The Croc was home and refuge and hangout and stomping ground. You could be there every night and sometimes it felt like I was. The bar, the booths, the dining room, the show room, the plate glass windows onto Blanchard, the long walkway from the front to the bar. When I broke up with a boyfriend, I didn’t care so much about custody of the friends, I cared about custody of the Croc, dammit. I went there alone and I went with large groups, I went on good dates and on bad dates. I had nice guys ask for my phone number and idiots try. I stood there stone cold sober and stumbled out drunk and happy and screaming.

I’m not trying to make it into more than it was, which was a great club in the right place at the right time with the right booker and the righteous soundperson. Eventually the magic fades. Eventually the rundown, forgotten neighborhood is reclaimed, the reclamation of said neighborhood being a movement the club was probably a big part of.

Kevn McKinney’s Thanksgiving shows; Bumrush (Mike McCready in drag); the first Wellwater Conspiracy show; Mudhoney; the Young Fresh Fellows, Scott McCaughey standing at the corner of 3rd and Blanchard; Sunday brunch; watching the band vans park in The Croc Parking Lot (3rd between Blanchard and Bell) when I lived at 4th and Blanchard: moving to 4th and Blanchard and being able to run out of the house sans coat, catch the headliner, and run home; three nights of Cheap Trick at the Croc; front row the night Pearl Jam opened for Cheap Trick at the Croc; eating dinner at the club night of show to “beat the line” and watching the eBay vultures stalk the likes of Mudhoney; Robyn Hitchcock debuting “Viva Seatac” at the Croc (”Viva viva viva/Viva Seatac/you’ve got the best coffee, computers and smack”); watching the Knitters while Steve Nieve walks by with Peter Buck, and six of us yelling, “Hey, Pete, going to throw some crockery?”; the Electric Six; watching Handsome Dick Manitoba mock the Mariners the first time the Dictators ever came to Seattle; ‘KURT BLOCH IS NOT A NICE MAN’ graffiti in the ladies’ room; the neon sheep in the bar; Tuatara; Supersuckers; Gas Huffer; Young Fresh Fellows; John Doe playing a half empty club the night after X at the Sky Church; seeing Mike Watt right after 9/11, seeing Mike Watt right after Elliott Smith died, seeing Mike Watt just about any time; R.E.M. at the Croc, “secret” anti-Bumbershoot shows (aka, “we can’t play anywhere in Seattle two weeks before or after Bumbershoot so we’ll play under another name”). The Fastbacks. The D4. Dead Moon. Bands long since forgotten that at the time seemed like the most important thing in the entire world.

And, of course, THE POLE. I usually stood down front so it didn’t bug me, but trying to find a spot BEHIND it that was acceptable is of course another thing entirely. If you have never been there, you likely do not know what I am talking about, but if you have ever frequented a rock club, I guarantee there is some similar fixture that causes you the same kind of agita.

God, what am I forgetting? I know I am forgetting so very much.

Funnily enough my last show at the Croc was Marah, long after I left town, which is more than fitting. At least I got to sit at that bar one more time and order drinks for my friends and tell them how much I loved the place.

Thank you and good night.

We drove down into Memphis, the sky was hard and black
Up over the ridge came a white Cadillac
They’d drawn out all his money and they laid him in the back
A woman cried from the roadside “Ah he’s gone, he’s gone”
They found him slumped up against the drain
With a whole lot of trouble running through his veins
Bye-bye Johnny
Johnny bye-bye
You didn’t have to die
You didn’t have to die

Played every time Bruce had a show on 8/16, except when he played PNC Park on 8/16/03. (Thanks to the boyfriend for that trivia).

Slaughterhouse Five fucked me up BIG TIME in high school. Like turned my world upside-down big time. That’s such a good thing.

We arrived at the Apollo Theater for the James Brown memorial just after 5:30 pm, and by the time we got to the end of the line, the police were already barricading it off and refusing to let anyone else join it. Aside from being disappointing, this seemed puzzling - the line was only three blocks long - until we walked around to the front of the theater and realized that there was an identical line running the other way around the block. With the theater closing from 6-6:30pm for a private ceremony, it was unlikely that everyone in the lines would make it into the theater as it was.

125th St. in front of the theater was still blocked off from the procession earlier in the day, which I was sorry I’d missed. We walked around so I could take photos and we could soak up the scene and stand there for a little while in tribute. There were food vendors and enterprenurial folks selling 5×7 photos in a cardboard frame, and, to our slight amazement, bootleg t-shirt vendors. The boyfriend briefly considered purchasing one.
“Just how much of a white boy in Harlem do you want to be?” I asked from behind the camera.
“Fair point.”
The gentleman behind us smiled.

It was, overwhelmingly, an African-American crowd, and a scene that we could absolutely appreciate but perhaps not completely understand. We weren’t the only white faces there, but there didn’t seem to be enough of us for my liking. Maybe the cold, maybe the crowd, maybe the holiday week, but it saddened me. (Of course, this was before I came home and started reading the local and local music blogs, where it’s patently clear that the man’s significance and importance are completely — not even lost, more like nonexistent. That made me sadder.)

So we stood there a few minutes more, watching the women singing “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” for themselves as much as the tv cameras, and the other part of the crowd doing the audience call-and-response to “Night Train” spilling out of a clothing store’s PA system, said our farewells and walked back to the A train.

“In light of the untimely passing of music legend James Brown, the Palace Theater will be issuing full refunds on all ticket sales for Wednesday night’s performance. Customers who purchased tickets online will be contacted by Tickets.com via email and receive a full refund within the next 48 hours. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Brown family during this difficult time.”

Regrettably, I do not have any Ahmet Ertegun stories. I have stories about ALMOST being somewhere where I could have met him, and have some stories about attempting to explain to people about to meet him who he was, so they didn’t completely embarass themselves and the company they worked for, but that’s about it.

However, these pieces (from Dave Marsh and Fred Wilhelms) are worth reading. (No quarter given on Atlantic’s inability to pay royalties to the musicians who made that label what it was, either.)

Dead Moon were my sounding board, my barometer, the band I went to to resynch when I got tired of bad attitude or tired of artistic phases or tired of anything that was outside of rock and roll, loud and onstage. They were the first local band I saw play live in Seattle, based on a post to some indier-than-thou music mailing list I used to be on back in 1995 (and whose name I no longer remember), where someone with taste waxed rhapsodic about this decidedly mono, non-bullshit band, and I loved the name and I loved that they were too old to rock and did it anyway.

I took friends to see them at Bumbershoot in 1995. I remember the gig primarily as the one the parents brought their 7 year olds who wanted to mosh to. And when i say ‘mosh’ I don’t mean that bullshit crowdsurfing crap that the grunge bands stereotyped, I mean old-school Black-Flag-at-the-CB’s-hardcore-matinee moshing, kids in a circle, heads down, arms flying, when someone fell down you picked them up.

That was a Dead Moon show. Always.

I saw them when they played big shows and small shows and all-ages shows, when there were five people there or five hundred people there. It didn’t matter. The gigs were always about that dynamic between Fred and Toody and Andrew, each points on a triangle, set up on the edge of the stage, candle on top of the upside-down Jack Daniel’s bottle, always burning. That candle never went out during a gig.

My favorite Dead Moon gig was in Olympia a few years ago. H. And I went down there to get the fuck out of Seattle for a night, to get away from rock shows filled with people who were there to be seen or there to see someone, and we wanted a room full of people we didn’t know. The bar was out of a timewarp (as is, well, most of Oly) and the band set up on the floor and played, while the audience huddled around. There was no magic circle at the front of the stage that people avoided because they didn’t want to be too close. You were IN the show. It felt like an off-the-network house show. It was vital and visceral and the lack of division between audience and band wasn’t bullshit, to me it epitomized what Dead Moon were about. There was nothing to hide behind, not even the artificial elevation of a three-foot-high-stage. Toody was fierce and beautiful and I ached because I will never ever be that cool.

[Afterwards, we went to King Solomon's Reef and I remember this because everything we ordered, they didn't have - until the waitress finally felt it relevant to mention that the grill was broken.]

Dead Moon played Europe more than they played the East Coast (and I understand why, now that I know musicians like them, who don’t fit into the format or the formula). They played Maxwell’s two years ago when I had a conflict with the Vote for Change tour, so I missed them, and they hadn’t been back here since. I had vowed to take the boyfriend, I had vowed to take some musician-friends who would have been energized and humbled by them, and, like usual, I wanted Dead Moon to reset my compass and remind me why I am here and why this matters and how the simple act of owning your art can be one of the most powerful things in the world.

And now they are gone, and the hole is bigger than most people will ever realize.