Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

ch-scene - The *real* end of an era

ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: The *real* end of an era
  • Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:56:41 -0500

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.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page