This past week, as the last cocktail was swilled, the last disco light snuffed out and the last dance was danced, I wondered if the Paramount could have been saved. Probably not. Various people have approached me to ask "What could we have done?" and one answer is, "Um, gotten your ass out to a Tuesday night show every once in a while," but I'm really not convinced consistently high attendance could've kept it open. Oh, maybe if the sweaty, wall-to-wall jam of people that marked the club's first several years-especially Oona's Trash Disco Wednesdays and crazy gay-boy Saturday night-had continued…maybe.
But probably not. Sadly, the Paramount was more of an anomaly in Santa Fe than it was a typical entity, a fact which makes it all the more sad it closed and all the less surprising. The rent was incredibly high, the overhead was incredibly high and physically it is a very big space, a space that needed to be filled for almost every show in order to make it. And it made it for a long time. For a club to survive almost seven years in any town is a wonder; to make it that long in Santa Fe is a miracle.
As the Diaspora of DJs and bands and bartenders and security people who relied on the Paramount as a homebase begins to spread through town, I think Santa Fe will kind of settle into the place it really is: a small town with a nightlife and club scene that is
simultaneously ambitious and sadly lacking. The fairly recent addition of WilLee's Blues Club (401 S. Guadalupe St., 989-4423) is welcome in that the proprietors had a vision and followed it, transforming an anonymous rug store into a fine-looking niche establishment. But it also is a vision of the future of our music world here: fairly local, restricted to blues/roots music and genre-specific "jams." Which is OK-which is good, actually-but is Lucinda Williams gonna play there? KRS-One? Tracy Chapman? Talib Kweli? MF Doom?
A number of you out there might not know who Kweli and Doom are, but there's no doubt their show at the Paramount was a quiet coup. "Quiet" in the sense that maybe the typical demographic of Santa Fe (40-ish, white, rich) has no clue who they are and hence there was little mainstream scuttlebutt about them. But there's another Santa Fe, one that really likes hip-hop, and Kweli and Doom are two of the hottest names in the genre right now, two intelligent, critically acclaimed, red-hot, big-city acts. And somehow, some way, they played here. Because they
had
a place to play, and people who knew that if we had the chance, we damn well better get them to our little outpost.
Things like that just ain't gonna happen again, until-or, rather, unless-a venue with the size and vision of the Paramount opens up. We are thus left with a number of smallish specialized clubs and bars, suitable pretty much for local bands, and then the Lensic and Paolo Soleri amphitheater, which physically could house the likes of Kweli and Doom, but which lacks the kind of intimacy these types of shows require to succeed.
This isn't entirely bad news, despite the fact the Paramount's demise clearly presents a loss, because the death of one entity-if I may be so Zen-always provides opportunity for something new to grow. Small venues can't be expected to pick up the slack, but they can use this time to grow and create pockets of creativity, energy and community. And there is hope for this on the horizon: The folks at the Garrett's Spot (311 Old Santa Fe Trail, 982-1851), for example, have busted out with several weird, outstanding bookings, including experimental guitar knockout and former Zappa cohort Mike Keneally and the California Guitar Trio. The club also has absorbed one of the most vibrant scenes in town, Chicanobuilt's hip-hop parties, which are shifting over to Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights there and will be supplemented with the fresh new genre reggaeton (see
). Also hope-inducing is the soon-to-be-opened Bar Noir, slated as a new gathering spot for Santa Fe's GLBT community (details are sketchy at this point, but stay tuned-SFR will keep you posted). WilLee's is thriving; the Cowgirl has stepped it up a notch with some hot out-of-town bookings (the recent Speedbuggy USA show is a good example); El Paseo has initiated a new original music double-bill night; and Half Rack studios and High Mayhem Studios continue to grow and frankly blow my mind with the exotic, unbelievable groups-both local and beyond-they bring to the underground. There's hope.
The point is, of course there's a new gap-a huge one-in the Santa Fe music world, but these little clusters, these little hives of activity, most likely are what Santa Fe truly is, and that's a good thing. The beauty of the Paramount was that it spoiled us with rarity. The reason this club didn't make it is because it never belonged here in the first place. It was an overachiever, and in that it found its bizarre, singular place here. But in the Darwinian world of clubs and venues, these things always come and go. We were lucky to have it, it will be missed. But hopefully the little musical outposts and satellite clubs are poised to provide rich aural fodder and prove the Paramount may be defunct, but Santa Fe hasn't been permanently de-funked. In the mean time, for bigger shows-for the Tailb Kwelis of the world-well friends, I'm afraid we'll be driving to Albuquerque a lot more this summer.
