Interviewee: Matt Obert

Interviewer: Kate Maxwell

Interview date: 14 December 2003

KM: So...I'm trying to see if this thing will work, you know...[unintelligible...] So...yeah, I mean, if you want to just....

MO: So, 25 years of history, right? We just read this club thing online, that's the history of the clubs in Providence from about '77 to 2004, right? You know, like, it's a lot. It's a lot. I didn't start going to clubs in Providence myself in the seventies. I do happen to know where the most influential clubs were. We had, uh, Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel in the building that's right around the corner, in the Conrad Hotel, which is now condominiums. The Living Room at the time was across the street from that. Um, the building's not there anymore, it was demolished, to, when they built the um, the Federal Building, with all the Army recruiting on the ground level...

KM: Oh, yeah, that big ugly awful building...

MO: ...and there's the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, and then there's the, the CIA is in there, and the FBI, and the ATF, and the, um, you know, the gnomes of Zurich, and the Bavarian Illuminati I think have offices in there...

KM: On the top floor...

MO: The UFO's, they're on the top floor. Yeah, so they had to...they knocked down the Living Room at that time, and um, right around the same time... [girl enters office] did you get a boo boo? there's a Band Aid down in the cafe, they might let you in, [there's a little First Aid kit], I could run upstairs and look for a Band Aid upstairs...[talking continues]

KM: So, there's both the Living Room and...

MO: Right, Lupo's and the Living Room closed right around the same time. The Met Cafe, also, you know I never went to the original Met Cafe, I never went to the original Lupo's, I never went to the original Living Room. The Met Cafe was actually sort of on the same street as this, like further down, where Empire Street changes into Chestnut Street, and then you go down where the highway overpass is. And I've got conflicting stories from five different people who say it was either on this corner, or that comer, or somewhere under where the highway is, or maybe they've moved the highway since it was there, and therefore no one can agree what parking lot it is now. But everyone agrees it's now a parking lot.

KM: Was that owned by Rich Lupo also?

MO: Jack Rich. Jack Rich and Rich Lupo had nothing to do with each other formally at that point, they were just competing club owners in Providence. I mean, Lupo probably did more, um, I don't know, he probably did more of the rock stuff and Jack Rich did more of the blues stuff. I think the Met Cafe was pretty much strictly like blues...kind of like a roadhouse.

KM: OK, that's totally different...the Met Cafe now does a lot of punk rock shows...

MO: Yeah, but this is a real, there's a real slow evolution there. I mean, Lupo's was a smaller club back in the seventies, but they, you know, the punk stuff would come to Lupo's, or the Living Room, not to the Met, as far as I have been able to gather from interviewing others, since I didn't experience that era here, you know, I didn't even live in Providence until the eighties...eighty five I moved here. So...

KM: How'd they...so they both closed at around the same time, the Living Room and Lupo's...

MO: All three of them closed at the same time. It was 1989, and it was the end of that whole era. That was also when the New Paper was bought by the Phoenix from Boston. And in 1989 - with really no clubs left in downtown Providence except for AS220 - that was when the Nice Paper started, that I ended up working for a few years later.

[Phone rings]

KM: you gotta get that?

MO: Sure.

MO: So yeah, oh, the Nice Paper, I don't know, see, that's gonna turn into a whole other story, and that's like a whole saga that's like completely separate. Not completely separate, intertwined, with the AS220 story, and with, all the other stories of all the clubs and stuff, and that's really how I made my entrance into the scene. At first, when I was in high school during the eighties, I had gone to see...1 think I went to see the Dead Milkmen, or something, you know, I went to go see Dread Zeppelin...

KM: Was that like a cover band?

MO: It was a reggae...reggae style Zeppelin.

KM: That must have been pretty cool, actually.

MO: It was a novelty act. And they were good to see once. Once.

KM: Where did the Dead Milkmen play?

MO: At the new Living Room, which isn't, which isn't the current Living Room. The one that we have now is the third Living Room. I don't know how great the old one was, but I do know that the second Living Room was amazing, it was one of the best local clubs. They called it the 'big bubble' because it had this huge hemispherical window, like a plastic bubble that you could actually sit in it during the show . You like could climb up the wall and sit in the window and you could lean back into this big, like four feet tall, really thick plastic...

KM: Wow, up on the top? like near, kinda ceilingish?

MO: No, not ceilingish, like a window coming out of the wall. Yeah, it was huge. It was like a big porthole, is what it was.

KM: that's great.

MO: So they called it the Big Bubble. It was in the Foundry complex. If I can regurgitate from the copy in the ads I think it was called the CIC Building, it was part of the Foundry complex, and it was right next to the Silver Top Diner, which also isn't there anymore. But, honestly, it wasn't very far away from where the Living Room is now, you know. You know what's another part of the story, because you seemed kind of surprised when I was like 'well, yeah, the Met Cafe used to always do blues, and if there was a punk show it probably would have come to Lupo's', and you were like, 'wow, everything 'is topsy turvy', but that happened really gradually. That happened because, I think in the nineties there were a lot more...there was a lot more interest in independent music, and like, um, you know, bands on smaller labels, bands that might have a smaller draw. And what ended up happening is that after Lupo's and the Met opened up sharing the same building together in the Peerless building, the smaller shows ended up going to the Met.

KM: Ok, so they just reorganized.

MO: Yeah, the smaller shows went to the Met because they were a smaller venue, and the bigger shows went to Lupo's because they were a bigger venue. And they stopped, since they had merged pretty much officially into one unit: Heartbreak Hits, is run by Jack Rich and Rich Lupo, really. Jack Rich is the booker, bookee, bookmak... bookkeeper. Bookkeeper.

KM: Bookdude. Yeah, that's a better way to introduce himself, like that.

MO: Yeah, the Met definitely got a lot of those, you know, those underground, or like, you know, I think, yeah, a lot of the stuff that I was listening to...especially in the nineties. There was a lot of interest in smaller stuff, and more independent stuff, and sort of an idea that, that was more authentic, you know? That it wasn't really authentic by the time it got to a major label. I don't know whether that was always the sentiment, you know, nobody accused Jefferson Airplane of selling out when they signed to a major label. Although, probably...

KM: It changed something...

MO: I don't know if it changed their music, you know, I might be in error when I say that no one said they sold out. Because I think even in the sixties, probably idealistic hippie types or whatever, that knew, you know, that there something was fishy with major labels. It just seems like that bullshit detector became more fine tuned in the nineties.

KM: Or people made like a conscious effort to support that kind of thing.

MO: Although actually probably in the eighties with the SST label, and their sort of relentless campaign, like brainwashing campaign anti-corporate rock, even though they sort of turned into a corporate record label, after a while. It was Greg Gin, that guy did so much good, and you know, a really good guitar player in Black Flag. [girl comes in office looking for a garbage bag.] You can ask Kim, Kim Kazan... We're not really even talking about the history of the clubs in Providence anymore.

KM: That's ok.

MO: It's a wide-ranging and eclectic conversation.

KM: No, that has value in itself. Um, why did they all close down... like you had the Living Room and Lupo's and the Met Cafe in this like three block downtown...

MO: Well, yeah, they were within, like five or six blocks of each other, yeah.

KM: What happened that they all...did the economy just totally fall apart?

MO: That may have had something to do with it, and I mean, certainly in the late eighties the economy in Rhode Island was kinda screwed up and it had a lot to do with the banking, the Sand L bailout, the Savings and Loans, um, and just some fishy financing, you know, going all the way back. But um, I don't really know why all three of the places closed all at once. I think they all closed for different reasons, and it took them differing amounts of time to locate a new home, with the Living Room locating first, to the Big Bubble. And Lupo' s and the Met Cafe being out of business for a very long time.

KM: Yeah, that surprising because...1 mean, now, they just got kicked out of that building...

MO: They did, and that's another crazy chapter in this thing. I should just, you know what I should do? That article - the way I wrote it - I've always, I've wanted to revise it for a really long time now. It's on the official City of Providence web site which I don't have the password to edit it. But I wrote the damn thing, so I should just make a copy of it, and rewrite it or revise it. Because when you get to the part when Buff Chase kicks Rich Lupo out of the Peerless Building, it's hard to write it in such a way that I would imagine the city of Providence being really happy with it being on their web site, considering that Buff is such a fat cat. But, you pretty much have to come right out and say that he doesn't look too good in that story, you know, he definitely looks like a big bully.

KM: Well, he's, I mean, he owns the building that they just got kicked...

MO: He owns them all. He owns a lot of buildings. The only person off the top of the dome that owns substantially more real estate downtown than Buff Chase would be Joseph Paellino [sp?], the guy who was running for mayor against Cicilline, and he's been mayor before. And personally I think it would have been a disaster if he had been elected, he's a very, you know, he's a real estate robber baron and he would have just like basically given himself tax breaks on all the buildings downtown. Which could have been good in a way for the revitalization of the downtown district. That was his whole campaign platform, like 'revitalize downtown by like giving property tax breaks to all the people who own stuff downtown'. And he just didn't come right out and mention that he owns like fifty percent of downtown, yeah, so...

KM: Well, I don't know, it seems like, it's sort of confusing because there's a lot of the same names that get carried over...

MO: It is confusing, and if I had printed out the, you know, article that I wrote, I would be able to quote more accurately what was in there, but basically I said that relating the history of the clubs in Providence is about as bewildering as a radio announcer doing a play by play on a three card monte hustle.

KM: Yeah, I remember that line, it's a good line.

MO: Because it's...the same club keeps moving around. And it really is confusing. I guess... there's been three Living Rooms, two Met Cafes, and now three Lupos.

KM: And Lupo's is moving to the Strand now?

MO: Yeah, that's what's happening, Lupo's is moving to the Strand. And I'm looking forward to the fourth Lupo's, actually, right after they get done...[sighs] I don't know, it's... [pause]...I have some pretty strong opinions about that whole situation, but Lupo was really railroaded into it. Lupo being in the Strand is a good thing, it would be great if Lupo owned the Strand. That would really be a good club, it would be a legendary, world-class venue, like, it would be like, I don't know, you know, something like the House of Blues in New Orleans or something that's like a really big venue, famous. That would have happened overnight.

KM: That people look for...

MO: What's happening instead is that Michael Kent is holding the lease on the Strand building. And Michael Kent is another one of the club players downtown. I sort of glossed over him in the night club article. I mentioned him in one context only which is that he, briefly he had a club that had some live music. It was a club, it was called the Campus Club. You know, we're going backwards and forwards through time here. We're talking about stuff that's happening this year, with Lupo moving into the Strand, but we're also talking about when Michael Kent had this...I guess he's still got the building, it's the Complex now. And on the second floor on the Complex there was something that for a while was called Campus Billiards. And it was just like, you know, I guess it competed with Snookers, or whatever. Um, what Michael Kent does from time to time is that he decides that he wants to give his club a face lift. He's still somebody who, you know, he's still the same person who owns it, but one week it was a Irish bar and this week and this week it's country line dancing with a mechanical bull and straw on the floor. But, you know, its still the same bar, it's owned by the same guy. You know what I mean? He does these goofy theme bars. Challenges, which is the sports bar with a zillion tvs in it, Finnegan's Wake is the one on the corner he also owns, that's a pseudo-Irish bar, not very authentically Irish. You could pick up all the things in the Complex and see that they're all, like, just skin deep, like a Saturday night fever disco dance floor. You know, they're strictly cosmetically different, but really scratch away the veneer and its the same thing. And he owns clubs up and down the coast. From what I understand, his nightclub empire stretches from Maine to Florida.

KM: Does he Jive here?

MO: He lives somewhere in Rhode Island. Not in Providence. And there's another story about him, too, that you might want to look up if bust out your Lexis-Nexis, you know, flex your flexis the lexis nexis...even Google might find this for you. Michael Kent had a situation with some property that he owned, somewhere in South County or something, and he just dumped shit all over it, and cut down all the trees and painted the stumps different colors. It was some kind of an argument that he was having with the city council. [something falls across the room] oh my god!

KM: Should we get that?

MO: She doesn't seem to care.

KM: So do you think that most of the club owners...there's Lupo's and the Living Room and there was another Strand, before this Strand, right?

MO: Well the Strand, just like the Providence Performing Arts Center, the Strand goes , back to the days where that was where. you would go to see movies. Because movies, people would go to these huge movie theaters because it was the new technology, it was miraculous, it was like going to see...I don't know, holograms. People just couldn't believe that there were movies and after that they couldn't believe there were talkies, and that was where they would go, to the Strand. In the vaudeville era it was a very, very large venue, very successful. The days when this sort of eight square block area, the center of what they call 'downcity Providence', though I've heard the rumor that nobody ever called it that back then, that that's just some weird marketing thing or something...

KM: like the Jewelry district?

MO: The Jewelry district, that's for real, there was a lot of jewelry manufacturing coming out of there. But yeah, what was I saying, that was when downcity, I'll just say downtown, I don't care, that was when it was really thriving as a commercial district. All The storefronts that are now all empty and vacant downtown? They used to be full. And you could come downtown at five 0 clock on a Friday night and it wouldn't be a total ghost town, you know?

KM: But that was a long time ago...

MO: Oh yeah, that's the twenties, thirties. The Strand is a historic building, it's an amazing, amazing theater. You know, there's been a lot of different uses for it. I don't know who owned it back in that historic era, you know, and during the Great Depression what happened with it. I'm sure people were coming to see happy movies, you know, during the Depression, you know, that was the whole thing, you pay a nickel and you go to the movie and forget about your troubles for an hour, let's have another cup of coffee, and let's have another piece of pie, you know. Like Hollywood fantasy.

KM: So I guess where I was going with that was...there's a couple of the same people that own...

MO: You did ask specifically, in terms of the Strand, though, specifically the Strand, you said 'there was another Strand.' What Michael Kent is doing with there now is a dance party, right, it's called Envy at the Strand. It's Envy, but it's just spelled N-V. Very clever, he's a very clever man. Before that it was empty for a while, and before that...I'm trying to remember. I think the guy's name was Michael Wright? Michael and Karen Wright, maybe? I'm not positive. Hey, Frank, you don't remember - when they used to book stuff in the Strand before Michael Kent got it? What was the name of the guy? Was it Stephen J. Wright? I don't know, something like that. You're not gonna gotta get it... lt's not, not Frank J. Russo.., Stephen Wright? No, that sounds like a comedian.

KM: No, Stephen Wright I think is a writer...

MO: You know, I took so many business cards out of my wallet pertaining to this era, and I don't have them any more. I'm trying to remember.

KM: No, it's really fine. Anything you can remember is...

MO: I used to talk to somebody there, to try and get on the guest list, and her name was Karen. Maybe she was the either the wife or possibly the sister of the guy who was the main financial...I don't know. [Don't quote me. Since your already not quoting me, right, and I'm already off the record, I might as well say that that was mismanaged out of existence.] They were getting some really good acts, big, big shows, bigger than you could have at Lupo's, like you know, who played there, David Byrne, Morrissey...1 saw the Orb there, that was pretty great.

KM: So that was like a rock club, though.

MO: It was a like a serious club, yeah. The problem that they had was, though, that they couldn't do small shows and break even.

KM: It's such a huge space.

MO: They couldn't do small shows and break even, and they wanted to support local music, but they couldn't figure out how to incorporate it. What they actually ended up doing right before they closed it down was they got this sort of modular temporary partition that you could snap up that would be like a wall, inside the club. And they would make it seem like a smaller room for certain shows that would be like half the size, or a quarter of the size, or maybe even a tenth of the size. You know, a couple hundred people could come to see Groovus Malt, or some band like that, and they'd come see them at the Strand, and 200 people in that place is like molecules in the vacuum. They just don't even bounce off each other, you know.

KM: Yeah, I've been to shows like that where even a bunch of people show up but it still feels empty, and its just a really weird vibe.

MO: Oh yeah, you get that even at Lupo's, but the Strand is cavernous. You want to have a really good time in there and you have to get Parliament Funkadelic on the stage, somebody's who's gonna really fill it, you know.

KM: Do you think most of the club owners were like Michael Kent and just sort of interested in owning the club than sort of providing these...not as connected to the music itself?

MO: Well, I'll tell you, anybody who's running a nightclub, it's all about making money. Just like anyone who opens a Del's Lemonade, or anybody who opens a shoe store. I don't know, but the difference is, if you're gonna run a nightclub, and do business with musicians, and that's how you choose to make your living, then if you're gonna be successful at it than you're gonna have to be passionate about music, and you're gonna have to understand it. Lupo is a great example. Michael Kent is something different, he's a really good business man. He hasn't showed himself to be good at dealing with live musicians. Most of his nightclubs, if there's entertainment at all it's adj.

KM: Yeah, the dance party now and bars...yeah. Fair enough. Who's the guy that owns the Living Room? Is that the same guy...?

MO: Randy Hain. H-A-I-N. And I can get you an interview with him from the Nice Paper that I have upstairs, if you want to read that, about the origins of the Living Room, sort of. Well, I think the interview actually happened right before he opened in his new venue, which is the former Victoria House, Steak House Restaurant, or something...

KM: Yeah, it sort of has a big dining hall feel to it, beer mugs and...

MO: You know what I've always said about that, as soon as he opened it, and I tried to phrase it in a way as friendly as I could, but I said it's about as comfortable and broken in as an old rotten sneaker.

KM: Yeah, I mean, you certainly don't worry about messing anything up.

MO: Yeah.

KM: But I mean, that's sort of nice. I don't know. I have a tendency to like that, I like smaller places that...

MO: Yeah, I always wonder how he does with his business does out there. There's no signage visible from the street. Unless you know where you're going, unless you've already been there, then you can't go there. There's no good directions to it, there's like, it's really hard to find, you know?

KM: Yeah, it's sort of just another warehouse next to a couple other them, I had to ride my bike around in circles...

MO: You have to park in the parking lot before you can see the sign on top that says 'the Living Room', and that's the god's honest truth. You cannot see a sign from the street.

KM: Yeah, I didn't even know there was a sign, I just looked for, I saw the back door, with all the people, I guess it's the back door...

MO: It's a sign that says the Living Room and it's only visible from inside the parking lot. So you wonder how he does out there. But at the same time, he does get certain shows that packs really well, makes money, primarily I think off the jam band scene, you know with even stuff like Max Creek or whatever, you know. Those are probably his cash cows. He also does really well with the hardcore matinee.

KM: Yeah, there are a lot of those. Has he been pretty consistent in terms of music or is it still just what's available, what people would...

MO: I don't know. Randy is a really smart, savvy guy. I remember loving his club so much at the Big Bubble, and when it had closed down there, and after Lupo's and the Met had reopened, and the Living Room was finally coming back...I just remember not going to a lot of shows at the restaurant space, the one that he has now. And not that he was doing a bad job booking or anything, I don't know. I'm almost looking back and considering that was like my failure to respect what the guy was doing, you know. I didn't really, I just didn't really pay as much attention, which is funny because he's definitely one of the...

KM: the guys?

MO: The guys, the movers and shakers. And his club is good. And I'm glad he's still there, I'm glad he's still with it. I don't know, I just didn't like it as much as the old one. I think it was my fault, really, that I had such a nostalgic view of Living Room Mach Two, because I had never even been to the first one. Maybe people that started out going to the first one, it took them a long time to get used to the second one, or whatever, you know. Or maybe those people just knew they were gonna stick with even if, you know, whatever. I don't know, I just didn't go there as often as the clubs downtown. The Call, right? That's over there. That used to be called the Last Call Saloon. And for years and years and years it was a biker bar, and they had a lot of blues. Or, well, blues, more accurately, rhythm and blues is what they had. A lot of R&B stuff, a lot of, and also a lot of, kinda, I don't know what to call the genre but kind of... goomba blues. You know? Like Goodfella blues, you know?

KM: But was that the kind of place where you'd go to see the band or...?

MO: Not at that time, although, you know, although a lot of bands did play there and a lot of people would go to see the music, it was pretty much through and through it was a biker bar so not everybody was coming to shows there. That changed in the...about...I'm trying to figure out Ty Jesso's in this whole thing but I'm not looking at that article, the article...

KM: I have a list of places you mentioned, if that helps at all.

MO: Right, the Loser Bar, Ty Jesso, there it is. He started it out at the Church House Inn, he moved it to the Last Call saloon, after the Church House closed down.

[Tape ends]

MO: Victor and Beverly...I can't remember their last name, Beverly was the mom, Victor was the son. Um, apparently they had, uh, you know, they were running a pretty respectable bed and breakfast over a nightclub, that was also a bar. Currently it's the strip club, the gentleman's lounge there, the...what's it called? The Sportsman's Inn. And it still has a sleazy motel upstairs from it. Ironically, before it was the Church House it was also a whorehouse. And before it was a whorehouse, it was the Church House. So it goes back, all the way to when it was built, it says "Church House Inn, erected 18 yadda yadda, to the glory of God" right in the stonework, on the actual facade of the building.

KM: Is it still there?

MO: I think so.

KM: Haven't stopped by the Sportsman's Inn in a while?

MO: And then whoever built that inn ran it for however many hundreds of years, or whatever, I don't know, probably goes back to, maybe not all the way to Colonial times but you know, it's a pretty old building. And then for whatever reason it became a brothel, and then...for many years, and I think it was pretty much under the thumb of the mafia, at that point. They, um, whoever owned it put this awful...by the seventies, they slapped wood paneling over everything, I guess, but they put this horrible facade on the front of the building. Now when Victor and Beverly acquired the building they took all that crap off, and they realized that it was, you know, what it said underneath it. So that was why they called their bar the Church House Inn, because it was the name of the building, you know, the historic name of the building, and they were just kind of amazed. I forget what the brothel was called, although, uh, the guy from Louis, Johnny, he'd be able to tell you what it was called. He's in the right age group to remember that.

KM: It hasn't had anything to do with God in a long time. [guy comes into office - can I borrow a hammer?]

MO: Sure, just bring it back. I don't think it had anything to do with God necessarily in the first place, it was an inn. Like a hotel. I think the people who built it were probably pretty pious, but I don't think it was a church.

KM: Just hoping for like, kindness to traveling strangers.

MO: Yeah, like that kind of a thing.

KM: What kind of stuff did the Church House Inn have?

MO: They had all the best like reggae and ska stuff. They booked a lot of stuff that you'd expect maybe at the Ocean Mist in Petunick [sp?]. They also had their share of punk stuff. But primarily, when I was getting involved in covering the club scene, they had Ty Jesso, who went under the name Totally Wired Productions, and he was booking independent stuff from all over. All over the world, really. Before, you know, Ty wasn't even online or anything, it was all zines. People who would stick dozens of stamps on these big envelopes and send them...you know it was this whole era, of zine culture being huge. And Ty would make zines with these little flexidiscs in them and send them overseas, and send them all over, you know, the US and Canada, and so he ended up in touch with a lot of the other people who had a lot of zines. And invariably, the people who had the zines were also, like, either they were in a band, or running a label, or at least they were like, promoting music locally, or...

KM: or their friends are in bands...

MO: Yeah, so he ended up bringing Stereolab over here before anyone knew who they were.

KM: oh wow

MO: You know, stuff like that. He was just always the first to hear about...and I could make a huge, huge laundry list of some of the most amazing shows I've seen in Providence, that Ty booked over the span of seven years. He was the guy who booked the cool stuff. And time and again, it was the stuff that was cool before you knew it was cool, you know.

KM: You'd just get lucky and happen to go...

MO: Not even lucky, he just had his feelers out there, and he was willing to take a chance on any band and bring them to Providence. And it was a different era, I don't know, it was like a different world. He doesn't, I don't know, Ty would be a really great guy to interview about this era. He's a really underrated, really important figure in the music , history of Providence.

KM: Yeah, no, I was gonna ask you about that.

MO: He's in the band the Fabulous Itchies, he plays guitar for them now. They're just a surf-tone, you know, a retro surfabilly kind of thing, or something.

KM: He doesn't book shows anymore?

MO: Not so much. What he does is, um, dj nights where they play 60s soul music, and of course he books for his own band. But he doesn't get so into, um, I don't know, making things happen for other people.

KM: Yeah, I gotcha. Well, he was booking stuff...was The Loser Bar like an actual place, or was that just the...?

MO: He was booking stuff...The Loser Bar was the name for it but it moved around. It started out at the Church House, it moved to the Last Call. And eventually, I guess, the name Loser Bar moved to the Met Cafe, but when they moved it to the Met Cafe Ty wasn't booking shows there. It was just all the same kids from the other Loser Bar, and they would just go there every Monday night and it literally was just a loser bar, you know? [KM laughs] I mean, it was a bar. They wouldn't have entertainment for it, it would be like drink specials or whatever, but yeah. And that was like the kids Mother Jefferson sorta hosting that. Formerly Backwash. I don't know if you... Pete Burr. Everybody called him Complete Blur. He was one of the bartenders.

KM: That's a good bartender name.

MO: Complete Blur? Pete Burr, yeah. I don't know, we talked a little bit about the Campus Club and the Strand, we talked about... It's not like Louis' is a nightclub, you know, I just mentioned it.

KM: Yeah, I was just going down the list, and it seems so strange to me...

MO: That was like a footnote in the article where I said there was a rumor that there used to be some kind of a Beatnik or something something in the basement there. I never...that was the 1950s, you know, I made an apology at the beginning of the article that I wasn't actually going to be able to go back in time and tell the complete history from like, the first garage band with Roger Williams and some Indians, you know.

KM: [laughs] They were rockin then, so I hear. Yeah, it's just so strange to me...

MO: No, it's just, like, I don't know what it is about Louis', but I feel like it's got some kind of...it's like the hidden magnetic pole of Providence. All stories somehow revolve around it or intersect with it in some weird way.

KM: Well, there's nothing to complain about, at the least, there's food for cheap, there's gotta be something you like, at the least...

MO: Yeah, but you already know about that, let's not talk about it. So the Met Cafe and Lupo's, even though they're not really connected entities, they started out as separately, they merged, and now they're unmerging again. Actually, I guess they're...another way to look at it is that they're completing the transformation. I can't remember what you call it, when a cell divides its mitosis, is it meiosis, when it merges?

KM: Yeah, the other one.

MO: Yeah, that's what it's like. Now there's only Lupo's. But Jack Rich is working for Lupo now.

KM: Did they just decided to combine forces when they both lost their space?

MO: They've been strategizing about this for years, you know, its been a really strange situation, you know. It's been a glacial pressure moving them out of there.

KM: I don't know, if you want to talk about...

MO: The Cage! I think it's where Mama's Metro Cafe is. That's something I have to correct in the article, I said it was in the same place as the Rocket and Babyhead, but it's not. But it was before the Rocket, it was downtown, it was called the Cage, and Mama's Metro Cafe, it doesn't ring a bell? It's between Saki's and...um...whatever's on the other side of Mama's Metro Cafe. [KM laughs]...uh...where the Dunkin Donuts used to be, uh, where Traveler's Aid used to be, uh, I don't know.

KM: Yeah, that's ok. I don't know, do you want to talk about AS220 in its different locations, and how that fits into it?

MO: AS220 is different from any of the other clubs in the list because, well, with the exception of Stone Soup Coffeehouse which is also a nonprofit, but unlike all these other bars, AS220's stated mission is not just to make money. So it is a little different. I don't know, you can get this story, I'm sure you already have me on tape saying this story, I say this story all the time. There's three different locations of AS220. It started out above the Providence Performing Arts Center on the fourth floor in a studio that would later be the Big Nozzo studio for many years, after AS220 relocated to Richmond Street. The reason that they relocated was, um, while the landlord that they were renting from at PP AC was pretty enthusiastic about what AS220 was trying to do, they also, um, had some issues with noise and with, uh...You know, there were just some really big parties, at AS220, and just with people coming up and down the elevator, like it made the landlord nervous. They sort of wrote Bert a letter that said 'we really like what you're trying to do, and we wish you luck in trying to find a better place to do it' , you know, that kind of thing. I mean, there was a really big show, like a really big, really loud show, called, I think it was called the Final Incision. With, um, a kind of doomy, gothic band called Sleep Chamber, a kind of gothic industrial band called Sleep Chamber, and uh a band called Shithaus, with the umblats over the u, and that was John Spencer, before the Blues Explosion, when he was going to Brown. And it was a band with him and some RISD kids and stuff. Shithaus played, Sleep Chamber headlined. They were burning incense and wormwood, and like they had all these, you know, movies of anything you could possibly imagine people would be offended by, like burning crosses, burning swastikas, burning stars of david, people defecating, people shooting up, people cutting themselves, you know, um. And it was just this really intense, intense show. And it was just really packed and crowded to the point where Bert was kind of wonied for the safety of the people in the room, you know. He was kind of watching the windows to make sure nobody fell out a window. It was on the fourth floor, you know, he was kind of freaking out. Um, and Bert likes to tell that story too, when he gives tours and stuff, because he likes to say that that was the first moment when he stood there and said to himself "is this what I mean, you know, when, in the mission statement when we said, 'open and unjuried', you know, is this what it really means, that anybody can do anything', you know. It was not just that it was like potentially volatile or offensive or anything, it was also potentially unsafe.

KM: Well, it's a good...it's lucky nobody fell out a window, but it's obviously a good sign when you have to...you're doing something right.

MO: Yeah, we had to relocate because of that. Well, I shouldn't even say 'we', they had to relocate. I had nothing to do with AS220 at that point, I was in high school. Hadn't even been to AS220 once until after they relocated to Richmond Street. They were only above the PP AC for maybe a year, I think, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. Um, possibly even less than a year, I think it was like a year and a couple months. You can get the straight dope on that from Bert. Then when they relocated to Richmond Street, that was when I started coming. At the time I was really...um, I had, I think the first time I came to AS220 I had some friends that I was going to high school with who were in a band called Voice of Reason, and I came to see them here. They happened to be playing with a band from Plainville, Massachusetts called Flower Gang, which ended up being my favorite band for a really long time after that. And I would go see them wherever they played. Um, that was kind of my introduction, I started volunteering at the door and stuff... did I do it while I was still a senior in high school? I'm not sure, I think I didn't do it until I had graduated, when I started at CCRI. Which is before I came to the Nice Paper. So AS220 was like a bridge between worlds for me. It helped me out of the CCRI world and the, you know, empty vapidity of my high school experience, and gave me a nudge in the right direction. Interestingly enough, I also had a friend from the church that I went to, who was just leaving the cool downtown rock and roll hipster scene and coming to the church. Whereas, I had just graduated high school and I was done with that church and I was ready to move on. So it was like, we took each other's places, it was like, um, it was like the two pans on the balance. You know, you take the coin off one and then put it on the other and you have to bring everything back in harmony.

KM: It all balances itself out, somehow.

MO: But it was instant, it was amazing. We switched places. I stepped into the...because he worked for the Phoenix6;dJ was trying to apply for an internship there, partially just because I thought this guy Dave Inglan [sp?] was so cool. He was going to my church, but he still listened to some really good music. He turned me on the Pixies, and Husker Du, and you know, the Minutemen, and stuff that I still love. So, and he was friends with all of my friends, that I later ended up...he was friends...before I met my friends at the Nice Paper he was friends with all of them. From the old days, when they all worked at the New Paper together, before the Phoenix bought it.

KM: So the Nice Paper...

MO: It was just like the Phoenix, only nobody got paid. And we had a smaller number a pages every week and a smaller circulation and didn't make as much money on ads. So we basically just coasted along breaking even from issue to issue making enough money to print the next issue. And, uh, nobody got paid unless you sold an ad. You'd get a twenty percent commission on all advertising revenue you generated, so everybody was an ad rep.

KM: That's a good way to do it, though, actually.

MO: Yeah, I didn't sell many ads, and it didn't matter. I was living in the office, so I didn't have to pay rent. As soon as they gave me a key I basically made a secret fort out of some cardboard boxes in the back of the room where nobody hung out, and dragged a futon behind there. And a boombox. So, you know, any time anybody ever came, I'd either be sitting at the computer, or you know, by the computer and the phone, working on the next issue of the paper, in which case they just thought I was a workaholic, or the other thing that could happen sometimes was that they'd come in and they just wouldn't see me because I'd be behind a wall of cardboard boxes sort of snooping on them.

KM: Well, you worked that well, then.

MO: Yeah, and since I had no expenses, I was in a position where, um, you know, I could make, if I sold one ad a week I could make a ten dollar commission on it and that was all the money I needed, you know what I mean? I could live on that.

KM: Well, if you've got a place to stay...

MO: I had a place to stay, I could get into all the clubs for free, I had a bar tab at Lupo's, you know what I mean? It was ridiculous. And yeah, this is...I started there when I was nineteen, twenty, something like that. And by the time I was twenty one I had carved myself a little niche. I kind of feel bad about it now because, you know, if I wanted to get in for free at one of the clubs in town nowadays they would scoff at me, anywhere, except for AS220, because I work here. But, you know, it's a little bit sad.

KM: No, I mean, I think it's hard to maintain that kind of thing forever. Like, you'd have to be the ultimate scenester to just...

MO: You know, I guess for a really long time I really thought I was. The thing that caused me to lose it was that I could only maintain it with a weekly column. When I started writing for other, after the Nice Paper went bankrupt, when I started writing for other publications, I went to a monthly schedule instead of weekly schedule, and you know, it just doesn't cut it. You can't really keep your name out there the same way. You can't really cover everything that happens the same way, and it becomes really fatiguing to write that one column. Instead of four or five columns in a month that are all really easy to write, you have to write one that's monumental, and covers a month's worth of listings. And that means more phone calls and more faxes to more venues, trying to cover, trying to actually do the research for it, you know? So I actually, I couldn't maintain.

KM: When did the Nice Paper go bankrupt?

MO: 1995. August. Yeah, July or August of 1995, I'm pretty sure.

KM: But that was a good couple years run, yeah?

MO: Yeah, 89 to 95.

KM: Yeah, that's pretty incredible.

MO: Yeah, It was longer that they thought... Longer than anyone thought we'd hold out, actually. Yeah, it was pretty great. The Nice Paper office was actually right next door to where the Green Room is now. Well, not next-door, next-door, but it was actually next door to next door, or something. You've got your Snookers there, right next to whatever that restaurant is called now. It used to be Leo's. We all miss Leo's. They had Dan Gosh [sp?] murals in there, which is the same guy who painted the stuff outside of Lupo's, those murals that they just took down.

KM: Oh, I love those. They saved those, right?

MO: Oh, of course, they're Dan Gosh. He was friends with, um, David Byrne when he was going to RISD, that was the same time.

[talking in office...session interrupted...tape cuts off]

Though not a native by birth, Matt Obert is a resident of Providence, Rhode Island and has been long involved in the local arts community. He has been an artist, musician, and performer in many different shapes and forms since moving to Providence to attend CCRI in 1985. In addition, he has written for several publications covering the Rhode Island club scene, most particularly the Nice Paper. He is currently a resident of AS220's third floor, as well as their Volunteer Coordinator.