Banned In Charlotte Article, September 1996 issue

Tangents: Banned In Charlotte and Loving It

Daniel Coston
September 1996
volume 2, number 1

Over the past year, many of you have followed what’s become known as our “banned counter,” or how many locations Tangents has been thrown out of.

We originally had no intention of keeping track of such things, but after a few restaurants and coffeehouses tossed Tangents away, claiming we were “obscene,” it became a private joke within our staff as to how many places we’d currently been banned from. When we first printed the number of banned locations on the cover of our fourth issue, our reader response was immediate. Unfortunately, so was our distributors’.

The human race is a funny bunch, boys and girls. Too many people are concerned about doing what’s perceived as right, i.e. what “everyone else” is doing. When some people see that Tangents has been banned by some places, they immediately think there must be something horrible about us, yet do not dare reading us for themselves and (Eureka!) forming their own opinion.

Within a few months, the number of banned locations ballooned from five to 14, and was threatening to spiral even further out of control. Realizing that some people weren’t getting the joke, we put the “banned counter” on page 2 along with our listing of those numerous brave souls that still carry us. Since then, we haven’t been banned from any further locations.

Actually, I wouldn’t mind being thrown out of those locations so much if they had the guts to tell us their decision to our faces. Each one would meekly mumble something like, “Don’t put your papers here,” and then run off to another part of the store, or an underling would be sent to tell us, “The boss said …”

We once received a fax from a Major Music Retail Store (that still carries us in two of their other locations in town). When I went to talk to the manager who sent us the fax (and turned out to be a former high school classmate of mine), she immediately launched into a lengthy (and stupid) five-minute tirade about how offensive our magazine is. There’s nothing more satisfying than having a dipstick, whose self-esteem is as plastic as their name tag, chastising me about the bad decisions I’ve made in my life.

One of the reasons we’ve survived is another human trait: acceptance. You’ve sought us out and told us how much you like this magazine, and for that, we’re eternally grateful. Even those who still don’t know what to make of us have realized we’re here to stay and have accepted us as part of this city’s plethora of information sources.

If you find a location that refuses to carry Tangents, ask for it and make sure the owners follow through. Maybe then they’ll do what’s “right.”

Back in the ’90s: The Charlotte music scene

by Daniel Coston

The way that many people viewed the Charlotte music scene was put in motion on September 18th of 1990, when GWAR performed at the 4808 Club. Local police arrested band frontman Dave Brockie and club owner Michael Plumides on obscenity charges. In statements given to the media after the arrests, the arresting officers made themselves and the city look like the prudish, backwards southern city that Charlotte was struggling to emerge from. There was also more to the arrest than just that night’s entertainment. It has since been suggested that the arrest was motivated by another club owner to remove his competition, and for the police to remove another music venue that they saw as a noisy nuisance. This event, along with other factors, kept many new and emerging artists from making stops in Charlotte. Despite this, the local music scene continued to thrive and find outlets as the decade pushed on.

Rock & Roll bands from Charlotte were already known to many as the decade began. Fetchin’ Bones, led by Hope Nicholls, had recorded three albums for Capitol Records before they broke up in 1990. The Spongetones saw their Beatlesque pop distributed by Sony Records in Japan. ANTiSEEN would carry their southern punk message throughout the world during the 1990s. Animal Bag would record two albums for Mercury Records and tour throughout the Southeast. Other bands that emerged from the Charlotte area during the first part of the decade included Thurn & Taxis, Hardsoul Poets, Blind Dates, Neglected Sheep, Kudzu Ganja, and many others.

Music venues in Charlotte kept changing throughout the decade. Local bands played at mainstays like the Double Door Inn and the Milestone Club. Many of the emerging Rock & Roll bands in town played places like the 4808 Club, the Pterodactyl Club, Jeremiah’s, and Amos’ (in its original location). Other smaller venues, such as Fat City, the Moon Room, and Jack Straw’s would also cater to local musicians. Larger venues, such as what was then the new Charlotte Coliseum, the old Coliseum (now known as Bojangles Coliseum), Ovens Auditorium, and Blockbuster Pavilion continued to draw national acts, but rarely featured local acts. There were also no music venues in the downtown area with the exception of Spirit Square. The venue featured touring theater and musical acts, such as Johnny Cash in 1994, and occasionally featured local musicians. The loss of festivals such as Springfest and Charlotte Jazzfest gave way to more regionalized festivals such as Center Cityfest.

During the 1990s, North Carolina’s music scene began to get more national notice. The rise of Chapel Hill’s alternative rock scene, and the emergence of record labels such as Merge Records and Mammoth Records, drew a lot of attention to the Triangle area of the state. By the mid-1990s, a number of Chapel Hill-based bands had songs on the radio. Ben Folds Five, Southern Culture On The Skids, Squirrel Nut Zippers and others showed one could be based out of North Carolina and hit the national charts. With that backdrop, a number of record labels came calling to Charlotte.

Sire Records alone signed three Charlotte bands during this time. This included Sugarsmack, led by former Fetchin’ Bones frontwoman Hope Nicholls, as well as Muscadine, which spawned future solo stars Jonathan Wilson and Benji Hughes. Jolene, which had emerged from Hardsoul Poets, also released one album on Sire, with their single “Pensacola” getting a good amount of national airplay. Also releasing major label albums during this time was Lustre, who formerly known as Shiner. Other groups such as Sound Of Mine, Spite, Come On Thunderchild, Sunny Ledford, Lou Ford, and Laburnum also received nationwide distribution through various record labels. The Charlotte music scene was especially strong during the mid-1990s, with bands such as Doubting Thomas, 2nd Skin (later known as Violet Strange), It Could Be Nothing, My So-Called Band, Peralta, X-Periment, Five Times Down, Poprocket, Major Nelson, Mercury Dime, David Childers, Gideon Smith, Draggin’ Flowers, Ublisch and others vying for listeners eager to hear the next new sound.

Despite the endless stream of bands in the Charlotte area during this time, it took longer for the city to provide the amount of venues necessary to support all of this music. Like many other music scenes, there was not always a lot of crossover with bands, and their various genres. Bands like ANTiSEEN and Spite might attract punk and metal fans to Tabloids, while rock and Americana fans might see their favorite bands at the Double Door Inn. If these bands played the same venues, such at Fat City or Tremont Music Hall, they rarely played together. For multi-genre acts such as X-Periment and Peralta, building up an audience took time. Much like the city itself, Charlotte’s music scene was just beginning to expand its views on where to go, and what was available to them. In time, the venues and audiences began to catch up to that need.

Clubs like the Pterodactyl gave way to venues such as the Baha Club and more underground venues like the Septic Tank. Some venues, like Tabloids, Cafe Dada, the Capri Theater, Atlantic Beer & Ice and others, came and went in a matter of a couple of years. New and larger venues for Rock & Roll music began to emerge, such as Tremont Music Hall when it opened in 1995. The Neighborhood Theater opened in 1997, utilizing a former movie theater that had originally opened in 1945. In another part of town the Visulite Theater, which had originally opened in 1939, opened as a music venue in 1999.

Looking back, the music scene in Charlotte during the 1990s had a lot to offer, and the quality of that music still holds up with any music scene during that time. The 1990s brought a lot of change and eventual growth to Charlotte, and the music reflected those times. With bands such as Hardsoul Poets and Fetchin Bones holding sellout reunion shows in recent years, the proof is there that people were listening to what was being created, and still care about it, all these years on.

Tangents Poetry, September 2015 Issue

The Rogue’s Voice


A boy out in the wild,
with pieces of other stories
that your father 
told you in haste.
You grew too fast,
the pieces no longer fit,
so you left that story
and created your own.

She believed in you
in ways that made you 
believe in yourself,
and another dream.
You returned to the land,
just enough distance from the past,
You spent time and thought,
wanting to believe.

They did not say
why you went away,
what changed in you
and why that story ended.
Like the change you made 
so many years before,
the story all got changed, 
broken when you were gone.

Your legacy is different
than what you’ve said to me.
I will never know you,
but I know the way you felt.
You just wanted to dream,
and I know that voice,
like a rogue’s song 
with constant changes, 
yet always returning
to the chord that is searching
for another way to sing,
and for another home.
-Daniel Coston

For David Pasquale

I first met David Pasquale in the second or third grade. We met in bus 42, the school bus that handled our respective routes. We both lived a good distance from our schools in Seneca Falls, NY. We had the honor of living the furthest away from town than any other kids. David and I bonded over a wonderment of life, adventure, and what else was out there beyond our rural lives.

David’s family had moved to town a couple of years before. I remember that they lived a number of places before they had found their large old house just off of Route 96. David had started school a year before I did, but one of his previous schools had held him back a year. By the third grade, David and I were both enrolled at Saint Patrick’s School in Seneca Falls.

We were best friends from the start. He was Huck Finn to my Tom Sawyer, or at least I thought so. Even then, I was dreaming of a world in, or near the spotlight. I wanted to be a filmmaker, a baseball player, broadcaster, musician. Anything and everything that interested me, I dreamed of it. My house was a mile or two away from David’s, looking directly out over Cayuga Lake. My backyard had been the scene of a massive battle between Indians and the colonial army in 1780. Only two other families around us lived there the entire year, with others coming in for the summer. It was rural, to say the least, but it gave me a lot of time and space to dream. And David and I dreamed big, like children do.

David’s experiences seemed more worldly than mine, even at that young age. He knew dirty jokes (at least to an eight-year-old) that I had never heard before. To this day, I can still recite most of them. David’s house, which he shared with his parents and his older brother Chip, also shared in that alternate view of the world. It was a rustic place, with lots of acreage. There had originally been a wood stove in the kitchen with a pipe that had gone straight through the roof. By the time I started visiting the place, the stove was gone, but the large hole in the room above the kitchen, where David and Chip slept, was still there. To my young mind, that was wild! Between visits to each other’s houses, we shared our feelings about school, our families, and what we someday hoped to do.

For all my dreams of traveling the world, when my dad got a job in North Carolina in the fall of 1983, I really didn’t want to go. I’d had a really good life to that point, and I didn’t want it to change. And I didn’t want to leave friends like David. We promised to stay in touch, and see each other whenever I came back. Truth be told, the first couple of years in Charlotte, NC were pretty hard on me, and I spent a lot of time wishing that I was back by Cayuga Lake. With David, all of my friends, and the life I used to know. Slowly, life carried on.

David and I wrote each other often for a few years. My family and I made a couple of trips back to New York. We swung by my old school, only to discover that school had been closed for that day. That summer, we stopped by David’s house, but the family wasn’t there. Within a year or two, David’s family had moved to North Chili, NY, and we kept writing each other. In 1988, David wrote to say that his family was moving again to another town, yet he wasn’t sure where. I wrote to David, hoping to catch him and get his new address. My letter came back, stamped “moved to unknown place”. I still have that letter, still sealed by the 14-year-old version of myself.

In the following years, I slowly began to realize some version of my youthful dreams. Be on TV? My high school friends did our own shows for local TV. Movies? I worked on a few film sets, before I realized that the individual moments in the camera, such as a still photo, held more emotion than the moving image. The Beatles? Seen two of them, and met and photographed their collaborators, children, and fellow musicians. I even went to Abbey Road, that place featured on an album I first fell in love with when I was four years old. I’ve had my ups and downs, but all in all, I’ve been very lucky, and still yearn to seek out the experiences that David and I first imagined having.

For years, I tried searching for David. Once, I thought I’d found him in a phone directory, but it turned out to be someone else. I kept searching for him, wondering where he was, who he’d become. I named one of my cameras David. Sure, I usually only named my cameras for loved ones that I’d lost, but David just seemed right. And someday, I’d tell him all about it. All of the things that I’d gotten to do, and wishing that he’d been there with me.

In January of 2014, I was doing research for a book, and had gotten pretty good at locating long-lost bandmates for North Carolina groups during the 1960s. I had realized that if I typed in the person’s name and birth year, I had a much better chance to finding that person. One night, I decided to look up David. I immediately found some information. Along with his death certificate.

Soon after, I located his brother Chip, who told me what had happened. In January of 1993, David had just joined the Marines. He had just gotten a motorbike, something that he’d wanted for a long time. He and some fellow cadets went out with their bikes. When another person on a bike in front of David suddenly stopped, David could not stop in time. He crashed into a pole and died on the scene. One of the things that Chip wrote me was, “One of the reasons that I liked about you and David was that you both liked to have fun.” We did have a lot of fun. David loved to have fun. One never knows where the things you love to do can lead you.

Gone. In 1993. Over twenty years ago. The news is very hard to comprehend, even all these years later. Had I known all those years ago, even on some unconscious level? I don’t know. As a kid, you want and hope for the best in yourself, and all your friends. Yes, it might seem naive to think that those dreams were possible, but they were very real to me, and I have carried them with me my entire life. And, now I realize, I also have carried David with me. The hopes, the dreams, the fears, the possibilities. These were things that David and I both created, wishing for our lives to come. And in that respect, David never left me. In some ways, David has been with me all along.

Later this year, I hope to return to New York. I hope to visit David’s grave, and finally say hello, one more time. Chip Pasquale recently sent me his parents’ phone number. The adult in me says, “What do I say after all these years?” The hopeful, excitable child in me says, “Just say hello! Go ahead!” Soon, I will listen to that younger version of me, and do so. Where does this circle lead? I wish I knew. All I can do is continue to hope for the best, and press on. Just like David and I always wanted to do.

Hi David. You have been gone from this place longer than you were here. Yet your memory is still very real to me. Recently, I photographed an event with a number of TV stars from the shows we used to watch. I found myself thinking, “The nine-year-old version of me wouldn’t have believed this.” Yeah, David, we would not have believed it. You’re still the best friend I ever had. I originally thought about writing this in January, on the anniversary of your passing, but I realized that I knew you as you lived. That is what I choose to celebrate today, on what would have been your birthday, July 8th. I still see you in my mind, just as the dreams of children will continue to live on, be they in upstate New York, or anywhere. As long as there still are kids to dream big, and there are adults that still believe in their own childlike dreams.

Happy birthday, David. See you around, again, someday.
-Daniel Coston
July 8, 2015