Club Ded

If the posts here haven't made it obvious, I spend more of my outside time going out to small-venue live music than I do going to bigger concerts, sporting events, theater or even films in cinemas these days. I get a major charge out of not only hearing the music but the stories the musicians bring to the stage in their songs and between them during their sets.  I've become friends with many of them, both local and afar, and it's a pleasure helping to support their careers through buying their recordings, talking up their upcoming shows, and in a few cases even helping to arrange local gigs for them.

Some of the reason for this preference is also the cost to see these performers- which often ranges from nothing (other than tip jars and food and non-alcoholic drinkery) to rarely above 20 or 30 bucks, and that commitment usually day-of or just before. Compare that to the big big stars who hit you for hundreds for a show that might (or might not) take place nine months from now. Maybe once or twice a year, I'll plunge for one of those, but unless it's something extraordinary, I'm waiting for the last minute to see if the scalpers overbought the event and I can see a Who or a Bruce for a fraction of what the first-day liner-uppers paid. (Secondary tickets for Springsteen's latest tourstop here, with original prices causing controversy among his fans, have dropped to around $200, which is still too high to get me into one of their nosebleed seats.)

These opportunities depend on the smaller venues which have been part of local music scenes in most cities for generations.  Buffalo boasts of at least half a dozen I've been to, Rochester about as many, and bigger cities have even more- but they're fast becoming relics and many are falling into mere memories of what and where they once were.

Among the places welcoming 10,000 Maniacs to downtowns before their meteoric rise to fame in the 80s? Here, they included the Continental: it's now a vacant lot. In Rochester, it was Scorgie's, now an empty shell, passed on the way to seeing Danielle Ponder back in October-



A bit further away from downtown Rochester was a club called The Creek, or Red Creek before that. I represented its owner for a number of years in the late 80s. Among the performers coming across its stage? Muddy Waters, David Crosby, Jay Leno, and my biggest bucket list miss of my life, Warren Zevon. One that didn't make it to the stage was U2, booked there in 1980 on their first US tour. Accounts vary, but either my future client threw them out for being rude or they pulled up and left when they wouldn't clear the bar of customers for a pre-show soundcheck.

Yet some have remained, or moved when a lease ran out or a neighborhood changed, while others have stepped up to the mic to bring these experiences to a new generation. I've written here about Abilene in Rochester, Sportsmens in the Black Rock section of Buffalo, the Towne Crier on the Hudson.  All have walls adorned with the artists who made us smile and sing along on so many previous evenings. All took major hits from the pandemic, between customers not coming and artists having to cancel at the last minute when the 'rona hit one or more in a group.

And now one of the legends of this city is looking for a new pair of caring hands.

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Around here, Allentown has nothing to do with Billy Joel, and any connections to the Bills quarterback are retronymic.  Allen Street runs through it, from west of Main just past Elmwood, and it's long been a neighborhood of the arts and of food and drink but with some grit to it.  Bars and restaurants have come and gone,  but the anchors of the district have long been the Towne all-night diner and the music venue known and loved by all as Nietzsche's.



That photo's from a local arts-oriented website, which reported over the weekend that the building is for sale.  That led to more than a little consternation from musician friends and supporters on my Facebook feed, as well as worried Buffalo Rising comments about it getting converted or Starbucked. First thing I did was check who owns the building, and yes, it's Joe Rubino, who's owned and legendized the first-floor club there. The sale is of the lock (building), stock (business) and barrel (the name). I can't see him selling his legacy for a song, especially if the song wouldn't remain the same.

Looking a little further, I discovered that Joe is a 2019 inductee to the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame for this venue's contributions to the local music scene. His profile there, written by a friend of mine (and father of an even closer friend of both of ours), recounts the long strange trip it's been:

Think of Nietzsche’s as the club that launched a thousand careers … or at least a heck of a lot of them.

For the past 37 years, the Allen Street venue has been home to live music almost every night, and its open mic nights have been influential in launching the careers of everyone from Tom Stahl to Ani DiFranco.

Nietzsche’s could enter the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame on number of performances alone. Think about it. Thirty-seven years. Somewhere around 13,000 nights of music – and counting.

 

But it all started with a dream, and that dream was Joe Rubino’s.

It was 1982, and Rubino was 31 years old. He was a partner in a club in West Seneca called Frodo’s that had done some live music.

 

Then a friend told him about this cavernous place for sale in Allentown called the Jamestown Grill. Rubino checked it out.

 

“After I walked in there the second time, I was obsessed with it,” he said in a recent interview. “I went in the first time and didn’t know what to think. There was tons of drop ceilings and whatever.

“But I’d gotten a little taste of music. By the second time I walked in the Jamestown, I was obsessed with buying it and I approached them to buy it. But I had no money.”

 

So he had to sell his share of Frodo’s to his partner and the partner’s father. He paid $80,000 to the brothers who had owned the Jamestown for about 40 years, putting $20,000 down and paying $5,000 to close. That left him with roughly $500 in the bank.

“I almost called it Kierkegaard’s, by the way,” he said. “I’m no expert on Nietzche, but he impressed me – not that I agreed with everything he wrote – but the whole thing about taking your life and creating from within was one of the things that I took from his writings.”

The bar went through a transition. Underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez portrayed the bar as a bikers haven in his memoirs of growing up in Buffalo in the 1950s and ‘60s, but by the time Rubino got it, it was an old men’s bar. It opened at 8 a.m., and the night clientele drew largely from the Native American population on Buffalo’s West Side.

It looked a lot different than it does now, too.

“Music was the plan from the start,” he said. Friends helped him bring in the wood work, he took out the drop ceilings and put in brass squares, and he put in a new stage in the back (there had been shows there in the 1940s, but now it was dilapidated).

Those brass squares are now covered with the autographs of hundreds of musicians, from world famous to locally beloved, who've been on that stage or just played to a smaller crowd from right in front of the bar, as one group did the last time we were there in the Before Times. Though I haven't been there since,  I know its place in local music lore and love- and can only guess how many friends of mine have signed that ceiling- and I can only believe that someone, or ones, from the local music community will step up to keep the name alive and let the music play on.