By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Karin Last, left, and Mari Matsuoka inside Nimitz Hall.
The club's final show this Saturday's show features
the Dance Hall Crashers.
Brother, can you
spare a stage?
Young music-lovers
By Nadine Kam
mourn the closing
of Nimitz Hall
Assistant Features Editor
Star-BulletinA Golden Age for certain music fans will come to an end when Nimitz Hall shuts its doors after the Dance Hall Crashers concert Saturday night. Some who attended the Perpetual Groove at the hall during the weekend were in tears over the news. But California-based promoter Golden Voice isn't giving up on Honolulu. The search is on for alternative venues for acts like Beck, Ben Harper, the Misfits and Goldie -- acts that are being turned away for lack of a place to play.
Mari Matsuoka, Golden Voice's representative in Honolulu, said the main office "won't even tell me anymore who wants to come because they know I'll get depressed."
If you're older than 30 -- that is -- past the age of relevancy, all this probably means squat. And if you're under 20 or so, you're probably too young to remember the Dark Ages, when you could count on just about two hands the number of big acts that performed in Honolulu over two decades.
(Let's see, there was Peter Frampton with Rod Stewart, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Aerosmith, Doobie Brothers, the Police with Stevie Ray Vaughn, and, heh, Bryan Adams, Blue Oyster Cult and Heart, U2, INXS -- the list starts petering out from there.)
Then a club called Pink's Garage arrived in Kakaako. Finally, bands too big for a coffee shop and too small for the Blaisdell, much less Aloha Stadium, had a place to play.
Pink's eventually closed, but Honolulu has been open ever since to almost every major act to surface within the past eight years -- from Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins to Tupac Shakur, and most recently, the Wu-Tang Clan and Marilyn Manson.
When Pink's closed, a new club called After Dark, set in an Iwilei warehouse, took up the slack. New owners came and turned it into The Groove, and when The Groove was about to close, Golden Voice took over the space, redubbing it Nimitz Hall.
Now that the hall is closing, fans of modern rock, rap, hip-hop and ska will know the pain of those who love jazz, country-western, Latin and musical-theater extravaganzas -- ticket sales can't justify the cost of transporting instruments, props and entourages across the ocean.
Bands appearing at Nimitz Hall would draw 1,200 to 1,500 fans. Contrast that to the 5,000 to 6,000 that Matsuoka said is needed to break even at the Blaisdell.
Music fan Matt Scott says he isn't worried. "I don't think (the closing) is a good thing or bad thing. I think there's always gonna be a place to see shows. If there's a demand for a show, it'll happen."
But Doug Davidson, who works at Jelly's Market City, said the closing is "going to be junk cuz there's hardly any venues now to go to."
"Mari is one of the few people willing to go out on a limb and be supportive of anything unusual, unorthodox, but legal," Davidson said.
"I was thinking that it would be cool to bring a band like the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black here, but they're like a big band and they have a floor show and it would be hard for anyone without the means of Golden Voice to bring them out here."
Matsuoka said the decision to close was a matter of economics. "There's no one to blame, no bad guy." The terms of Golden Voice's lease called for special events only -- it could not be run as a club on a nightly basis. That was an unprofitable proposition that Matsuoka said the company agreed to because "the amount of work done in the hall was not something to be thrown out. Here was a place with the right zoning, an untarnished liquor license, parking, alarm system, sprinklers, lighting and stage.
"It costs about $2,000 to $5,000 to put up lights. A stage can be built for $2,000 to $17,000 depending on size. We wanted a situation where we didn't have to reinvent the wheel every time we put on a concert.
"If anybody has tried every place in the islands, it's us," she said.
She's looked into golf courses, airport runways, public parks and airplane hangars, as well as more traditional spaces, without much luck. If anyone has other creative ideas, she'd love to hear them.
Beyond business concerns, Matsuoka's involvement in the music scene and youth culture is personal and she feels as strongly about it as the many causes she supports, such as the "Stolen Lives" project that notes murders committed by police officers.
"It's important that youths be allowed to experiment, create and have that ability to explore and dream. In this country, music has been the form that experimentation has taken. Every new scene broke with another generation of people."
Youth, she said, offers a degree of insulation from the compromises of adulthood. Messages of newer generations, she said, "never represent everything the adult community wants to hear, but they also have an aspect of the truth. That's what makes it vibrant and sometimes scary.
"The extent to which a community supports that is a reflection of how open and closed they are to change."
It's ironic that in a community presumably focused on solving its economic problems, she said, that the legality of posting flyers on telephone poles has been questioned.
Not everyone going into business has $100,000 to start, she said. A small 25-and-under crowd -- perhaps tomorrow's business leaders -- is hosting parties and raves, and may only have a $100 budget to get the word out.
"I think a city's cultural life can be measured by posters on telephone poles -- anywhere you go, from New York to Paris," Matsuoka said. "People should be happy to see expression. It shows that brains are working, that people are alive."
If there's any positive news to come out of this, it's that a growing local scene may step in to fill the void.
"There are all kinds of smaller clubs hosting events, so there are at least two to three raves or parties to choose from every weekend," Matsuoka said. "There's a huge DJ scene that seems built to be temporary. They can pack up their equipment and go anywhere. The whole hip-hop scene was built with that kind of street flexibility.
"Maybe people will take a little more notice of the things happening here and give a little more support to it."
Fiona Apple is the first modern rock act to be booked in the wake of Nimitz Hall's closing. Fiona finds a place to play
The concert will be at the Sheraton Waikiki Ballroom Dec. 17 and tickets, at $22.50 reserved, go on sale Saturday at Tower Records and all Connection outlets. Or, charge by phone at 545-4000 or 1-800-333-3388.
"Already you can see we have to tailor the acts to what rooms are available," said promoter Mari Matsuoka of Golden Voice. "Fiona Apple does more of a cabaret show. She normally does a sit-down concert behind a piano. It's not a kid show."
Apple, the 19-year-old with the low, gritty alto, is music's current "it girl," having won accolades based on her multi-platinum debut album "Tidal," with its hit song "Criminal."
Final concert
Performing: Dance Hall Crashers
