I've been on a bit of an indie / underground music history reading kick lately. It started with Jesse Jarnow's Yo La Tengo biography, Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock. I followed that up with Michael Azerrad's essential Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. And I just completed No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens by former regulars of the Trenton club, Amy Yates Wuelfing and Steven DiLodovico.
No Slam Dancing... works nicely as a companion to the other two books and helps to complete a picture of the underground music scene -- especially in New Jersey -- during the 80s and early 90s. Azerrad paints the "big picture," a picture in which bands like Black Flag carved out a network of clubs across the country where underground and punk bands could play. In North Jersey, the area covered by Jarnow's book, there was Maxwell's. To the south, in Trenton, there was City Gardens.
Wuelfing and DiLodovico conducted what must have been hundreds of interviews with the likes of Ian MacKaye, Henry Rollins, Gibby Haynes, Keith Morris, and (former bartender / current Daily Show host) Jon Stewart along with former City Gardens regulars and employees -- including former stage manager, bouncer, and current great FoCDM, Gentleman Jim Norton -- to compile a chronological, show-by-show history of the Trenton institution.
One of the main characters in No Slam Dancing... is City Gardens show promoter, Randy Ellis (a.k.a. Randy Now). Randy turned a warehouse-sized former car dealership -- owned and operated by Frank "Tut" Nalbone -- in one of the worst parts of Trenton into one of the most important underground rock clubs in America. In the words of Kevin Patrick of New Math and Jet Black Berries, "...everybody played there. Bands put their stake in the dirt, and playing there established you as a band at the level you wanted to be at."
With a few exceptions, bands in the book describe Randy Now as someone who treated them well and, maybe more importantly, loved music. He put together eclectic bills and provided a place for bands to play when there really was nowhere else.
The book's other main characters are the City Gardens regulars and employees. Whether skinheads that attended hardcore shows, bouncers and bartenders that saw everything, or the people who came to Thursday's 90-cent dance nights, the people at City Gardens formed their own community with its own set of rules and customs. The sentiment that crops up over and over in interviews is one of finally feeling accepted, of finally finding a place where it was ok to be different. Dance Night regular, Doug Reineke sums up that feeling:
"I tried to start a typical career working 9-5, and then I realized I didn’t want that, I wanted an alternative life. I want to get up every day and do something I enjoy, and if I don’t, I’m going to find a path with something different and better. I just want to live an honest life. I feel like that whole period of my life at City Gardens really gave me the strength and the vision to know that that is a real choice."
Regulars tell stories of going to three and four shows a week, of being driven to all-ages shows by their parents who waited in the back or in the parking lot, of fights and skinhead "walls of death," of unselfconsciously dancing alone on a Thursday night. Employees talk about some of the regular characters and about some truly historic shows.
A book so heavy on details can't help but feel a little long in some places, and some of the anecdotes repeat at different points in the book. But No Slam Dancing... is an important record of one of the New Jersey stops on the indie / underground railroad.
I wasn't into hardcore or anything much more "underground" than The Clash, The Replacements, or R.E.M. when I was a kid growing up in Jersey. No Slam Dancing... did make me feel a bit like I missed out on something by not being more adventurous when I was young. More than that, though, it allowed me to experience vicariously a time in music -- in New Jersey -- that's never coming back.
And I've got to talk to Jim Norton about Dave Navarro and that pitcher of ice water.
No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes: An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardens is due out on March 10th.
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