Twenty-some years ago, my band booked a gig in LaCrosse WI, at a place called the Warehouse. An all age club, right in downtown. I can’t remember how I found the contact but after the first show there, we knew it was someplace special. Steve Harms, the owner, was friendly, supportive and when he said he liked your music, it was real.
We made some friends down there, other bands and supportive fans. It was a great atmosphere. We ended up playing 4 or 5 times down there, according to my drummer’s gig log.
The Warehouse is still there, chugging along but in a little different capacity. They recently became a non-profit, even though Harms would say they were a non-profit all along.
After good times and bad times, and business issues out of Harms control. The Warehouse has been hanging on by a thread for the last few years.
The one constant is Harms and his never say die attitude, and even though his life might be simpler without the Warehouse. The place is him, and it’s what drives him.
From what was going to be a quick Q and A, to help spread the word. Harms gave me plenty to work with to create a multi-part history and his attitudes about people who play music and the music business itself.
This first part is about why he started the club in the first place, and it’s history up until grunge happened.
Please give $10 or more to the Warehouse if you can. The next parts will come weekly, in 2-3 more parts depending on how it all breaks down. Enjoy!
Why Steve Harms started The Warehouse and it’s beginnings.
I had been in a local band in high school and for several years after. We were serious, doing only originals when the modus operandi of the day was cover songs. Touring without the internet, booking college gigs, venues in faraway States. That all sounds simple now, but back then it was sitting in the library looking through phone books and college directories and sending out postcards to college radio stations that they would return with info about their community (the cool record stores, venues, etc.). It was a continuous process to get to the point where we were touring every other month, if only for a week.
We put out several singles (vinyl), a cassette ep, and eventually a full-length vinyl LP. It was 180gram West German Teldec virgin vinyl, direct-to-metal mastered, in a gatefold sleeve. We went over the top because we knew we were from West Salem Wisconsin and A&R reps don’t know West Salem Wisconsin from the bottom of the ocean.
Got a great review in Billboard, but self-management blew it when Chrysalis Records called and wanted to buy one of our songs for their band Armored Saint. My decision was, if the song was good enough for them to buy, then we were good enough to sign. Complete shortsightedness, as obviously we had a billion more songs in us, and selling one song would have made money and got us recognition.
Stubborn me, thinking I could do everything myself, didn’t want to have a band manager. There comes a point when there are real legalities and business choices to be made, that a band DOES need a manager.
We toured for a couple of years after the LP came out, but eventually grew tired of the constant work (back in those days we were carrying a complete sound system and a 60 par can lighting rig with multiple trusses, so it was a lot of work setting up every show. Plus it was the early days of Midi, and our set-up was electronic drums and samplers and keyboards and sequencers and thousands of feet of midi cables and midi splitters and midi nightmares. Between digital audio routing and the internet, bands do not realize how easy it is now comparatively speaking. I know, I know. “Get off my lawn,” right?
After we had paused the band (still on pause 25 years later), I worked for a sound company doing everything from Tractor Pulls to Garth Brooks on a haywagon trailer stage to auction barns at county fairs. On breaks, I would hang out at my friends tanning salon in the building that would become the Warehouse.
One day I asked them if they had keys to the rest of the empty building. Downtown La Crosse was in sad shape at that point, because a mall had opened up at the edge of town ten years earlier, and local businesses had fled the downtown for the mall. Many many vacant buildings, and the Warehouse building was no different.
My buddies had the keys, so I went exploring the first floor, and then went in the door to the 2nd and 3rd floors. The woodwork blew me away — how had it survived for 100 years. I ignored the broken out windows; the rooms with completely collapsed plaster and lath ceilings, the Winnie-the-Pooh sized beehive in the stairwell. The obvious roof leaks causing ceiling collapses all the way to the first floor. None of it mattered. It was all voided by the big windows and the incredible view and the woodwork and WOW! there’s a big open room up here!
I didn’t expect that, and of course, my mind was all about the possibilities. Because I was young and dumb, and knew nothing about codes and permits and licenses, etc.
My buddies were all about going dancing in Mpls on the weekends, and we thought, let’s bring that energy to La Crosse and do a late night dance venue. Since they held the lease, I just went with the assumption they were getting permits and licenses, etc. The upstairs was all knob-and-tube wiring and had been abandoned for years. (Building was owned by a St.Paul Real Estate Holding company, and they were using it as a write-off, no intention to ever fix it). So we put in a ton labor and repaired toilets and painted and removed old wallpaper and patched ceiling holes and built a half-ass bar from whatever lumber was in the building. Part of the bar top was an old door, I remember. Five of us were involved, and it went fairly smoothly because we all had delegated tasks.
We were open from 10pm-4am on weekends, which in La Crosse is just the worst idea ever. Sure, it brought out people that loved to dance. We had a couple of great vinyl DJs who were the get-a-box-of-vinyl-from-England-every-week types. So it was a great set of tunes every weekend. But La Crosse has an enormous binge drinking culture, and we would not end up getting cool people who appreciated eurodance music.
What came through the door were people who were too drunk to know they should go home. That had lasted for about one year before we all decided it was just too much work to keep it going for the benefit of 10% cool people and 90% drunk idiots. So we closed up shop.
One of the original 5, a high school buddy of mine, hung out a lot and began to realize that we never had a cool place like that to go to when we were in high school. Years earlier, when I was in a band, we got the city council to allow us to have a couple “all-ages” shows at a large local venue, Mississippi Queen. It was one of the old, Good Music Agency (Mpls) booked venues that would feature cover bands and bands like the Phones, Chameleon, and other Mpls bands for 1-4 night runs. A huge venue for little La Crosse. They could do around 1500 people. We sold it out a couple of times for the permitted all-ages shows.
Remembering this, my buddy and I thought about a venue that kids could go to on a regular basis, not on specially permitted nights. A “venue” for teens, rather than a “teen center” etc. Those are typically sterile, institutional, boring as hell. We pictured a unique all-ages venue that was interesting.
Again unaware of what we were getting ourselves into, we talked to the St.Paul landlords and agreed to rent the upper two floors, under one condition: bring everything up to code, and deal with the inspectors ourselves. How hard could that be?
We spent three months building a multilevel dance stage, new DJ booth, new bar, elevated seating deck, installed furnaces, new electric, plumbing, water heater, everything. Still had roof leaks in the pitch and tar roof. That is a tar-paper roof that is covered with small rocks. It leaked everywhere. So every rainstorm we would go into the attic (not an easy task, crawling around on 4000 sq ft of exposed rafters) and attempt to find where the leak was coming through the roof. As one of us did that, the other would go up on the roof in the rain with round bases from microphone stands. The person in the attic would hammer the underside of the roof right where the water was coming in, and the rocks on the roof would fly into the air with each hit. The person on the roof would then put a mic stand base on the spot where the leak was. Then the next dry day we would clean off the rocks, sweep the tar paper, and add roof tar in the spot where the leak was then cross our fingers it would help.
We got the place open and had success with DJs. It wasn’t necessarily where my heart was, but those $3 admissions added up when it was packed Friday and Saturday each week, and we put every dime back into improvements.
Eventually, we decided to add a Thursday night dance night, featuring some of the more alternative music that was underserved in the area. That was where my heart was at.
I had spent so much time in the 80s driving to Metro in Chicago and First Ave, seeing great alternative (I will use that term very broadly) bands. Like the Suburbs, Flamin Ohs, the Three O’Clock, The Alarm, Ministry, Revolting Cocks, Shriekback, Depeche Mode, etc., and that was my music.
Turned out, there was a big call for an alternative music dance night in La Crosse and the community of kids that developed was second to none. The DJs could play anything from Nirvana to BiGod20, from Dinosaur Jr to Cop Shoot Cop, and some section of the kids were into it.
Punks were hanging out with skaters hanging out with rivetheads hanging out with full-on goths. The issue? The Fri & Sat “top 40” kids started to associate the Warehouse with dudes wearing black kilts and girls with black lipstick, and parents did too, and eventually the Top 40-style nights on the weekends started to die down. We combined the two nights of Top 40 into one, on Saturdays, and decided to move the Alt Night to Fridays. That changed everything. The Friday night event drew kids from Mpls, Madison, Milwaukee, and all around the Coulee Region.
During that time, Dave Reinders (Porcupine) was in a band called Junk Farm, and he talked to me about renting a couple of rooms in the Warehouse to build a studio. We spent several months replacing walls and ceilings and putting in a control room, and iso booth and electricians wired it up, and Junk Farm had a rehearsal space.
One day, Dave said “you know, that soundboard you are using for DJs is a 32-channel live mixer. You have monitors. You must have mics and stands from your old band too. You should let us play here.” Eventually, he convinced me, and locals Dream-13 (featuring Casey, who is also now in Porcupine) played. It was well-attended and opened my eyes to the possibility of live bands. We discussed it and decided we should do bands once in a while.
Way years earlier, while, in the band, we had provided sound and lighting services to a local guy who brought in bands to a local rental hall, making it possible for bands like Replacements, Soul Asylum, True Believers, Black Flag, etc. to play La Crosse. So I wasn’t a stranger to show production. Local music enthusiast Parker Forsell, now with the annual music fest in Winona MN, helped get some local and regional bands to come through.
We also started getting calls from bands from Seattle/Portland/Olympia, because they were driving to New York to showcase, and I-90 from Seattle comes right through La Crosse. If you were a grunge band from the Pacific Northwest, you were most likely going to be driving through La Crosse. Once those bands found out, there was a place to play, and that the people were nice there, our reputation spread.
http://www.warehouserocks.com/
https://www.gofundme.com/AllAges
https://www.patreon.com/AllAges?ty=h
You must be logged in to post a comment.