OK, THIS place was fucked up. and charming. Bernie was one hell of a guy. when you're driving down a state road in alabama, and see a building, smaller than a trailer, one beer sign lit in a single window, Do you stop? Do you book a show? Repeatedly? How did Bernie afford that big house and all those race cars in various stages of disrepair? And what was in that room we weren't supposed to go into when we spent the night there? Probably just cats that he didn't want getting out. Some guy tried to over-charge me for acid in the parking lot. We gained some die-hard fans in Montgomery. They made us barbeque, which I believe directly contributed to a fight I got in at the 1048 Club (see that link for the full story), also in montgomery.

This venue is no longer. Bernie was a uniquely weird character. He had some kind of bizarre, presumably drug-related relationship with hordes of local teenagers, so our first couple of shows there were completely packed. But then something went awry, and kids stopped going there. The first time PopCanon played there, I was deathly ill and nearly passed out after two or three songs. The band played the rest of the three-hour show without me. The second time, Bernie had promised us that there would be a "Lesbian lockdown" which was some kind of regular event where he locked the doors and brought in strippers or something. But apparently by the time the show came around he wasn't doing the lesbian lockdown anymore. I assume he must have run into some kind of trouble with it. I still don't know what was going on there. Sometimes we stayed at a sleezy motel (free Playboy channel) next door afterward, and sometimes we stayed at Bernie's mansion. His wife was very suspicious of us, although we never could figure out why.