In recent years Durham has risen from its status as a junior partner in the Triangle music scene to a thriving music community that is home to indie bands with national followings. The Bull City has lacked a mid-sized, dedicated concert venue for some time, however.
Although the Duke Coffeehouse, the Pinhook and the Layabout (courtesy of Craig Powell) have catered to local and touring bands alike, their capacities are decidedly modest. The Durham Performing Arts Center and Duke Performances are bigger organizations, but they skew toward older, more established acts. Bands falling outside these categories had to turn to clubs outside Durham like Raleigh’s Lincoln Theater, Local 506 in Chapel Hill and the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, if they had even considered the Bull City at all.
Two recently opened clubs hope to change that. Motorco Music Hall, located at 723 Rigsbee Avenue, and Casbah at 1007 West Main Street are dedicated concert venues and full-service bars with an ambitious goal of filling this void.
Motorco, located in the Durham Athletic Park neighborhood, boasts a 3400-square-foot floor space and a 450+ person capacity. This location is out of the way for most Duke students and beyond the downtown orbit. But following the August opening of Fullsteam Brewery’s Tavern across the street and the reopening of King’s Sandwich Shop a block away, the former business district seems to be undergoing a rebirth of sorts.
Jeremy Roth, along with Chris Tamplin and Mike and Candy Webster, conceived of Motorco as providing a venue for local bands and drawing national and regional touring acts. Carrboro’s vaunted Cat’s Cradle looms large in the imaginations of the bar’s owners and staff. Roth sees his club as the Durham equivalent, and the design of the space speaks to that. Motorco is very much a concert hall with a bar rather than a bar with a stage—the cavernous room framed by black, wooden bleachers and exposed piping in the ceiling suggest a newer, more sophisticated Cradle.
Tamplin will keep bar and book, taking on his former role at Raleigh’s Tir Na Nog, where he oversaw the Irish pub’s transformation into a live music venue with the successful “Local Band, Local Beer” series.
Roth sees the club open at least six nights a week, with plans for ping-pong and four-square nights in the future.
Located in the former Wells-Floyd Florist, Casbah is more modest in scale, with a capacity of just under 300. The club’s exterior is unassuming, aside from the prominently painted logo on either side of the building. The interior, however, has been extensively remodeled and takes on a Middle-Eastern aesthetic with murals, arched doorways and a hand-crafted wooden bar. Owned by Fergus Bradley, co-owner of Alivia’s, The James Joyce and The Federal, and his wife Jana, Casbah is more firmly rooted in Duke’s social scene and has been rented out for Greek events already. They have announced weekly DJ nights and monthly Monti storytelling open mic nights as regular events.
Adele Williams, a bartender at Casbah, said that with a smaller capacity and a full liquor bar, Casbah has more in common with Local 506 than the Cradle.
“We keep bar hours so we aren’t going to kick you out after the show, like at the Cradle,” Williams said.
Steve Gardner, formerly of Yep Roc and Sugar Hill Records and current WXDU DJ, has been hired as booking manager at Casbah. He sees “the club as an eclectic, comfortable listening room,” with a modern PA system and the atmosphere of a house show.
Although the openings of both clubs in such close succession might raise red flags, Gardener doesn’t consider the two venues competing. He said that the owners and staff of the two clubs, as well as those of the Pinhook, are friends.
“The way we see it, we are all filling a niche,” Gardner said. “We’re trying to make Durham a vibrant live music scene, and no one club is going to do it by itself.”
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