Who’s Asking

There’s an hour on Central when the street belongs to nobody. Dinner crowd’s gone home, the club lines haven’t formed, and for about twenty minutes the neon does its work for an audience of line cooks on smoke breaks and one guy walking east with his hands in his pockets.

I’ve been that guy more nights than I’d admit to a doctor.

You want a name. I understand. You’re not getting one, and it wouldn’t help you anyway. Here’s what you get instead. I was born here. Schooled here, married here, and my kids drew their first breath at a hospital you can see from Central. I’ve left this town more times than I can count, for all the usual reasons, and every time it reeled me back in. They don’t call it the Land of Entrapment for nothing.

I remember when the city ended at Academy. I remember when the houses hadn’t crawled up the foothills past the U on the mountain, and if you don’t know about U Mountain, that’s fine. It’s gone now. That’s sort of the point of me. I remember when the west side quit at the bottom of Nine Mile Hill, which got its name for being nine miles out from downtown on the very road this site is about. The city grew past all of it. Somebody should remember where the edges used to be.

And the music. My first show was at Tingley in the seventies, Kiss headlining, an unknown band called Rocket opening, my ears ringing for two days after. I watched a local punk outfit called Idiot Savant open for Black Flag in the SUB Ballroom at UNM and understood, maybe for the first time, that the opener could be the story. I dated a girl who worked the ticket window at the Lobo Theater, back when that got you in free and made you feel like a king. I saw the Sunshine when it still had seats. I lost entire evenings in a circular booth at The Bird on Gibson watching local groups whose names I’ve been forgetting for forty years, and I was standing in Confetti’s the night Foghat walked in and jumped on stage with the house band, because that was the kind of thing that happened here. I came up in this town in the eighties and nineties, when music was everything to an entire generation, and I was here when it happened. On this road.

Speaking of the road. It turned one hundred this year. The government decertified it back in ’85, pulled the shields off the posts, told everybody it was done. Nobody told Central. Eighteen miles of it run through this city, the longest unbroken urban stretch of Route 66 left anywhere, and on any given night somewhere along those eighteen miles a band is loading in through a back door. This site exists because I got tired of hearing about it on Monday.

That’s the whole origin story. Flyers stapled over flyers. Five ticket sites, each holding a fifth of the truth. Press releases calling everything “essential” until the word stopped meaning anything. Somebody needed to write it all down in one place and tell it straight, and I had the bad judgment to volunteer.

So here’s what this is. The calendar gets rebuilt every morning, covering every room from the fairgrounds to the river and past it. When something’s worth leaving the corridor for, I’ll list it, and I’ll tell you plainly that it’s off Central. You’ll never catch me pretending a casino ballroom sits in Nob Hill. This Weekend does what it says. The Guidebook holds the venues, the neighborhoods, and the acts whose names you should be learning now so you can be insufferable about them later. The newsletter lands once a week, free, no games.

And here’s the promise underneath all of it. Every listing on this site tries to earn one sentence you won’t find on the venue’s website. Where to stand. When doors actually mean doors. Whose crowd shows up on a Tuesday versus what the poster claims. Nobody buys a kind word here, and nobody gets torched for sport. What’s good is good. What’s bad is bad. What’s complicated gets treated honestly, which in this town is most things worth loving.

One more thing, and then I’ll let you get to the listings. Go to the show. Not the one you already know about. The other one, the Tuesday one, the one where the opener’s mom is running the merch table. Somewhere out there is another Idiot Savant, and their Black Flag night is coming. The Sandias will do that watermelon thing they do whether you’re out there or not, but a city only stays interesting if people keep showing up for it.

I’ll be around. You won’t know it’s me. That’s the point.

Tip your bartender. Buy the opener’s shirt. And if something’s happening on this street that I don’t know about, I want to hear about it.