Eastside story

Though it’s such a small place, there is enough energy in Eastside Tavern to split a face in two. With horror movie figurines watching from elevated shelves, a Darth Vader cutout taped to the door and a plastic bust of Elvis sitting next to a demonic Santa Claus statuette, Eastside projects definite attitude.

And then there is the music.

Since it opened its doors in the 1990s, Eastside, 1016 E. Broadway, has become Columbia’s asylum for the kind of musicians who pull no punches with their music. The venue offers music as diverse as straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll, heavy-metal bands in the style of Slayer and Fungazi, Zeppelin-inspired classic rock and industrial rock.

It’s a place where rock ‘n’ roll never dies, where people hang onto the metal’s edge.

“As far as Columbia goes, I can’t really speak for St. Louis or Kansas City, there’s nothing else like this here,” says doorman Josh “Big Pants” Windle. “We’re sort of a diamond in the rough. A rough-looking diamond, but it’s a diamond.”

On any given night, for the price of a fast food value meal, rock fans can get a taste of several bands inside a venue with a personality all its own. Danny Matteson, 23, is with the Columbia heavy-metal band Bald Eagle. An Eastside regular, both as a performer and a patron, Matteson describes the establishment in simple terms.

“It’s a rock and roll/horror movie bar,” Matteson says. “There are Ramones and ‘Evil Dead’ posters up. What more do you need to know?”

The first clue that Eastside is a different kind of place is the bouncer: Big Pants, a tattooed, 6’8”, 500-plus pound man responsible for booking the shows and keeping the peace. On a recent Friday night, Windle chatted with friends and patrons as Isabelle ­— an experimental but undeniably heavy rock band from Hermann — cranked out a raucous set.

Behind the bar is bartender Brian Craig, who for years played his rock ‘n’ roll music to audiences large and small.

“It’s like the sonic intensity is like ‘huaaaah,’ if you’re good,” Craig says. “But if you’re terrible, it’s like ‘gosh, shut up!’”

Embalmed in a lime and turquoise spotlight, Isabelle was the opening act, playing before a small crowd of a few dozen people. The audience was placid at first, staring at the band with little to no emotion. But within minutes, lead singer Lee Schnelting had whipped the crowd into a frenzy, with the bedlam reaching critical mass once he began violently clapping his hands. The crowd’s reaction added to the already copious collection of sound swirling around the room.

As Isabelle’s set demonstrated, Eastside is a place where each guitar lick is a vicious beast that sneaks into the concert-goers’ ears and locks the door; a bar where drumbeats rumble through so hard they vibrate without cessation inside the body. While much of the music featured at Eastside is no longer considered mainstream, its fans are devoted to its energy and abandon.

“Metal has never really gone away,” Windle says. “There’s dozens of labels that still put out relevant music that’s metal.”

In fact, a recent article in Rolling Stone magazine reported increasing interest in hard and classic rock music among teenagers aged 12 to 18. The article claims that teens are shying away from “bland” hip-hop and pop records, preferring to spend their money on hard rock pioneers like Led Zepplin and Jimi Hendrix.

Paul Siler, from the North Carolina-based rock ‘n’ roll band Birds of Avalon, which played at Eastside last weekend, says that changes in taste are a fact of life in the music business.

“It just goes in waves,” Siler says. “I think every seven or eight years, people discover their uncle’s albums, and it just keeps like recycling.”

Windle, however, agrees more with Rolling Stone’s thesis that shifts in attitude toward harder-edged music represents a rejection of the middle of the road rotations that permeates Top 40 radio programming.

“On an underground level, with MTV and VH1 shoving hip-hop and all that stuff down your throat 24/7, and pop and mainstream radio, definitely people get tired of it,” Windle says. “There’s an appreciation for places like this where you can hear something new and refreshing.”

Craig can echo that sentiment from his own experience. When he was growing up, he grew tired and bored with both radio and MTV.

“So I had to go dig, dig for a lot of classic rock, and I found a lot of great bands, like Black Flag — punk rock bands which I never would have listened to — but I got turned on by other people digging, trying to find something that wasn’t ‘government issued’ music,” Craig says.

As with any style of music, some current rock and metal bands will likely stand the test of time, while others will fade into obscurity, Craig says. Still others will defy death and trends to somehow still be heard.

“A band like Alice In Chains are kind of old now,” says Craig, referring to the popular ‘90s-era grunge band that’s still on the airwaves, years after a drug overdose killed the lead singer. “They’re still a good band. It’s just that nobody really listens to them anymore. I’m sure there will be a resurgence of them in 10 years — everyone will buy their albums or something. But everything dies out for a little while and then comes back.”

Metal bands, to their fans, have never gone out of style. The genre continues to move forward because the musicians are committed to originality, refusing to copy the styles of the past, Craig says.

“Some bands take on style and grind it into the ground,” he says. “Sort of like a lot of death metal with all the high-pitch screaming.”

Heavy metal and some forms of hard rock have a reputation for inspiring and abetting violence. This belief peaked in the 1980s, when high-profile trials involving Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest — cases in which plaintiffs alleged the music drove teenage listeners to suicide — were in the news. However, neither Osbourne nor Judas Priest were found liable.

Craig attributes the bad rap to misconceptions about the music by people who don’t really understand it or the people who listen to it.

“That’s what Christians want you to think: heavy music is caused by the devil and makes you want to fornicate and stab people,” Craig says. “You know, it’s ridiculous. It’s music, man. It’s just music.”

If anything, Craig says, playing metal music is a better alternative to violence.

“This is how people feel,” he says. “It’s better to express yourself musically than to take it out on the wife and kid. At least that’s what I think.”

Windle and Craig say Eastside Tavern is not known for attracting an aggressive audience. There have been a couple fights in the past few years, but otherwise few reasons to call the police.

“Most heavy metal and punk rock shows, there’s fighting every night,” Craig says. “But when you’ve got a door guy who weighs about 550, you might think a little differently.”

Indeed, the crowd at Eastside is usually not contingent to the style of music. Occasionally, depending on who is performing, the bar attracts people from out of town. But, Windle says, it’s mostly “college kids who don’t have any place to go” and the “townies” who come to hear some music.

“There aren’t a lot of people who go to shows because they’re ‘metal’ shows,” Windle says. “There are a lot of people who go to shows because it’s their friend’s band that’s playing. It varies, depending on which band is playing.”

And for a city dominated by bars catering toward what Windle dubs the “fraternity/sorority” crowd, Siler says there’s always a place in Columbia where his musical tastes are appreciated and celebrated. He’s even discovered that the Tavern’s friendly reputation to both the bands and the patrons it hosts is extending across the Missouri border. Before Birds of Avalon even booked its first gig at Eastside, the word had spread among his contacts.

“They were like, ‘Yeah man, that place is awesome!’” Siler says. “They were like, ‘yeah that place is cool, they’ve got a sci-fi theme going on and the people there are really nice.’”