Black Cat Celebrates 30 Years – WCP

The building at 1811 14th St. NW was bought lengthy earlier than mimosa brunches and excessive cost actual property have been commonplace on the stretch connecting Logan Circle to U Street NW. The final 5 years have seen the world transition for quite a lot of causes, each deliberate and unplanned. But Black Cat has weathered gentrification, a altering music scene, and a worldwide pandemic, and remains to be doing what it’s at all times achieved: because the track goes, “the ground’s unsolid, don’t forget to keep your ear to the ground.”

This previous weekend, Black Cat celebrated its 30 years of longevity with a bought out, two-night anniversary get together. Multiple bands with roots in D.C., each old and new, have been available, together with Ex Hex, Gray Matter, Flasher, the Messthetics, and Birthday Girl on night time one, and the reunion of Velocity Girl, enjoying for the primary time in 21 years, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Bad Moves, Hammered Hulls, and the Owners on night time two. But it was a reunion within the traditional sense too, as dad and mom introduced their youngsters, pals bumped into old pals, and people group ties that always get damaged as you get older have been refastened. In the phrases of Mabel Canty, lead singer of Birthday Girl and daughter of man-in-every-local-band Brendan Canty, “the Black Cat is the one still standing club that can connect me to the music my dad made, the music of the original D.C. punk music generation.”

Ten years in the past, for the Cat’s twentieth anniversary, City Paper printed an in depth historical past concerning the membership and its proprietor Dante Ferrando. We talked to Ferrando once more this month to see how the final decade has been and the modifications he has seen each inside and out of doors the venue.

WCP: Between 2013 and 2023, what have been a few of the main milestones for the Cat? 

Dante Ferrando: We’ve modified a lot during the last 10 years. We’ve achieved it in little chunks, so it was in all probability a five-year course of to get from the place we have been bodily again then to the place we are actually. But that was preceded by years of planning on what we might do. Originally we have been going to place a roof deck on the place, type of take all the pieces that was on the primary ground and plop it on the roof. Then we needed to modify that plan for quite a lot of causes and scale that again and ended up with the Red Room on the second ground, closing the espresso home, closing the Back Stage …