The Next Seattle: Memoir of a Music Scene

by Neal A. Yeager

prerequisite strangely luminescent hair color—the entire rainbow was represented on the heads of those kids. Naturally an extreme hairstyle also requires an extreme wardrobe to match. From tattered leather jackets held together by safety pins to phosphorescent green pants to who knows what else, these kids definitely stood out from the others in the club. And I found myself again wondering how these colorful young people were perceived in this Indiana town. Sure, you see these kinds of people in New York—you see pretty much every type that you can imagine in New York—but I would imagine that right at that moment I was looking at the entire punk population of Terre Haute, Indiana. I looked at them and found myself hoping that life wasn’t too hard for them.

  But what the hell? If I was going to wish a relief from hardship for someone then why didn’t I wish it for myself? Certainly I deserved a break by now. Certainly I had been punished enough. Certainly it was time to pull my life out of the sludge into which it had fallen.

  I stepped up to the bar and asked the bartender where I could find Samantha. He replied, “sound room” and pointed to a small booth in the back of the club. As I neared the sound room I could see that far from being a room, it was merely a partitioned space which housed the sound-mixing console. And sitting at the helm of the console was Samantha.

  “Another of your duties?” I asked.

  “Hi,” said Samantha, “Yeah. There’s not anyone else to do the job, so I’m it. Beside, I’m in debt up to my ears for this equipment — this stuff was the main cost of setting this place up — and I’m not about to let somebody who doesn’t know what he’s doing touch the damn thing.”

  “How did you learn to do it?” I asked.

  “It was either learn to do it or go bankrupt real quick. I’m sure that if nothing was coming out of the speakers, the club would lose some of its appeal.”

  “I’d think so. So you’re self-taught then?”

  “Well, the guys who sold it to me — they were these Christian metal guys who had been touring with this board for years — they installed it and gave me a crash course. And a Bible. The rest I figured out as I went. "

  I glanced over at the band setting up its equipment on the stage. The band was a group of spiky-haired kids with large metal racks of old synthesizers and drum machines. They pretty much looked like The Cars. And for these kids, this was most certainly a retro-fashion statement.

  “This next band up, ‘The PDQs’, this is only their second gig, so they’re still trying to find out what they’re all about."

  I left Samantha there in the sound room and made my way back through the crowd toward the bar. Several more people had come in during the time that I had been talking to Samantha and again I was impressed by the size of the weeknight crowd.

  The bartender looked up at me and said, "Hey, you’re that journalist, aren’t you?"

  “Yes. And you’re the bartender aren’t you?”

  “Steve,” said the bartender with a laugh.

  “David,” I answered back. “Jesus I feel like I must be on a wanted poster or something. Everybody seems to know who I am.”

  “Well, the boss has been talking about this for a long time.”

  “She’s persistent?”

  “You could say that,” replied Steve, “What can I get you?”

  "Scotch," I said.

  "Well... no scotch."

  “No Scotch?” I asked.

  “No Scotch.”

  Well, all right,” I mumbled, “I guess I’ll just have a beer.”

  I was at a bit of a loss to decipher the expression that came over Steve’s face just then. It seemed as though he was worried about something. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what might worry a bartender about being asked for a beer. It wasn’t as though I had just asked for some obscure drink that he wouldn’t know how to mix. Maybe he just hadn’t heard me and for some reason he was embarrassed to ask me to repeat myself. So I repeated myself.

  “A beer,” I said.

  Still Steve appeared to be worried. “Um, okay,” he stammered, “um, I guess she didn’t explain that to you. We don’t have any alcohol here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we don’t have any alcohol.”

  Now I felt as though I must be the one who hadn’t heard. “No alcohol?” I asked, “I don’t think I understand. Did you lose your liquor license?”

  “We don’t have a liquor license.”

  “Yet? Is that what you mean? That you don’t have one yet?”

  "I mean that we don’t have one, period."

  “But,” I mumbled, lost, “but this is a bar. You can’t have a bar without alcohol.”

  “It’s not a bar, it’s a club.”

  “You can’t have a club without alcohol either. I’ve been doing this since you were in diapers and I’m here to tell you that clubs serve alcohol. It’s an association that goes all the way back to the beginning of time: People listen to music; they drink.”

  “That’s not what we’re about.”

  “Not what you’re about?” I fairly shrieked, “Not what you’re about?”

  “Um. No.”

  I really could not believe what I was hearing here. A nightclub without alcohol was an oxymoron. Now if they had told me that they were running a coffee house I would have said “fine.” But Seattle had always been referred to as a club. And clubs have alcohol dammit.

  “Look,” I shouted to Steve above the noise of the blasting music, “I don’t mean to sound rude, but I need some booze, man!”

  And in one of those moments of coincidence which seem to be so perfect as to have been divinely planned, Samantha had chosen that exact moment to cut out the music from the CD and open up her mic to introduce the band which was about to perform. She didn’t fade out the music, rather she just abruptly cut it off, which meant that the overall volume of the club dropped significantly just at the precise moment that I was shouting, “ I need some booze, man!”

  This, of course, was followed by that inevitable moment in which I felt that everyone in the club, hell everyone in the entire world turned to look at me. Without turning to acknowledge their stares, I merely raised my hand as if to admit that, yes, I was the guilty party.

  Samantha missed only a beat, then she introduced the PDQs and life went back to the way it had been meant to be in this place at this time. The band came on-stage and I sat staring at the bar, afraid to turn around lest somebody was still looking my way.

  Eventually I did turn around in order that I might check out the PDQs. I could see what Samantha had meant when she had said that they were still trying to find out who they were. The keyboard player seemed to be a fairly talented fellow, but the rest of the band didn’t seem to quite be with him. They didn’t have that “tight” thing that every good band has to have. Plus the lead singer didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands as he sang. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether to hold the microphone or put his hands to the side or wave them in the air or what. So, as had been foretold to me, the PDQs still needed some work. Or maybe I was being unfairly critical due to my frustration at the lack of alcohol. Looking back on it now, I’m not really sure which it was.

  As I sat playing a game with myself of trying to guess the next moves of the lead singer’s hands, the unmistakable flash of a camera bathed the room in instant light. I looked to my left in order to ascertain the identity of the photographer, and who else should I see wielding the camera but Samantha. I looked back toward the sound room and saw that nobody was manning the console. Now, I’ll admit that during the perhaps 20 or 30 seconds that Samantha was away it would be highly unlikely for some incredible audio catastrophe to occur, but you never know. At any rate, she snapped a few photos using a rather impressive-looking 35 mm camera then dashed back to her station at the sound board.

  A few songs into the PDQs set I again motioned for Steve. “Are you sure,” I began, “that you don’t have anything alcoholic in this place? Maybe a bottle that you keep stash
ed behind the counter just for really special guests? In case the President drops by or something?”

  “I’m sorry,” Steve replied.

  “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure?”

  He nodded his head and walked away.

  “Damn,” I mumbled. Had I known that this place was going to be dry I would have stopped at the hotel bar before walking out the door.

  I called Steve over yet again. “Steve, is there anywhere around here where I could get a drink?”

  “Well,” he said, “Yeah.”

  “Anyplace within walking distance?”

  “Well, not really. I guess that you could walk but the nearest bar would be a pretty good walk.

  “All right,” I said forlornly, “Forget I asked.”

  I turned around and watched the rest of the PDQs set without a word.

  The moment that the lead singer said “Thanks and goodnight.” I got up from my barstool—which didn’t deserve the title of barstool because this place wasn’t really a bar—and made my way back to the sound room.

  “Okay,” I said as I approached Samantha, “this is quite some practical joke you’ve got going here but let’s end it.”

  Samantha didn’t even look up at me. She just continued plugging and unplugging cables in preparation for the next band. “Practical joke?” she asked.

  “Yeah, this thing with the no alcohol. Steve over there tells me he makes a mean cappuccino but that he doesn’t have any liquor. You’re really not telling me that is seriously the case are you?”

  “This is not a bar,” she replied,