Be a Good Neighbor and Give Generously to the Dutchmen Fund.

I was asked by a good friend to post this story over a month ago and I never got around to it and feel quite guilty. For those of you unaware, the Dutchmen is a very historic place not only for the Seattle music community, but for anyone who's a fan of rock music and grunge in particular. Nirvana, Tad, Mudhoney; they all recorded there. Here's the gist of the story:

On the morning of Thursday January 8, historic rehearsal studios the Dutchman and Calleye recording studios were destroyed by a tragic fire. Gary Mula, founder and proprietor of this Seattle music landmark, was away when the blaze erupted and fortunately was not injured. He is however terribly shaken and unsure of his future.

The Dutchman Fund has been organized in response to this catastrophe. The intent of the fund is to provide an opportunity for Gary's friends and colleagues to assist him in a time of dire need. This website has been set-up as a channel to receive donations (which are payable directly to Gary via PayPal) and to promote upcoming benefits. It is also intended to serve as a resource to communicate developing news on the event and its aftermath, as well as serve as community forum to remember and celebrate the Dutchman and Calleye.

UPDATE: January 23, 2009
The Seattle Fire Department has determined that the cause of the fire was accidental and has handed control of the building back to the owner's insurance company who are in the process of conducting their own investigation. At present Gary has limited, escorted access to the studio. He was able to determine that Jules-studio cat extraordinaire-unfortunately did not make it out of the building. He was a fantastic cat who will be greatly missed. As for Gary's personal belongings, a few items have been salvaged, but all of his instruments and studio gear have been totally destroyed. On the brighter side, his data archives and most of his hard discs miraculously survived the fire and a great deal of data has been recovered. His main recording drive however, did not survive and we're hoping to raise funds to recover the data. There's a lot of wonderful music on this drive and it would be tragic if it is lost forever. If anyone out there specializes in data recovery and would be willing to donate their services, please contact us immediately.

Here's the link to the website.

Stitches

Update to my below post on Travis Young's horrific injury at The Skylark on Halloween night. To catch those of you up too lazy to scroll down to the previous post, Young, the singer for We Wrote The Book On Connectors, (a band name that is entirely too long), went crowd surfing during his set and despite his diminutive frame, the inebriated hipster audience was unable to adequately support his body weight and he fell on broken glass and slashed open his thigh. (Strangeways is still recovering from the sight of blood gushing from Young's leg in a scene that recalled Sam Peckinpaw at his best...) I'm happy to report that Young made it to the emergency room in time and didn't join Kurt, Jimi, and Janis in the Rock Star Enclave in the Sky, but he did receive 28 stitches, or so I hear...

The best of luck to him on a full recovery and hopefully, a valuable lesson learned, (don't expect drunken, aging hipsters in smelly Red Light costumes to catch you, if you should fall...)

Bloody Fun

I've been meaning to post this for days, but I've been busy at work and too lazy at home...I went to The Skylark in West Seattle/Delridge on Halloween to check out some friends that were playing there that night, (the details of which are down below in my Halloween post). Basically, what they booked was a bunch of different bands to do short sets of covers from famous bands. The results, weren't very surprising; most of the sets were of the wedding band variety or steep descents into Karaoke-ville. They were entertaining, but there wasn't much effort from any of the musicians to put their own stamp on the songs. Only the girls from Danielli/H is for Hellgate/The Hungry Pines bothered to funk up some classic Nirvana songs and make them more contemporary and modern; they did a great job, (and obviously I'm biased since I'm very good friends with Danielli, but still, these girls rocked it out...).

But the biggest crowd pleasers were the dudes from "We Wrote The Book On Connectors" who went to town covering The Beastie Boys, complete with multiple costume changes, robots, backup dancers, props and a lot of general mayhem...the audience went nuts and people began crowd surfing, which may or may not have been partially pre-aranged, and towards the end of their last song, co-lead singer Travis Young decided to join in the fun and leapt from the stage and onto the crowd. Only problem, the crowd was insanely drunk and despite Young's diminutive stature, no one was apparently able to support him and he fell and landed on someone's glass or beer bottle, thereby inflicting a long and deep gash into his thigh. Young quickly leapt back up on stage, finished the song and began removing the pants to his costume to get a better look at his injury. I was standing with my friend Kerri behind the stage area and we were fortunate enough to be close enough to the stage to witness a foot long gush of blood shoot out of Young's leg after he took his pants off. Kerri and I simultaneously looked at each other in horror and said, "That's fucking bad...that dude needs to get to the ER immediately". Meanwhile the band is tearing down their equipment and props and someone hands Kerri some costumes to take downstairs to the musician's holding area and eventually Young gets off stage with his guitar and limps downstairs. No one in the band seems that alarmed at their bandmate's injury, so I made a point to tell the bass player, (or maybe it was another guitarist) that they need to get their buddy to the hospital as soon as possible but he just kinda shrugged and mumbled at me as he walked by. Fortunately, Kerri was downstairs when Young showed up and Young's girlfriend as well, and Kerri was able to play grown up and convince them to go to the ER and to apply some pressure to the wound to staunch the bleeding. It also helped that Young and his girlfriend realized that a huge gash in your leg and blood soaked clothes are not a good sign of long term physical being, so they quickly left for the hospital. I'm not exactly in the loop when it comes to long music news and gossip, so I didn't hear how it had all turned out, but I finally found out on Monday that they made it in time and he was ok, so that's good.

It was a fun and exciting evening, but I have to say that The Skylark needs to get their act together. The place was packed and it had to be over their occupancy limits; if there had been a fire or an earthquake or anything that would have caused a stamped to the exits, a lot of people would have been killed. And, they also didn't appear to have any security, just a woman at the door checking I.D. As a result, the crowd got way too rowdy and The Skylark is NOT the ideal location for crowd surfing; people were throwing stuff around and spraying each other with beer and at times, it seemed like it was verging on the edge of getting past the point of no return. The bar staff seemed overwhelmed and a little freaked out and no one seemed to be in charge. Hopefully, the management will have the sense to hire some security for big events like Halloween and New Years. I think they were just lucky this time that something really awful didn't happen.

The picture of Travis Young is from the We Wrote The Book on Connectors website: http://www.wewrotethebookonconnectors.com/bio.htm