Club Congress is at the epicenter of Tucson's rock 'n' roll scene, along with Plush, the Rialto and more recently, The Hut. The nightclub in the historic Hotel Congress is so dominant now that it may seem as if it always has been that way.
But no.
Twenty-five years ago, Tucson's booming music scene was scattered among venues grand and grungy, mostly grungy, throughout downtown and North Fourth Avenue, with others on East Grant Road (Twin Peaks), North First Avenue (Nino's Steak House) and even as far east as Tanque Verde Road (Chances). Club Congress was just getting off the ground. It started booking live music in May 1985.
Until then, what we now know as Club Congress was just a weird little room in Hotel Congress that hosted performance art once a week. But one spring night, Al Perry and the Heifers, the River Roses and the Vegas Kids shook the walls downtown and started to build the music hive we've come to know.
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Dave Slutes, 45, who books music for Club Congress, was a member of that first night's opening act, the Vegas Kids. He also played in one of Tucson's biggest and longest-running bands, the Sidewinders (later known as the Sand Rubies).
Slutes said this weekend's 25th-anniversary bash rightly pays tribute to the places from which today's Tucson music scene sprang.
The three-day celebration, on stages inside and outside the Hotel Congress, includes performances by reunited bands from earlier periods, as well as some current acts, playing on stages named for those long-gone venues.
The event will include two barbecues, one of which is a tribute to Rainer Ptacek, a vinyl record show and a multimedia look at Tucson's rock history.
The performance stages will be named for a few of those hallowed, cigarette- and beer-scented palaces and dives: Nino's, the Poco Loco, the Stumble Inn, El Casino Ballroom and the Airport Lounge.
As for Club Congress, it has achieved national prominence. In 2007, Esquire magazine name it one of the best bars in America and it is widely regarded as one of the longest-running venues west of the Mississippi.
In addition to the local bands, the club hosted some touring acts that would become famous.
X, a Los Angeles punk band that became one of the genre's top acts, played at several local clubs before graduating to Congress. And it can be argued that the country-folk roots in X's punk music influenced the local sound that became known as desert rock.
No Doubt went on to play stadiums, selling millions of albums.
And then there was Nirvana, which checked off all the boxes for different types of fame - the glorious and the grim.
Some of the other important, or at least popular, places from the pre-Club Congress days: Pearl's Hurricane, Tumbleweeds, The Night Train, the Country Club Lounge, Chances, Dooley's and a dozen more.
Many of those clubs were far from the stylish venue that Congress has become.
Greg McNamee, 53, now a Tucson author and editor and an occasional guitarist back in the day, worked and partied in some of those pre-Congress places. Pearl's Hurricane Lounge, an early home for Tucson's punk scene downtown, stands out in his memory. He said much of Pearl's daytime crowd was made up of drunks who had been chased from a nearby bar that was trying to clean up its image.
You weren't allowed to sleep at that other bar, McNamee said.
Sometimes, one or more of the daytime patrons at Pearl's would sleep through the racket of a punk band loading in. But nobody slept through a punk band's sound check.
"I distinctly remember one of these winos passed out at the bar at Pearl's waking up to one of those punk bands blaring," McNamee said, re-enacting how the snoozing boozer instantly sat bolt upright and wide-eyed, throwing his hands in the air like he was doing the wave.
"I was at those sound checks," said Robin Johnson of Gentlemen Afterdark, who at that time was with the '80s pop-synth Gentlemen's punk predecessor, the Pills.
Johnson, 47, who will be playing at the reunion with the headlining Gentlemen Afterdark on Saturday night, said the day drunks sometimes clashed with the night's punks.
"Even though they had been passed out and drunk, they'd have something to say," Johnson recalls.
And it wasn't a request to "play that one again."
But he said Pearl's, which was on the south side of Broadway near Stone Avenue, was rich with seedy atmosphere, a natural for punk bands.
Besides local bands such as the Suspects and the Untouchables, and later the Pills and Jonny Sevin, McNamee said Pearl's also hosted Phoenix bands including Billy Clone and the Same, and JFA (Jodie Foster's Army).
At Nino's, one of Tucson's top two or three clubs for touring bands in the early to mid-'80s, the music was more varied. It was a mix of local and touring acts. There was plenty of brutal post-punk, but also 1980s skinny-tie pop bands.
Rich Hopkins, 52, founder of the Sidewinders, remembers being glad to land a gig at Nino's.
"We weren't very good at all. We had ambition, I suppose," Hopkins said of the band's early days. "We would open up for anybody. We were kind of the low guys on the totem pole.
"There was a band called the Onlys; they were really pretty good musicians. They had us open up for them at Nino's one weekend. I went to get paid. The bass player gave me five bucks. I'm not kidding. We never made a lot of money."
The Sidewinders, aka Sand Rubies, persisted until 1989, and depending on how you look at it, Hopkins said, the band either reunited twice or took a couple of breaks. Hopkins' current band, Rich Hopkins and the Luminarios, continues to play around Tucson occasionally, but its strongest fan base is in Germany, where it continues to tour once or twice a year.
The Poco Loco, on East Speedway near North Alvernon Way, predated punk. It was home in the 1970s to the premier country-swing band, the Dusty Chaps.
A pole in the middle of the stage jolted many a guitar player who grabbed it while plugged into one of the bar's ungrounded outlets. When the place was packed, as it usually was for the Dusty Chaps, the swamp cooler couldn't keep up with the heat, and the dancers steamed in their own sweat.
The Dusty Chaps were the first Tucson band to land a major-label recording deal in many years.
"We played the Poco Loco for two years," said George Hawke, the Dusty Chaps' founder, bassist and songwriter, who revealed no fondness for the place.
But, he said: "The whole country-swing thing started in Tucson. We played there, and people just danced rock 'n' roll style. Then one guy started dancing Lindy Hop style."
It caught on and became known as country swing.
"These kids would come out from back East and they'd say, 'I've got to learn to dance like that to have a social life here.' "
Country-swing dancers packed the Poco Loco, the Stumble Inn, the Red Eye and other Tucson bars that hired country-swing bands.
By the early '80s, the emerging punk and new-wave scene was taking over swing venues and finding some new ones.
Hawke's next band, the pop-rock Los Lasers, was the biggest local draw in Tucson in the early 1980s and packed many of those venues with dancers two or three times a week.
The Night Train, a big rock club on North Fourth Avenue where the Surly Wench is now, was the most popular venue for touring mainstream rock bands, often using local acts to open shows. The Go-Go's performed at the Train several months before their debut album launched them into platinum orbit.
Robin Johnson said the polished, big-haired pretty boys of Gentlemen Afterdark sometimes ran into hostility.
Johnson remembers singer Brian Smith, he of the pale visage and heavy black mascara, getting hit in the head with a table candle at The Night Train.
Johnson yelled for the bouncers to throw the candle-throwing biker out.
"Instead," he recalls, "we got escorted out the back door. Back then people didn't understand guys with orange hair, a glammy punk band."
But they were welcome at Club Congress.
Jefferson Keenan, 52, frontman of the revered Phantom Limbs, said Club Congress immediately felt like home.
"We played Tumbleweeds. We played The Night Train a few times. We played Chances. Club Europa on Stone, south of Grant. A lot of shows at the University Cellar, Dooley's. We played some shows at the Wildcat House. Faces on Roger Road. I personally never liked Nino's very much - playing there or going there.
"So when Congress opened up, it was a great place for us to play. I think we had our best shows ever there."
The Phantom Limbs, who were together from 1980 to 1999, were a must-have band as plans for the reunion took shape, Slutes said.
The band's lineup will include co-founder Jim Parks, plus Gene Ruley and Tasha Bundy.
The Limbs will be the closing act on the Nino's stage on Friday night.
The vast majority of the weekend's lineup consists of local, or formerly local, bands, with out-of-town acts Bad Manners, Merle Jaggar and Borts Minorts filling out the bill.
Hotel Congress will again be the life of the party in a couple weeks when it throws its annual HoCo Festival. This year's festival, scheduled for Sept. 24-26, will feature the Meat Puppets, Robyn Hitchcock and Mexican Institute of Sound.
