K-Town and Sadlack's - A Tribute

I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 22, 1977 at the Old Rex Hospital that once sat at the corner of Wade Avenue and St. Mary's Street. My earliest childhood memories, as long-time readers of my blog may be able to affirm, are saturated with the landmarks and buildings of the capital city that have been around much longer than I. Over the years some of these buildings still stand, some have seen remodels or changed locations entirely; others are long gone. One of my long standing stories that I tend to tell from time to time is that when I first got my license in 1993, against the express instructions from my parents not to do so, I drove straight into downtown Raleigh and began what would become my 20 year run of hanging out at Cup a Joe on Hillsborough Street (And it should come as no surprise, this is where I sit now, writing this to you).

36 years of Hillsborough street... I have many memories... some highlights...

1983, NCSU wins the NCAA championship... my dad, an NCSU Alumni decides he must take his family on a cruise up H-boro to celebrate with his comrades. My mom's car at the time, an ancient royal blue escort, is splashed and coated with red latex paint on the passenger side. In my skewed kid-memory, the streets and everything surrounding is snow-white with toilet paper, anything not covered in TP is on fire.

I persist in begging my parents to take us to “That place with the cherry on top!” ...an ice cream parlor on the corner of Dan Allen called Swanson's(?). I distinctly remember once making the decision to order “bubble gum” ice cream and being furiously irritated as there were actual pieces of gumballs in it and ice cream shouldn't be work.

Riding back towards the fairgrounds from the old Darryl's on the corner of Hboro and Oberlin and my dad points out the prostitutes waiting around at the corner of Chamberlain.

My mom works in her salon on Saturday mornings and dad take my brother and I on his errands to local hardware stores, etc., and we typically stop for lunch at Char-Grill beside the old church and eat our Jr Steakburgers on the tailgate of the truck.

Home from college (ECU) to hang out with friends still in town... They have decided to do acid, I am the DD, as I am too scared to try it. We walk up and down Hillsborough, from the Electric Co Mall to Sadlack's... My friend swears the bricks are full of water and the sky is full of angels.

A quiet Tuesday morning and no one is in Cup but me, a few older guys that seem to live here, and my friend Dawn. Several moments go by with no cars on the road and a lone tumbleweed rolls down the center of Hboro St.

IHOP on the corner of Ashe at 3am with an ex-boyfriend... A homeless man comes in and proceeds to drink all 4 tabletop syrups and lies down on the floor beneath the booth and falls asleep.

Endless hours of Frankenstein pinball at the Fast Fare or Funhouse pinball at the pizza place beside Foundation's Edge.

A gutterpunk named Suede tries to sell us cassette tapes he found in the trash behind Schoolkid's.

My friends have somehow managed to shimmy their way onto the roof of Cupajoe and are throwing jumping jacks from the roof and shooting off roman candles.

And now most of these places are gone. The Comet, The Brewery, Pantana's, to name a few. And now one more to add to the list... Sadlack's. It is a painful loss, but before the doors shut, in true hometown honor-system, Raleigh rallied and sent this quasi-shabby, shitsqualor manor of mayhem and drunken foolishness off to the great dive bar in the sky in ...er.... well... style...? A full week (or so) of what I called “Last Call Rock Shows.” I did my best to show face and throw some more cash in the till before it was all over.

Sadlack's sat at the corner of Enterprise and Hillsborough, across from the iconic NCSU Belltower. In my teens and early 20s Sad's was actually not the place you would hang out... In fact, I was warned against it by my father. My crowd were usually at the Comet or Stingray (later on, everyone migrated to Jackpot and then eventually downtown to Landmark/Neptunes/Captial Club). Sadlack's throughout the 80's and 90's had a pretty rough reputation. And before the Great Remodel a few years back had perhaps the smallest, most terrifying bathrooms I've ever experienced. Being situated only a block or two from all the Ghetto-blaster room-for-rent Shrader properties and around the corner from the blood for cash donation center, the assumption was that Sadlack's was basically the vortex for all the homeless or may-as-well-be-homeless gutterpunks and lost souls. The joke goes that Sad's is where Cup a Joe went after close or that it was the official AA Meeting afterparty. It wasn't until my friends decided to quirkily gentrify (sorta kinda) Maiden Lane (and inadvertently, temporarily all became coke addicts,) did I start half-heartedly wandering up to hang out on the patio. Then the glorious advent of Hopscotch and the convenient fact that I had moved into a duplex near the Rose Garden, within walking distance myself, saw me spending more and more time with Raleigh's own island of misfit toys.

Now, I know to the untrained eye, (or those unfamiliar with Karla-speak) you may misconstrue that I am talking smack about Sadlack's and those that chose to spend their time there – I'm mostly trying to explain why it took so long for me to warm up to it. And how once I figured out it was basically, second only to Cupajoe for me, Homeroom for Underdogs and how I started aligning myself with them folks. God knows I love an underdog.

The announcement of the closing came so long ago, so long before I left for Costa Rica in fact, that I had almost forgotten it was coming. And it wasn't until the last few weeks, once we officially saw the 3rd-ish incarnation of Schoolkids close beside it, that reality began to sink in. It was really happening. Suddenly things started happening... The Raleigh music scene remembered its rusty roots of afternoon no one shows on the patio, NCSU alumni who spent their sunny Saturday afternoons came out to reminisce, and the same old freakshow drunks who'd been there since the dawn of time were in full force. I made three “official” stopovers.

Dexter Romweber – 12/22/13

Dex, of Flat Duo Jets fame, started off with an early solo set around 6pm. I hadn't 100% planned on this show, but I was in the general vicinity and I was rocking a solo Sunday Funday and didn't quite feel like wandering down to Landmark, so I made a detour and I'm glad I did. Dexter played for a bit, rested a bit and then picked it back up. I saw great friends and got some serious toe-tapping on. Later I snagged his setlist, which was actually written on the back of an old power bill, which seemed almost intrusive but I got his permission to add it to my ever-increasing setlist collection.

Scores from the past couple weeks in the door of my car. This is getting out of control. kinda.

MARTEEEEEEN!

Kenny Roby & Friends – 12/28/13 (aka The Official Shit-Starts-Gettin'-Rowdy show)

Now this was epic. A Saturday night show, packed to the gills with who's who of the long standing Triangle Americana scene and old school Six String Drag fans. This was a two-fisted tallboy show; a-hootin' and a-hollerin', unexpected covers, surprise special guests and encore after encore kinda gig. Easily one of the best shows I've seen since I got back to town. Toe tapping gave way to eventual gratuitous head-bobbing, morphing seamlessly into full scale dancing, eventually seeing us dancing on the tables, then ...aw fuckit, down front, in front of everybody danceparty!!! There was more love and good vibes on that patio than I have seen in a Raleigh crowd... man, you know, I almost said “years” but honestly? I think EVER?

Damn the Man

I ARE FAN

Gettin' Goner With It

Yeah, That happened!!

More shows were scheduled after this one, (including the Backsliders on New Year's Eve that I very briefly stopped in for one last adieu,) but in my heart I knew nothing would ever come as close to this as sheer live show perfection at Sadlack's and I wanted it to be my last memory of the place, not the shambles I knew it would become as the evening wore on and revelers would tear the place to pieces, nuts and bolts, the way they did on the “first” last night of Jackpot when folks were walking past Q's place on Morgan carrying pool sticks and bar stools. My last memory of the night is watching as some friends lit a Chinese fire lantern loose and it floated dreamily into the sky.

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

photo courtesy of Johnny of House of Swank

January 1, 2014 saw the end of Sadlack's. The facebook page was flooded with love, support and memories. Local publications published tributes and locals took photos of the boarded up windows in memorial to good times gone by.

Three days later, one of my dear friends, Carole, celebrated her birthday with her husband, friends, and family. Early the next day we learned the terrible news that Matt, her husband, her truest love and longest friend, our friend, our love, had passed away tragically, unexpectedly... I had been, as I tend to do, procrastinating with writing this "tribute to Sadlack's" post, (perhaps waiting for the flood of other media outlet articles to fade out,) but in the wake of this devastating news I knew that the best thing I could do for myself and perhaps for my friends who are hurting as much as I am for these two people who have touched so many lives in such a deep and loving way, was to dedicate this post to them. As with what has been the case with the majority of the posts found in this blog, I sit here holding back tears, spewing catharsis. 

Carole has been a deeply important person in my life for many years, floating in and out like a guardian angel when I am my deeply saddest and most lost; seemingly knowing exactly what to say and the right way to say it to pull me out of wherever it is my soul is trying to retreat. Not to say that I am some deeply enigmatic and nihilistic soul with no way through my crabby crustacean shell, but the universe (G-d? Who knows anymore?) has always found a way to set such transcendental and casually rational souls such as Carole into my path. One of my fondest memories is a random evening when she and Blinker showed up at Jackpot in full clown regalia after I had just barely met her and she enveloped me in one of the warmest and best hugs I can recall in real life, as if she had known and loved me her whole life.

Matt was someone I met when I staarted to meet Raleigh Kids outside of high school overflow. I had started spending my time with the notorious Rob Roy and he spent lots of time with this group of folks that circled around the kids Jenny (Wood!), Chris, Nancy (Brown!) and Matt, (who we called K-town, as he was from Kinston). Rob called him his “lawyer” ...Matt once posed as his attorney to get him out of a traffic ticket ages ago (this may have been a joke, but we still called him K-Town: Attorney at Law for years.) Time passed, folks moved on, “cliques” faded, merged, melted into one... I'd find myself at parties with crews of folks I'd never pick out of a lineup to know each other. I'd be on Bart's stoop on Chamberlain with hippies, punks, hipsters, art fags and sorority girls and I never knew how we all knew each other, but it was there that K-town came back into my life and Carole became a life-preserver and one of my soul's strongest advocates.

I am having trouble keeping it together now, as I am writing this in public and it's not in my best interest to break down at Cupajoe, so I will end this by saying that not since losing our dear friend Sean “Old School” Johnson a few years back, has my soul ached so badly for the loss of a friend. I have no comforting words for Carole or their family at the moment, (as I am stuck somewhere between the extreme anger/helpless grief phase myself,) and I don't ask you for yours. I would just ask that whoever you are, whether or not you know these two beautiful people, that you take a moment to revel in their love and feel blessed to know that such people like this existed on this planet in your lifetime. And if you get a moment, send a loving burst of hope and comfort to Carole, the kids, and their family.

Services for Matt will be this Saturday afternoon, the 11th, with a reception to follow at their home. Feel free to contact me at karlaanne@gmail If you would like to coordinate carpooling or need directions.


Donations for the family can be made here.