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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Kings/Raleigh Music Hall/Wetlands
  • Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:09:50 -0500

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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