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captainsblogOops, wrong Bruce.
We remain Out and Proud in our sobriety going into our fourth full years of doing without. The "out" part is getting harder, though, and it's not on our account but because of opportunities being taken away by non-recoverers reaching the upper echelons of non-sobriety. Two legendary music venues in downtown Buffalo, soon to be just one, have roles in this tale.
Starting with the one we know better: Nietzsche's has been a fixture at the far end of Allentown for about four and a half forevers. Last summer, we became friends with a local musician, born in Rochester and whose father was a friend of both of ours when we lived there over 30 years ago. Over 20 years ago, Ann began a Sunday night tradition at the bar, as she and the owner acquired a rambling old piano from the former vaudeville theater down the street during its renovation and rolled it down Allen into the front section of the bar. She's been doing Sunday night piano performances almost every week since. This past Sunday night was the third we attended together, and unfortunately will probably be the last. A small bit was about one song in the music- I'll get to that later- but it's mostly because we had lucked out on several of the earlier trips because they were either during a late afternoon Bills game or on a Sunday where our prime-time darlings were playing later that night or on Monday night. Those crowds, though small, were not loud and stupid enough to distract from the happy vibes of the night.
This past Sunday, though, was five hours after a once-typical 1 p.m. Sunday home kickoff, and while it was relatively quiet when we got there, the venue quickly filled with what seemed like a party bus had dropped off a bunch of near-blackout drunks who'd finally made it through the postgame traffic jam. A day or so later, I found this helpful graphic on the Internet to bring home the vibe of the dive:
To that I added the following:
Not shown: couple in recovery for more than three years, who can still go to a bar for music and drink NA beer (if they even have any) but still get very uncomfortable when the near blackout drunks arrive hours after the Bills game ended and carry on like idiots.
We left after not quite an hour, and Eleanor admitted that, while she has no problem being around people drinking per se, being in an atmosphere of people carrying on WHILE drinking is a pretty triggrery experience for her. It is for me, as well, particularly when it gets past stumblin around and dancing and into loud words and even violence threatened or acted on. None of that night's crowd got to those latter stages, but it was close enough to imagine; and when the point of an evening out with a friend's performance is to get away from things that trouble you, it becomes less of an attraction.
----
At least nobody got seriously hurt, and that brings us to a less familiar venue that, now, will never become one:
On the other side of downtown from the dives of Allentown, away from the strips of entertainment in the Theater District proper and closer to the ballpark and arena, Mohawk Place has been a live music presence for over 30 years:
In brief, Buffalo’s Mohawk Place has been a staple of the city’s music scene since 1990. Pete Perrone founded the bar, acting as a godfather to scores of hungry young bands. Occupying the bottom floor of a building built in 1896, the location housed and fed vaudeville performers for several decades before becoming a nightclub that boasted performances by Jack White, Link Wray and The Black Keys among other legends. After briefly closing its doors in January 2013, and breaking the hearts of local concert goers, Buffalo’s Mohawk Place came back to life without losing a bit of its trend-setting charm.
New owner Richard Platt reopened the historic music venue one year, seven months, and 30 days later, with some important modifications. For starters, he repaired the bar, the floors, the roof and plumbing, replacing fixtures, sound and light systems, and doing most of the work himself with a small crew. In fact, he’s taken care of technical issues while retaining the same "shot and a beer" dive bar warmth. Along with keeping the hip, old-school vibes, Platt wisely brought back Mohawk Place’s former booking agent....
Unfortunately, one of the acts booked into the joint last spring was an Australian band who didn't read the very clear signs I saw when attending one of the few shows I ever made it to there to see friends onstage. The ones that said, among other things, NO CROWDSURFING: a 24-year-old attendee
suffered a devastating crowd injury while attending an April 30th Trophy Eyes show at Mohawk Place in Buffalo, NY. During that concert, Trophy Eyes‘ vocalist John Floreani jumped backwards from the stage into the crowd, landing directly on top of Piché, along with several other concertgoers.
As a result Piché, suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury that left her partially paralyzed in the immediate aftermath, with a lengthy recovery process following. Piché‘s mother initially told local news outlet WKBW just after the incident that her daughter had suffered a broken neck from Floreani‘s stage dive.
In light of the incident, over $88,000 was raised via crowdfunding for Piché. Among those to contribute were Trophy Eyes, who offered up $5,000. Mohawk Place also contributed $500 to the cause. Unconfirmed initial reports also indicated that Floreani rode along in the ambulance with Piché to the hospital.
Per a May 2025 report, Piché was hopeful to eventually make a full recovery. However, her complaint, which was filed on November 12th of this year in Buffalo, NY, makes mention of her suffering permanent injury from the incident.
I'll assume the "May 2025" reference involved a typo rather than a TARDIS, but in the present day, that case has no doubt led to this announcement yesterday on their Facebook page:
It looks like we won't be around much longer, but here's what we hopefully still have coming up:
Saturday, January 4, 6pm doors/7pm show, $12 advance/$15 at the door
Sevagoth, Elusive Travel, Arcana, Into The Light, Venom Mob, Guillotine
Sunday, January 5, 7pm doors/8pm show, $20 advance/$25 day of show
Anthony Raneri, Nate Bergman (rescheduled from 11.17)
Friday, January 10, 6pm doors/7pm show, $15
G.O.A. and Hold Out release show, Do Crime, On the Cinder, Bile Study
Friday, January 17, 7pm doors/8pm show, $15 advance/$20 day of show
Damages, The Queen Guillotined, Mental Anguish
Saturday, January 18, 7pm doors/8pm show, $25 advance/$30 day of show
Mat Kerekes, Equipment, Bike Routes
1.25 Winter Reigns V
2.1 Fooled By Eve, Seneca Peak, Dead Orchids
2.8 Brooke Surgener & Star Theory, Star Theory, Nancy Dunkle, Akloh.
That last act is one of the friends I went down there to see a few months earlier. He had just gotten a major boost to his burgeoning music career by getting an afternoon slot on a local TV "news" program:
Mohawk was one of the first local stages to give this relative unknown a place to bring his talent and his friends becoming fans and paying customers, and now it looks like it will go dark because of a headliner band member's utter stupidity.
----
As for the song: this was not the "why" of Eleanor's departure from the Sunday night regular visits to our piano woman friend, but it was played that night before the party bus arrived and I knew the story that probably few of the original artist's fans know:
John Prine was a living legend of folk and Americana until he became a passed-on one in 2020, one of the first people of any fame to lose their lives to COVID in its early deadly stages. I knew him a little from the one CD we had and from playings of some of his songs on NPR music programs, but in the numerous tributes to him in live performances and cover recordings released or circulated in the almost five years since, the signature song for him has become "Angel from Montgomery." It has been covered by Carly Simon, Bonnie Raitt, John Denver with some slight modification, and in any number of film and television soundtracks. It's also quite the trigger of depression, as Prine himself was among the first to acknowledge, saying he was intrigued by the idea of
a song about a middle-aged woman who feels older than she is...[Eventually] I had this really vivid picture of this woman standing over the dishwater with soap in her hands...She wanted to get out of her house and her marriage and everything. She just wanted an angel to come to take her away from all this."
He added he likely was drawn to Montgomery as the song's setting by virtue of being a fan of Hank Williams, who had ties to that city. Since the idea of "a woman who feels older than she is" is one Eleanor has been fighting off for most of this century, I can understand why it's not the celebrational anthem to her that it has become for so many.
Then it came back in a different context. All of the first four mornings of 2025 so far have been rough on my subconscious. I've awakened each time to a potently emotional weird dream, some with unknown characters, at least one with two friends of mine (and former co-workers of each other) in which I was asked by one to commit overt acts of espionage on the other, breaking and entering and hacking into their smartphone. (Just in case, if your phone password is WIZARDOFOZ, I suggest you change it;) I'm taking some steps to combat whatever may be feeding into my brain to put out such subconscious goo at the end of my sleep cycle, but yesterday morning, after another of them I've mostly forgotten the details of, I went out into the world into a run of minor annoyances.
I'd taken Eleanor's car to Rochester the day before, and she mentioned that the CHECK TIRE PRESSURE warning had come on my car's dashboard, in addition to the on-again-off-again check engine light. I'd seen it, too, the day before that and thought I'd check it at the tire place during the day sometime. That was then escalated to DO IT NOW when that yellow tire ! turned red with a new and improved TIRE PRESSURE FAILURE warning. Fine, fine: I made Mavis my first stop and it was down to 24 psi from the desired 36 and got right back up to standard without any issue. The light is absent this morning and I'm going to have that tire checked- it's one of the older snows I just had put on- to make sure it's okay and that this is just from our once-weird-now-normal 40F-degree temperature swings in the middle of winter.
That got me closer to my second annoying stop. Pepper has been on one brand of heartworm medication the whole time we've had her, but our vet doesn't carry it. Wegmans has always autofilled it, but when I checked in early December when I dispensed the last of her previous six-month supply, it was on back order. As of yesterday, which we have calendared for her monthly dose, it still was. The vet suggested Chewy. I went to see it Petco had it, which they did. Online. Assorted hiccups ensued getting it ordered through their site with the store associate helping. Finally, I got out on the road just in time for what I thought was a 10 a.m. phone appointment, and of all the songs on all the stations in all the media choices in the world, what has to walk into mine?
"Angel from Montgomery." Prine AND Bonnie Raitt doing a live version of it.
Pass the dishwater. Just not the band member.