I don’t remember going to my first concert. By the time I was 9 years old, I’d gone to countless house shows and music venues. I saw the Smashing Pumpkins live and grew a lasting affinity for the White Stripes.
Growing up, music encompassed me. It became my childhood security blanket.
My mom met my stepdad Eddie because they were both entrenched in the Winston-Salem music scene. Eddie was in the locally famous garage-rock band Jews and Catholics, in which my mom’s best friend, Aunt Alanna (the Jew), played the upright bass, while Eddie (the begrudged Catholic), played the guitar. Having moved here from New York, my mom was the ultimate cool girl and made sure her associates were up to snuff as well. All of my parents’ friends either played music or owned a bar/venue, usually both.
When I was little, common names like Ziggy’s and The Garage, or underground haunts like the Black Lodge were all parts of my vocabulary. I saw They Might Be Giants at Ziggy’s in the fifth grade. I ordered Sprites at The Garage while watching my stepdad, dubbed “Shreddie” by his friends, tear up the stage. While he would flip through records at Earshot, my mom would shop in Marshall’s, and I would stare at the David Bowie statue while sitting on the ratty green couch. As block fests like Summer on Trade played, I’d eat the shoestring fries from Skippy’s while watching my parents wade through a crowd of people — who they all knew. I loved running around Krankies, now a hipster eatery and coffee shop, which used to host the coolest gigs and art markets.
My way of rebelling from my parents was not attending art school or being in a band in high school. Instead, I had a phase of straightening my hair and wanting to be a lawyer. Now, in my early adulthood, I couldn’t be more grateful for my semi-unconventional upbringing.
Places like Ziggy’s and The Garage became like childhood friends to me. Eventually, these places closed. Ziggy’s first, then The Garage. Earshot was replaced with Hippo Records after the beloved owner, Phred, died after a battle with leukemia. Jews and Catholics disbanded in 2015, leaving me and the garage rockers of Winston-Salem heartbroken.
By the time I got to high school, a lot of the cool venues around town were gone. Now, you had to drive to Charlotte or Raleigh to see big names, and Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill to see the indie-rockers. My parents and their Cobain-worshiping friends still hung around at smaller venues like Monstercade, and in 2018, The Ramkat took over what used to be Ziggy’s. Still, compared to when I was 9, my local concert attendance had drastically changed.
When I was 15, I realized I did not grow up in the same Winston-Salem that many of my friends did. Sometimes, I would lament not having cookie-cutter parents and secretly stew in jealousy of the families I saw on TV. My way of rebelling from my parents was not attending art school or being in a band in high school. Instead, I had a phase of straightening my hair and wanting to be a lawyer. Now, in my early adulthood, I couldn’t be more grateful for my semi-unconventional upbringing.
When I started to go around town with my friends in high school, they would always joke that I would run into two people I knew per minute. Strangers often came up to me, gushing about how they knew me when I was “this tall” or asked me how my parents were. Besides being a local musician, my stepdad worked at a local radio station, and my mom had stints writing for the local paper, helping run a large art school and teaching at local universities. They were the epitome of hip young parents. Perhaps over-involved in the 30-to-40-something former-grunge-listening-garage-rockers scene, they wouldn’t even let me watch Disney Channel or listen to any music they didn’t think was objectively good.
For my high school graduation party, I begged my stepdad to reunite Jews and Catholics for the first time since 2015. I had only given him and my aunt a month’s notice, and with heavy hearts, they said they couldn’t do it. However, when I was working as a server after school, they would secretly sneak the upright bass and stacked pedal board into our garage and practice. For my party, they surprised me with a reunion show and left me (and everyone else) in tears.
I stayed in Winston-Salem for college after a lot of Ladybird-esque rampages yelling about how I needed to leave my hometown and branch out in my collegiate life. Life as a Wake Forest student differs drastically from that of a “townie,” which I have been called several times. In Wake Forest circles, I always feel like a local or the Winston-Salem representative, and in my Winston circles, I am a Wake Forest student. It feels like an evil tug-of-war, where I feel like an outsider, no matter where I am.
When I started hanging out with the Wake Radio disciples and artsy folks on campus, a common complaint I heard was that the art scene in Winston-Salem sucks. For being the “City of Arts and Innovation,” the scene seems lackluster compared to the flashier nearby cities like Durham or Asheville. While I get to complain about Winston-Salem any day of the week, the second I hear a negative word come out of someone else’s mouth, I rise to defend it. I take every knock of the city to heart — and often rise at the chance to throw some punches at my college, just to prove I haven’t been fully converted, yet.
To me, Winston-Salem will never be Deactown. It’ll be going to house parties that my parents’ friends threw in Ardmore, skipping class in high school to get Café Gelato and sitting in the art park on Trade Street, reading a book from the Little Free Library.
When I tramp around town now, dragging my out-of-town college friends around Winston-Salem, I’m the most depressing tour guide in the world. A lot of my highlights are spaces that are now unrecognizable, and I share a sob story of how they closed forever. I clutch the places of my childhood close to my chest. I’ve never been good at letting things go. Winston-Salem grows more gentrified by the minute, and I leap at the chance to tell anyone what we once had. In a way, it’s hard to watch my peers now talk about my old haunts. I feel a sense of ownership over my town and fight the urge to gatekeep the spaces that I want to preserve for locals.
I still long for what Winston-Salem used to be, but my rose-colored glasses will stay strapped to my head for our little city.
But I also jump at the chance to bring them to my stepdad’s shows or proudly tout my status as the resident nepo-baby of the local music industry. I’ll never skip a chance to bring someone to the Airstream, hit up McKay’s and then go catch a show at Gas Hill.
Perhaps I do agree that the art scene in Winston-Salem is dismal. I miss the venues of my childhood, big names coming into town and large block parties filling summer downtown streets. I romanticize my childhood and mourn the scene that my parents had. In the same vein, The Ramkat has been ramping up artists. New venues like The Den are emerging, and small local bands are popping up all over the place. Art Crush prevails with the simple pleasure of shutting down a block and filling it with good, loud music.
In 2023, Eddie and Aunt Alanna reunited to play Fem Fest, a festival that stems from the organization FemFestNC, a non-profit that supports women through art and music, donating their funding to Family Services. Their main mission is to advocate and fundraise to end sexual violence and domestic abuse, aiding women all over Forsyth County. Bryn, the founder, was a friend of my stepdad and passed away in 2021. Her legacy is an important one to be honored. FemFest was one of the most special nights of my life, and I was ecstatic that Jews and Catholics took the big stage at The Ramkat, playing for a public audience for the first time in eight years. My mom and I danced at the front the whole time, surrounded by the friends, musicians and the artists who raised me.
I’ve accepted my kooky, pretentious family and realized I turned out exactly like my parents. Now rid of my teenage shame, I’ve jammed with more musicians at Wake Forest than I ever did at my arts magnet high school. I still long for what Winston-Salem used to be, but my rose-colored glasses will stay strapped to my head for our little city.
I would never blame my parents or their army of band-tee-shirt-clad friends for the “downfall” of the Winston-Salem indie culture. It’s not the responsibility of the generation who created the art-filled spaces of my youth to uphold the music scene. It’s our turn.
