NOTE: Any Boise peeps who were around the music scene in the '80s whohave photos of shows at the Crazy Horse, please email them to me @ waynerayflower@gmail.com. All photos will be properly credited (if you didn't take them, let me know who did). Thanks!
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…
STATE OF CONFUSION 21.6.1986 Crazy Horse, Boise, Idaho; photo by Helge Schreiber
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 and buy alcohol, a rare stroke of good luck.
The Crazy Horse is still around, I am happy to say, under the name The Red Room (http://redroomboise.com/), and bands play there to this day (in fact, I just played there for a video shoot of State Of Confusion for a reunion we just did there last September, more on that later, I will probably do a separate entry on that). The place hasn't changed too much. Though years ago (until fairly recently) on the wall behind the stage there used to be a drawing of a horse and western font spelling out ‘The Crazy Horse’…interestingly, there was no reference to the American Indian whose namesake they used. Just a drawing of a ‘crazy horse’, literally, which is comical, in one way, sad in another.
The Red Room, formerly the legendary Crazy Horse - Photo not credited that I see but retrieved from:
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 then contemporary '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 dance-able music and because of their singer, who had a British look and sound 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, a large man who drummed with authority (one of my top 5 favorite drummers of all time, I shit you not.). He was most often dressed in a white dress shirt and slacks, his hair short. He was a butcher at Albertson's meat department (the store was born in Boise, FYI), fairly mild-mannered, friendly and extremely intelligent
By 1985, I had become pretty 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 a lot, 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 '80s. 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 minds of many others) one of the most influential musicians in Seattle, and would also become one of the fathers of a whole new sound to come from that wet, sleepy burg which would take over the world. He has just 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 any given time may have hated our music, but they loved the business we brought in with us so they tolerated it. That is to say, to varying degrees, through various owners. We went through around 5 owners in 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 in this bar again!” Within a few months after such a proclamation, new owners came on the scene 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 during the glory days of the bar happened under them.
The first was Dale, a short man in his '50s who was straight out of the mid-'70s 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 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 and other people beers and then he announced to all within the bar that he was having a party at his house, none of the invitees had been carded, and many of them (myself included) were underage. We did not attend this party, as 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, this was 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, with a slight gut but a 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 Jabba The Hutt, with bleach blond hair and voice that could curdle milk and freeze liquor, a voice that is forever immortalized on the State Of Confusion album ‘A Street’ from a recording of her in action which Pat captured one night. He was trying to record some of the bands we were playing with by using batteries in a Fostex 4 track machine. He wore it on a strap, plugged in a mike, and wandered 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.
Martha & Mel
Tammy was tall, possessing a full-bodied farm girl beauty, and though she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she was sweet as pie 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 tip 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 can hear Martha’s loud, piercing voice “Oh, Tammy’s clappin' ’, where’s all your taste…in your ass?”
Tammy is heard in the background but her words can’t be made out except for 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 an' all their equip'ment so they can play for ya...? Yeah, they're goin’ home with you tonight 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?
Hear the song Creeps here at about the 2:01 minute mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-AI_wNWytA
Stay tuned for The Crazy Horse Part II; Local bands and touring bands that played the Crazy Horse included 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.
