Cover Story: Still mourning Graffiti and the Decade?
Get over it!

There are plenty of venues for
live music here in the zeros

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The view from the stage is a working musician's dream: captive fans up close and personal and a busy dance floor that stretches all the way to the bar.

From behind the bar, it looks like the

answer to the owner's prayers: the constant ca-ching of the cash registers and customers stacked three deep at the counter; behind them, a contented crowd grooving with the band.

Throughout most of the last 10 years, that could have been the point-counterpoint of a good night at any of Pittsburgh's major live-music meccas: The Decade, Graffiti and Metropol/Rosebud. During the last few years, the invasion of the corporate theme discos dominated the city's night life. But in recent months, young audiences have begun exploring a new wave of music venues that have recently opened or just hit their strides.

M (for Metropol) and Rosebud, the multifaceted music duplex that started the Strip District's entertainment career, remains the king of the clubs. As the city's only remaining showcase, Rosebud has the capacity and inclination to routinely program club-level touring bands. Although M remains primarily a discotheque with difficult sight lines, it can handle acts that bring in more than 1,000 people.

But new live music rooms are popping up all over town. At Station Square, the new Rock Jungle disco is experimenting with live bands. As for existing music spaces, Club Laga in Oakland stays hip and Club Cafe on the South Side got hip thanks to aggressive, streetwise booking. New coffeehouses, Quiet Storm and Shadow Lounge, are bringing multicultural local talent to Friendship and East Liberty. Punk and underground bands have found new digs at Mr. Roboto in Wilkinsburg and the Warsaw Tavern on Polish Hill. The Cultural Trust is -- gasp! -- opening a pop music bar Downtown, and just last night, the new Chapel of Blues was baptized in a former Roman Catholic church in Green Tree.

The new venues share three important features:

• They are opening or expanding at a time when the economy is buckling. Historically, hard times are great times for original live music. If discos entertains the body, live music comforts the soul.

• They are locally owned -- read: no corporate agendas. Non-chains have a vested interest in their host neighborhoods and recirculate profits back into the community. They generally have more flexible programming and don't require a nod from the home office to substantively respond to local conditions (bye-bye Banana Joe's of Pittsburgh, Inc. in the Strip, but on Wednesday the same company reopened with a new name, Headliners).

• With the exceptions of Laga and Rock Jungle, the new music rooms are anywhere from small to tiny. "Intimate" is the preferred word for places with less than the 400-seat showcase capacity.

Former Graffiti owner Tony DiNardo denies that he wants a piece of the action, but he keeps his nose to the wind wafting over Pittsburgh's entertainment scene. Small, he says, is good.

"There are lot of advantages to going small," he says. "Primarily, small venues are within the financial reach of their operators. My first place [the 80-seat Portfolio in Oakland] was small. Those places are as much a proving ground for the management as they are for the bands. If you have the gumption, you can make it happen for 100 grand.

"As for the talent, it's like a pyramid. You need smaller places at the bottom where bands can explore their dreams and build followings. How many [local] bands out there right now have made it to the point where they can attract 500 people to a premier showcase?"

Since the day before his 22nd birthday, Justin Strong has been building a dream called Shadow Lounge at the corner of Baum and South Highland in East Liberty. For the past 17 months, with a little help from East Liberty Development Corp., he's turning the former East Liberty Chamber of Commerce building into a tea lounge where entry-level bands can begin building dreams of their own, 50 fans at a time.

"I'm not into the club scene," he says. "Drunk, smoky venues? I'm more into laid-back progressive ideas. I'm trying to provide an outlet for disadvantaged cultures -- hip-hop, DJ, soul, Latin, acid jazz, poetry slams."

At a former nuisance bar in nearby Friendship, music booker Lynn Benson has replaced the bookies. In October, the loud and dangerous Quiet Storm Bar & Grill was reincarnated as the peaceable Quiet Storm Coffeehouse & Restaurant. Gone are the pimps, prostitutes and pushers. Benson is programming music, mocha and vegan munchies.

"My vision here is to have a venue that supports local artists and gives an opportunity for up-and-coming artists to have a place to voice themselves," she says. "I'd like to develop a reputation as a place where musicians know they can stop in and collaborate in combinations that maybe they haven't before in a very open and inclusive place."

The Friendship Development Associates bought the troubled corner bar and leases it to engineer Ian Lipsky. Without a liquor license, every night is all-ages, but Benson's booking separates the wheat from the chaff. Some shows attract crowds who could drink if they wanted to, but they'd rather sip latte at Quiet Storm. Tonight, she has Crisis Car and Ritual Space Travel Agency. Tomorrow, Ouve Azzy Runk.

"I see it as a place for a number of things to happen," says Lipsky. "Not just a music venue, not just a restaurant, not just a coffeehouse, but a place where the community -- and you can define 'community' in a lot of different ways -- can have a place to meet. Symbolically, I think it was a beautiful transformation because where drug dealers once dealt there are kids playing now."

Lipsky is pushing the bean-spread dinners and weekend brunch. After a structural nip and tuck, he says he hopes to double the current legal capacity to 200.

Shadow Lounge and Quiet Storm aren't breaking new ground by attracting multiracial audiences to predominantly African-American parts of town, but they're on the cutting edge of slicing through Pittsburgh's lingering racial barriers.

Club Cafe isn't new, but the vibe is. Since shortly after former M/Rosebud booker Karl Mullen switched sides in July, the upscale South Side space has been packed, and not just for the primo martinis.

"It's about having the right band at the right time and building reputations with agents and audiences," says Mullen. "You have to keep informed about what's going on. It's all about knowing what's hot, who's coming and being the kind of room that can groom emerging talent."

Although some local bands have grumbled about getting bumped (welcome to the business), Club Cafe programs a good balance of local bands and national artists on the verge of breaking big. With a fire code classification limiting the space to 125, artists are literally eyeball to eyeball with the crowd.

"Some of the artists are a bit scared by it," says Mullen. "It can be quite intimidating. But others love the contact that they can't get in a bigger space."

Smaller can also mean higher ticket prices. But Mullen says his generally upscale crowd is willing to pay a few dollars more for the intimacy.

Before opening several years ago, owners Marco Cardamone, Barney Lee and Clay Kisker wired the place for state-of-the art Webcasting, a new technology that provides better-than-TV transmission of steaming audio and video on the Internet. WYEP (91.3 FM) broadcasts one concert per month live from Club Cafe and Mullen says he's lining up top-level artists to record live DVDs in the room.

For all their good, however, one theory goes that small venues don't provide the critical mass necessary to breathe life into a viable music scene. It happened only a few times in Pittsburgh in the last 20 years -- at the Decade in the late '70s and at Graffiti in the '80s.

A few larger venues have the space but lack the right vibe.

The night before Thanksgiving, enforcement officers from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and Pittsburgh Health Department and police raided a Buzz Poets concert at Rock Jungle. Drug-sniffing dogs found no traces of Ecstasy or other illegal substances, but two people were charged with underage drinking and the band's sound man was busted for resisting arrest and was subsequently hospitalized.

Several days later, with the dance hall already packed to its 1,000-person capacity, police turned away another 1,000 begging to get in for nothing more than an under-21 DJ dance party. Owned by the people behind the Strip District's Boardwalk, Rock Jungle has attracted the attention of Allegheny County's Nuisance Bar Task Force, and Mount Washington neighborhood groups say they are bothered by the noise, traffic and litter generated by its customers.

Rock Jungle is hot, some say too hot. Twenty-four-year-old marketing director Aimee Arnold says the year-old dance club is "exceeding income projections." Mostly a tropical-themed disco with restricted zones for customers over- and under 21, Arnold occasionally gooses the programming. MTV recently held an open casting for a new show there, and monthly concerts by acts like P.O.D., Nelly Furtado and Vanilla Ice have packed the place.

"When we first opened, we did local bands every Wednesday," said Arnold. "But it didn't go over. I think management likes the idea of being a disco more than being a performance facility, but we're still talking with Clear Channel about doing some other concerts."

In the rapidly changing night scene, the word "new" begs the question, how new?

A few years ago, the addition of a new balcony at Club Laga pushed its capacity into the mid-sized club level. A steady stream of national alternative music from Joker Productions keeps it edgy and happening. Although some local bands are booked, Laga isn't nurturing anything resembling a scene.

Want edgier? The Millvale Industrial Theatre brings in bands that are so far underground, the alternative bands haven't heard of them yet.

The closest thing Pittsburgh has to a new music scene is the punk thing happening at the 31st Street Pub on the far side of the Strip. The Pub picked up the local slack left by The Decade and the Electric Banana. Its limited capacity, however, keeps what's sizzling there at a slow boil.

Dowe's on Ninth is a relatively new place, but, well, it's jazz. Jazz and rock are apples and oranges.

Nick's Fat City has always had the right capacity, but it hasn't done anything new in years.

Headliners, the old Banana Joe's, still has a concert stage buried somewhere in its maze of theme rooms, although the focus remains primarily DJ dance mixes.

Chapel of Blues on Greentree Road hopes to pick up where Buffalo Blues left off, after dropping live music from its schedule last year. With entertainment that will be dominated by classic R&B covers by a house band and touring blues acts, the Chapel, like blues heaven Moondog's in Blawnox, is not likely to attract a young crowd.

On Dec. 21, the creators of Metropol and Rosebud will debut Bossa Nova, a 550-seat "comfort lounge" at 123 Seventh St., Downtown. Patterned after their successful Heaven on Sixth, which was closed when the former Fulton Building was sold, the Latin-themed lounge will not include a dance floor and will feature upscale drinks and tapas. Initial plans call for piped-in music and occasional low-key lounge performances.

The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is building two cabarets Downtown, but don't let the word scare you off. "Cabaret" is the Trust's upscale way of saying, "nice bar." Both places -- the Theater Square project in the lobby of a new 800-space parking garage next to the O'Reilly Theater, and the as-yet-unnamed space at 801 Liberty Ave. -- plan multifaceted entertainment, not just lounge singers.

Mayor Tom Murphy scrapped his plans to subsidize a House of Blues to help shore up revitalization of the Fifth-Forbes corridor, but don't forget about the Hard Rock Cafe that's coming next summer to a floating dock at Station Square. Another chain theme club, its programming will include live performances.

Before there can be a rebirth of a living, breathing local music scene, there needs to be a place to put it. With so many new or newish performance spaces unfolding, it will be interesting to see what local musicians do about it.

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Space: 120 is maximum capacity

Vibe: Club Cafe has become the premiere small venue in Pittsburgh. With solid acts playing six nights a week, a good munchies menu, a great floor plan and a nice bar, it attracts a big crowd most every night it's open. For the bigger acts, such as members of Rusted Root, the place gets packed, so plan to arrive very early if you want to snag a table.

Cover: $3-$6 for smaller shows; up to $20 for ticketed shows.

Hip Quotient: The layout is what makes it such a great scene. The tables scattered in the middle of the room and booths along the perimeter, make most live performances very interactive. Artists onstage often chat with audience members between sets and mingle with them afterward. The bar is often too crowded, however, and it may be necessary to be aggressive to get a drink. But that's just a symptom of a successful venue.

By Eve Modzelewski

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