Cosplaying the Inevitable: From The Dirt Club to the Digital Pit
Sticky floors, narrow doors, and the Facebook dungeon.
I want to tell you about The Dirt Club basement. The Dirt was an infamous punk club in Bloomfield, N.J. I did a little internet research because it’s been 35 years, and I didn’t remember what I was making up and what was true. It was all true.
For most of the 80s, it was New Jersey’s CBGB. The Smithereens were from nearby Carteret and, as a result, tagged as the biggest band to come out of The Dirt.
I was working with a post-metal hair band that was resisting the pull of grunge by 1991. I’d just finished my certificate in audio engineering at The New School and had volunteered to help the band make its demo. I can picture each band member, but time has stolen both their individual and collective names.
I was 20 years old and working one full and two part-time jobs at the time. I honestly think I slept about 100 hours between 1990 and 1993, so I’m amazed I remember as much as I do, but The Dirt was visceral.
Earlier in the year, I’d had a beer with the band at the Stone Pony, which I found shockingly unimpressive, with its low stage and lower ceilings. I left convinced that the only thing keeping it in business was the occasional rumor (and even less occasional instance) of Bruce showing up for a set.
The Dirt made the Stone Pony look like the Garden. It was a weekday, and the band was going on at 10. I drove around the block twice, thinking I had the wrong address. There was a sign, but this building was clearly abandoned and possibly condemned. Still, I heard music as I approached, so it was not abandoned.
It was spring, I think, or early summer, and word was out that The Dirt was closing. The building had those tall, narrow doors, the kind that you almost had to shuffle sideways through when only one was open. You could feel your feet come off the sticky floor as you walked. There couldn’t have been 15 people in the place.
The lead singer of the band was tall, handsome, and broad. His curly brown hair piled on top of his head and bounced on his shoulder. The rest of the band surrounded him, but it’s not like I wouldn’t have been able to find them otherwise.
Everyone was smoking.
The guitar player was blonde and lean. He bent close to me to be heard (the music felt louder, I suppose, for the lack of people), and pointed out Johnny Dirt, sitting hammered at the bar. That was his thing. He bought a strip club and converted it into a punk bar with the (or so legend had it) express purpose of being able to come in and get hammered.
A side note: There was a pole on the stage, a thick black industrial thing that may have been the only reason the building was still standing. It wasn’t just on the stage, it was right where the singer would be.
When they got the gig, the pole was all the guys could talk about: how they were going to navigate the pole. This quirk, I’ve come to understand, bonds the people who have navigated it.
The world was tinged blue from the lighting or maybe from the lack of it and the dark, but in my mind, everything had a cross-processed feel. Maybe it’s just because it was the early 90s.
“Have you seen the basement?” The drummer joined us, a lanky guy with long straight brown hair.
We followed him past the bathrooms to the right of the stage and then down into the dungeon.
When it opened, The Dirt was only playing at being filthy. It was made up like a dungeon, and (I’ve discovered) you could even buy a commemorative bag of dirt. But a decade or so of, let’s say, inattention had taken its toll.
Still, what I recall most was the art. The place was covered in murals, and the basement appeared to have been comprised of subjects too risqué for Heavy Metal Magazine (which was the only other place I’d ever seen topless women in chains). Every surface was covered in either intentional or incidental art.
It was the graffiti that got me, because it didn’t really cover the art. They were more like scribbles at the fringes, as if they were trying to correct whatever surfaces remained unpainted.
It was dank, but smelled less of urine than I’d expected. Mostly, though, it felt small and sad, like what a kid would make if he were trying to be cool. But, of course, that’s precisely what it was. Everyone was trying so hard to be cool, and here I was, in a shirt and tie, less than six months away from fatherhood. My days of trying to be cool were over. I was who I was by then, and the effort of being impressive was a drain on energy I didn’t have.
I don’t know that I’ve thought of The Dirt since I got home that night. The number of crazy places I was in during those years is as hazy as the names of the crazy people I encountered there.
When I checked on the internet, I saw that The Dirt is still really well regarded by the surviving middle-aged punks who remember it. My hazy memory of it doesn’t jibe with other accounts, but I guess that doesn’t shock me. I was there for the end of a scene I really wasn’t a part of.
Punks looked to me the way Hippies probably looked to Punks: children cosplaying counterculture as a way of denying the inevitable. For my part, I was cosplaying middle age. They’re not times I miss, which maybe is why I haven’t revisited them.
Still, they came knocking unbidden this week, though, when I was searching for an analogy.
What I really wanted to tell you about this week was my experience on Facebook. As you may remember, I kicked off my own deathcare publication recently, and this week I relented and tried to go on Facebook. I genuinely had forgotten what a pit the place is.
I joined a bunch of funeral adjacent groups, hoping I could garner some readers. With the exception of a very few, most of the groups were hellholes, remnants of a time when having a Facebook group was still considered the best way to “reach your audience.”
I was trying to think of how to tell you about the claustrophobia it gave me, even though I’m sitting in a pretty spacious office with all the air I could ever need. As I searched for an appropriate place to share my latest funeral story, I was possessed by that vision from The Dirt, circa 1991. People were putting up the coolest things they could think of, and I, spray-can in hand, was just looking for an empty place to tag as my own.
It felt pointless and a little sad, so I didn’t bother.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
PostScript
I found this video of The Dirt Club that was taken right around the time I was there. Everyone seems so happy.
TR