Despite all the new music, for me Café Racer Radio strikes a nostalgic note, both for the pre-coronavirus days when we could discover such bands live and in person, but also for the older, smaller, scrappier Seattle. There’s a whiff of it here, in the DIY aesthetic, with its simple website and hosts prerecording intros and identification breaks on their phones.
Ramsey says right now he’s seeing about 100 to 150 regular listeners per week — an intimate club, which I can almost feel while listening. “The goal is not to be big,” Albertson explained, “But to do a bunch of cool things.”
One of those is Back in the Day, a new podcast from Ramsey (watch for it next week), in which he flips through old issues of Seattle music newspaper The Rocket (1979-2000) and gives a sense of what was going on musically at that time. In the first episode, he looks at the August 1991 issue and notes the feature story, about local music label Sub Pop: “Sub Flop: Is the Price of World Domination Too High?” (Spoiler alert, it wasn’t. Sub Pop opened its second retail shop downtown earlier this week.)
The feature might be targeted to “olds” like myself, but it also offers a longer-term view of Seattle music’s highs and lows. Things are certainly dire for venues right now, having been closed since March. Forthcoming grants from the recently passed Save Our Stages Act, as well as the Washington-based Keep Music Live relief fund, should help ensure these dormant spaces will still be around to reopen once it’s safe to sing, nod and rock out together in large groups. And when will that be? Who knows?
In the meantime, Café Racer’s radio pivot stands as a symbol of the Seattle arts and music community’s resilience and ingenuity. Like other venues — including indispensable all-ages club The Vera Project, which celebrated 20 years just last night — Café Racer will return eventually. But in a slightly different incarnation: Ramsey has secured a new space nearby, with a landlord who he said, “gets it.” I look forward to returning to these spots, standing close to strangers and listening.
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January 29, 2021 at 09:01AM
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ArtSea: Seattle's Café Racer turns up the radio - Crosscut
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