TCB
By Christopher Gray, Fri., July 28, 2006
BEYOND THE BACK ROOM
The Back Room is eulogized plenty in the pages to come, with good reason. Consider this: The Riverside Drive venue, which opened in 1973, is as old as doomed NYC punk shrine CBGB; moreover, both were ultimately felled by skyrocketing property values. But the Back Room's true value goes well beyond money. It inspired a degree of loyalty in its staff, performers, and patrons practically unheard of in the cutthroat nightclub industry. Often to its financial benefit, but sometimes not, it was consistently willing to program genres and styles shunned by trendier venues. Because of this, it was one of the few clubs in town whose clientele comprised a true scene – and without bending over backward to make sure everyone else knew about it.
Though the Back Room has booked as much mainstream rock and pop-punk as anything else for some time now, and though its most profitable shows over at least the past year have been hip-hop, it will forever be synonymous with metal. And the metal scene it nurtured for so many years is thriving like never before. Local metal is on TV with public access' Pure Metal Sickness, on the radio with 101X's No Control, in print with The Edge, Whoopsy!, and Reloaded, and in the clubs at Redrum, Headhunters, Red Eyed Fly, and Room 710. The one place it's not, it seems, is at the same dinner table as some of Austin's more celebrated genres.
"It's booming. It really is," says Tammy Moore, who began booking Redrum in January after two separate stints at the Back Room. She reels off a long list of bands populating this resurgent scene: Course of Ruin, Hatchetwork, Closed Hand Promise, By Any Means Necessary, Shrapnel, Mevyn, Images of Violence, Vesperian Sorrow, Pleasant Valley, Meet Fist. Most, if not all, she insists, deserve not just local but national attention. One side effect of the Back Room's closing, Moore notes, is that it has forced the Austin music industry at large to finally pay attention. She just hopes it sticks.
"That's exciting to me, because one of the main things I want to happen is for the city to take the genre seriously," she says. "These guys are real moneymakers."
Although the game side will remain open on a month-to-month basis for up to two more years, the Back Room's musical side signs off this weekend with an all-day barbecue and rock show Saturday (see schedule) and one last local hip-hop blowout Sunday with Basswood Lane, Nac & Swift, Casino & Gutta Gang, C-Note, Rob G, 3rd Degree, and many more. In the end, like CBGB, it was just a building, albeit an unusually long-lived one in a business where clubs come and go like the tides. What went on inside that building, however, for most if not all of the Back Room's 33 years, provided a wealth of lessons the rest of our beloved music scene would do well to learn.
