All's quiet on the Mill Avenue front — Tempe bands forced to find clubs off beaten path
By CHRIS HANSEN ORF
Get Out

In its mid-’90s heyday, the Tempe music scene was being hailed by label reps and music fans alike as “the next Seattle” — a hotbed of talent ripe for national discovery.

Nowadays, with most of its influential clubs having shut their doors, Tempe is not even the old Tempe anymore.

“It was a trapped moment in time back then,” says Rowland Perkins, a Scottsdale resident who's been going to Mill Avenue music venues since turning 21 in 1994. “You had so many great bands — you'd be watching Dead Hot Workshop and be thinking ‘These guys are as good as anything on the radio, maybe I am seeing the next big thing’ — and so many good clubs to see them in.

‘‘If a band was having an off night at Long Wong's you could just walk across the street to Gibson's or Balboa Café or Edcel's Attic and catch somebody else.

“I am sure there are great bands in Tempe now, but where am I going to
go see them?”

With the trend in downtown Tempe bars swinging more toward retro dance clubs and DJs in recent years, all of the live-music clubs that percolated on Mill Avenue between University Drive and Third Street during the Tempe music boom have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

“I think the biggest thing that killed the Tempe music scene was the new generation of kids going to ASU,” says Ohio native Raven Blackwood, who had been a Long Wong's regular since moving to the East Valley nine years ago. “They seem to be more into hip-hop and dance music and they weren't really supporting the live local music scene.”

Longs Wong's, the venerable Mill Avenue and Seventh Street club that was the epicenter of the downtown Tempe music boom that spawned the Gin Blossoms, Dead Hot Workshop, The Refreshments and The Pistoleros, all of whom went on to sign major label record deals in the ’90s, closed last April.

Ziggy's, which took up the space long held by popular music hotspot Edcel's Attic, was the last bastion of hope for local music on downtown Mill Avenue until it, too, closed its doors in September.

With The Bash on Ash also pulling the plug early last year, Tempe musicians are left with few options to perform original music downtown.

“I thought it was dismal before, but it's far worse now,” says longtime local singer/songwriter Dave Insley of Dave Insley and The Careless Smokers. “Ziggy's closing was inconsequential and inevitable. In fairness, it was the closing of Long Wong's and the original Nita's Hideaway (on Rio Salado Parkway just east of McClintock Drive) that were harbingers of doom for the so-called Tempe music scene.”

The “Tempe Sound” has been shuffled off into far- flung clubs such as the Yucca Tap Room, Last Exit Bar and Grill, The Clubhouse and The Sets, with The Big Fish Pub remaining an alternative for harder rock groups and The Sail Inn becoming a haven for jam bands.

“It really scares me, honestly,” says J. Scott Howard of Tempe's countrified rockers Tramps & Thieves on the rash of club closings. “I understand that my scope of music venues to play in Tempe is really pretty limited. I've been spoiled by Long Wong's, the Yucca Tap Room and Nita's Hideaway.”

The Yucca Tap Room, located at Mill and Southern avenues, has become a welcome refuge for fans and musicians who used to haunt downtown Tempe. The bar offers an eclectic mix of live music every night of the week — everything from hard rock to country to alternative — in the same kind of friendly, rustic, dimly lit atmosphere that Long Wong's provided.

“I go to Yucca because it's a low- maintenance, no-pretense club,” says Dianna Bernard of Tempe, an English teacher at Mountain Pointe High School in Ahwatukee. “The options are pretty limited for me — it's either Yucca Tap Room or Last Exit. Those two places are the only bars I go to no matter who is playing.”

Long Wong's close proximity to ASU once enabled bands to build a following based on one of the largest student populations in the country. Live-music clubs situated in other parts of Tempe inevitably suffer from a lack of the walk-in crowd that clubs on Tempe's famous strip once enjoyed.

“It was always cool when someone I'd never met would compliment the band and I'd ask, ‘What brings you out to see us tonight?’” Howard says of Long Wong's. “They'd say, ‘We were walking around downtown and came in for some wings and heard you guys playing.’ It happened all of the time.

‘‘This just can't happen in Tempe anymore and that's really too bad, because little things like that really helped to create the Tempe scene.”
With only a handful of clubs left to carry the torch for musicians to ply their original material, and none of them in downtown Tempe, the pervading fear is that the all-music venue is merely a relic of Tempe's once-booming downtown music scene. Can playing sports bars and strip clubs be far behind?

“I know this seems obvious, but what I'm scared of is that all of these great local musicians are going to be relegated to out-of-the-way bars without the facilities to truly be ‘music venues,’ ” says Howard, “places that don't really understand that the featured artists on any particular night really should be louder than all 100 television sets.”

HEAR THE MUSIC

The best places to see live local music in Tempe

Yucca Tap Room: 29 W. Southern Ave., . Music seven nights a week featuring a variety of genres, from country to hard rock to acoustic.

The Clubhouse: 1320 E. Broadway Road, . Recently expanded, features local and national alternative and punk bands.

Last Exit Bar and Grill: 1425 W. Southern Ave., . Music seven nights a week featuring alt bands.

Big Fish Pub: 1954 E. University Drive, . Music every night featuring local alternative and punk bands and national touring acts.

Sail Inn: 26 S. Farmer Ave., . Live music featuring jam bands in every genre from rock to bluegrass.

The Sets: 93 E. Southern Ave., . In addition to DJs, IZW