There is no sound emanating today from the well-worn cinder-block building located at 123 Maple Avenue.

But that was not always the case.

It used to be loud, hot and fun in there, back during the mid-80s to early-90s glory days of Tip Top Cafe, a fantastic tiny Huntsville dive bar that hosted world-class music on a regular basis.

Blues singer Bo Diddley is shown performing at Tip Top Cafe in Huntsville in 1993. (Courtesy photo)

The list of bands who played Tip Top included many that would go on to fame and much bigger venues. Widespread Panic. The Black Crowes, back when they were still called Mr. Crowe's Garden. Concrete Blonde. Goo Goo Dolls. 311. Collective Soul. Kenny Wayne Shepard. Better Than Ezra. Leftover Salmon. And plenty of underground heroes, like Dead Milkmen, Flat Duo Jets, Fishbone, Fetchin' Bones and Quadrajets. Roots-oriented artists, such as Bo Diddley, The Iguanas and Buckwheat Zydeco. And there was even the occasional celebrity sighting, like when dreamy actor River Phoenix's band played Tip Top or that time members of Cheap Trick stopped in to shoot some pool before their arena concert.

Tip Top was also known for the eclectic mix of customers it attracted.

A punk with a blue Mohawk could be standing next to a sorority girl, next to an 80-year-old black man, next to a hippie chick, next to a suit-and-tie lawyer. And although Tip Top's official capacity was around 100 or 120, 300 people or more frequently squeezed into the club.

The former Tip Top Cafe building at 123 Maple Ave. as it appears present day. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)

Mary Beth Williams Johns, who was a regular during her college days and now teaches art at Athens State, says that intimacy is what made Tip Top special. "Other music venues would be large enough (for you) to stay all night and not talk to anyone you didn't know. At Tip Top you would be packed in so tightly that you had to be neighborly to the guy next to you. Because you were likely standing on his toes."

Former Tip Top Cafe owner Lance Church. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)

Growing up inside a bar

The Applebee's on South Parkway near Joe Davis Stadium is located less than five miles from the old Tip Top building but in terms of atmosphere it couldn't be further away. A clean corporate chain restaurant. At 4:30 p.m. on a recent rainy Monday, this Applebee's is surprisingly bustling. Folks are sipping draft beers and snacking on mozzarella sticks. Lance Church, who owned and ran the Tip Top during its glory days, has been the front-of-house manager at the South Parkway Applebee's for about two years.

Church stands 6-foot-5 in height and is in his mid-50s. He still thinks about the Tip Top almost every day, he says. "I miss it a lot. I miss the bands, mostly the customers that came in." Church literally grew up inside Tip Top. As a kid he'd play behind the bar and in the kitchen and sometimes help his grandmother clean off dining room tables and wash dishes.

His grandfather Calvin Church opened Tip Top in the 1940s. For years it was known as Church's Tip Top Cafe. Lance says he thinks the name changed when the business' old Coca-Cola sign out front broke and the replacement sign Coke sent them just said Tip Top Cafe and no longer Church's. He'd love to have that old Coke-style Tip Top sign but has no idea where it disappeared to. He doesn't know who made off with the longhorn-steer horns that hung on the wall in the Tip Top's bar area. Or the framed copy of a "Girls of the SEC" Playboy issue in which one of the models therein said Tip Top was her favorite place to "hang out," Lance says. He was able to save a few mementos from Tip Top though. Mostly old family photos.

Lance purchased the Tip Top from his father Marshall Church around 1986. "I'd had the place for about six months and we were doing a really good business during the day, Monday through Friday, then Saturdays we were just dead." Lance ran into a friend and told her he'd been thinking about bringing live music to Tip Top to hopefully help draw a better crowd on weekends. The friend gave him the number of someone who played in a local band called Reverie. Lance booked Reverie, the first band to ever play at Tip Top, he says, and "the first night it was just packed. College kids having a good time." He remembers Reverie playing a mix of originals and covers but "it wasn't your typical covers, like Foghat and Boston and all that. As time went on, I think they played there a month, the lead singer said, 'I think they're getting a little tired of us. You may want to mix in some other bands.'" The singer passed along contact info for another local group, Them Crackers. "And they packed it out," Lance says. "So I'm like 'Hey maybe we got something here ...'" Lance began making road trips to Birmingham to check out that city's edgy rock club The Nick and obtain more band contacts. "And it escalated from there."

The band Miscarriage performing at the Tip Top Cafe in early 1988. (Courtesy photo)

After starting with local and state bands, Tip Top began attracting regional artists and eventually national acts, with Lance handling the booking.

"Where Huntsville's located, of course, we're between Nashville and Birmingham," he says, "so a lot of the bands would be at the Exit/In in Nashville and then they'd play The Nick in Birmingham and in between they'd catch us. Or on their way they would catch us. And we got a good name. The place was a dive but the customers in there made everybody feel at home. A lot of the bands would go home and spend the night at different customers' houses and stuff. Everybody had a real good rapport."

Lance would find new bands through press packages, which typically contained a demo recording on cassette or CD, one-page bio and 8-by-10-inch publicity photo, sent via post. "Bands would call me for the most part. I had an answering machine at my house and we had a pay phone at the Tip Top - it would ring off the hook too." Lance would also consult friend and local musician Rusty Garrard, a Tip Top fixture who played with acts including Them Crackers and Lucky & The Hot Dice, to get his input. (Garrard passed away earlier this year.)

A Tip Top calendar from August 1992 listing upcoming acts there.

Although many cool bands played Tip Top, there's one group Lance wishes would've worked out. The venue had been sent a promo pack for Seattle grunge rockers Pearl Jam. "And I guess it took a while to get to me and then they blew up so I never even bothered calling them," Lance says. He thinks he still has a box of old Tip Top band demos, probably somewhere in the barn out at his Hazel Green home.

A City of Huntsville noise ordinance shut down live music at Tip Top in 1995. Around this time Lance began leasing out the Tip Top for the next 15 years or so. In early 1996, the venue began hosting live music again, but quieter shows. In 1997 new proprietor Marian P. Johnson revived Tip Top as a neighborhood cafe. Around 2010, the Tip Top shut down after a final tenant just couldn't make it work and finally in August 2013, the building was sold at auction for $15,000.

Before coming on board with Applebee's, Lance worked for a time in the Huntsville Times circulation department. He says people still ask him once or twice a week about Tip Top, usually Applebee's customers. "'Yeah, you need to open it back up.' Can't do it. [Laughs]," Lance says. He walked out of Tip Top for the last time shortly after the 2013 auction feeling understandably blue.

Col. Bruce Hampton & The Aquarium Rescue Unit, which featured bassist Oteil Burbridge, was a Tip Top favorite. (File photo)

'Everything was sticky with beer'

Chris Brown was one of five or so soundmen who worked at Tip Top. He was about 23 when he got the job, having worked previously as a radio deejay and in WAAY-31's local TV production department. The mixing console at Tip Top was an old Peavey model. (Another former Tip Top soundman, Tim Mitchell, still has the board as well as the rest of the venue's old P.A., Brown says, as well as live recordings on cassette tape of countless Tip Top live shows. Mitchell did not respond when I reached out via Facebook to ask about interviewing him for this article.)

Besides getting good sounds in a small and often cramped room, the ramshackle gear also presented a challenge. "Like I literally had parts of the P.A. system held together with coat hangers and duct tape," Brown says. "Things would break all the time and people would get into fights and knock into the equipment and spill beer all over everything. Everything was sticky with beer."

Brown particularly enjoyed working with surreal jam band Col. Bruce Hampton & The Aquarium Rescue Unit, whose bassist Oteil Burbridge later joined the Allman Brothers and currently tours with Grateful Dead offshoot Dead & Company. Brown also enjoyed working with Nashville math rockers Clockhammer, who he said were "great live but their albums never quite captured the spirit of the band."

Working at Tip Top from around 1990 to 1995, Brown estimates he ran sound for around 1,500 shows there. He noticed bands that played there were often small and rising or formerly big and on the way back down. "You could see a big attitude shift and probably not the way you would think," Brown says. "The bands that were coming up were often arrogant, difficult to work with, technically naive. Bands that had been big and were coming back down and playing smaller places again were generally much more humble, much friendlier, easier to work with, more professional." He cites Georgia rockers Drivin' N Cryin' as an example for the latter category and Nashville "cow-punk" combo Walk the West for the former.

Back in the '90s, Brown maintained a typically '90s soundman look: ripped jeans, ratty old band T-shirts (often given to him by groups that played Tip Top) and "bad rock and roll hair." These days, he appears much more professorial, with close trimmed white hair and goatee. He works as a server at Thai Garden restaurant, a job he also began around the time he was working at Tip Top.

Caroline Prince performs with Huntsville band Trip to Argentina at Tip Top. (Courtesy photo)

Mary Margaret Turner worked at Tip Top from around 1987 to 1998. She waited tables and helped cook during day and tended bar at night. "I even ran it for a while after we quit having bands," she says. "But it was just never the same."

When blues singer Bo Diddley played the Tip Top in 1993, Turner cooked for him. Bo's order? Catfish, hush puppies and coleslaw. Food wise, Tip Top was known for its Friday lunch special: 8-ounce ribeye, corn on the cob, baked potato and Texas toast for $3.25 plus tax. These days, Turner, who began working at Tip Top when she was 18, manages a Starbucks in Decatur. Asked if she saved any mementos from her Tip Top days, Turner says, "My husband." Hubby Steve Turner was a bartender there at one time and also was "one of the guys that ran what we called the 'naked bootleg,' running beer out to cars on Sundays," Mary Margaret says.

Yes, back before Sunday carryout beer sales became legal in Huntsville in 2003, Tip Top sold to-go beer on Sundays on the down-low. "That was one of our biggest days at one time. It was nothing to sell 20 or 30 cases," Mary Margaret says. "We sold beer for $5 a six-pack, which was crazy stupid expensive at the time, and people were lined up buying it."

Angy Wood's first night bartending at Tip Top was New Year's Eve 1988 when Tuscaloosa hard-rockers Storm Orphans, who always packed the club, were performing. She was 21. "It was insane," Wood recalls. "After that I could handle anything." She says owner Lance Church "had a heart of gold, just a terrific man to work with. Goofy as all get out but he would help anybody he could." Turner adds, "Lance cooked; Lance kept it all together. He's got a great personality - just one of those people you like to be around."

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Wood worked at Tip Top through 1992 and currently works for a Huntsville custom home builder. At Tip Top she'd earn $300 to $400 in tips on a Friday or Saturday alone - and that was selling beer only, as Tip Top did not have a liquor license during its prime.

A photo of Tip Top's bar area. (Courtesy photo)

The day crowd

Tip Top's neighborhood cafe daytime vibe was in stark contrast to its rocker-oriented nighttime. A mix of blue collar painters and construction workers eating lunch and neighborhood old-timers, who had nicknames like "Red Rider," holding court and sipping cheap beer. Bottles of Bud Light, Natural Light and Budweiser went for around $1.50. Lone Star was a buck.

There was a crossover time in the evening, around 8 or 9, when the retired electricians and leather-jacket-wearing longhairs mixed. "Sometimes there was a little conflict between the day crowd and the night crowd, but eventually they all learned to respect each other," Brown says. "The day crowd would start hanging out for shows and the night crowd would start coming in in the afternoon."

According to Brown, Tip Top employees enjoyed a camaraderie that was "very family-like. Everybody there loved each other and watched out for each other all the time." Sometimes that involved literally having a fellow employee's back, if a day-drunk customer came in brandishing a gun and claiming someone there owned him money, or knocked another customer out cold and wasn't stopping there.

Tip Top regular Mary Beth Williams Johns, third from left, is pictured with some of the now-closed bar and restaurant's "day crowd."

The iconic (and infamous) doorman

You can't tell Tip Top's story without talking about the bar's unforgettable doorman, Lanny Taylor.

It's no secret Tip Top let in many underage customers, some of whom were still high school students. Employees were told just to make sure customers had ID. No matter if there were 20 people in the bar that night from Mississippi or whatever state kids were making fake IDs for at the time.

But just because you had a decent ID didn't mean you were going to get past Taylor. Basically, if you had ID and he liked you, you got in. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't mess with college kids during those interactions or decline a brash frat boy or two.

Taylor weighed well over 400-pounds and his personality was just as big. He was frank, sarcastic, smart and surly. A bona fide character.

Angy Wood had known Taylor since she had a class across the hall from him at Gadsden State Junior College. "I actually thought he was a professor or something," Wood says now. "I had no idea he was as a student. A few months later we met in the cafeteria. He just flagged me down and said something like, 'You look like somebody I need to know.' 'OK.' So we became fast and furious friends after that." They'd go on road trips in Taylor's gigantic American gas-guzzling sedan to Pensacola, Nashville or Paint Rock Valley and listen to R.E.M. cassettes. "He liked to just drive around a lot," Wood says.

Tip Top doorman Lanny Taylor. (Courtesy photo)

During the summer of 1988, Taylor would sometimes rent a cabin on Huntsville's Monte Sano Mountain and throw parties. At one of these parties, Wood's sister told her about Tip Top: "'You've got to check out this club and there's this great band playing.' We rode down and I fell in love immediately with the place. It was a little dive in the middle of a neighborhood and so rockin'. There was great music and things were dirty and dusty. It was just killer."

Before Taylor attended college, finishing up at Jacksonville State University in 1988, the 1966 Butler High grad dealt his share of drugs. He eventually got busted for selling weed and did prison time. Even though he now had a math degree, Taylor felt his record was preventing him from finding employment as a teacher. After Wood began working at Tip Top, Taylor came by to see her there once and asked if the bar could use any help. As luck would have it the bar needed a doorman that night. Church hired Taylor on Wood's recommendation because "she was such a good worker."

A closeup of the back of a "Lanny Wear" T-shirt featuring Tip Top doorman Lanny Taylor. (Courtesy photo)

Taylor would sit on a bench outside Tip Top, where he'd ID customers and take up cover charges. Taylor's dry wit became as much of the bar's experience as the electrifying rock music inside. Eventually a few of his oft-uttered responses to annoying customer questions were printed on Lanny Wear T-shirts also bearing his goateed visage: "Of course I know what time it is but it's still $5"; "No, I don't know where the hell the band is from"; "How would I know if there's anybody inside you know?"; "No you can't just go in to use the damn bathroom." According to Mary Margaret Turner, Taylor also worked for a local bookie and would take money for bets from his Tip Top bench, and frequently ask her to update him on game scores.

Tip Top employees Lanny Taylor, left, and Vira Ceci outside the venue. (Courtesy photo)

Vira Ceci, who was 23 when she began tending bar at Tip Top in 1990, says, "Lanny definitely added a lot to the vibe of the Tip Top, and it certainly wouldn't have been the same kind of place without him. I really liked working with him."

Ceci adds what many people didn't know was that, despite the gruff exterior, Taylor could also be very kind. "One time, another Tip Top bartender, Peggy Sue, and I were riding with Lanny, and we came upon a box of puppies someone had abandoned in the middle of nowhere. Lanny didn't even hesitate to turn around so we could go rescue them once we figured out there were animals there."

A longtime Huntsville resident who worked at Baskin Robbins as a high school student but wished to remain anonymous for the purpose of this article recalls Taylor stopping in for free milkshakes. Large rocky road malt with extra malt, cherries and marshmallows blended in. Sometimes Taylor would get two. "If there were people there, he never stayed," says the source, who now works in ad sales. "I'd lock up and we'd sit in there and bulls--- for a little while every week. We never really talked about Tip Top. Of course I never paid to get in and he always had my back if there was trouble. I'll always remember him with fondness and respect. He was the first person to ever treat me like an adult. Just by letting me through the door to that dark, dingy, dank old building, I credit him with some of the most epic memories I can recall from my teenage years."

Normally, Tip Top paid doormen $20 plus free beer for each shift. But since Taylor did not drink, he got $30, Wood says. And, as many bands that played Tip Top will tell you, Taylor also skimmed from the door. One veteran local musician told me the last straw for his band was when "there was a $3 cover and I stopped counting at 100 people who paid. I sat next to him on the bench and counted. I believe he paid us about $40."

Taylor had another habit to feed beyond milkshakes. It's well-known he was a narcotics user, shooting up heroin, coke and Dilaudid. "It was pretty hardcore," Wood says.

By September 1993, Taylor had left Tip Top and with a business partner opened his own Huntsville music venue, Lanny's Downtown at 201 Washington St. Many of the golden era Tip Top bands performed there. The venue's interior was cool. The music there was cool. But Lanny's Downtown shut down after just a year; an insurance office is located in that building now. After Lanny's closed, Taylor moved to Florida, where he began to turn things around. He got a job working at a friend's law office. He became a Christian, got clean and did volunteer work in substance-abuse counseling and homeless programs, which after five years led him back to Huntsville to do the same. He also began working the door at Tip Top again, on weekend nights.

A mid-90s calendar from Lanny's Downtown listing upcoming musical acts there.

A couple weeks before Taylor died in March 2007, Wood arrived at his home to find him foaming at the mouth. Taylor was transported to the hospital. Soon after Taylor left the hospital, there was another such episode and an ambulance took him back again, Wood says. Doctors told Wood that Taylor "probably wouldn't leave the hospital but he probably wasn't going to go in the next couple of days," and that she should go ahead with the beach vacation with her daughter she'd planned. A couple of days later while at the beach Wood received a phone call. Taylor had died.

But he didn't die alone. As AL.com reporter Lee Roop wrote in his stirring obituary for Taylor, "In his last days, visitors included childhood pals from Westlawn, college friends from Huntsville and Jacksonville, and newer friends from his beloved St. Thomas Episcopal Church." Taylor's last wish? That gifts in his memory go to First Stop, the homeless agency he supported in west Huntsville. Taylor's beloved brown dog Gracie would now live with Roop, until Gracie died about six years after her former owner.

Lanny Taylor with his dog, Gracie, circa 2003 after returning to Huntsville following a period living in Florida in which Taylor had turned his life around. (File photo)

'Almost famous' bands and local music incubator

When it first began bringing in live music in the '80s, Tip Top didn't even have a stage. Bands would perform in the alcove area right next to the bathrooms. The upside to this was that it made playing Tip Top more like a house-party for bands, with all the loose, feet-on-the-same-floor energy that comes from that. The downside? The toilets would frequently overflow. "I think that's the real reason people talk about Tip Top being Huntsville's CBGBs, because the bathrooms were so bad," jokes Wyatt Akins, a local bassist who played Tip Top with bands including Rumblefish and Monster Dog. "They were as bad as they could be." In addition, the roof above the alcove was only about 6-and-a-half-feet high. So bands had to watch raising their guitars in the air, jumping up in the spirit of the moment, etc. Now a 48-year-old web developer, Adkins believes that when Tip Top built a stage, located at the front of the building, it helped the venue land bigger and bigger bands.

Huntsville musician Michael Kilpatrick is seated outside the front door of the old Tip Top building at 123 Maple Ave. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)

On a recent afternoon Michael Kilpatrick is standing in the gravel parking lot outside Tip Top's former location. He's grinning fondly at the building where he performed many times. "The fact this building is still standing is kind of amazing," Kilpatrick says. He's wearing a Clash T-shirt and the personalized license plate on his Scion automobile reads "RAMONES." Kilpatrick is a Huntsville working musician lifer. These days he's known for bashing his Ludwig drums with heart for artists ranging from Americana songbird Amy McCarley to garage-rockers Go Go Killers. But back in the day, Kilpatrick was a kinetic frontman, performing with acts like punk rockers the Snob Doctors and rockabilly combo The Frigidaires, among others, from about 1986 to 1993 or so.

"We were just glad to have a venue to play in because it was rare to have a venue in this town where you could play original music," Kilpatrick says. "It didn't matter if you were heavy metal or blues or whatever it was, if you were good and you went over here you got to come back. And that's why so many bands, even when they got bigger and could chose to play bigger places they would still play here."

Michael Kilpatrick is shown performing with local rockabilly combo The Frigidaires at the Tip Top. (Courtesy photo)

As Tip Top evolved and began booking more touring bands, the venue remained an important incubator for local acts. It gave young Huntsville bands something to shoot for. If they could only play Tip Top - even just once - that was a pinnacle.

Now a local singer/songwriter, in the '90s Alan Little was the drummer in Huntsville jangle-rock band Plaid. "There were so many pictures of big shots that came through there on the wall," Little says. "You sort of knew that you were in a special place. Having a commonality with the venue with those 'heavy hitters' meant something. That's where we'd go to weigh ourselves against those who were getting gigs there and how we found out where we needed to be quality-wise to get a gig there." Little says seeing local rockers Then Again, with a lineup that included Dave Anderson, Antony Sharpe, Andrew Sharpe and Jim Cavender, perform at Tip Top, "was a bar raising experience."

A photo of '90s Huntsville rock band Plaid. Alan Little is second from left. (Courtesy photo)

Local bands would pound the pavement with staple guns in-hand to promote their Tip Top gigs, says Danny Whitsett, formerly singer/guitarist with Huntsville funk-rockers There From Here. "We loved covering the telephone poles with flyers. It's almost like before social media, things had more of an underground scene. Only those 'in the know' would make it to the cool shows at Tip Top." Now residing in Birmingham, Whitsett put together a band earlier this year and did a show at WorkPlay. "I was able to tell how many and who all was coming just by the Facebook event invite. Not sure if I like that or not."

Hunter Copeland, left, and Danny Whitsett perform with Huntsville band There From Here at Tip Top Cafe. (Courtesy photo)

Hunter Copeland, a local guitarist, was a member of There From Here and later Plaid. At Tip Top, he got the chance to open for mid-90s hit-makers Gin Blossoms. He saw a pre-fame Goo Goo Dolls play to a tiny crowd there but says that band still "killed it." Even when There From Here or Plaid were touring the Southeast, those bands relished coming home to "their home field," says Copeland, who currently works on Redstone Arsenal and on weekends performs with Juice, a local wedding band.

He recalls doing a soundcheck to an empty Tip Top and then leaving for a while before coming back to discover "there's like a line going down the street and around the block. You could barely get to the stage. And then playing for people that were packed up against the stage and it stays that way the whole night ... it was really cool."

Although many notable bands played Tip Top, a 1993 performance by blues legend Bo Diddley is probably the most iconic show that ever happened there. Guitarist Mark Torstenson was among the local musicians who backed Bo up that night. "It was terrifying, but it was a lot of fun," Torstenson says. "I'd been a Bo Diddley fan for many years so being able to actually play with him was an incredible experience. He was a very imposing figure but very nice and he pretty much just said, 'Here's what I do. You guys work in around me and if I don't like it I'll look at you.' [Laughs]."

Local guitarist Mark Torstenson, right, performs with blues icon Bo Diddley at Huntsville venue Tip Top Cafe in 1993 (Courtesy photo)

That night with Bo Diddley, Torstenson played a snazzy Gretsch G6119 guitar. At the time, Torstenson was a member of Huntsville band The Frigidaires. However he first played Tip Top with Trip to Argentina, a local group with a left-of-the-dial, college-radio sound. Torstenson, who also owns long-running music store The Fret Shop, says Tip Top had a built-in crowd. No matter who was playing, "people knew the music there was going to be good. So if you were a local band you'd get an opening slot with some other people coming through town and you'd get in front of a lot of people. It helped get your name out."

Will & The Bushmen. (File photo)

Not every touring band that played Tip Top turned into the Black Crowes and went on to have a 25-year career playing arenas, amphitheaters and theaters. But some bands became "Tip Top famous." Bands like tuneful Nashville combo Will & The Bushmen, Atlanta metallic funkateers Follow For Now and the aforementioned Walk the West and Storm Orphans. It was a likely to be a big, sweaty time when any of those acts played there.

Will Kimbrough was Will & The Bushmen's frontman. "I have very fond memories of the Tip Top," Kimbrough told me during our 2015 interview. "That was the first band I was ever in that people knew the words to our songs. It was awesome. We'd pull into town and a bunch of people would show up, jump up and down and go crazy".

A clandestine destination

People rarely ended up at Tip Top shows by accident. You had to seek the place out. Tip Top was located in the middle of a working class neighborhood off of Meridian Street. Not some hip part of town surrounded by other vibrant nightspots where passersby could decide on a whim to check it out because the place looked "happening." Many of the customers who went to Tip Tip for music didn't go there during the day to eat, making the surroundings even less familiar nocturnally.

Obviously, this was long before smartphone maps apps existed. One out-of-town band after not being able to locate Tip Top supposedly drove to a Huntsville pizza place, ordered a pizza to be delivered to the bar and followed the delivery driver in order to find the venue.

A flyer promoting a band's show at Tip Top Cafe. (Courtesy photo)

This under-the-radar aspect added to Tip Top's aura. As did a hint of danger.

Singer/guitarist Tommy Womack says a late-80s Tip Top show was the only gig his Bowling Green, Ky. rock band Government Cheese ever played where someone pulled a gun. A belligerent male was trying to get into the club. "The guy pulled his weapon and tried to force his way inside," Womack recalls. "Trouble is you can't really force your way past a 400-pound doorman. The interloper stuck his armed hand forward and the doorman slammed the door on his arm, maybe not hard enough to break his bones but hard enough to be damned painful."

The belligerent male was now shut outside but his gun-toting arm was still inside. He continued to wave his arm wildly and thus also the firearm. "The lights were in our eyes and we didn't see a thing," Womack says. This was when Tip Top bands still performed in the alcove without a stage. "Suddenly the audience all dropped to the floor and a few people screamed. We thought they were doing the Gator Dance."

By the early-90s, a then 21-year-old Dave Creek had been hearing about Tip Top for a while: "How all these awesome bands play there and it's this really cool bar." But the first time he arrived there, his first reaction was, "This is it?" At least three other people interviewed for this article said they had similar first reactions about Tip Top. Hey, it wasn't the most impressive building. "But as soon as you got into it, you could see it was a cool place," says Cheek, who currently lives in Chattanooga. Robyn Everhart Garing started going to Tip Top in her late-teens and saw many shows there while attending UAH. Including a then-unknown South Carolina bar-band called Hootie & The Blowfish, who would later sell 16 million copies of their 1994 debut album. "I remember people yelling out, 'Play Metallica! Play Lynyrd Skynyrd!' But they just kept playing their own music and they were really good." Getting the chance to see bands up-close before they became famous became part of what Garing, now a Savannah, Ga. resident, liked about Tip Top.

Tip Top was a young Pat Morris' introduction to live music. It's been a passion of his ever since, first as a fan and later as drummer and solo acoustic performer, including a 1993 set opening for local guitar-hero Dave Anderson at Tip Top, an experience he calls "nerve wracking." Now a Jacksonville, Fla. resident, Morris was 17 the first time he got into Tip Top as a fan. He says rolling up underage there could be intimidating: "Gravel parking lot, cars piled up everywhere. Loud as hell. And then you had to get by Lanny." Jason Pauls was in his mid-teens when he began riding his motorcycle to see bands at Tip Top - the same place he'd gone to eat lunch with his grandfather when he was younger. Pauls says seeing live music there in the days before smartphones was more enjoyable. "These days everyone's so concerned with spreading it all over social media that they do not get to focus on the actual show," says Pauls, now a 44-year-old Huntsville tattoo artist.

Kami Falkenberry, right, and friend Kelley East Wall are shown "pre-gaming" before a night out at Huntsville's Tip Top Cafe, circa 1989. (Courtesy photo)

During the time Kami Falkenberry "hung out religiously" at Tip Top during the late-80s, she'd keep an eye on the bar's monthly calendars, printed on letter-sized paper, to see what bands were playing next. Now a Nashville resident, Falkenberry says the absence of mobile phones also made for a more social scene at Tip Top. "We had no choice but to show up and participate."

A Tip Top calendar from May 1993. (Courtesy photo)

Kip Shepherd was in his mid-20s and working at a local eyeglass store when he began going to Top Top shows. A bunch of them. Around the time trailblazing female guitarist Cordell Jackson was in a Budweiser commercial with rockabilly ace Brian Setzer, Shepherd wrote Jackson a letter saying that if she ever performed in the Huntsville area, he'd like to come see her. Jackson wrote Shepherd back replying, "Book me a show in Huntsville." Shepherd asked Tip Top owner Lance Church if Shepherd could book her at the bar. "All I had to say was it was the old lady from the Budweiser commercial," Shepherd, now 53, says.

After Jackson's show packed Tip Top, from then on whenever Shepherd wanted to put on a show he could just call Church up. He ended up booking around 20 to 25 shows there. "A band would play there once to 10 people and then they'd play to 30 and the next time it would sell out," Shepherd says.

A flyer promoting a Woggles and Sex Clark Five show at Tip Top Cafe. (Courtesy photo)

In recent years Shepherd, who is about as knowledgeable as a local music fan gets, has compiled a list of more than 500 bands that played the Tip Top. You can find the list on "I remember the Tip Top Cafe," a Facebook public group Shepherd's wife Melissa Shepherd and "Rocket City Rock and Soul" author Jane DeNeefe created in early 2009. "I remember the Tip Top Cafe" now includes 754 members. "Jane was working on her book, and Kip was digging up 45s and I was feeling nostalgic for the least productive but most fun era in my life," Melissa says of the Facebook group's origins. Some of the Tip Top bands she enjoyed the most included Southern Culture on the Skids, Dash Rip Rock and The Woggles. And Sex Clark Five, a Huntsville group whose bassist Joy Johnson was also Melissa's roommate at one time and introduced her to Kip. Now a systems analyst, Melissa says she still can't believe the number of hot bands Tip Top brought to Huntsville.

"If that gross, sticky, crowded and wonderful tiny bar had not been there, if Lance had decided to close it at any time, a lovely little piece of history would never have been. It was home."

A void still unfilled

After Tip Top's musical mojo faded (and the short run of Lanny's Downtown), many Tip Top bands began playing Vapors and eventually a new venue called Crossroads that opened in Heart of Huntsville Mall. But none of those places - as good as some of that music was and as fun as some of those times were - possessed a vibe approaching Tip Top's. In more recent years, Copper Top Bar & Grill, at 200 Oakwood Ave. N.E., has emerged as the new home of local and regionally touring edgy rock acts. The Concerts on the Dock series and Flying Monkey Arts at Lowe Mill, address 2211 Seminole Drive, has done some of that as well. But very few of those bands have made the kind of mark on a larger scale that so many Tip Top acts did.

Then again, rock's role in popular culture has greatly diminished. The clever, creative people who might've been in bands during the late-80s or early-90s are very likely now focusing their energies instead on electronic music or technology.

So what exactly did Huntsville lose when it lost Tip Top, the real-deal, gritty Tip Top?

"It was a big community," Mark Torstenson says. "It was tight-knit even though we all came from different parts of town and different socio-economic backgrounds, and when that shut down a lot of them went their separate ways instead of going to the new place trying to be that. I don't know exactly what the difference was, but we definitely lost a scene."

Angy Wood simply says, "We lost our musical soul."

One thing's for sure: the Tip Top left a void Huntsville has never filled.

And possibly never will.