Gruver/Gruver Deeluxe Hal Hixson Happy Dragons heather shayne blakeslee Heather Waugh Hipswitch Jared Mahone Jason & the Argonauts Jeffrey Altergott Jesse Henry Jen Miller Jen Shamro Jeremiah Birnbaum Jim Volk Jim Zartman John Turck Jonah Sage Jonathan Rundman Kara Kulpa Kit Malone Kristy Hanson kristi strauss and the blue medusa La Revancha Larry Mariotto Leah-Carla Gordone Liz Malys Maioan Person Mark Fitzharris Mark Webster Megan Palmer Michael Joseph Michael Shoup Mike Mangione Modern Gomorah Myke Rock Nathaniel Seer Nic Engel Nobody et al. Nude Porterhouse Pretty Balanced rachel ries Rachanee Richard Thorne Ripley Caine Sarah Asher Sarah Cohen Sarah Lovell Scott Stein Shelley Miller SJ Tucker Sonya Lorelle Stickmen Music Summertooth The Bogtrodders The Farewell System The Floorwalkers The Kyle Sowashes the moist star The Peasants the red wheelbarrow The Sure Things The Vague Thora’s Birch Tom Freund Tristen Shields Ukulele Man Way Past Frown (Thomas Boles) Willie Phoenix Worldwide Ocean Yikes McGee
Victorian’s also had a little artwork gallery, dubbed the Hub Gallery, where they would rotate in various featured artists. So they have listed just a pair of artists, John Nagy and Tom VanKuiken, who it says “have visited Vic’s Hub Gallery.” Although I’m not sure if that means these are the only two artists who stopped by to view their own gallery (which seems more likely), or if those are the only two artists who ever swung through, period.
2006 happenings
Beyond the punctuation shenanigans, their hilariously simple website was also a little confusing for another reason. The events calendar would list things that were happening all over town, not just here, yet to my mind it’s not always entirely clear which is which. So I think these things I’m listing below all happened at Vic’s…but I could be wrong about that. And of course regarding the writer’s club, etc, I am inserting my own details here, not theirs:
January 11
our 1st writer’s club meeting at Victorian’s. Dan, me, Nathan, Shannon. I’ve never been involved with anything like this before, but they have, they’ve held clubs like these for years, off and on. And even published a zine for a while called Floating Liars which is sweet, it looks professional as hell. We talk books, parameters for future meetings. Always a short story guy, Nathan recently bought a book on writing a novel in 30 days and then did exactly that. “Well, 30 days and 6 hours, technically,” he concedes. Dan brought his song book, and some loose imagery from one about a burnt down house he drove past. We pass it around and critique it. Meet at 6 – I’m late – have a couple beers.
January 18
open mic night, hosted by Crazy Pete Frenzer. This is a regular Wed and Thu night thing and it runs from 8 to 11.
January 19
The Thursday edition of open mic night, hosted by Crazy Pete Frenzer.
January 20
themed musical night under the banner “Folk The War – A Bush Bashing.” UkuleleMan, Pete Cassani, and Bob Starker play.
January 22
movie time with Tadit Anderson, whatever that entails
January 25
open mic night with Crazy Pete
January 26
open mic night with Crazy Pete
January 28
Mike Mangione plays at 8pm, followed the The Two Timers at 10.
January 30
Rob has a short story and then another piece of dialogue (unrelated). These meetings have been surprisingly productive: “okay, has it been established what he’s shooting the whore with?” I question, reading Rob’s story. Nathan busts out laughing. “You have to find a way to say that again!” (Rob’s sci-fi “Fast Food Galaxy” novel he’s working on). Talk strays into movies. I suggest comedy is a form of drama: “it’s a skill.”
“It can be, if done right,” Nathan says.
“Some actors, they can just walk onto the screen and I start cracking up, they don’t even have to do anything…”
Nathan and I both say “Bill Murray” at the same time, pretty bizarre. More cracking up. We discuss possibility of an award winning literary choose-your-own-adventure novel – writing one. Nathan has some sci-fi book he’s picked up from shelf, a what if – Hitler a sci-fi writer isntead. So bad it has to be hilarious, but he doesn’t buy it…
Tonight I also bring a piece for everyone to critique, from my eventually published (in 2025!) Well-Behaved Monsters novel:
January 31
Something called “the people’s address to the State of the Union.” Megan Palmer, UkuleleMan, Connie Harris, and Victoria Parks all appear in some capacity. Ohio Peace Network are listed as the primary speakers.
February 4
Connie Harris headlines some “Come Together For Peace” event from 8pm until midnight
February 5
Amy Steinburg plays from 8 to 10
February 6
It’s the first Monday of the month, which means it’s time for the latest Columbus Area Filmmakers’ Group to meet. It begins at 7pm.
February 11
The Yogi Poets perform at 8pm, followed by Moonlight Child at 10
February 25
Mardi Gras Costume Ball. Chief Johnny Lonesome plays and the special drink of the night is the Hurricane
March 3
Brad Yoder plays from 8 to 10pm. Chris Gough then takes the stage at 10.
March 4
reserved for a private party
March 17
Folk The War
March 18
Central Ohio Peace Network
March 24
SJ Tucker plays at 8pm
March 31
Thomas Birch plays at 10pm
May 1
latest meeting of Columbus Area Filmmakers’ Group
May 3
Open mic – no host listed, so it may or may not be Crazy Pete by this point
And it also happens to be the night for one of our writer’s club meetings as well. This time around, Nathan is here as usual, but I get to meet his brother and dad for the first time. Before they show up, though, we hand in our critiques of each other’s short stories submitted last week. I dusted off Smuggler’s Cove (from ’98, though edited a touch before bringing it here), which I really don’t care much about, so others can have fun slashing away with their proposed edits. Meanwhile Nathan had this one called Milk Dragon – very good, its tone and protagonist remind me of the Moody sci-fi piece from that Eggers anthology.
The “hottest pregnant chick ever” (Dan quote weeks ago, and everyone agrees) (curly red hair, blue eyes, great smile), the tall thin brunette, and the shorter brunette with doorag (Nathan rates her 9.8 today), who has these dark brown eyes that positively sparkle (prettiest dark eyes ever), as well as the tanned blonde who somewhat resembles Virginia are all working “bar.” We sit at “bar.” Man in tie dyed AC/DC shirt running sound. Guy in long goatee doing spoken word, is somehow wearing the exact same tee shirt at Nathan’s brother. On laptop, watch and listen to Steven Colbert’s funny speech at this G. W. Bush banquet. Nathan rates tall black haired waitress (white tee, small breasts), Ruthie, a 7.
“Well, that might be 7 on a worldwide scale, but as far as the parameters of what’s actually obtainable are concerned…,” I joke.
May 4
Open mic – see above
May 10
Open mic. Meanwhile at our latest writer’s club meeting, I bring another of these J-Mac’s Spring Mix 2000 and 6 mix CDs I’ve been passing out like candy, and give one to Nathan. Owing to the limited storage space left on my computer at the moment, I was only able to put 9 songs on there, but am pretty happy with it anyway.
May 11
open mic
June 9
Liz Malys & Nic Engel perform, 8pm
June 14
Writer’s club meeting. It’s just Nathan and me showing up this time. I had printed out a new 5 page beginning to Pushed Over and give him a copy to review before the next meeting. I wrote this in a fury last week – where does this come from? I have no idea. Obviously, I started the story years ago but have compiled ideas ever since, and then one day out of the blue just finally attacked it.
June 17
SJ Tucker plays, 8pm
June 21
Writer’s club meeting. Shannon, Nathan’s dad, and Nathan’s brother show up in addition to the two of us this time. Nathan has his suggestions for Pushed Over. Shannon doesn’t like my proposed ending, when explaining it, that I plan on having this guy kill himself. I haven’t even written that part yet, obviously, am nowhere near doing so, but argue a case for it anyway: how can this possibly be any different than the main character dying by different means? Plus I also believe that the title alone has you somewhat expecting a passive resolution, like things happening to this character that are maybe beyond his control.
Well anyway. Elsewhere, Nathan, his dad, and Shannon debate the meaning of the word “discipline.” We all also discuss whether anyone can truly make it writing exactly what they want.
July 12
open mic
July 13
open mic
July 19
open mic
July 20
open mic
July 21
Heartbreak Ochestra play at 8pm
August 12
Heartbreak Orchestra with special guest Neal from Go Robot, Go!
August 23
Writer’s group. First one I’ve attended in a month. Nathan and Joe just bought motorcycles, both are here. I tell them I’m a semifinalist in Alive sportswriter contest (well, sweet 16, anyway). We agree we’re going to start having “submission nights,” where we’ll all show up with a short story and send them off to the same magazine. Also talk of our own magazine, and vending machines.
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Pick up a copy of my latest music history tome, concerning that iconic year! Among the shows covered are a Primus and Smashing Pumpkins, both held at Newport Music Hall. Also the Lollapalooza stop at nearby Buckeye Lake, where local band Scrawl was on the bill, and Cbus musician Foley played as a member of Arrested Development.
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