Someone brought up a point about the new Wal-MArt which opened up recently, which Brooke and I decided to go shopping at this weekend. The location is up on the hill on 72nd Street where the Ranch Bowl used to be. Of course, that's my frame of reference because the fact of the Ranch Bowl is as old as my any of my memories of Omaha. Then Angie makes a comment, God, I just don't know because we used to do so many things at the Ranch Bowl and now it's a Wal-Mart! Which was a point I hadn't even connected at all, but God, amazingly true...then immediately, I got to thinking about the various shows I was able to see at the Bowl... one hell of a bruiser of a place to see a gig...
It started back in 1991 with Pearl Jam for me. My first real concert ever. My parents let me go out on a Thursday night, school next day for the first time ever. And I had enough to go see this show. Went with Sigler in his parents' grocery getter to see Eddie Vedder and the boys. Tribe After Tribe opened. 311, a few times. Mudhoney, Frank Black, Mike Doughty, Blue October, Galactic, Koko Taylor, Clutch, Shannon Curfman, James McMurtry, Bob Mould, and of course, I can't remember any others for some odd reason... when a band came through there, without fail, the drumbeats would ripple through you and the guitar would wail through the air. Total bruiser bar with a hard concrete floor and chain link separating the bar from the main floor. I know it was during a couple of the 311 shows where the crowd was so thick, everybody so excited and moshing around I also got knocked over and stomped completely. You had to fight the tide through that, because it would skin you alive if you succumbed to it. Tickets to the Bowl were never more than 20 or 25 bucks and I guess that's maybe due to the hike in cost for tickets or something like that. Toward the end, when I saw Koko Taylor in what must have been 2001, they set up tables on the floor and put drapes over them, lit candles. That particular show was probably one of my first blues shows (not many since actually) where it was all class and the rest was blues. Totally different atmosphere than anything I could have hoped for. The back story of how I got in there, involving me picking up the guitarist and drummer from the airport, still kind of blows my mind.
I suppose a major reason why I can't remember a lot of shows was because the ones I mentioned already were the big ones. The Bowl was legendary for their local shows and I couldn't count how many bands I saw there. Crappy, thrashy, junky bands. Bands that so far as anyone knows went nowhere. But that was the beauty of the place... I know my friend Garrity said he saw Widespread Panic there a while back in its history and the show got called because neighbors had filed a complaint for the noise. Something like that was said to have happened for Bob Weir's Ratdog. I thought that was the point of having music in bars and not outside. Even so, the place would get packed so tight that it was like a sweat lodge in there. During the winter, the windows would fog up on the outside, and then people would be ducking outside real quick to have a smoke, freeze near death, then come back in and pick it up again.
The thing you could never truly forget was that there WAS in fact a bowling alley. My sister and her friends used to play there on weekends, for lack of anything better to do. It was a real deal bowling alley and rock joint. You could play volleyball on a team during the summer if that was your thing. Now it's a f*&%in Wal-Mart for all that's worth. In its last days, the place looked delapidated, its spirit crushed.