July 23, 2008
Eulogy for Radio Cherokee
On July 23, 2006, Radio Cherokee hosted one final show before permanently closing its doors.
The show coincided with my boyfriend's brother Sean's 19th birthday, and before leaving for Radio Cherokee, I surveyed my room for a last-minute birthday present and wound up stuffing my copy of Alabama Wildman by Thurston Moore in my purse. (Short of a narrative in which Thurston moves to New York, develops a crush on a girl with a Bratmobile patch and has alternate run-ins with Richard Hell and Lydia Lunch, the book is just Dadaistic tripe, Lawrence Ferlinghetti with a hangover from after-hours Hell, and I could bear to part with it.) Later, during the show, we posed as Myspace groupies and had members of So Many Dynamos (who were either on the bill or just in the crowd) autograph the book's title page.
I spent the majority of the night sitting in the courtyard behind Radio Cherokee, drinking, chain smoking and tottering to the bathroom and back. Everyone crowded in the courtyard, waiting for Bunnygrunt's set, was seemingly drunk beyond drunk and floating somewhere in that realm of free-associative genius that comes right before blacking out, where every conversation sounds like a Vast Aire freestyle.
Whispered word went around that Bunnygrunt was about to play, and the courtyard emptied as everyone spilled into the venue, vying for a spot near the stage. I don't remember a lot about the actual performance ('cause it's been two years and I was more than a little woozy at the time, okay?), but at the end of the show, Radio Cherokee's staff distributed the old-timey radios that decorated the venue to people in the audience. My boyfriend got one; it's sitting on a shelf in our kitchen.
Leaving the venue, we spotted Beatle Bob and chased him down an alley shouting 120 decibel demands that he give us all his cocaine. Wild summer, wow!