I was on the wagon, and the weekend was approaching, so naturally I was looking for a circumstance special enough to justify stepping down off of that particular conveyance for a bit.
It was Tom DeGeorge, general manager of nightclub and concert hall Masquerade, who found it for me. During a Friday afternoon phone conversation about the various rumors that lately have been swirling around that storied Ybor City venue, DeGeorge suggested I come down the following evening and have a drink.
Because it might be the last chance I'd get to do so.
"We could come to work Monday, and the door could be locked," he said.
Nightlife is a fickle industry; clubs close every day. But there's been a Masquerade in Ybor City for as long as I've been living in the Bay area. Hell, before I moved here in '90, and before the club moved into its current location in the old Ritz Theater at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 15th Street, I was going to Masquerade's former digs at the other end of the strip during summer visits to Tampa.
(Nirvana played that room, where the hip-hop joint Club Empire is now, a few years before "Smells Like Teen Spirit" erupted.)
Masquerade isn't another little dive that's going under because some former musician who rented an empty restaurant was a little too supportive of unknown local bands and a little too loose with the free drinks. It's an institution, the city of Tampa's answer to New York's CBGB, or Chicago's Metro, or Boston's Middle East, or Atlanta's, um, Masquerade. It's also the final holdout from Seventh Avenue's gritty, bohemian pre-Centro Ybor incarnation, from the days of Ybor Pizza & Subs, of the Star Club, of Three Birds Bookstore and Blue Chair Music.
But it looks like Masquerade is going under, just the same.
"We've been losing money steadily for a very long time," said DeGeorge, who shot down persistent rumors that the club's current financial straits are the result of its insurance company's refusal to pay out over the tragic, senseless death of Tommy Laskas, who was killed in an altercation there last June. (Laskas' widow, Wendy, filed a wrongful-death suit against Masquerade's owners in September.) "I know what people are going to say, but the bottom line is, our landlord" — developer Joe Capitano Sr. — "is suing to get us out of the building.
"There's this perception, when people see a big place and they come in and it's packed, they think these guys are making a ton of money. But maybe the last time you had a show like that was three weeks or a month ago."
DeGeorge blames the club's cash-flow woes on "a combination of a bunch of bad things," from Ybor's curfew and noise ordinance to deep-pocketed competitors that he says overpay national touring bands in order to secure in-demand acts for their own venues. He's currently scrambling to find a last-minute angel of an investor to step in and forestall the eviction — apparently, his bosses in Atlanta have decided their Tampa location isn't worth saving — but at this point, the club's closing seems a foregone conclusion. DeGeorge may be able to keep the doors open for another couple of weeks, or they might be closed for good when a bundle of this issue of the Planet lands on the sidewalk next to 'em.
So I went down to Ybor Saturday night to have perhaps my last beverage at a place I've patronized since before I was old enough to drink there. It was one of those misleading nights DeGeorge mentioned the day before — a sold-out show, the line snaking around the side of the building and back past the headliner's tour bus toward the parking garage a half block away.
Inside, the Masquerade staff bustled as usual, the security guys patting down ticketholders at the door, the male and (mostly) female bartenders pouring beers and cocktails as fast as they could. As the first act got started and the venue's main room began to fill up, it seemed impossible to believe that there was trouble, that there was red ink, that this club was all but doomed.
I watched three bands play the stage I'd played several dozen times myself. I'd opened for a national act for the first time on that stage; I was standing on it when I first played to a crowd of more than 500. That room hosted many more of my musical "firsts," and introduced me to more great music — and put me within arm's length of more of my musical heroes, from Mr. Bungle's Mike Patton to the Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli — than I can possibly mention here.
Sure, if the doors do close, it could reopen again as something else, maybe even another concert venue. But it won't be the same.
When Dave King, frontman for Los Angeles folk-punk group Flogging Molly, announced from the stage that their set might be Masquerade's last, the crowd bellowed incomprehensibly, because that's what you do at the big show when the singer says something about your town. Immediately afterward, though, I could see people looking at each other with quizzical expressions — "did he just say that?" It was news to them.
And when the show was over, after the majority of kids and men and women filed out through Masquerade's long, cavernous entry hall, I slipped into the club's little side pub to sing a little karaoke, and meet DeGeorge to toast the likely end of an era.
We didn't talk about it, though; DeGeorge, a former Atlantan whose five years running the place have so enamored him of Tampa that he can't imagine leaving should the worst happen, said all he was going to say on the matter over the phone on Friday.
"Seven years ago, this was a really hip area," he'd said. "They had what they wanted [Ybor to be], and they ruined it. Now, their solution is to drive the little bit that's left, the original music, out of the area. So they can have a nice quiet strip, put in some homes and businesses, and then a museum or something.
"Does that sound bitter enough for you?" he'd laughed. "Just what Ybor needs — more upscale cigar shops."
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2006.