RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

See today's Indy. What the landlord is getting out of it is a free 
demolition of a building he was eventually gonna tear down anyway, 
apparently, but that's all.

I was joking about the music fans loitering. The City of Raleigh 
undoubtedly doesn't even realize that there *are* live-music venues in 
downtown, nor that they might be something they'd want to support & 
encourage.

It is instructive, perhaps, to remember that the last time the Cradle 
had to move, the Town of Chapel Hill about freaked out & started making 
plans to erect a building to house it on the top of the Rosemary St. 
Parking Deck, so concerned were they about its impending demise.

The *next* time it moves, which should be sometime in the next year or 
so, it'll be into the Performance Bikes building, temporarily, and then 
into a Brand New Building that will be built for it, more or less behind 
Performance, as part of the big East Main St. development in Carrboro.

I'd wager the demise of the Martin St/Raleigh Music Hall was maybe 30% 
downtown-destruction-related and the other 70% 
booking/management/whatever, although according to Menconi, it was 
lease-related, which sounds like somebody didn't have a realistic 
business plan. Hardly a first for a rockclub.

Which is why it's such a pity that Kings is dying to make room for a 
"temporary construction easement" for the building of a building that 
isn't even going to occupy the site where Kings currently is. Any club 
that can manage to stay on its feet for this long deserves better.

I don't have a super-hot handle on every bit of downtown-Raleigh 
property, but I'm going to go out on a limb & wager that it's not going 
to be a cakewalk to find a suitable new space quickly enough to sustain 
their momentum. It's *hard* to run a rockclub, and those guys have been 
doing it for a long time. A six-month vacation may be just long enough 
for them to come to their senses & say "let somebody else do it," for 
which I would not blame them one whit.

xo

Ross

p.s. oh yeah, like you've never employed hyberbole before, huh.

Todd Morman wrote:
> What Jason said. I really doubt the music fans loitering or the
> "progressive"-but-high-on-convention-center-koolaid mayor had anything to do
> with this, Ross. My guess is the landlord's gonna sell for big bucks, which
> would have happened to any business there, no? But I guess we can ask Steve
> and co. for more details (you guys are reading this, right?). As for Raleigh
> Music Hall, wasn't that Martin Street and a whole bunch of other places? I
> don't know how they'd been doing over the last two years, but for a long
> time before that, it had trouble deciding what it was and finding an
> audience, often due to sudden management decisions to change the nature of
> the club with no notice. That may have been under former owners, - like I
> said, I haven't been paying attention for a couple of years - but I remember
> that spot going from a gay-friendly spot to a hip-hop club to a hipster
> joint on what seemed a monthly basis, with no warning at all. I still know
> folks who have bad feelings about the way, if I recall correctly, they
> cancelled the wednesday dnb nights by closing down one week, leaving the djs
> outside the locked door, wondering what was going on. Hard to come back from
> stuff like that once word gets around.
>
> Anyway, bottom line sounds like Kings is the only real crisis here, and
> looks like they're working on it. We'll see how tough the city makes it for
> them.
>
> todd oh and "I don't think the arts in Raleigh suffered any worse under Tom
> Fetzer" is a fairly ridiculous statement morman
>
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