Horizontal Action Blackout
A new mini festival dubbed the Whiteout–booked not by the Blackout folks but by Darius Hurley of Criminal IQ Records–has sprung up to capitalize on the ridiculous influx of out-of-town fans and bands with a string of early-evening shows Thursday through Saturday. It says a lot about how big the Blackout’s gotten that bands as good as the Feelers and the Catholic Boys–and others from as far away as Paris–end up playing piggyback gigs up the street at the Mutiny.
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As the magazine grew, the Blackout grew too, moving from the Beat Kitchen to the Subterranean and then jumping to the Bottle in 2004, when Horizontal Action events coordinator Matt Williams started working there. So why stop now?
“There’s always something that stands out,” Mabry says, “but last year was the coup de grace as far as that goes. We were cleaning up at the end of the night, and as we swept the piles of garbage one of the bartenders started retching and screaming. I look over to him and he’s pointing at the ground towards an obviously used condom that wasn’t more than five feet from the bar. Since all the nights were sold out and the bar was pretty packed, it would be possible for a couple to get it on surrounded by so many people. Or someone maybe just dropped it there. Who knows.”
Jim “Hollywood” McCann of the Tyrades (and the late Baseball Furies) knows from his own experience that Horizontal Action was good for more than a nice set of ta-tas: “It was definitely the focal point for our crappy little solar system,” he says. “Todd and Brett were always buying records before anybody else and were cued into good music, and unlike other underground music zines, they were centered on fun and making friends.” That group of friends became the nucleus of a larger audience for the band, and in June the Tyrades will be kicking off the second day of this year’s Intonation Music Festival. “So now, instead of failing in front of 100 people, we get to fail in front of 7,000,” McCann says.
“It’s become too much work,” says Novak, “but not the same amount of returns as before. It’s the law of diminishing returns. You don’t want a dozen donuts, you only want one.”
