Hunting down the exact coordinates for this place has been one of the more amusing and unexpectedly frustrating challenges of late. The only specific online reference I’ve been able to find, after months of searching, and believing I hit the jackpot with locating a late 90s campus bar directory at last…listed its address as “corner of 10th and High.” And yet even that isn’t quite correct, because it actually sat across the street from where 10th dead-ended into High.
Located near the end of the line, where campus attractions begin to steadily thin south of 9th, it’s a live music dive bar in every sense of both extremes. Live music a surprisingly difficult find at the time, the muted thud oozing through its pores is like a siren song to us the first occasion where we pass this place. Three dollars at the door and we’re ushered inside, privy to the Local Color experience.
A bohemian outfit gracing the minuscule stage, Local Color somehow cram a small army upon its meager surface. Just left of the entrance, amidst a sea of swirling red and green pinspots that would make Pink Floyd jealous, the band is flailing away, half a dozen strong. Fittingly, these dislocated hippies are slithering through Floyd’s seldom heard gem Fearless like ripples on a pond, and as we stumble our way past the queued throng beside the ladies room door, our eyes never leave the stage.
For a small time local act, it’s immediately apparent these cats have their ducks in a row. More than the half assed combos gearing up at Ruby Tuesday each night, though for all I know Local Color plays there too. It would certainly seem their ideal locale, sticking, as they do, to golden 60s nuggets by the Dead and Country Joe. Normally this music drives us bonkers, but they pull it off with such splendid grace, often bettering the originals, that we’re hopelessly drawn into their hazy web.
Tight and musically competent, I feel they could do with a slimmer roster than that of the lead guitarist, the singer who strums an acoustic, the bass player, the saxophonist who picks up a rhythm axe when not blowing his horn, the keyboardist and the drummer, but whatever the particulars they impress. Their craggy faces, impenetrable and unreadable behind tinted glasses and facial hair, stake wordless claims upon the years these songs cover. Ponytails and jeans and faded tee shirts worn like badges of honor, war medals, further strengthening their unspoken bond with the crowd.
As for the crowd, words can never do this mob justice. Body odor hanging in a ripe fog, whether male or female those wearing dreadlocks and overalls prevail in equal proportions. These chicks are by no means averse to sporting rampant armpit hair, nor are the guys opposed to donning what I’m guessing to be potato sacks with holes cut out for the arms and head.
“Look at the way they dance!” Damon howls, pinpointing a handful of specimens with the precision of those swirling red and green lights.
Truly a sight to behold, this jig. Pervasive enough to make us wonder whether someone at the door is passing out booklets detailing this single particular maneuver, and we’ve failed to pick one up. Throughout the bar everyone else except us is operating under the same mysterious spell, dancing in a like manner. Arms raised slightly, elbows bent, they shimmer their bodies up and down, swaying side to side, with an occasional three hundred and sixty degree turn thrown in for good measure. When inspiration strikes they elevate their arms and hold them there, though only as high as their heads. Then it’s back to the same routine.
Uncomfortable, we slide onto the only seating we can find, at a picnic table located near the sound booth. Situated in the center of the bar, it affords an enviable view of Not Al’s Rockers, in every direction, confirming our initial suspicions that this is in fact the only piece of furniture in the house. Aside from the bar, along one wall, and its few token stools, Not Al’s unfurls as one large concrete slab, whereby its occupants either dance or stand along the rear wall. Making no effort to conceal their continuous daisy chain of joints, those situated furthest from the stage lean against the wall with giant dopey grins, suffusing the room in that sharp aroma just a notch below the foul armpit smell.
Together, these elements lend the occasion more the feel of an outdoor festival than a Monday night at some run of the mill tavern. We stick out here like the proverbial bulls in a china shop, but care not the least, and in fact find this unfamiliarity, the newness of a community such as this, of unmitigated interest. Wholly fascinating, this submersion into their hippie subculture, if only for one night.
Local Color finishes Shakedown Street, and we respond with modest hand claps, with respectable hollers. But here, these cliched responses stand out like an animal activist’s paint splashed against a fur coat. They have the clapping thing down, but we’re not about to hear a woo! or an oh yeah! anytime soon, we’ll perish before someone sets forth the first whistle. Instead of what we’ve come to characterize as the standard classic rock response, these peculiar beasts toss off wild kingdom shrieks, and what might be snatches of bird song.
“What was that, a mating call?” Alan jokes, just before hooting like an owl.
But as we’re sitting on the picnic table, the fever and an all purpose weariness are crushing me, I can barely kept my head aloft. My left hand accidentally grazes someone else’s beer bottle and sends it spilling out all over the table, onto the floor, but the goodwill vibe of the place is such that the guy isn’t the least bit angry. Such that I would hand him a twenty, tell him to buy himself another drink, on me.
“I can’t believe you just did that!” Damon gasps, eyes wide.
But the guy has a face I feel I can trust and sure enough, he returns with my change, thanks me. No problem, brother. Maybe these hippies aren’t really our scene but their laidback kindness sure beats the snooty bitches we’ve encountered to date at those other clubs, and the assholes surrounding them.
1998
The only occasions where we ever seem to make it to this place are on Mondays, to witness Local Color. Even so, a year will separate visits, before Damon and I finally get around to checking them out again.
We pay our three dollar cover in exchange for a hand stamp, and enter this no frills, warehouse looking place with the concrete floor. It’s an aesthetic so rustic and unadorned that it’s almost come back around full circle to being trendy again. Almost. Throngs of long haired, shabbily clad, often odorific youngsters fill the room, with an older variation of the same occupying the makeshift stage over our shoulder, along the street facing wall. And “stage” is a loose term, for like many bars of this caliber, it represents only a cleared off corner where bands are able to play.
Immediately, a few slight differences between previous visits here and our current one become obvious. For one, the crowd is more normal, or should I say offers more babes while at the same time boasting proportionally less girls with hairy armpits. And yet as far as the band is concerned, Local Color has almost moved in the opposite direction, not quite the same slick classic rock outfit we remember.
For starters, they appear less professional than the competent, laidback cats we last saw onstage a year prior. Their performance is a tad bit sloppier, while the light show, which had bowled us over back then, how impressive it was for a bar band playing covers to possess such a rig, this has been scaled back to a cut rate version of its former self, featuring only the bare essentials now.
But none of these developments can quite match the impact of their new drummer, a younger kid going way too far overboard trying to make his presence felt, or else in an effort to pump up this somewhat moribund crowd.
“COME ON PEOPLE!” he shouts into a microphone while standing up in between songs, “I WANNA HEAR YOU SING!”
“CLAP YOUR HANDS PEOPLE!”
“MAKE SOME NOISE!”
After the latest of these ceaseless entreaties, I quip to Damon, “Jesus, if I wanted to watch Lars Ulrich, I’d go see Metallica.”
“No shit, man!” he agrees with a laugh.
Still, even a cheesy, too flashy and incongruous skins basher isn’t enough to spoil a basically solid boomer rock combo. They break out their Traffic tunes, more than a treasure chest’s worth of Dead, the expected Santana, even one old early Floyd obscurity. All in all, not a bad show and certainly a reasonable entertainment option given the relatively low door charge – though it is strange that, considering all the hippies I work with if not knowing from elsewhere, Joel’s neighbor Buddy is the only familiar face I bump into here all night. Especially when considering that Ruby’s for example boasts a similar vibe and cribs many of the same bands, though serving them up to smaller crowds, yet I can’t recall the last time I stepped in there without recognizing some of the clientele.
Inspired by this trip down memory lane, we soon risk another, this time with the girls Damon and I are seeing, Shannon and Jamie respectively, and the latter’s burned out hippie aunt, Lynn. We spend a good fifteen to twenty minutes in getting there and our girls, surprisingly, don’t seem too bothered by the walk. After forking over the small, apparently inflation proof cover charge, we gain entry and stand not too much further inside the door, directly right of the stage and near the restrooms.
No sooner have we arrived, and here comes Carrie and Sara drifting through the front doors, too, along with about three other friends. Carrie is an extremely popular name for girls our age, and this is seriously maybe one of five we’ve hung out with – or more – in our year plus of living here. This Carrie would be, of course, that dark haired, plain looking girl Damon had met at Maxwell’s one night last spring, Sara her taller and considerably better looking brunette friend. They’d been freshman then, are sophomores now, and we haven’t seen them since Carrie’s short lived attempts at wooing Damon had ended. So naturally fate has it that she reappears on a night when his rarely visiting girlfriend comes out to a campus club.
Carrie stands and talks to Damon for quite some time, wearing the camouflage jacket like always, her face still riddled with acne and pock marks, black hair shoulder length and kind of greasy looking. Still no beauty, but she’s always been a cool one to party with, and the same goes for Sara. Speaking of Sara, as Carrie’s yapping Damon’s ear off and Shannon’s looking either angry or bored, Sara spends a good twenty minutes in the restroom, having darted inside there immediately following their entry.
She emerges, and right away it’s obvious the girl’s fucked up on something. Normally, you can’t get two words out of her, but now she suddenly wants to converse with both of us at a breakneck clip herself. Ordinarily, Sara’s cool, almost too cool, low key and laid back, but at this mysterious moment she’s bubblier than a bottle of soap.
“How you doing?” I question.
“Oh, good, good! How you guys been! It’s been so long since we’ve seen you!”
“Are you okay?” Damon asks, laughing.
“Yeah! Why?”
“Well, you were in that bathroom for quite a while, I thought maybe you were sick or something.”
“Oh no, no! I’m fine!” she insists.
Carrie and Sara eventually forge onward, toward the back of Not Al’s swelling, crowded interior. Damon can tell Shannon isn’t enjoying herself, now – these matters are a continual juggling act – and so by mutual consensus it’s agreed upon that we should leave, after not even sticking around for one full set, not even long enough to form any impressions of the band tonight. As far as I can recall, this is the last time we will see Local Color perform live, and our final visit to Not Al’s Rockers as well. This hippie oasis won’t last too much longer, and might not even survive the 1990s.
