Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Was it 1988 before we made it to New York City to play for the first time? I’d been a couple of times as a tourist, but perhaps it was Mecca Normal’s first NYC show: an event hosted by Bob Z. Not sure how we heard of Bob Z. In those days, musicians and poets used to mail stuff around—cassettes, booklets, zines—and you’d check with other bands to hear who put on shows, Checking by mail: snail mail. I recall when it came time to book tours—when I actually had to phone people—I bought answering machines with the tiny cassette tape, made my calls, got my responses and plotted out the tour. On the day we left town, I’d erase the tape, package up the answering machine and take it back to the store for a refund; it was still on its 21-day return policy. When you think about playing in NYC, you think big, maybe too big, when, especially for New York, it is better to think small, very small. And in this case, it was down very steep stairs into the cellar—stairs like the ones you see when grocery stores are loading stuff off a truck into a hole in the sidewalk—down there. That’s where we played. At the Anarchist Switchboard. I found a cassette tape of this show that I was thinking about putting online, but it is just so bad. Not us; the recording. I guess it was a sort of disappointment when we saw that the show was in a hole in the sidewalk, that the place was so dank and weird, but I think we were in a strange state of shock, too freaked out to be indignant. It seemed like the place had a history of doing shows, and I recently found a reference to it online. A brief history of this activist center.
