Disclaimer: Memory is a funny thing, and an elusive one. Meaning; I might have some of this wrong, as 1. My memory is not always accurate, like anyone and 2. It is from my perspective only. Any friends who were there, feel free to correct me or add things I have missed. It helps! Also, no gossip on anyone here, it aint about that. Personal details are on a surface level, and friends, girlfriends and others are re-named to respect their privacy. People in bands generally put their names out there on albums and in interviews anyway, and are not in the habit of staying anonymous, and therefore are named here. That said, anyone who is in the blog that wishes me not to use their name has only to ask.

Longest absence from the blog…ever. No apology would be worthy, so…

The Crazy Horse, Part I

I wrote a poem at age 23 that started with the lines, ‘I was in this long, narrow, human bowling alley/Actually, it’s a saloon they call it The Crazy Horse/and I grew up there…’ This is pretty much true. I started playing music in The Crazy Horse tavern at age 18.  None of the owners ever carded any of us. And at the time, I only had a year to go to be legal, because the drinking age in Idaho at the time was 19. When they changed the law to age 21 (being pressured by the Reagan administration to do so by the threat of withholding much-needed highway repair funding) I had already turned 19, was grandfathered in and could still go to bars an buy alcohol, a rare stroke of good luck.

The Crazy Horse is still around, I am happy to say, under the name Terrapin Station and bands play there to this day, though I believe it may be an all ages hall now (anyone?). From photos I have seen, it looks as if the place hasn’t changed too much, the same sign is behind the stage that I remember well; a drawing of a horse and western font spelling out ‘The Crazy Horse’…interestingly, there is no reference to the American Indian whose namesake they use. Just a drawing of a ‘crazy horse’, literally, which is comical, in a way.

Not a big bar, The Crazy Horse is a narrow, boxlike room (thus my description as a ‘human bowling alley’), the bar itself is to your right as you walk in and there is a stage at the back of the box. In the 80’s it was a bar that sold cheap beer and booze and was frequented by seasoned drinkers. Then the bands invaded. It would never be the same again.

H-Hour

Our first experience of the Crazy Horse was to go see shows there. H-Hour was a popular local band who played mostly original songs, and their cover choices, for the time, were pretty non-mainstream; Joy Division, Shriekback and various current new wave hits (just before new wave became a radio whore). I have waited to talk of H-Hour until now, because they are inexorably linked, in my mind, to The Crazy Horse saloon.
H-hour, during that incarnation of the band (there would be one more a few years later in Seattle) around 1984, was a great live band and all the young women loved them because of their danceable music and their singer, who had a British look about him, though he was from the US, and a pretty decent stage presence.

H-Hour packed the bar and the owners, whomever they were at the time, loved them. People came and danced and drank. I remember many a fine evening spent watching them. I was especially impressed with their drummer, Tad Doyle, who was a large man who drummed with authority. He was most often dressed in a white dress shirt and slacks, his hair short. He was a butcher at Albertsons meat department (the store was born in Boise, FYI), fairly mild-mannered, friendly and extremely intelligent (and one of my top 5 favorite drummers of all time, I shit you not.)

By 1985, I became good friends with Tad. I would visit his apartment in Hyde Park (the Boise version) and we would exchange music and talk into the night. I would play him Bad Brains, Articles Of Faith, Minutemen and Husker Du and he would play me amazing new wave stuff like Joy Division, Shriekback, Gang Of Four and Killing Joke, bands I had heard of but never heard in depth, and still listen to to this day.

Tad was the first person I knew who made music on a computer. In 1985, it totally blew me away. He had an amazing ear, approaching music in a way I had never thought of. This influenced me hugely, though it took years for it to manifest, and he credits me with introducing him to ‘the dark side’, which cracks me up. Suffice it to say that we both influenced each other quite allot, and we are still friends to this day. He began to hang out regularly with State Of Confusion and our crowd, a friendship that would become crucial when we moved to Seattle as The Treepeople, 4 short, yet long, years later.

Tad was also a pioneer in the Boise music scene, playing in bands prior to H-Hour such as Red Set in the early 80’s. Little did any of us know that Tad Doyle had far more lurking inside him. He would, within a few short years, become, in my mind (and the mind of many others) one of the most influential musicians in Seattle, and become one of the fathers of a whole new sound to come from that wet, sleepy burg. He just has never gotten proper cred for it. More on that later.

The last thing I will say about Tad is that once when SOC played a show with H-Hour at The Crazy Horse, I was fucking around on Erik’s drum kit after the sound check and after I finished, Tad asked me, “so when you gonna start playing drums?” I have to admit it was a huge compliment (though I may have played it cool at the time) and was quite a prescient question, since in 3 years, I would end up playing drums in Treepeople. I credit him, partly, with giving me the confidence to do so.

“You’ll never play here again!”

By late 1984, State Of Confusion also had enough of a following to fill the place, and our crowd were drinkers, so whomever owned the bar at the time may have hated our music, but they loved the business we brought in with us and tolerated it. That is to say, to varying degrees, through various owners. We went through around 5 owners with two bands during our time playing there.

Some owners fade from memory, as it was uneventful during their ownership, or, they didn’t own it for long. What I do remember is that a few sets of owners got sick of the punk music and sometimes rowdy crowd and at some point had said to us “you’ll never play here again!” Then within a few months after such a proclamation, there were new owners and there we were again at the door, guitars in hand and drinkers behind us (not literally, of course, but doesn’t it make a cute ‘movie moment’?) and we were back in action. We always had the last laugh. And this did become a standing joke among us “you’ll never play here again!” was often said in different variations in response to some situation or another.

There are two owners, or a set of owners and a single owner, I want to speak of here, as they were the most entertaining reigns and the glory days of the bar happened under them.

The first is Dale, a short man in his 50’s who was straight out of the mid-70’s with his cheap plaid suits and his round, plastic-framed glasses that sat atop his bulbous nose. He was a former insurance salesman, if memory serves me, and he looked it (with a some used-car salesman thrown in). He had a gruff, growling voice, as if he were trying to sound like one of the Rat Pack.

Dale was pretty enthusiastic and was always coming up with marketing schemes to draw people into the bar. The scheme he goes down in history for was the ‘$5 for all the beer you can drink’ scheme. You read correctly. Like a buffet, but for beer! Once the town drunks caught wind of this, they camped at The Crazy Horse day and night. The SOC shows were packed full, and needless to say, everyone got drunk as all hell. As a result, the shows were pretty rowdy. I don’t remember Dale ever really caring about that fact, or that our music was so obnoxious. All he cared about was making money, though, with schemes like all-you-can-drink $5 beer’, I am pretty sure he was never in the black and was more than likely losing money, fast.

What stands out most from the reign of Dale (which was very short, in my memory it was the latter part of 1984) was the one that sank him. One night, after a particularly busy evening, Dale was in very good spirits and was buying the band beers, buying other people beers and then announced a party at his house to all within the bar, none of whom had been carded, and many of whom (myself included) were underage. We did not attend this party, as we knew it sounded like a bad scene that would be busted quickly. Sure enough, Dale was busted for serving minors alcohol and for contributing to minors (which I am sure was not all they threw at him, considering the circumstances in such a conservative town). Thus, the end of the reign of Dale.

Creeps

There was a couple that owned The Crazy Horse; Mel and Martha (I shit you not, their real names). My guess as to when they owned it is around 1984 to 1985. Mel looked dead up like a hick version of Bluto from the Popeye comics; tall, slight gut but muscular build, an incredibly thick black beard and rug of hair and a flesh beak of a nose that protruded out over his thick mustache almost touching his upper lip. I never saw him in anything but a t-shirt, jeans and a baseball cap. His face was always twisted into an angry looking scowl, though he had moments when he was nice. He was, after all, married to Martha. Poor, poor man.

Martha can only be described as looking like a hick, female version of Jaba The Hut, with bleach blond hair and voice that would curdle milk and freeze liquor. A voice that is forever immortalized on the State Of Confusion album ‘A Street’ from a recording Pat captured of her in action. He was trying to record some of the bands we were playing with by using batteries in a Fostex 4 track machine so he could wear it on a strap, plug in a mike, and wander around the bar. Needless to say, the music can’t really be heard well. Mostly you could hear the crowd, and it was incredibly entertaining to hear a tipsy Pat randomly interviewing people and asking them bizarre questions, interwoven with his unique, signature chuckle. At one point, someone whom Pat gave the recorder to while SOC played catches an exchange between Tammy, the cocktail waitress, and Martha.

Tammy was tall, possessing a full-bodied farm girl beauty and though she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she was sweet and she loved the State Of Confusion boys. Come to think of it, all the waitresses loved us because we brought in people and made them money. I actually had an affair with one of the waitresses at one point, a very brief one (I am allowed to gossip about myself in this blog, fyi;).
Tammy was waiting for some drink orders she had put in to Martha. SOC was on stage, between songs. Then you hear Martha’s piercing, loud voice “Oh, Tammy’s clappin’, where’s all your taste…in your ass?”

Then Tammy is heard in the background but her words can’t be made out except a few here and there. What I hear is her saying something like “hey don’t you be sayin’ that kinda shit, I like these guys,” and though she can’t be heard well, you can tell by her slurring that she is completely drunk. Then Martha says to her “well why’nt you take ‘em home with ya? Yeah, their goin’ home with you and playin’ for ya all night long.” Behind all this, you can hear Young Wayne saying “…this poor rabbit has to listen to all of this ” (it was near Easter and someone had hung a stuffed rabbit in front of the stage) and then you can hear the crowd yelling at me, at us.

This snippet ended up as the intro to the last song on the SOC album ‘A Street’, called 'Creeps', Pat’s idea, and a brilliant one at that. The Crazy Horse, forever memorialized on vinyl. Poor Mel and Martha…I wonder what became of them?

Stay tuned for Part II; Local bands that played the Crazy Horse and touring bands including Danger Mouse, Beyond Possessions, Honor Role, Tex and the Horseheads, Watt’s Bald Head, Phantom Tollbooth and the infamous Dead Kennedys (as well as any other bands I remember or that you remember! Let me know!) and the band who used The Crazy Horse as an incubator; Treepeople.