Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Today's Blind Items- One Night At The Border Part One

A mid-week announcement just to wish each of you a Merry Christmas and that I hope that you have an amazing couple of days and are spending it with people you love. Well, except for the crazy uncle. If you need a break from the activities, I will be here tomorrow and hope to see all of you.

Back in the day I had a friend. His name is Carlos. Real name. Owned a great club and taught me a lot about concert promoting and also had some very useful life lessons which have come into play more than once and introduced me to some people who are still some of my closest friends. Anyway, one day I was over at his house because I had a show coming up and even though we were friends, money was expected to be paid on time and in full or he would cancel your show in a second. He needed absolutely no notice to get a band or two in his place and fill it up so he had no qualms about shutting you down. Once money exchanged hands he would smile and he told me to come to the club later that night because he wanted to introduce me to a band he had playing. Later that night I showed up at the club and was frisked. Walked a little further and was frisked again. Carlos' shows were a little different than the ones I promoted and the crowd was completely different. Going inside the massive darkened club an opening band was playing and they were awful. It didn't matter to the crowd though because they came for one reason and it was to beat each other all night long in one huge mosh pit. Knowing the crowd, I was shocked to see one of my best friends way in the back where some chairs and tables were set up. She will always be A list in my mind and to her millions of fans. I had met her at an outdoor concert two years earlier and when she (lets call her JL) was not touring would usually hang out a couple of times a week. I hadn't known she was coming. If she was there, then this band must be one I really needed to meet. She mall type than was not someone who generally came to Carlos' club. She would go to my shows there and had even played there a few times but she was always more of a mall type than a double frisking security kind of place. Her boyfriend was with her but he had to go watch a guy play at a different venue that night who was going to replace a member of their band so almost right after I got there he left.

Conversation was impossible. The club was basically one big room. Walk in the door and the stage was in the front and the bar on the right. 1,000 people could fit inside but you would all be best friends at the end of the night. The music was always turned up to a massive volume. There were no neighbors to complain and there were so many police officers who earned a ton of money working overtime at the club that any call about noise complaints would be ignored. When the band stopped playing, Carlos came over and with him was a guy I had seen many times and was the lead singer (lets call him PK)  of a band that could sell out every club just like this one all over the country every single night and did. They had started out as one kind of band and made no money so they switched things up and the next thing you knew they were huge in a  club kind of way. They made tons of money and sold hundreds of thousands of records one night at time. Their sound belied the name of the band. They were anything but. With the lead singer (lets call him RP) was a guy I had never met, but had seen. They were just making it big. Huge actually. First big monster record had been released the year before. I say monster hit. It actually did not crack the Top 40 records but if you are a fan of the band you have heard the album many times and there are very few people who don't know the intro riff to the very first song on the record. Apparently the singer was there as a favor to the other lead singer and they were going to surprise the crowd later that night by playing together.

As the night wore on the word started to spread that tonight was going to be kind of special. Other people I knew started trickling into the club and other bands would finish their shows at other places around the city and were coming in. By 1am that 1,000 person capacity had been maxed out. This was probably 25% above that. This was going to be one night no one wanted to miss. The place almost exploded when the two came out. The crowd was expecting the headlining band of the night but when the singer of the monster band came out with him and that riff I spoke about before started blasting out of the speakers there was an eruption of noise that could probably only be matched by standing behind the engines of a 747. You would not think that kind of noise could be sustained for very long. You would be wrong. For about 90 minutes there was not one second I can remember where the crowd was not enthralled and mesmerized and totally into every word and beat. It was a show of epic proportions. It was hard to believe that the night was only going to get crazier. The craziness began when PK said to myself, RH and JL after the show that we should go to Mexico that night. (to be continued tomorrow)

 

 


22 comments:

  1. Och Enty i was just getting into that

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  2. Tricia132:19 AM

    Band Nirvana
    album In Utero(first Nevermind)
    JL-Sheryl Crow?
    RP-Kurt

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  3. MontanaMarriott2:22 AM

    KC and Nirvana?

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  4. Tricia132:23 AM

    PK-Axl Rose?

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  5. shakey2:25 AM

    Aimée Mann for JL.

    I don't know - Mark McGrath for RP? Didn't Sugar Ray change their sound, then made it big with I Just Wanna Fly (or whatever it's called)?

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  6. Tricia132:41 AM

    PK could easily be Anthony Keides (Red Hot Chili Peopers) as well JL being Sarah MaClachlan

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  7. french girl3:44 AM

    PK as Nine Inch Nails's lead Trent Reznor and JL as Tori Amos?

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  8. missy3:54 AM

    would it be too obvious is JL was Juliette Lewis? LOL probably

    but i definitely think the second band is Red Hot Chili Peppers. they fit the "changed sound and became famous" description.

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  9. Greengrl5:29 AM

    Enty, you're such a tease!

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  10. My guess:

    The men were any two of Layne Stanley, Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains could all fit the name of the band that belies the genre clue. Also, knowing what happened to Layne makes me think that he would have a hankering to go to Tijuana. It's hard to sort out which were the up and coming artist, though, because they were all blowing up around the same time. I guess Soundgarden and Alcie in Chains were around prior to Pearl Jam, so it's still murkey.

    Was it this show? http://www.alternativenation.net/looking-back-at-1991s-rip-party-featuring-pearl-jam-alice-in-chains-soundgarden/

    Who was the woman? Edie Brickell? Paul Simon could have been the boyfriend. Aside: Matt Cameron was a member of the New Bohemians and Pearl Jam. Not sure, though.

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  11. hothotheat8:52 AM

    Not Edie, she and Paul didn't play in the same band. Sheryl Crow only hooks up with famous people and/or rich men. Not her. I like the Amy Mann guess. She had a boyfriend in her band at one point (or was he was a producer).

    Also like the Nirvana guess.

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  12. Don't know about the others but RP is absolutely Kurt Cobain.

    First track on Nevermind's record (which debuted at #144 on Billboard's charts) is Smells Like Teen Spirit, which has one of the most recognizable guitar riffs of the 90s. Prior to their success, they were flat broke. They recorded their first album, Bleach, for only about a few hundred dollars which was given to them by a charitable fan. They also constantly switched drummers until finally settling with Dave Grohl in 1990, and got signed to Geffen records shortly after.

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  13. B. Profane9:48 AM

    Timing sounds more like peak of the L.A. hair metal era than 90's. That timing fits with when David Berson (aka ur-Enty) was still working as a music promoter prior to going to law school.

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  14. The 10th Doctor12:03 PM

    I think the lead singer is Axl Rosr from G'n'R with the intro riff for Welcome to Jungle being the song everyone knows. Think he was probably performing with LA Guns who they were friends with and had a solid underground following. Don't know who the female singer is.

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  15. Chi Chi12:14 PM

    I think the same, what club? The Viper Room? what other club was big then, the Whiskey had to be on the way out by that time.

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  16. cantsleep4:11 PM

    PK=Kurt Cobain--Nirvana
    RH= Michael Stipe-- REM....everyone recognizes the 1st riff on 1st song of their album & they were great friends
    JL=Aimee Mann --'Til Tuesday (pre- Penn )

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  17. The 10th Doctor7:18 PM

    The Whiskey was still around and hot in the late 80s @chichi but GnR played The Troubadour a lot. It was their main stomping ground.

    I know Kurt Cobain is a popular guess on this but this blind is shaping up to be an epic journey of debauchery and that was not Cobain. He was painfully shy and his destructive behavior was not generally "let's party in Mexico!" It was more internal and related to Courtney Love in latter years. Finally, Nirvana was the Seattle scene, not LA, and OG Enty (and that's def the voice here) is LA-based in his blind items for his music promotion blinds and comments. That firmly puts Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden out of the running. To me this is a metal band for sure.

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  18. chi chi7:20 AM

    None of the clubs mentioned were owned by a Carlos, Enty says it's his real name. Troubador was Doug Weston, Roxy is Lou Adler, hmm, might be some shit hole from back then, lol.

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  19. The 10th Doctor7:57 AM

    @Chi Chi, I saw that in my research and was wondering if it was maybe a club manager. There was a punk club called Jabberjaw that was called The Jabberjaw by a lot of folks...can't find the owner's name, though.

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  20. Jason Smith12:34 PM

    Gary Dent owned Jabberjaw.

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  21. […] }); . Today is the good. I have written about her once before in multiple parts. Here is part one and part […]

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