A dark long place, maybe twenty feet wide, though the red walls make it closer—sometimes someone bugs and then its close cropped like a marine at the door—but only if you’re paranoid enough. The whole fall-apart place stretches way-back past cheap, old fast-food booths to pool tables; where the yellow and orange painted planes of the haphazard furniture make happiness dependent on minutes that pass too quick for a lot who enter and drink their fill. Those folks’ worrying done, those leftover occupy the space taken up a lot by old neon signs (the red and orange kind) besides plenty of other reminders of who has been here before you—people who had gotten together musicians that they were sure mattered—and R.E.M. anyway. So dark, recyclable, posters litter walls. Underwaterfall, Big Tractor, Red Caboose, Soul Miner’s Daughter, big Billy Cutup—who went on to be Billy Trucks, and killed the Georgia Theater—and even Jackopierce—which was, in terms of completing the musical hallowed ground of those who cared, basically among those who were the most important. Still, though, the Cantebury tale of Lallapalooza was all just because of the nature of good taste, who had it, and when they decided to let it drip or perhaps coalesce in puddles of agreement that most folks could abide by. Relics. That’s what they were, adorning the walls. And come to think of it, most of the folks in the booths, too.

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