Three-day holidays are ideal for a little catching up, and the Labor Day weekend gave me a chance to visit some old and new haunts in search of good music. Here’s a brief rundown of what I encountered:
Friday: There’s a chance that we all take the Venice Café a little bit for granted. It seems that the funky little club on the border of Benton Park and Soulard has always been a part of our local culture. But, in fact, the Venice has been around for “only” 17 years, a fact advertised on the side of the building during its recent anniversary weekend.
Outside on Sept. 2, some of the key players stood along the brick sidewalk. Former bartender and jack-of-all-trades Ray Brewer extended a hand. The club’s doorman, the inimitable Uncle Bill Green, nodded hello while owner Jeff Lockheed offered a salute. Out on the bricks, you could hear both the buzzing conversations drifting out of the sculpture garden, which Lockheed tends almost every afternoon, and the neo-country of The Round-Ups dominating the sound inside.
The seven-piece was packed into the small “stage” area of the Venice, with a good chunk of the visual area taken up by the band’s vertical merchandise stand featuring everything from CDs to thongs. The audience was younger and more rambunctious than the usual Venice crowd, which is normally a mix of Bohemians on the flipside of 45. Here, the crowd was at least a decade younger, and, as they nodded their heads and blasted away at their beers, every other person sported a Pabst Blue Ribbon cap or T-shirt.
It’s the Venice, but somehow it was just a bit different this night. Happy birthday, Venice. We’ll not spend so much time away.
Saturday: For a generation weaned on the classic piece of Patrick Swayze cinema known as “Road House,” the charms of South Broadway’s expansive Rock Island might just bring on some memories. To get in, you usually pass a row of motorcycles, and the club’s location in an industrial zone just inside city limits gives it a suitably gritty feel.
Usually it’s free, but there was a five-spot cover on Sept. 3 for good reason. Hitting the stage a couple minutes after midnight, Paradise City offered all the spectacle and panache of Guns N’ Roses during that band’s “Appetite for Destruction” heyday – it just pulls off the show in a venue about a hundredth of the size of the original band’s stadium days. That doesn’t stop the group from cranking out reasonably accurate versions of “You Could be Mine,” “Night Train” and “Live and Let Die.” The band’s Axl Rose thanked St. Louis multiple times, and the group’s Slash had the perfect hair and solid licks. But was the second guitarist supposed to be Gilby Clarke or Izzy Stradlin? He was almost a hybrid of the two.
For a minute, as the group churned through its tracks, the audience swelled on the dance floor, and, while the night was still young at Rock Island, I almost felt as if I were seeing … well, a tribute band. But it’s a competent one, working very hard and earning every penny of the $5 cover. Bravo, faux Axl! Keep rockin’!
Sunday: The 12th version of the Washington Avenue Beat Festival Sept. 4 was a somewhat strange animal. The audience was there, congregated in the usual spots. The line at Velvet was as long as always, but no one was knocking down the door to get into the Creepy Crawl. The wristbands getting you into a list only four venues deep didn’t pack the same wallop as in the “old” days when a good seven venues were part of the mix.
Unable to identify most of the acts, I opted out of the wristband altogether and hoped that the holiday street scene would bring enough enjoyment to offset the fun I was missing inside the clubs. Some of the nonparticipating venues were doing a crisp trade, city police were walking the beat and both club boys and girls were wearing simply smashing outfits.
Cruising the block, though, it still wasn’t clear whether the neighborhood’s continued rise as a residential enclave would allow the area to fully function as a late-night club zone; the former venues still linger on the block, reminders of crazy times just a couple years ago, when the nightspots were the only things keeping the area vibrant during the long, long reconstruction.
Maybe next time it’ll click a bit more, because Beat Fest remains a great idea.
Monday: Driving from one closed club to the next on
Sept. 5 – Pop’s, O’Connell’s Pub, The Royale Food and Spirits – I tuned the car stereo to KPNT, 105.7 The Point. It was “shuffle weekend,” meaning the station opened up the playlist and spun more than the same 50 tunes. Predictably, the sound was much better than normal. Not knowing what the next song might be added a whole level of intrigue to radio listening. The station and the concept should be wed again soon.
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2005.
