Fraters Libertas

Shut 'Em Down!

I was discussing the eventual and long-overdue closing of First Avenue with someone the other day and after we both had a good laugh that it needed to happen, I proposed that ALL area live music clubs be shut down for a period ten years.

Since punk blew through this area in the mid-to-late seventies the path of it's destruction has been vast. Yes, a few (very, very few) good bands came out it, but for the most part punk has produced more crappy, snotty, drunk, boring, out-of-tune garbage than new wave, metal, disco and polka put together.

And it’s not just the dreadful bands that it has wrought, it’s the entire attitude that has permeated every black motorcycle jacketed skinny doofus on Lake Street. Here is a short compendium of some of attitudes that have driven most people away from the local live music clubs and why they should all be boarded up:

1. Do not give the people what they want. That is for Foghat. We’re artists and they must learn our genius...after listening to us play our original songs over and over and over.

2. You don’t need to really learn how to play your instrument. It’s your attitude that matters most and you hate corporate rock! That will shine though (especially if you play loud enough).

3. Never, ever, under any circumstances (unless you are being ironic) are you to play a cover. Covers are for bands in the suburbs. We are telling it like it is in the city.

4. National acts are to go on at 11:45 on a weekday night. Yes, doors are at 9, but the club wants to sell beer and make you listen to two entirely dull local bands first. You should be home by 2. And anyway what are you working, some kind of corporate job? (I guess not everyone can be an Assistant Manager at Ragstock.)

5. You are not in the business of entertainment, you are in the business of art. Starting shows when you are darn good and ready, getting really loaded, sniffing WD-40... all these things are fine. People must learn that as a suffering artist, you must do what you have to do alter you views of reality. And wasn’t it Aldous Huxley who said...

6. Inventing entirely new genres of music that most people have never even heard of is encouraged. Emo-core. Ska-metal. Punkabilly. Y’allternative. I can see a young couple going over the City Pages deciding on what to do on a Saturday night:

“Well” one says “We could head down to the Entry where a band called the Against are playing.”

“I’ve never heard of them, what are they like?”

“The paper says they are Emo-core, but with a Punkabilly soul and a smattering of ska”

“Umm, let’s just go to Bennigan’s and then catch a movie.”

When Bennigan’s announces that it may have to close it’s doors because no one eats there, we can go over the reasons all chain restaurants should be shuttered.

Until then, the clubs are to lay fallow for 10-15 years . Let the new generation not weaned on punk forge some kind of new music. A music that people will actually be interesting in listening to.