(slow guitar music) (slow guitar music) - [Brian Weiss] In the early nineties, the center of the cultural scene of Las Vegas was really university focused.

It really was coffeehouses and bars, and that's where the energy was.

Those were where all the music venues were.

- [Sean] Everything, anything cultural was on Maryland Parkway for a long time.

I think, 'cause it's proximity to the UNLV campus.

But back then, it was pretty much the center of town.

- [Dayvid] Maryland Parkway was the center of commerce.

It's city planning 101, this is where you put your hospital, this is where there's the big movie theater, this is where there's the university, this is where the airport is located, and all the restaurants and businesses in between.

- [Gregory] Maryland Parkway was the backbone for the whole incipient art scene.

- [Jason] You had some great record stores, the best in the city.

You had the radio station and the culture surrounding that.

And then the anchor to all of it, were the cafes.

- [Doug] We had a wealth of coffeehouses and artists and poets and musicians, all being engaged at the same time.

- [Mike] There was constantly good music and poetry and just interesting things happening.

- [Kelly] We all had a scene, like it was, everybody knew each other, and we'd pull other people in.

- [James] It blossomed because there was kind of a social movement.

There was a lot of things that were sort of coalescing that made the early nineties feel a little bit like the late sixties.

- [Brian Weiss] The cultures were starting to come together, and there was a real openness to that within our community.

- [Brian Kirsch] It was that whole blending of that punk DIY do it yourself ethic, that whole Bohemian, we're going to do it, we're going to hang it out there, and we're going to dance, and we're going to have fun with it.

- [Chad] It was the hub of anything that was happening that was underground, that was creative.

It was exciting.

- [Harry] We were challenging what was basically a notion that everything happened on the Strip, that all the art happened on the Strip, that all the entertainment was on the Strip.

- [Adriann] It helped me to know that there were other people who were creating, who had a place in Las Vegas, where they had an outlet.

- [Dayvid] And so it really became this sort of thoroughfare of easy space, and people would find their niche.

- [Kelly] We were in this together, you know, and we were just trying to make something happen and make it work.

And it did for a while.

(slow electric piano music) - Culture in Vegas, in the late eighties, early nineties, was lacking perhaps, unless you knew where to look.

You had to really dig for it.

If you knew people in bands, you could find some culture.

If you went out to the gigs in the desert with a generator and a couple of bands.

Beyond that, it was pretty lacking.

- People don't realize just how small Vegas was just that short time ago.

It was huge swaths of just desert.

- I grew up here in the 1980s in Las Vegas, and it lived up to the phrase cultural wasteland, at least from my perspective.

In the eighties, if you wanted, you know, art or culture, you got in your car and you drove to LA, if you grew up in Vegas.

There was no place to do things.

There were no venues.

There was no cultural infrastructure.

- I'm from Vegas, grew up in Boulder City, and I went to UNLV.

When I started in 1985, there was really nothing going on on Maryland Parkway.

There was no decent coffee shop.

- In 1986, I believe, I opened up The Newsroom on Las Vegas Boulevard at Carson, focusing on coffee and literature and chess and history and stuff like that.

- So yeah, The Newsroom was a place where people could come in the morning, mostly downtown casino workers.

You know, you'd have all sorts of odd people come in because it was an international newsstand and some word would get out.

- A friend of mine and I like to just like to go out and hang out there.

And then it was like, it was kind of fun to go downtown.

And the way The Newsroom downtown was set up, it was really kind of small and lots of different newspapers from all over the world, magazines and so on and so forth.

- It was what I wanted.

It's what I'd seen in traveling, these places where people would just come together and drink coffee and talk and laugh and play games.

There wasn't anything like that in Las Vegas.

The first day we opened, we were busy as we could be, and it stayed that way for a long time, until the time where we were faced with eviction for demolition purposes.

We chose the university area because it seemed kind of silly not to.

We were able to get storefronts in newer buildings.

You know, we ended up in the arcade building with the big holes in it that looked out across Maryland Parkway to the music school.

It immediately changed the feeling of The Newsroom because most of the guys who were in there playing chess all the time, you know, lived downtown.

We suddenly had many more kids.

So a lot of college students, a lot of high school students, a lot of goths.

- We lived in an apartment, um, right behind The Newsroom, really bad apartment complex.

So we would jaywalk across the street in the middle of class.

You know, we'd get tired of painting, whatever, and professors would come with us, and we'd walk down and get coffees at The Newsroom.

- [Sean] The art department was a huge part of what was going on in the coffee-- I had an art show in The Newsroom.

You know, we had art shows there.

So we had the poetry stuff going on and the art stuff there, but the UNLV art department was a big part of that 'cause we were right there on Maryland Parkway, part of the whole scene there.

Like I had a show at The Newsroom 'cause there was really nowhere to show, and the gallery on campus was usually reserved for either graduate students or visiting artists.

- After a really great six months, lots of live music, jazz, classical, lots of great art, my partner at the time got very sick, and we had to leave.

I had to take him home because he was going to die, and he wanted to die at the home that he grew up at in Vermont.

My business partner, uh, John Laub, who I'd gone to high school with, uh, got married, and his wife did not really approve of The Newsroom.

She did not like him spending time, money, nothing.

Brian Weiss was made the manager, and he tried, but, in the end, by the time I got back, it was pretty much done.

- After Lenadams left, The Newsroom very quickly fell apart and eventually closed.

And the space was taken over by Bad News Cafe.

It was a dirtier, seedier version of exactly what we'd had there before without the cultural influence.

It was just a guy trying to sell coffee to university students and make a buck.

And he was absolutely using the fact that he was in a space that had once been a cultural center uh, to his advantage.

(guitar feedback) - My first experience with Maryland Parkway would be The Record Exchange, which later became Underground Records and Wayne Coyner and Louie Thomas, when he was a kid, he was working there.

I met the Legendary Stardust Cowboy there.

I did art shows there.

We're talking mid eighties, mid to late eighties, where the very first art show In was at this little record store that was the punk rock Mecca.

It was the only thing like we had in Las Vegas.

And I remember the very first time I walked in there, and I'm still in high school, and I'm looking at the walls and there's a big DOA poster and Dead Kennedys.

I'm like, should I be in here?

'Cause I'm listening to AC/DC and Ted Nugent or whatever.

And so that would be the first time I was really aware of what the cool side of what Maryland Parkway was about to be or become, but it was really just there.

- I was about 15 when I first really clued into Maryland Parkway.

When I discovered The Underground, I would beg my mom to take me down there as much as she would suffer through it, where I would pick up the greatest punk and garage and goth and Psychobilly, the greatest underground stuff you could find in the city.

- When you put out a cassette or vinyl, which we did back then, uh, you know, put out a little record or whatever, Well, you're not going to sell it to Tower Records, you know, but you'll sell it to The Record Exchange or Underground because they would support local bands.

- We would hear the song of a band like the Dead Kennedys, we'd rush over.

If they didn't have it at Underground, you got it in Maximum Rock N Roll, and there's ordering in the back, and you had to order these things.

That's how we got our Doc Martens.

It's how we got our music.

But you heard these bands first on KUNV.

- [Keith] 91.5 KUNV Las Vegas, left of the FM dial, it was a community radio station, uh run by uh the faculty of UNLV and by students, mostly at least in theory.

- I discovered KUNV while in high school um, looking for good music on the radio.

It was the only place, as you're scanning through the dial, where suddenly The Misfits would jump out at you or NWA or crazy jazz that you just weren't hearing anywhere else.

One of the things that really cemented my love affair with KUNV was Rock Avenue.

(punk music) - [James] And Rock Avenue was the programming that happened at night every evening that was punk and new wave, generally, music.

- Rock Avenue played things that no other radio station even came near.

To hear Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü and Spacehog maybe back to back, literally, I mean, come on.

Where did you get that?

- The very first time I heard the Dead Kennedys, the very first time I heard Public Enemy, was seven in the morning on the Rock Avenue at KUNV.

- And now, KUNV's Rock Avenue has become one of the nation's best, if not the best, college radio programming.

They won the Gavin Award for the top radio programming.

And so much of the Vegas culture centered around that.

I mean, people, it was almost like the DJs had become stars.

Ah, people would go up there and take them lunch or take them dinner just to hang out and listen to what they were going to play next, um, And they were students, which was made it really accessible.

- They were real music fans.

They were kids.

They weren't getting paid.

They were doing this because they loved music.

They weren't the highly compressed, EQ'd, DJ personas of the mainstream radio channels.

- [Dirk] I remember the very first time I heard my band on KUNV.

I'm driving to work.

I pulled over because I didn't have a cell phone cause it's '87 or whatever, and called up Anthony Hudak, and I said, dude, listen to the radio.

They're playing us on the radio.

They're playing us on the radio.

By the time he turned it on, it was gone.

- It was already finding great music through things like Flipside magazine and Maximum Rock N Roll, and then KUNV completed the picture because that was a sea of people who were looking to explore beyond what traditional mainstream radio was providing.

And the things they would turn me onto, I would then go down to Benway Bop and ask Ronn and Kelly, okay, I love this.

What else do I need to hear?

- Like we basically opened this store on like 'bout 10,000 in product and 10,000 in cash that we borrowed from my dad, and just set up on Maryland Parkway.

- He was determined to get a place on Maryland Parkway.

His mom lived right down the street.

Uh, he remembered that from his high school days, and he would go to the mall on Maryland and Twain.

- I bought my very first 8-track tape in a store that was in that same mall, so that mall was really important to me.

Like the Tower Records was the next mall over.

I grew up in that Tower Records.

Tower was incredible, the displays were incredible, and I was just like, this is what I want to do with my life.

- We did like our little research for when we got the loan and did demographics of the area and you know, college over here and there's a radio station over there, and it did help a bit.

Sean Jones did all of our artwork, did our amazing flyers.

And, um, we handed out flyers, we went to bars, we handed out flyers, went to schools, handed out flyers we posted them all over UNLV.

People would come over and say, hey, when you opening?

It was very exciting, you know?

And it was very motivating.

Like, I would hate it if we were sitting there building a record store and nobody came by to find out what the deal was.

But we had a good response, and from day one, we did okay.

- We set up and like, kids were, kids were banging on our door, like before we even opened like, asking for music.

Like, can you get me this?

Can you get me that?

And I was like, I can get you this.

I can get you that.

- [Ronn] People who I grew up with would walk in the record store and say, this looks like your bedroom when you were 17.

And I was like, that's what I want here.

I want a living room.

I want a couch in back.

I want this to be a comfortable haven for kids who have nowhere to go because I grew up as a kid who had nowhere to go here.

- [Keith] I was still in high school when I first went to Benway Bop, but I was looking through the records, just checking the place out, and then I heard a familiar voice.

It was my friend Bil Hooper that I was going to high school with at Valley.

I was just talking with Bil, and I met the owner, Ronn Benway.

And I was getting into this whole scene.

It was a very colorful place.

Uh, Ronn Benway had a very good sense of humor, and was just kind of a fun welcoming guy to interact with.

So sometimes just going to that record store, even if you weren't buying anything, it was just a fun experience.

You'd get to hear about something cool that you've never heard before, like Ween.

- Benway was slightly more than a record store.

I mean, it had to be, because all we had coming in from the outside world in terms of, you know, independent music was Benway Bop and Rock Avenue, KUNV.

So if you had a question about , if there was a band you needed, Ronn was the hookup.

A big part of why we set up was because KUNV was across the street.

We knew there was records.

We knew there were people interested in music.

- Rock Avenue led to, you know, me going to Benway Bop.

You know, I'd hear something on the Rock Avenue and go, Oh, this is good.

And I'd actually write it down, and go to the Benway Bop and find it.

- A lot of times there was no venue for anyone to play.

Like when, when Cub first came through town, they were lost.

They didn't know where to play.

They didn't know what to do here.

And we'd just take them under our wing, and go, Hey, come on, come play in our store.

And there was always trouble from the from the, uh, Stake Out next door uh, with in-stores or whatever it was.

If we were too loud, and they couldn't hear their sports scores on the other side of the wall, there was always trouble there.

Every time I went to Benway, there was always a crowd there.

I would walk out of that shop with something that I had no idea I was going to, I didn't go there looking for something, but I always went there and found something.

Let's put it that way.

(jazzy guitar music) - After Bad News closed, Cafe Espresso Roma opened in the in the same place, and that was a considerably more legitimate coffee organization.

They were a chain.

Uh, they decided it was a good location across from the university, and they had the means and the experience to actually turn it into a legitimate coffeehouse.

And it became a real focal point in the university and something, I think, I think they just filled the niche at the right time.

- Uh, I was looking specifically for open mic poetry places that would let me do my brand of non poetry poetry, which was just designed for laughs.

And I found one right away.

- Poetry Alive was a poetry reading hosted by John Emmons for at least four or five years every Thursday night.

- I played the same room in Vegas for five years every Thursday night.

- At Roma, I believe something like four or five poets decided it's time to have a poetry reading.

- It was three or four people sitting around the table, reading their poetry to each other.

- What was occurring for the first six months or so was that the people were learning their voice.

They were finding, not their aesthetic voice, literally they were learning how to fill up a room.

Like, how loud do you need to speak, and how does a person behave on a stage if you want to hold the attention of a large room?

- All of a sudden, the original crew weren't there, and the moment they weren't there, everybody else in the cafe, in the community, realized this is not a clique.

This is a thing.

And that's about the time when I began hosting it.

But when the original group of people sort of dissipated, it opened the door for everybody.

- It was rapidly growing to the point where I think by, so this would've been '91, there's like maybe 10 people in the audience or so, by '94, '93 or '94, uh, there was just no space for people in those poetry readings.

It was, it was wall-to-wall kids, uh, you know, sitting on the floor, legs crossed, uh, sitting on top of tables, sitting on top of the counter.

I mean, it was really a full house, fire code violating house.

- Poetry Alive was the first thing I stumbled upon on Maryland Parkway, and I was thrilled.

I didn't know that you could go to a poetry reading outside of a boring university one.

I didn't know that you could sit there like a beatnik and look at other beatniks, and, and there was this tension and yet this creativity all in one room.

- It was an opportunity for people to get stuff off their chests in public ah, with no fear of censorship.

- I mean, all it took was to go to a poetry reading, the weekly Poetry Alive reading, and just hear poetry and poems that among some of which were pretty good.

- I had gotten interested in going to poetry readings, and I think that I found the, uh, Poetry Alive readings through a listing in the local paper, so I started showing up to that.

- [Dena] Reading that first poem, people treating me like I belonged there, I, like, I wasn't too young, or I wasn't too pretty to be smart.

Um, it was all so new to me.

- [Penina] There was never this feeling of that there are special people and less special people.

It was whoever wanted to read, could read, and my impression is that it remained that way pretty much for the life of that reading.

- I didn't really get hip to, uh, the fact that there was something actually cool happening on Maryland Parkway until probably the end of '92.

I'd say it was around that time period that I got turned on to the coffeehouse scene in Las Vegas.

I went to Roma, and I really didn't know what, I just, I didn't know where I was headed.

I didn't know what I was walking into.

And so I walk in, and I really was sort of overwhelmed by the stimulus.

There's paintings on the walls from local artists, and there's flyers from the floor to the ceiling for all of these shows at all of these venues with all of these bands that I've never heard of and zines, just racks and racks of zines for free, you know, people expressing themselves, artwork and goofy drawings and who knows what, and, uh, you know, kids riding skateboards outside on the brick railing.

And it was really just this moment of like, Oh, here's where everybody's hanging out.

This is where this is all happening.

- [Gregory] Everybody went to Cafe Roma.

Even though there are a lot of other cafes in existence by then, that was really the nerve center of everything.

And it just exploded from there.

- It was really informal.

Like I, there were people that I had really deep philosophical conversations with, who I felt that I knew on a really deep level, and I didn't know their name because it was very informal.

You know, when you've met somebody, you just kind of start talking, and people didn't go, Oh, hi, this is Bill.

Bill, this is John.

John, this is Fred.

You know, it was not that.

It was just, you just sat down, and you'd hear a conversation and you'd pipe in.

- For minors, there wasn't much else to do.

So they were ending up there, and then they were going, Oh, art.

I can sit up on the stage, and I'll spend the first few times swearing, and then I'll start actually writing.

- There wasn't much for people underage to do, under the age of 21.

All of the venues where most concerts were happening were 21 and over.

And there just wasn't a lot of youth activity going on, so we really had to make up our own kind of a scene.

- What kept bringing me back was my fascination with this space.

The place itself, the physical place itself was really intriguing to me and the people that chose to hang out there, people from all walks of life, - [Dayvid] There was just a lot happening there, and a lot of people would is kind of hang out there.

I mean, you'd get Anthony Zuiker, who went on to create CSI, would hang out the Roma, and write during the day while the different things were going on.

I mean, it was just kind of an easy gathering place.

It was nice and open space.

It was theoretically subterranean, but it got all the natural light.

Um, they had a pinball machine there, which I would often be found on, and the coffee wasn't bad, and the people who worked there were cool and weird.

(dark alternative music) - Virtual Radio was an audio collage where I would come up with a topic, and then I would find source material around that or sometimes just riff.

I would walk around with my tape recorder and record people saying things and then edit them and put them into the show.

So it was always a creative process to figure out a way to do a show and come up with topics for it.

After I became attached to the poetry group, I would invite them to the radio show every week, and I would have poets come on and read poetry or just talk.

I remember I had different areas of the studio mic-ed, and wouldn't necessarily tell people when they were on the air.

- During the Virtual Radio years, we would go up there and just be weird freaks on the air for a little time after midnight on Sundays.

- [Doug] Also, there were lots of phone calls, use of reel-to-reel and 4-tracks and different types of equipment to create sonic landscapes.

- I met Doug Jablin, got involved with KUNV, started doing radio with Doug, and Doug had begun doing, right around the time I arrived, he actually did one of the first Club Virtuals at Benway Bop.

- So Club Virtual started at Benway Bop in January of 1993.

Initially, it was a poetry group along with a little bit of music.

- So people would get up, read poems, play music.

Ah, it began sort of curated and then sort of became more a open mic.

The idea was there would be a house band, people to play music in the background or to do things in between, and whoever had something to read or perform could do so.

- At that point, there wasn't any kind of cohesive nature to it.

It just was a work in progress.

I was trying to figure it out, and I engaged the help of Anthony Bondi and Jeff Morris.

- [Gregory] Well, we migrated the show over to the Cafe Rainbow, which was one of those cafes that let us do anything we wanted.

- Again, I got Jeff Morris to bring his sound down and asked Tony to come and help out, and he started creating designs for the poetry reading where he would have these huge cut-up billboards, and he would staple them to the walls.

Tony was really bad that way.

[laughing] He didn't really care about the walls.

- I'm thinking to myself, well, we need to transform the environment if we want to encourage the people on the stage and the audience to have a sense of themselves being in someplace different, that's not familiar.

Therefore, what you see, what you know, the production might not be familiar, so I started doing quick silly sets.

We were doing this once a week.

- That was the thing that, um, really caught my eye because of the multimedia experience that was happening with that event.

Yes, there was poetry, but there was so much more.

There was of course, ubiquitous body painting.

Usually somebody was doing some kind of artwork on the walls.

It was just such a wonderful and overwhelming mix of every, you know, sights and sounds and smells and all of that stuff.

It was really, really incredible.

- I learned to be dynamic as Club Virtual came about.

I learned how to give a performance.

Sometimes people laughed.

It felt like building nonsense that we love, so it wasn't nonsense.

It just felt like building nonsense together into something creative and entertaining that drew people together.

- Then at the end, we were going to do it every other week, so we had production time.

And the first one was my idea, which was Heaven In a Cage, where we put a cage around the poets.

Then what was supposed to happen after that was I think the Virtual Homeless Show, where we had homeless people, a soup kitchen, at Club Virtual.

That was Jeff Morris's idea.

And, uh, - [Interviewer] Did that happen?

- No, no.

That was going to be the week that, the next week, and then we just saw that it was closed down.

And Jerry was not getting enough people buying coffee.

And there's a bunch of footage of me saying, you know, we're all doing this for free.

Go and buy some coffee.

Which is really funny because eventually he went out of business because not a lot of people were buying coffee.

A lot of people were coming and hanging out.

It was a coffee house where nobody bought any coffee.

(bubbly electronic music) - Cafe Copioh was, for a very brief time, in my opinion, kind of the be all end all of the coffeehouse scene for Las Vegas.

It exemplified, I think, what could be happening for a coffeehouse culture for Las Vegas.

Coming from the outside in, the parking lot alone would kind of give you a sense of the mayhem and the incredible crossroads that this coffeehouse had become.

- I'd never seen anything like it.

It was just like a bar.

You know, everybody knows your name.

It was all students.

It was all teachers.

It was all just a very living room environment.

You know, every time I went there, I just settled in.

- Every night was different.

You didn't know what was gonna happen, whether there was an open mic or just a bunch of dudes playing chess, which happened a lot.

- [Meagan] Mike got coffeehouse culture in a way that we didn't get to experience through Roma.

And it wasn't the same vibe as Cafe Rainbow, which was very psychedelic.

Cafe Copioh, I could see that coffeehouse existing throughout time.

I could see that coffeehouse existing 800 years ago in Turkey, um, and it would still have been, you know freaks and hashish eaters and performing artists and poets.

And it would have been exactly the same mix of people and races and beliefs.

It brought the scene, quote unquote, together in a way that I don't think any other coffeehouse did.

- You would be there just to experience, just to be around it, just to let whatever spontaneous art or happening happen.

You know.

- I loved Copioh.

I fell in love there like so many times.

There's all these cool kids like doing poetry, art, music, playing chess, dressing funky.

It was, it was heaven.

- A lot of what we were doing was just kind of creating something on our own out of nothing, out of thin air.

Oh, there's a desert.

Let's put a show there.

You know, Oh, there's a coffeehouse.

Let's, let's put a scene there.

We didn't just say, let's do it, and then we did it.

It just kind of sprouted organically.

- It was a great alternative to the bar scene at the time because it was a place you could hang out and be sober or be, you know, blown out on espresso, depending on what it was you wanted to do.

But it was a place where people could hear themselves talk and have intellectual discussions and, you know, explore the culture of the moment, you know, and enjoy that.

- So these coffeehouses became kind of the de facto scene for a lot of these bands to get up and get seen and get their tapes sold and get their flyers out.

And the coffeehouse culture wasn't the only place where music was happening, but it was definitely kind of like the headquarters.

It was the clubhouse.

If you were looking for fliers for shows, you went to the coffeehouse, and then you figured out where you were going to go from there.

- You know, you could walk from Cafe Espresso Roma, or you could go upstairs to Sports Pub.

- Sports Pub was a sports bar slash dance club.

It was on the second floor of the Promenade and you entered through the back.

- Sports Pub started having not a lot of punk bands, but they did enough where it was a place to play, and that was important.

- The Huntridge Theater was like a historical theater going all the way back to the middle of the century, and it had more morphed, morphed into different phases and became a different type of a venue, and then it closed for a long time.

And then when it reopened, they started having shows there that were both national and local shows.

So it gave a lot of the local bands an opportunity to get exposed.

- I mean, I was in local bands that performed in everywhere from, you know, the Huntridge Theater or played at Cafe Roma.

Um, we played at Cafe Copioh.

- I was in a band, uh called Nature Boy.

(dissonant music and shouting) Around the time that we started to do our thing, I feel like I was seeing a lot of different bands spring up, solo artists and groups.

The goth industrial scene was really starting to pop off, and the noise scene was really starting to pop off, but lots of other stuff was becoming popular at that time as well.

Those Copioh gigs are what helped us kind of start making more friends in the scene, and like, people invited us on to like play shows with them.

When Cyber City Cafe opened, uh, it, it stretched the scene too thin.

Cyber City Cafe had a very different vibe.

They were very much like an up-and-coming, new, modern, clean vibe.

Um I think a lot of us maybe didn't feel comfortable there.

(uncomfortable laughter) It also was catering to this new internet thing that everybody was pretty sure was a fad.

There was something about Cyber City Cafe that just, for the briefest moment, seemed to inject a bunch of energy into the scene, and then it sort of like deflated after that.

And everybody kind of went off to their corners.

There just wasn't enough of us to go around.

I think part of the structure and the strength of the scene was that we were all hanging out in this really tiny little space together and either you were here or you were just across the street over at the other coffee shop.

If you were looking for somebody, you know, those were the two places that you would go.

And now you had to walk all the way down past Tower, which, you know, in 137 degree heat in Las Vegas actually does kind of feel far.

And it, I feel like it stretched the scene a little thin.

- And then let's not even get into what every single cafe owner has always bemoaned, and that is that you can't choose who your consumers are.

When you welcome all, you welcome all.

And some of those places paid the price for it.

- Maryland Parkway, as much as it was thriving, was essentially always going to be the student district.

That meant it was going to have to renew itself every three years because there goes another grand batch of students.

And so if the culture that was developing in the shops was to be enduring, it actually needed to get away from Maryland Parkway.

It needed to get into the whole of the city so that it would not be judged or subsidiary to UNLV.

- Well, that's the interesting thing is that there wasn't a huge amount of involvement from UNLV students or faculty.

There was some, obviously, there's gotta be some overlap, ah, but it wasn't, the Contemporary Arts Collective included people who taught at UNLV, but it also included people who were not affiliated with the university.

There were plenty of people who hung out at Cafe Roma who were not college students, but then, of course, there were plenty of people who were college students.

I mean, it was right there.

- The fact that the Temporary Contemporary was down by UNLV and a lot of UNLV students came to it because they could walk to it.

November, 1995, was the last show we had there, and we had figured we had to go somewhere else.

And at that time, there was talk about things starting to happen downtown.

- One of the things that kept popping up during the 1990s, when things were happening, was a desire to create an arts district, to create gallery spaces, to create more permanent music spaces than just, you know, random bars.

- The Arts Factory was happening then.

That was starting to blossom there.

And so it was kind of a natural progression.

We ended up there.

- Out of that move and a number of other smaller cultural activities, the shift of the culture did seem to move more downtown.

- The Enigma Cafe really started to establish itself as a destination downtown.

And so a lot of people were just sort of avoiding the Maryland Parkway situation altogether to hang out there.

- There was no sense as that developed that moving some number of people and culture downtown was going to in any way diminish Maryland Parkway.

It looked like Maryland Parkway was going to thrive all by itself forever, and there was only to be the benefit of of spreading it out.

And so to expand downtown wasn't to diminish Maryland Parkway, it was just to get bigger because that's what things do.

You know?

Uh.

And then of course, it turned out that that uh, was all, was all illusion and not at all so.

As Maryland Parkway began to decline, there was the other raft that had already been set free from the mother vessel that could serve as a as a place to, you know, avoid drowning.

If Maryland Parkway is not flourishing, oh my gosh, well, now there is downtown.

- Unfortunately, KUNV's Rock Avenue was sort of like, you know, cut off at the jugular, and it happened for a variety of different reasons.

And one of the reasons was Rob Rosenthal, who was the GM at the time who kind of shepherded this movement, uh, left the station and moved back to Portland, Maine.

- And he was replaced by an acting general manager named Don Fuller.

He was one of the jazz DJs.

Don Fuller didn't really seem to appreciate the diverse programming that we were offering there, not to the extent that we had it.

- The Edge came on the air.

uh Which was a commercial alternative radio station for whatever that's worth.

- But all they would do is they just cherry pick the stuff off of Rock Avenue, the stuff that was the big hits, and then all the interesting stuff was left off their playlist.

- Alternative culture just started to rise.

And you know, I'm not looking down at KEDG at all, The Edge at all, because with the rise of The Edge, came the rise of Scope Magazine.

I mean, the fact that alternative culture made it out of the underground and into the mainstream is really what propelled us to be able to keep going on this tiny little shoestring budget for as long as we did.

- So in 1997, at some point, the acting general manager, Don Fuller, hired a program director, a professional program director, from the local NPR station, and he started making some changes around the station.

One of the biggest changes was canceling out the morning Rock Avenue programming and replacing it with smooth jazz.

Uh, we started kind of seeing that, uh, things were happening, like the staff wasn't getting new membership cards anymore.

Ronn Benway was joking, yeah, 'cause he's going to fire all of you.

And I thought that was so cynical.

Why would he?

He's not going to do that.

He would have done that by now, you know.

But sure enough, a few months later, on May 18th, 1998, I woke up, and there was a voicemail on my answering machine from the music director at the time.

And he told me this, the one of the most horrible pieces of news I've ever heard, that Don Fuller had canceled all of the rock programming from KUNV, but he got rid of the Rock Avenue, he got rid of Radiolucent, which was the other show I was involved in, and The Still Hour and Audio Apocalypse and the Speed Zone and Brain Pain, and he kept very little of the non jazz format there.

- You know, maybe it was what the donors wanted, and I still don't know why he did it, but there was a great sadness that day.

Ah, we lost a way to promote our shows.

We lost a way to introduce each other to new music.

We lost a way to promote our bands.

- And that really made an impact, I think, on us, especially, but on, on, um, The Underground, on Tower Records.

- Where did you get new music at that time?

Because The Edge was fine, but it was, it was still a commercial radio station, so it was still the same rotation, the same top 50 or whatever alternative charts there were.

- KUNV played all the bands I loved, bands I never knew existed, and like taught me so much.

- I think it was devastating to the culture of Las Vegas.

It, no longer was there the ability to hear these individual kind of voices.

Like, I don't know that it became more corporate, but it definitely didn't have a, there wasn't that platform anymore.

- I felt like things were radically changing in the scene.

Benway had closed once and possibly closed again by that point.

And the first time that, uh, Benway Bop closed, it really seemed to take a lot of air out of the scene.

We close our record store in Vegas, and we take this stock to Venice Beach, and we put a punk rock record store, Las Vegas punk rock record store, in Venice Beach.

And we opened the door, and the first 30 people in the door go, where's U2 Pop?

I want to try you guys out.

We were like, (record scratching) we don't have it.

I think by noon, I was in a car driving across Los Angeles to get a box of them.

So a few months goes by, and we're not doing so well in Venice Beach where we're both from, where we both worked for another independent record store for years, and we both decide like, maybe we should have a fallback.

Maybe we should go back to Vegas and have a fallback in Vegas and be ready to run from Venice Beach.

- So we said, you know what?

We can still open a store in Las Vegas.

We can, in the same center, we did it.

- [Ronn] We came back, and there was no Rock Avenue.

We saw it change so quickly.

When Rock Avenue went down, that was our billboard.

That was our advertising spot.

- [Kelly] There was no place for these kids to hear, you know.

Bikini Kill or Butt Trumpet or anything on K Records, Relativity, anything.

Really, it was very sad to close that store.

'Cause we went back up there 'cause we'd missed it.

We missed the people, and at least we could go up there every other week and know that we were making a difference.

And Rock Avenue, just kind of squashed that.

It was sad.

- There was something about that record store closing that was sort of this like trumpet blast off in the distance, and you could start to feel like rumbling under your feet that things were beginning to change.

- I mean, it seemed like it was pretty vibrant.

It seemed like a lot of things were happening and you know, it seemed like it would kind of happen forever.

I didn't think like anything was amiss.

- The thing to remember is that the nineties was a huge boom town period for Las Vegas.

After The Mirage opened, all of that boom time on the Strip began.

That was a real sort of Rubicon.

We cross over from, things have been sort of stable in the seventies, eighties, to now everything is changing.

Those of us who were sort of interested in having more arts and cultural offerings thought, well, that's great.

As the city explodes, the number of people who are going to be into the arts is going to explode with it.

- For all that we were doing and being creative, all the time there were conversations where people were like, I want to get out of Vegas.

I want to get out of Vegas.

I want to get out of Vegas.

Like, that was always an underlying theme, even though we were there like doing this thing.

And I was definitely one of those people who was like, you know, I can't stay here forever.

- I guess you're looking at a lot of your mainstays and people you would have depended on business for, you know, showing up less and less, but we saw it.

And even when I was in town, I even created kind of a Cold War era propaganda campaign, graphic design flyer set, trying to get this idea for people to save Roma because it was in danger, as all those places were.

- In Vegas, something fails, and then you're just without it until somebody else comes along.

Really, the death knell for Maryland Parkway as being that was the closure of Cafe Roma.

- Copioh, I think in that December of 2000, had its unfortunate fate.

There was somebody who broke into the spot, who had been angry about being 86-ed, and put a can of gasoline on one side and a pipe bomb on the other.

And so with the death of Copioh and what was looking like the closure of all of those different spaces on Maryland Parkway, it became really apparent that it was up to us to do something about it.

And we're kids.

We didn't know what to do, you know.

Posters was about all I could offer.

- The problem in general with cafe culture is that it's very hard to make it a profitable venture and maintain a sense of community, you know, communal standards within it.

Either you're a business that sells coffee, or you're a place people hang out.

- You know, I left in '95, um, and I went back in '96 and '97, and it seemed like the community was still going strong.

There was still all kinds of things happening.

And then I went back again in the year 2000, and it was like a wasteland.

Everything was shut down.

The Copioh wasn't there anymore.

Sports Pub wasn't there anymore.

Cafe Espresso Roma wasn't there anymore.

It just felt like it just all went away.

It's really a sad moment when I went.

Just walked up and down Maryland Parkway, and it was almost like, it went back to the way it was before the scene was there.

- You know, the record stores and the venues, you know, kind of found their footing again, you know.

Not long after Benway and you know and Balcony Lights and lot of those guys closed up was Big B's, which carried the torch for awhile.

The cafes never quite came back.

- And it's strange to me that things didn't, like when those businesses kind of faltered, that other businesses didn't come in and take over because the clientele was there.

Like, it was already in motion, so, I mean, it could have been still successful if other people had stepped up.

Now there's really nothing.

When I go by Maryland Parkway, there's not, there's no foot traffic there.

There's no, like, energy there that used to be there.

- Even the sort of corporate landscape of that stretch of Maryland Parkway, like the Pizza Hut, the Wendy's, the Carl's Jr., where generations of UNLV students, you know, sat and, you know, did their homework, all that stuff's gone too.

- Part of the reason for going to Maryland Parkway was you could go to Cafe Roma, you can swing down to Tower Records, go across the Paymon's, and you're always gonna run into somebody that you know.

There's always going to be something going on.

You can find something going on.

And I think that that particular energy has definitely shifted to downtown.

- Downtown took pretty much anything that was going to happen on Maryland, where most of that started, is now downtown.

- It feels stuck right now, and I can't figure out why.

I can't think of the last new place that opened up down there that I, you know, that I wanted to go to.

Even the places that opened up after the fact, you know, that, you know, opened up after the boom, like, Freakin' Frog was one of them, there was a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf for a hot minute that was very popular, and those are gone as well.

It was like a wave wiped clean all of the local Vegas, all of the independent Vegas that had taken root.

You know, it could be that UNLV is still largely a commuter school.

It could be that their student union is pretty pimped out.

I know they've got a lot of restaurants in there.

- Well, they took the coffee shops and moved them into the student union, which is a great idea.

I want to hang out and have coffee while I'm studying.

Well, why should I walk across that horrible gigantic Berlin Wall of Maryland Parkway to go to an independent?

Why don't I just stay there?

And so they do.

- The university has more students than it ever has, and they're building more on-campus or near campus housing.

A lot of that's happening right now.

- [Dirk] With the university, yeah, they're busy, and they're growing and expanding, but this area, it's just heartbreaking that so many businesses around me now and businesses across the street, they either come and go or they just close.

They're just a store front now.

- There is a decline to that area.

However, having been a resident of Las Vegas for 30 years, I've seen this cyclical nature.

I believe that Maryland Parkway is actually kind of up and coming now.

There's an area on Maryland Parkway called Paradise Palms that's become a fairly popular place to habitat.

And there's a number of things that are starting to come back.

There are developments, there are new bars, there are new restaurants, and we'll see, you know.

We'll see.

- Everything I learned and saw and was exposed to in the early nineties on Maryland Parkway had a direct connection to every step I've taken since in regards to music and my career and my passions It's exciting to know that I found something early in life that was so influential, that has guided me ever since.

- It was that community's open arms that took a lost kid like me in and helped me grow.

You know, it really did.

All the experiences for better or worse, they're all in me and still with me and a part of my life.

And I'm super grateful and thankful that all that happened and that I was able to discover that because it was a very, very magical time and a very, very magical place.

- [Kelly] I met some of the best friends in my life there, honestly, friends that will be my friends forever.

- The nineties for me were really, really special.

There weren't a lot of barriers, at least that I could see.

And it was a very, very magical time.

- The ability to be a part of that, to push out culture into a town where arguably, the culture was extremely narrow and focused on things that didn't speak to hardly anybody I knew, to be able to be a part of that and part of that history, it's something I'm still proud of to this day.

- I grew substantially, dramatically, as an artist and as a poet and as a creative person.

Uh, and I would not be who I am, doing what I'm doing, if I had not experienced those few years in Las Vegas the way that I had with that group of people.

- It was just wonderful to have my own space, to have my own space to be weird, because I was always told in Vegas not to be weird.

Like, I grew up here being told like, Hey, don't, don't be so Mork from Ork.

Sit down and don't be so crazy.

- It was the nineties.

I mean, it seemed like everythig was okay in the nineties.

You just sort of grooved along in the nineties in a way with each other, especially where we all were, you know.

We had all these activities and opportunities and places to go, and everybody didn't get along, but there was, it was a diverse group of people.

There were so many people, so many people.

- There were all these different, like, sub-groups within this scene that were like kind of crossing over and mixing and mashing and, uh, in some way, it all created this cool confluence of creativity, of people just trying to make things happen and trying to express themselves.

- I think one of the things that I remember when I think back on that time is just the comfort I felt, you know, being in that collection of people It was a collection of misfits, and it was very comforting to be in the fold with that, with those people, even if, you know, a lot of times, I barely knew the names of some of these people, you know.

- I miss it.

I miss the marble table tops at, at Roma, and I miss the comfy couches at, at Copioh, and I miss the weirdness of Rainbow, where it was really uncomfortabe when you walked in there.

- I mean, that whole, that whole scene of the nineties was really kind of like a, like a cultural primordial stew for a lot of people who went on to do other things in media or music or in arts.

It feels like nostalgia to look back and go, wow, we did something pretty amazing.

But the fact is is that there was, there's actual evidence that some really great things came out of that period.

- Well, I mean, there were a loe who went on to great things.

I mean, you know, we saw our friends in The Killers get very famous.

The first Killers show I ever saw was at Cafe Roma.

I know Ronnie Vannucci used to go to the poetry nights, not as a poet, but he was just kicking around that scene.

'Cause that was kind of the scene that was going on.

- [Penina] And we weren't thinking, you know, we're going to create a movement or this is a movement.

It was more like, Oh man, let's make this thing.

Let's do a performance piece.

Let's just get together and listen to music.

That was kind of special, (laughing) and I'd love to create something like that again.

- Maryland Parkway was one of the best parts of my whole life.

It changed me.

It changed everything for me.

It changed everything.

I don't think I've said that enough times, that it was my springboard, and Maryland Parkway was magical.

- You know, was it special?

Was there something incredible happening there?

Was there something really unique happening there?

I think to an extent, we look back and we romanticize it.

I think we romanticized it then.

But yes, I do think something very special and very unique was happening in that environment partly because we didn't have the luxury of living in a larger city where these scenes were already established by generations of freaks and weirdos and Bohemians and beatniks before us.

There was very little in the way of fringe or alternative or underground in Las Vegas.

And even in its heyday, it was incredibly small.

So we kind of had to go to everyone's show and be at every event because otherwise, it was, you know, you and your five friends hanging out on the couch.

Like you had to be involved in all of the different scenes and check out all the different bands, and that lended an incredible strength because everybody knew about everything.

Everybody hung out everywhere 'cause there wasn't really anywhere else to go.

But there was also a real power and a magic to it because we were the inventors of this.

We weren't inheriting this scene from a previous generation.

We were building it.

We were birthing it.

We were the folks that were deciding what it was gonna look like and, and how long it would last.

(alternative rock music)