Mountain Xpress on the early 90’s Asheville music scene
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009That scene has local ties a plenty, and there is a reunion event forthcoming.
An excerpt from the long feature story:
Asheville’s music scene in the early ’90s was a lot different than today’s band-on-every-street-corner, band-in-every-bar land of plenty. Downtown was gritty; the bars raw. “When we were starting bands, adults pretty much frowned on it,” says Carter in an interview from his home in New York. “When we were in our early teens we would go see any band that played at the Spiders Web, or Fine Arts theater and later Squash Pile (the defunct venue on Riverside Drive that now houses Curve studios).”
He adds, “It was fun. We wanted to be rock stars and the world was our ashtray.”
An overflowing ashtray: The DIY grit-rock and punk scene of that era (born in reaction to the bluegrass and hair bands that dominated early ’90s Asheville) spawned two CDs plus one cassette tape anthologizing (then for kicks; these days for posterity) the sounds of bands like the Mathmatics, Biltmore Forest Overdrive (BFO) and Tripod under the “Decline of WNC” umbrella. The cover art parodied, appropriately, the classic L.A. punk compilation The Decline of Western Civilization.
Equally fitting: The idea for a Decline reunion came about from a drunken conversation between Carter (who now owns a T-shirt company in New York City) and Bailey, now a local filmmaker. This weekend, July 24 and 25, some of the Decline bands will play again at Broadways and Stella Blue (two of the clubs where it all began). Maybe for the last time.
