RTP-area local music and culture

[grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>]

For a brief period after I moved here, the best place to see shows in 
Durham was a weird narrow downstairs room (with the stage on the long 
side) called Under the Street. No, I wasn't there for the fabled Sun Ra 
show, but I saw a lot of the Triangle's bright lights there.

Needless to say, Durham being Durham, UTS closed just as the early-90s 
"next Seattle" hypestorm was peaking.

Cut forward a few years (to ~2002), and for a time the space experienced 
a renaissance as Bully's Basement/The Basement. It was probably most 
notorious (among women, anyway) as the bar where they'd connected the 
hot-water line to the toilet, but it also anchored the emergence of the 
newly-visible (always present, but often more underground) Durham Scene 
(whatever that is). Saw a bunch of great Sames shows there, an amazing 
show by the pre-Wigg Report band Rosa Begosa, one of the few Triangle 
appearances of Asheville's Piedmont Charisma, etc.

So of course it had to die after a year or two (this still being Durham).

Today I learned via blog that following a long fallow period, the room 
is now the MidSouth Fencer's Club: 
http://archerpelican.typepad.com/tap/2008/02/mid-south-fence.html

http://midsouthfencersclub.org/

(Fencing being that thing you do in the white suits and the mesh 
face-masks and the long skinny sword-like things)

Which is actually probably an excellent use for such a long skinny room.