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May 08, 2005

Wetlands Dancehall

Ron Liberti designed and screenprinted this poster for the Kerbloki dance party that I DJed a week and a half ago at Wetlands Dancehall. This coming Saturday night, Ron's own band The Ghost of Rock will be playing at Wetlands on a bill with Greg Barbera's new punk rock trio The Chest Pains. I'll have to ask Ron if he remembers performing at this exact same Treehouse/Wetlands space a very long time ago during one of its earlier pre-Cheap Shots incarnations: a sports bar called Rosey's Good Times. During the summer of 1992, WXYC started sponsoring some cheap live shows at Rosey's, and I remember there being a Pipe/Archers of Loaf show there at some point. I didn't make it to that show or the even odder-for-a-sports-bar bill of Smog and Royal Trux (oops!), but I did manage to catch Shrimp Boat when they played an ill-timed Rosey's gig during the middle of the 1992 World Series. Shrimp Boat captain Sam Prekop is actually coming back to town on Thursday June 9th. I'm sure the Carrboro Artscenter will be a fine venue for him and Archer Prewitt, but it's almost too bad that Prekop isn't playing Wetlands Dancehall, since I'm sure that this time around he could get it specified in his rider that no Braves/Blue Jays games could be broadcast during his performance.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Chapel Hill/Carrboro's live music clubs/venues and how they've changed over the years. When I first started loading my records into Wetlands Dancehall for that Kerbloki dance party, I looked over to the right half of the club and was very surprised to see a freshly constructed stage completely surrounding the DJ booth. It was at that moment that I finally started thinking of Wetlands Dancehall not just as "The Treehouse with a new name" but as a completely new venue capable of hosting a whole new lineup of rock shows, live performances, DJ nights, etc. Making even a partial transition to "live music club" is obviously not going to be an easy task, but one thing Wetlands Dancehall has going for it is the fact that it can hold a ton of people.

Perhaps more importantly, the place has a good downtown Chapel Hill location. Ever since the Lizard and Snake Cafe closed up in 1998, the vast majority of cool live music shows in town have taken place in either Carrboro (Cat's Cradle, Go!) or the very-close-to-Carrboro edges of West Franklin and West Rosemary (Local 506, Nightlight, The Cave). As a proud resident of Carrboro, this is totally cool by me and convenient to boot. But I can't help thinking what a shame it is that the East Franklin stretch of downtown Chapel Hill (the part of downtown that is closest to the UNC campus) can't seem to get any more interesting or happening than it is. During my freshman and sophomore years at UNC, I lived all the way across campus in Morrison Dorm but I still wound up walking to Cat's Cradle shows all the time....'cause back then, the Cradle was located at 206 W. Franklin, currently the site of Buffalo Wild Wings. That incarnation of the Cradle shut down in May 1993. When Frank Heath reopened his club at its current Carrboro location in late November of 1993, the geographical center of Chapel Hill's live music scene was almost a mile west of where it used to be. Which may not seem like much unless you're a student living on campus without any sort of automobile at your disposal.

Luckily for campus dorm-dwellers, the live music scene seems to be slowly creeping back downtown. I think it's kind of interesting that for probably the first time since the Lizard and Snake closed in 1998, "underground"-type local bands are playing at downtown locations like Wetlands Dancehall and The Library. I shouldn't saddle Wetlands Dancehall with too many expectations or more significance than it deserves, but I'd really like to see the place succeed in its new and more interesting post-Treehouse incarnation. The folks that work there are awesome and the place seems to have a lot of possibilities given its location and vast square footage. And with Hell down below it's got a great companion bar with which to trade patrons back and forth. If I had the ear of one of those urban planners working on Chapel Hill's downtown redevelopment projects, I'd suggest that they find a way to support venues like Wetlands Dancehall and stop pinning all of their revenue-generating hopes on mall-type stores like Rugby and Sephora. Such a strategy seems to have worked quite well for Carrboro over the last decade.

On a less serious note, am I the only one who thinks that "Wetlands Dancehall" almost sounds like it could be the name of a ridiculously narrow micro-genre a la "sino-grime" or "Rio baile funk" or "Swedish glitch" or whatever? Like, you know, there's all the new dancehall riddims coming out of Jamaica, and then there's this new weirder wetlands dancehall shit that people in the Florida Everglades are starting to make...

Posted by Tim at May 8, 2005 11:11 PM

Comments

Posted by: jenn at May 9, 2005 09:37 AM

Posted by: Stuart at May 9, 2005 11:12 AM

Posted by: Tim R at May 9, 2005 11:50 AM

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Posted by: Richard Allen at May 12, 2005 03:29 PM

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Posted by: Ayal at November 10, 2005 10:23 AM