According to owner Jeff Parks, the venue will be moving to Grand Center, a few doors down from Jazz at the Bistro and about a block from the Fox Theatre. Parks says the space will have a capacity of between 550 and 600.
"I'm really stoked," Parks says. "It's a real step forward for us.... It should really be great for us in the long run. We're still going to have a nice, intimate feel to it. I'm glad we're preserving that quality."
The planned opening date for the new location is March 17, but Parks intends to send out the old Creepy with a bang on March 13. The lineup features the Spunks, Gito Gito Hustler, the Independents and "Surprise Special Guest" Peelander-Z.
Members of community radio station KDHX (88.1 FM) recently received mailings about a pledge drive scheduled for February 9 through 15.
The goal for this drive — a one-off to supplement their regularly scheduled fall and spring drives — is to raise $100,000, with a special focus on recruiting new members.
Station manager and music director Nico Leone says the largely volunteer-run station has already cut corners behind the scenes, largely by "tightening up expenses." He says a number of other factors necessitated pledge overdrive, including an unexpected dearth of new members during last fall's drive that he believes may have had to do with the Gulf Coast hurricanes.
"Normally when we do a pledge drive, we get almost 50/50 new members to renewing members," Leone explains. "[In the fall] it was 80 percent renewing, 20 percent new members. People were so focused on their charitable giving to disaster relief, people looking to new places to give would be turning to those places first. It's a pretty natural response."
(KDHX itself donated 10 percent of its fall pledge funds — in the ballpark of $15,000 — to WWOZ, a New Orleans "jazz and heritage station" whose facilities were damaged by Hurricane Katrina.)
As with many home dwellers in the area, the station has also felt the financial sting of rising natural gas prices; Leone says KDHX's expenses are "up in the range of 30 to 40 percent."
You can't help wondering what'll happen if the station fails to raise this $100,000.
"The answer isn't that we go away," Leone says. "We don't want to give people the impression that this is ‘Send in your money so that KDHX doesn't disappear.' That's not the case. We feel like we've tightened up our expenses and operating to the point where any further cuts we have to make will impact the types of services we can give to the community. That's a line we don't want to cross."
If you're looking ahead, the annual spring drive has been pushed back to early May.
With the seventh anniversary of the weekly Noiseday Hootenanny looming, the still-open-but-not-for-long Frederick's Music Lounge (4454 Chippewa Street; 314-351-5711) holds a special edition of the night tonight (February 9). Hosts from the past five years have been invited back to take part in the revelry. Trashy, Replacements-esque rockers Two Cow Garage (hey: A to Z spelled it correctly this time!) return to Fred's Saturday, February 11, for a gig that promises to be the hottest one in town that night.
Hey, DJs! Want to earn a chance to spin at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami during the Winter Music Conference in March? Send A to Z your best mix CDs to: Annie Zaleski, Riverfront Times, 6358 Delmar Boulevard, Suite 200, St. Louis, MO 63130. The deadline for submissions is February 17, with a spin-off among the finalists the following week. We'll keep you posted on developments.
