I spent the last few weeks afflicted with the nostalgia virus. I contracted this from reading Stories For Shorty: A Collection of Recollections from the Jockey Club 1982-1988. (available here, for a limited time.)
It's a collection of essays about a hellhole of a club I used to frequent back in the years 85-86 and features a brief essay by me. I had to buy a copy because if contributors got free copies, that would have probably covered half the print run--it's a small press and a small print run. I was happy to pay--it's a really well-put-together book, and it's a document of a time and place that I feel lucky to have, and this kind of micropublishing feels really cool and DIY to me. Plus I got a t-shirt! If you ever went to the Jockey Club, this is an essential volume. If you never went there, well, I don't think you'd enjoy it all that much.
For me, though, it was a lot of fun to read about this place. It's especially interesting to get a kaleidoscopic view of a time and place--everyone's memory is slightly different, and the club itself meant different things to different people. To some (perhaps many) people, it was the first place they really felt at home; to others, it was the place that saved or transformed their lives; and for me, it was just a place to go and hear music.
Having said all this, the nostalgia that affects people when they are talking about something or some place that was important to them as a teen or young adult does get annoying. The Jockey Club brought in a lot of great bands, and it was always easy for the underage to get in and see a show. And it was the only home for punk rock in the Greater Cincinnati area for at least 3 years. And I guess it was a kind of unofficial clubhouse for a bunch of people.
And yet.
The place never felt warm and inviting to me--there was almost always the threat of violence there, perhaps because there were so many drunks. The neighborhood was scary, and there was, even in this relatively small group of midwestern punk rockers, the back biting and jealousy that emerges whenever you get more than two people together. And it's fine to look back on the club with its numerous code violations and poor sanitation, fondly, but seriously, if there had been a fire, we all would have burned.
I had a good time there, but it wasn't any kind of freaking golden age--it was like anything else; there were good things and bad things about it. It's cool that it existed, and it was an important place, but it wasn't perfect.
And the fact that a bunch of old farts had a cool place to go when we were young doesn't mean that the stuff kids today do is somehow lame and inauthentic. It was ironic to read that sentiment from former Jockey Club denizens, since at the very time we were going to the Jockey Club, baby boomers were dominating pop culture and giving us that, "oh, in my day, we had Woodstock, blah blah."
And the fact that a bunch of old farts had a cool place to go when we were young doesn't mean that the stuff kids today do is somehow lame and inauthentic. It was ironic to read that sentiment from former Jockey Club denizens, since at the very time we were going to the Jockey Club, baby boomers were dominating pop culture and giving us that, "oh, in my day, we had Woodstock, blah blah."
So I enjoyed this book a lot, and I recommend it with this caveat---take anyone's nostalgia with a grain of salt. e
