From: wrat@unisql.UUCP (wharfie)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: Re: Solar Circus Tour Dates
Date: 13 Apr 92 17:34:05 GMT
Reply-To: wrat@unisql.UUCP (wharfie)
Organization: UniSQL, Inc., Austin, Texas, USA

In article <1992Apr12.154248.18942@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> raj@ctt.bellcore.com writes:
>	5-22	Fastlane, Asbury Park, NJ


	Geez, is that dump still open?  They closed Mrs. J's, they
closed the Stone Pony, Park Place burned down, and the Sunshine Inn's
a parking lot, but the friggin' Fast Lane's still open, eh?  Must be
the only thing in Asbury Park that's not burned down, bulldozed, or
just plain rotted away...

	Asbury Park was an elegant old resort town, with a beautiful
beach, a wide boardwalk and about 45 bars in a single square mile of
town.  When I was a kid we'd go there as a family and spend the day
riding the Ferris wheel, or the merry-go-rounds, the kind with real
wooden horses that had manes of real horse-hair, and zebras and
unicorns and camels, too.  When I was a teen-ager we all had summer
jobs in Asbury Park, serving fried flounder to little blue haired old
ladies down from the Bronx on a day trip, or sending little kids
spinning round and round on one of the kiddie rides, you know,
miniature cars that drive forever in a 10 foot circle around a plastic
laughing clown, or comical fiberglass spaceships that never leave the
earth by more than a few inches as they ride like psilocybin boxcars
in an endless fiberglass train one after another after another, or
maybe little brightly colored circus elephants nose-to-tail, and they
had buttons the kids could push to make little brightly colored
fiberglass spaceship noises.  We'd work all day at whatever
chickenshit little jobs we had and spend the nights huddled under the
boardwalk, making out and smoking reefers.  One consequence of those
huddled nights is that to this day I can't smell creosote without my
thoughts turning to warm wiggling armfuls and the sound of the waves
washing tarballs up on the Jersey beach...

	Because even then it was the beginning of the end for Asbury
Park.  Beaches began to be closed because because of pollution, and
that summer we had race riots, horrible home-made civil wars, just
like what happened in Watts and Newark.  Blocks of the city were
burned down, and the tourists deserted the place running like a herd
of one of those bizzare African antelope being chased by tigers, and
they never came back.  Stores started moving to the new malls, and all
the beautiful old hotels were bought up by the state and used as
half-way houses for former State Hospital inmates.  The busiest place
on Main Street was the methadone clinic on 5th avenue, and the corner
of Lake and Ridge which was a sort of outdoor 7-11 of various and
sundry tawdry illegal sins.

	I left for 10 years, more or less, on the road, more or less,
and when I finally drifted back that square mile was a derelict, a
blind and dirty August West awash in junkies and winos and poor
pathetic lunatics who wandered the streets talking to themselves and
to the street lights.  But that old town still had some heart: you just
had to poke around!  Mrs. J's, which had been a speakeasy in the 20's
and a family restaurant in the 60's had been reincarnated as a biker
bar, filled with the sounds of live rock and roll and the noise of the
big V-twins lined up along the curb like the tanks at the National
Guard Headquarters in Sea Bright.  Bruce Springsteen still played at
the Stone Pony, and real acts came to the once-proud and even now
still hanging on to a few shreds of gilt Convention Hall.  Jerry
Garcia played there, and the road show of Hair.  The boardwalk was
lined with carnival-style games of chance - knock down the clowns with
a baseball and win a stuffed dog! Spin the wheel! Always a winner! -
but the real once and for all end was near for this final incarnation,
for even this down-and-dirty zombie vampire resort that only came
alive after dark with Harleys and carnies and hookers and high school
kids in from the farm towns 30 miles inland looking for a little...action...

	Done in by greed, it was.  The local city council had taken advantage
of the preciptous drop in property values brought on by their...careful
management... and bought real estate in the doomed city.  Then, in one of
those super-slick and too-good-to-be-true moves they sold the entire two 
blocks of the oceanfront to a developer and voted in the appropriate and
expected tax breaks and incentives-to-development tha would allow said 
developer, one James Vaccarro, to turn the carcass of Asbury Park back into
a high-class resort and residential community.  The carnies along the
boardwalk found their business licenses suddenly too expensive to pay for
stuffed dogs and baseballs.  Places like Mrs. J's found their liquor licenses
denied for "noise problems" or "anonymous police calls".  Vaccarro dismantled
the fine old merry-go-rounds and sold the wonderful horses and camels and
unicorns to collectors, and boarded up the old Palace Amusements, after 85 
years: that old carousel had been built to run on steam, and the roof was
copper sheeting green with age and salt air.  He bulldozed the entire two 
blocks of town closest to the ocean, ostensibly to build condominiums and
convention centers and "upscale apartment dwellings".

	Then he went out of business, leaving the banks holding the paper on
20 blocks of vacant muddy lots and the city council wondering what to do with
it all not the least of which was their properties which instead of being
next to a Vibrant Modern and Up-Scale metropolis were now next to nothing,
and worth the same.  The Stone Pony, hanging in to the last, trading on
reputation, couldn't make enough to pay its taxes and was padlocked by the
IRS.  Xanadu, a Manhattan-style disco with valet parking and Picasso-moon
mirrorballs hanging from the ceiling closed up when they realized that 90%
of the people inside on a Saturday night worked there.  But I'm sure Vaccarro
laughed all the way to the bank...

	Ahh yes, the Fast Lane:  alternately open and closed as a live
music venue slash night club slash shooting gallery since the early '60s.
On 4th right next to the Asbury Lanes (no relation, Asbury Lanes is a 
bowling alley).  Sly and the Family Stone once canceled a night there
'cause rats ran across the stage during the shows, but since even the
*rats* left Asbury a long time ago heading for better rations at the municipal
land fill they built in Tinton Falls I'm sure that won't be a problem 
anymore...

							the wharf rat
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead