Verse 1 - The Hay That Fed the Bull!

This Post is the start of The Bowery Station Story.

We like beer.  We like live music.  When I say we, I am referring to both me and my wife Lisa.

I grew up in Vermont and Lisa moved there in her early 20s, during the early 1990s.  We met in Burlington, which at the time had become a live music mecca...around the time Phish was just hitting stride, catapulting from the bars of Burlington into the national scene and onto the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.

Their justified rise to stardom drew musicians from Boston, New York, and around the Country to Burlington, only to electrify the live music scene further.  Everyone looked for their chance to play the stage at Nectar's, the namesake bar of Phish's first album, A Picture of Nectar, and one of the stages they developed their unique sound on.  Lisa and I were blessed to be able to wonder out on any given night and find an array of live music options, with exceptionally high levels of talent.  The days of my youth in Vermont of sneaking in the fire exit of a smoke filled beer hall on a back road and listening to cover rock bands as underage kids were far gone, along with the mullet.  This was the early 90s in Burlington, and the live music scene was on.... big time.

One thing Lisa and I both noticed on our almost nightly ventures bouncing between blues, jazz, grunge and zydeco venues while sucking down the suds of the evolving Vermont Craft beer scene was.... it was friggin' cold.  I mean full on bugger freezing cold.  People whom have never experienced the term, or it's inspiration, don't get it...  you step outside, and even if you don't suck air in your nostrils, you feel everything that is exposed to the air begin to freeze immediately... immediately.  That's bugger freezing cold.  The kind of cold that hurts to breath.  When it wasn't cold, it was raw.  Damp, rainy, dreary and well ....still damn cold.  Summer, which might occur for a week or two sometime in July or August depending on the cold fronts, was short.  Like weekend short... over before you know it kind of short.  Like, don't take too long a nap short. Thus standing in line to hear your favorite musical act was more than likely a painful wait...but ultimately worth it as always.
The bugger freezing cold led us to expand the radius of our outings....like for EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES of an expansion.

As often as we could we would scrape together enough gas money, and Lisa and I would jump into whichever vehicle of ours at the time showed the most promise of making it... and make an old school road trip to Key West.  I had done this on my own since High School and during my many spring breaks in Colleges...  (Seventeen Years and Five Colleges to gain an Associates Degrees to be exact) and had already learned it was never good enough to simply make it to points in Northern Florida such as Daytona, or St. Pete, but rather, one must dig deep and go the distance... yup, Key West always offered a guarantee of shorts and flip flops.  There wasn't nearly as much craft beer, and the music was much more Buffett-centric at the time, but the need to thaw out took precedence over our other entertainment priorities.

It needs to be mentioned that I had played guitar most of my life...well I should say that I played with guitars.  The reality was that I never really seemed to get past a collection of five songs that I had currently memorized at any one time to really impress any chicks.  I also, frequently put it down long enough to lose any sort of callouses I had developed, making the choice to pick it back up that much more painful.  I occasionally would try to check out an Open Mic in Burlington, but inevitably due to the talent base in town... someone like Trey Anastasio would step on stage for an all night jam with comparably talented musicians... thus it quickly dashed any hope I had of auditioning my bastardized version of Country Roads for all the world to see.  As well it discouraged my interest in developing my talent any further on the ol' six string.

Ultimately,  I relegated myself to the friendly Vermont campfire, although I'm sure my friends were none too thrilled with my sixth rendition of Brown Eyed Girl as they roasted their marshmallow and swigged back 32oz Gennie Cream Ales.  Needless to say, I left the performing for the pros, but always wished there was a venue or stage to showcase my level of performing, and get the experience of playing through a sound system in front of a crowd.

Stay tuned as The Bowery Station Story unfolds in the next episode...Make Hay When the Sun Shines!