Ryan Brown

Senior Staff Writer

This article originally appeared in the Nov. 3, 2014 edition of the FSView.

Standing in the center of an empty Club Downunder, as I did earlier this week, one realizes that they are in something of an invisible museum. It’s not what’s in the room that is important, but what used to be–nearly fifty years and countless generations of students and entertainers coming together in one small room.

In order to give that kind of invisible power a shape, I spoke this month with a variety of individuals to color in some of the details of the campus venue’s past. They included:

David Ranon, Coordinator of Student Activities for the Oglesby Union

Mark Stiffler, Senior Associate Director of Oglesby Union

Colleen Flynn, CDU alumni and Senior Talent Buyer at Hard Rock International

Lyle Cayce, CDU alumni and and Senior Director of Marketing at LiveNation

David O’Connor, CDU alumni and Partner at Wilkinson, Barker, Knauer, LLP

Matthew Moyer and Heather Lorusso, journalists for Ink 19

David Settle, local musician and alumni

Ian Weir, FSU film faculty and alumni.

THE BEGINNINGS

Ranon: People’s opinions vary on what the very very beginnings were, but from what I’ve been able to discover, it started as a ratskeller, which was a common name in the 60s and 70s for bars on campuses. They were almost always underground. And that was under what is the current food court, which is strange now because it’s all just hallways and storage. There’s nothing down there now.

Striffler: That was in the sixties...It was during that time of folk artists, beatnik movement, you know, the Vietnam war going on...when FSU was the Berkley of the South, so to speak. The singer songwriter folk artists were touring, and that’s kind of how the thing got off its feet.

Ranon: And then somewhere shortly after the ratskeller was founded–I think people weren’t too happy that there was a bar on campus, I don’t know, that’s just my conjecture–but they changed the name to Downunder Coffeehouse. It was still a bar, I think it was a coffee house and then it did the bar thing in the evening. There are people with better recollections of that than mine, because I wasn’t born yet.

Striffler: By the time I was involved as a student, in the seventies, it had evolved into a place where bands were playing. It was in the basement of the Union, hence the name. Steve Martin played there several times, doing stand up comedy, Michael Keaton, Jimmy Buffett played there years ago, some fairly memorable rock shows–The Replacements, for example. And then in the mid 1980s, 1986 I believe, the club closed because they were actually tearing up the basement for a renovation to the Union.

Ranon: The current building actually started out as the University Bookstore–that was its first function. This whole building with the post office is the oldest building in The Union. Student Center, it was called when it first opened. And then after it was a bookstore, it became a food service space, and it remained like that for a very long time. I think up until 2003 you can still get Raleigh’s burgers out of a window down there, and there was a pizza place up here where the bar is now. So during the day it was food service, and at night it was a concert space.

Club Downunder Fun Facts:

1) When Lil Kim performed at The Moon, she showed up in a limo and demanded ten thousand extra dollars, but eventually settled for a bottle of champagne.

2) The National devised the riff in their hit “Fake Empire” while they were backstage at Club Downunder.

3) Kanye West performed a mostly unknown show at the Civic Center in 2004, following his release of The College Dropout.

4) In November 1991, The Pixies walked out of their own performance at The Moon after one too many people stage dived.

BEFORE THEY WERE BIG, THEY WERE DOWNUNDER



Ranon: The roster of artist that we’ve had come through here is amazing. We got bands as they were starting to get played on college radio, and they were on their way up. So sometimes when they come there isn’t a big crowd, which is a bummer, but it can also be really cool. For example, one year The Books came and played, and Grizzly Bear opened, and I think there was probably less than 100 people here, for that performance. And two years later, Grizzly Bear is headlining festivals. So to see that rise is always really cool.

Striffler: That’s kind of the beauty of it. It is, in some ways, kind of an experimental venue. When you go to see these bands,you might be seeing the next really cool band, where a year or two later they get really big. And we’ve done it time and time again–Yellowcard, Sonic Youth, Matt and Kim...

Flynn: I remember when I first started working at The Club I kept telling Mark we have to book this band Nirvana, and I think we tried like twenty times and it never worked out. Eventually we got them for a show at the Civic Center.

[Kanye West also played a mostly unknown show at Leon County Civic Center following the release of The College Dropout in 2004.]

O’Connor: The Goo Goo Dolls played, and it was one of those shows where they were already on a trajectory, we got them right on the upswing and we were probably too small to really be hosting one of their shows. But I think it was one of the first nights that Officer Booney was working the venue. Back then, stage diving was huge and so we had Officer Booney set up right in front of the stage–so near the end of the show, the lead singer of The Goo Goo Dolls took off his guitar and put it over Officer Booey–and he did remarkably well, strummed a few chords, you know–but it was a fantastic show, great atmosphere.

Lorusso: I hadn't heard of The White Stripes, but Matthew [Moyer] convinced me to go out. He said that the guy sings and plays the guitar and the girl plays the drums and, oh yeah, they dress all in red. It sounded quirky for sure, so I was in. I was not prepared at all. First, there were so many people there, and I hadn't seen Club Down Under that crowded, ever. As soon as I walked in, I could feel the excitement, the energy, and I felt like they were all in on a big secret no one told me about. Then when Jack and Meg got on stage, everyone just went mental.

Honestly I don't remember that much of the set, because I was so caught up in it. Jack was screaming, shaking, sweating and decimating his guitar while Meg calmly kept on at the drums. It wasn't until they played the cover of Dolly Parton's “Jolene” that I kind of returned to the moment and realized that I was part of something special and that years from now I'd be able to say that I saw the White Stripes before they got huge–in Tallahassee, Florida no less, of all the places in the world. When they made it big, I felt so privileged that I had been a part of it, and was sincerely happy for them and the mainstream success they've achieved. Few bands merit such universal adoration.

Striffler: The day Stone Temple Pilots played CDU was the day that their first MTV video debuted, so the band was more interested in having a television so they actually could see their video on TV...and then a year later, they played here at the Civic Center. So there are plenty of neat things like that.

Weir: I saw The National play a show here at Club Downunder a few years ago [the actual date of the show was September 11, 2007]. They were really great, really nice, they chatted with the crowd the whole time. And after they played “Fake Empire,” they told us that last time they played there, they had actually come up with the first version of the riff tinkering around on the piano in the back, so that was pretty wild.

[”Fake Empire” would later become one of the band’s biggest hits, and that piano tinkering would become the soundtrack to a portion of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.]

Ranon: That piano is actually on stage now; it’s right over there. That’s definitely one of our bigger claims to fame. Anytime anyone plays piano on that stage, they’re playing that piano. I kind of want to put it back in the Green Room though, put a plaque on it or something, keep that dream alive. There’s actually, online, a recording of that performance, when they play “Fake Empire” here for the first time right after Boxer came out. So there’s proof, at least.

Striffler: Reverend Horton Heat played one year, apparently left the stage and went up into the balcony, got up on top of the speaker stacks, hung from the railings on the second floor and back down on to the stage...crazy things like that. Cat Power, not wanting to go on stage, because at the time she apparently had a lot of stage fright, but was calmed down by one of our students and went out and did a hell of a show.

Cayce: This isn’t a pleasant one, but we had the band The Verve here, if you remember The Verve –“Bittersweet Sympho- ny” and all that–and they were just a bunch of English assholes. They were just miserable bastards. There wasn’t enough beer, there wasn’t enough seating, we need barricades, we had to move tables around to make them barricades and it was just like–no one cares. No one’s gonna mob you, like maybe they would overseas. Luckily I never crossed paths with them again.

THE BEST AND THE WEIRDEST

Flynn:

So I booked a band once, it was a last minute thing, and we needed support for somebody...I don’t even remember who the headliner was. But the guys came loaded in and they had like these, parachute pants on, and they went on stage, entered with all the lights off, and we turned the lights on and BOOM–you could see everything. Full frontal nudity, people were freaking out. So...I think about that, a lot.

O’Connor: One of the weirdest shows we ever had at the club was Dread Zepplin. It was a reggae band that played Led Zepplin songs, and the lead singer was a 300-pound Elvis impersonator. People kinda started out at the back during that, and then eventually came forward and it was a pretty great show.

Striffler: There was a Lil Kim show at The Moon, she showed up in her limo and demanded an extra ten thousand dollars. We had fifteen minutes of bluff, it was all through her tour manager, and it went from I want five grand, I want two grand, I want a grand, I want a bottle of champagne–I said, stop–do we have a bottle of champagne? So we got her a bottle of champagne, and that was that.

O’Connor: The loudest show I ever heard, and I swear my ears are still ringing, was Dinosaur Jr., which was a great show, but the opening act was this band called My Bloody Valentine, who were great, but it was one of the only times I remember cupping my ears during a show.

Ranon: I think the biggest show we ever had was probably The Ting Tings. They had that big single, and I remember we had to turn so many people away.

Settle: Probably the craziest show I ever saw at the Club was Andrew W.K. He was supposed to be playing outside for like A Last Call Before Fall kind of thing, but it was raining so they decided to move the whole show into Club Downunder, and it was way too big for a venue that size. And people were going crazy, they were jumping off the balconies, and I had to sound mix during all of that. It was pretty crazy.

O’Connor: The best show I ever saw here, it was at The Moon actually, but it was The Pixies. Fantastic show, it only lasted 56 minutes because of stage diving. Frank Black said ‘If one more person stages dives, we’re shutting down’–and sure enough some idiot, uh, jumped. And sure enough they dropped their instruments and said we’re outta here, and we went back and begged but to no avail. That being said, it was the best 56 minutes I’ve ever seen.

Striffler: The best show I ever saw in the club–two come to mind. Sonic Youth for sure, that was a very special show. But there was this old blues musician, Clarence Gatemouth Brown and he played down there. He was probably in his seventies at the time. We used to do a lot of top shelf blues band shows down in the club, and you could always rely on about one-hundred people in the community who liked the blues to come out, but our goal was always to try to get the college kids to come out for it. And for this show, it was a huge crowd and a lot of kids who had never experienced anything like this, never seen that kind of big city blues before–and just the cheers and adoration that these kids gave this old, seventy-whatever blues guy...it was really, really special.

LOVE IN THE CLUB

Striffler: I’m just really thankful that the University has been so good as to continue to support it over the years because it has become, frankly, a nationally recognized venue–the bands really appreciate it and I think the students do too.

Settle: I think it’s just the fact that there’s not many other colleges in the nation that have a venue just for students, and further than that, a venue that gets as cool of shows constantly for students to go to. It’s a really special thing; it really helps to add to the scene in Tallahassee, that we get bands that we do, and that you can see them for free. It’s really special.