We’re now into the second month of our highly selective tour through the past two decades of local news and arts in C-VILLE. Already, we’ve touted our early jump on the Obama bandwagon (remember, this is the paper that projected DMB’s rise to the top), and this week we revisit some music news to jive with our current cover story, including a snippet of our very first review of a Gravity Lounge show from the year the club opened. So stay tuned as we keep looking back at the accumulated pluck and pizzazz that will power this still free and still free-thinking institution into the next 20 years.
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Paging through the archives
“Critical darlings of folk Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri rounded out a three-week tour through the Northeast and Midwest with a naturally brilliant, if somewhat uninspired, performance at the Gravity Lounge Friday, November 21. About 120 local music lovers made a committed fan base of all ages, though heavily skewed toward an audience of scruffy-looking hipster 20somethings whose tattoos peaked out from beneath collared shirts. According to Gravity Lounge owner Bill Baldwin, it was the fourth-largest turnout on record for the five-month-old venue. The largest? A late August Sproule/Curreri show that featured the debut opening performance of Lauren Hoffman and The Lilas.”
Ben Sellers, December 2, 2003
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Getting covered
For those of you who have been considering what it might take to save the Gravity Lounge, our September 23, 1997, cover is a sobering sight. At that point, the Charlottesville music club Trax—one of the venues that helped launch Dave Matthews Band—was about to celebrate its 15th year of existence, and C-VILLE’s Bill Chapman was brimming with suggestions about the right kinds of bookings that could “save the soul” of the club (i.e., keep it a burgeoning business). Well, it kept on rolling for a few more years, and then in 2001 became, under a new owner, a country and western club called Max, and closed for good in 2003.
