Ancient Goth (was Re: Docs, Nurses, Attorneys, Music)

[Chris Rapier]

On 3/23/06, Joseph Presley <jwp7 at pitt.edu> wrote:

> Grand pa, could you tell us stories of the old days? ;>

No, fuck off.

> Seriously, I'd be really interested to hear about the scene in the days
> before shows. Where did people hang out? Was there even a place people
> hung out? What happened? What was it like?

Look, the year that Manny put on the show wasn't some sort of annus
mirabilis for goths in Pittsburgh. It was just a show. Was it a good
show? You betcha. But did it fundamentally change the way goths
interacted and congregated in Pittsburgh? Not really. Being that I was
deeply involved with the scene, as it were, I can speak somewhat
authoritatively on this. We still generally just went to parties and
tried to get into the upstage for quarter draft night (which, 17 years
later, has morphed into 80s night), and basically just hung out with
friends. The majority of our social interaction did not happen at
shows or in bars/clubs. This doesn't mean that a scene did not exist.
Nor does it mean that the people involved didn't consider themselves
goth or whatever.

The thing to keep in mind is that at that time there weren't enough
freaks in the city of pittsburgh to allow any sort of real
differentiation between the various subsects. So basically if you had
a freak bent you just went to whatever show happened to be going. It
may be goth band but more often it was just a rock/punk band. It was
actually pretty cool because even though there were less goths you had
a much more varied crew of people to hang out with.

Anyway, Manny put on a lot of these shows and he was very important in
bringing some good music to this city - but he didn't create or
inaugurate this scene on his own. The music did help the scene but a
scene would have existed with or without the live shows.