I have a weird request for all readers of this site. I want you to familiarize yourselves with Dayton, Ohio. Of course, I am mostly just joking, but, in general, we bloggers would mostly extol the idea of having a readership which could readily name the three most important bands from Dayton — Brainiac, The Breeders and Guided by Voices — a little genus of indie pop with cultural clout way disproportionate to Dayton’s meager population (137,000) [1].
Anyway, even with the knowledge of this precocious group of influential lo-fi rockers from this little Midwestern speck on the map, I’d kind of held Dayton at arm’s length, in general. You’ll notice, for instance, the bands being cleaved strictly along sex lines, the only aberration being The Breeders’ male drummer, Jose Medeles. Take away him and you’re either a gang of guys or a gang of girls, if you rocked here in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s (and maybe today as well, for all I know). One look at the lists of early gigs on setlist.fm and you’re likely to confirm a certain sexism prevalent here, even as late as the early’ 90s — The Breeders in fact didn’t play a single gig in Dayton throughout the whole years of 1993 and 1994, the undeniable apex of their popularity as a band. Contrast this with Guided by Voices, which, to date, has rocked the Canal Street Tavern in downtown Dayton, a total of 22 times, including at least one ’94 gig. (1994, for their part, was when GBV enjoyed a certain popularity glut with their baffling indie breakthrough Bee Thousand and its focused, expedited approach to songwriting.)
I mention the Canal Street Tavern as a key Dayton music venue, which, truth be told, historically, it has been. The sad truth now, however, is that they no longer stage concerts anymore at all, and the stage area has been overtaken by arcade games and booths, the former seating area driven out by an expansion of the craft-beer-soaked bar area. According to a gentleman I talked to at the bar who was in his 50s or 60s or so, the concerts stopped happening there around 10 years or so ago, when the original owner passed away. I made the comment that “It must not have been lucrative” and the man seemed to deny this stance, in a sense, while also not really explicitly disproving it, in any way. It’s certainly funny to think, regardless, that the extinction of live music at the Canal would have occurred so soon after Guided by Voices’ 2012 gig at the tavern, an event which took place during an undeniable resurgence in the band’s popularity, by way of the acclaim they’d received in the blogosphere during the prior 10 years or so. [It’s easy to see, along these same lines, how this very online buzz over such indie and lo-fi acts would have spawned the band’s comeback album, Let’s Go Eat the Factory (2012), in the first place.]
Then, from the complete lack of references to other venues around town from the guy I was talking to, I was left to deduce that these pubby, beer-soaked, frenzied, intimate shows we all know and love (think Nirvana playing the Pearl Street Pub in Boulder, Colo. on the Bleach tour in 1989 or Modest Mouse rocking Rhino’s in Bloomington, Ind. supporting The Lonesome Crowded West) are just a thing of the past. The guy did bring up the summer concert series, which, as well-founded and well-meaning as it might be, does smack to us millennials of anticlimactic old-people fare. I mean, you can’t yell, and pour beer on people, and stuff. You can’t really dance too closely onto someone else. It’s just a totally different enterprise. This being said, I do obviously support the “11 Man” concert series in Dayton and would be interested in seeing what kinds of acts they hold.
The festival circuit seems to be alive and well, anyway. I suppose it’s the same kind of phenomenon as buying your Internet separately, as opposed to bundling it with voice, text and cable TV. It’s just always going to be more cost-effective for everyone involved to chunk things together, like running multiple errands at once, or two corporations fusing into one conglomerate. Out with the old… in with the new.
Anyway, in light of this cultural shift, which, in the case of the Canal Street Tavern, yielded Planet of the Apes and Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion on the TV, approachable indie selections from the attractive female bartender and two overweight lesbians in their 40s looking at naked men on the arcade game thingie, I did discover, or, rather, have something reinforced, about people in the year 2024. They are very ready to discuss things like this. That is, the average person in the Canal Street Tavern is likely to have a knowledge of the commensurate history of the establishment, and to appreciate music, whether it’s Motown or Simon & Garfunkel or fuzzy, distorted lo-fi rock from the 1990s. The girl behind the bar, while I was talking to the guy, chimed into our conversation, claiming to have seen “The Heartless Bastards” [2], and her playlist selections included Spoon, Neil Young, MGMT and some other local Cincy band which I liked — stuff straight out of High Fidelity, in other words. She was really nice and the guy was really nice and they say a cat can tell when somebody in the nursing home’s about to die and will curl up next to them an hour before expiration, lying there motionless with complete patience the whole way through. Sometimes stuff is just like that, I guess. Anyway, now I don’t feel like quite as much of a loser for never being able to find gigs going on anywhere, I suppose.
.
[1] This being said, for some reason, even growing up as a Hoosier, I never realized that Dayton is pretty much a suburb of Cincinnati — nothing but 40 miles of urban sprawl, pretty much, lies between the two cities, demarcated starkly from the countryside I’d envisioned (as composes much of the space between Chicago and my native South Bend, Ind., for instance). That being said, this “suburban college town” shtick is certainly troubled by the rash of empty buildings and the untoward violent crime rate pervading the city.
.
[2] Heartless Bastards, for anyone unfamiliar, are a killer grunge-folk unit from Cincinnati, prominent in the 2000s decade. I also highly recommend the solo album from lead singer Erika Wennerstrom.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>