Music Everywhere by Jourard Marty

Author:Jourard, Marty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2016-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

Trader’s South. Photograph by author.

Despite the titillating nature of the club, Trader’s South was your basic family-run business, with the disarming presence of Tom’s wife collecting the admission charge at the door, his daughter serving drinks, and his son occasionally sitting in with the band on saxophone, at the “suggestion” of Tom.

Through the years many local bands acted as the house band at this thriving business frequented by a diverse clientele. “Some topless places are really crude,” Henderson says in a feature newspaper article profiling the club and dancers, “but we run this place clean. There’s no bottomless, no strippers, no hustling. We got live music on weekends, and people come here just to have good entertainment.”

The Wednesday night topless dance contest prize was fifty dollars, for a dancer the equivalent of twenty-five individual tabletop dances, and competition for the money was always intense, to the delight of band and audience alike.

Across town at Dub’s, perhaps in response to the recent passing of the Equal Rights Amendment in January of 1972 as well as the growing ranks of the feminist movement, Dub Thomas discontinued the ever-popular topless dancers. Attracting female customers to the club and therefore attracting even more males to the club was most likely the primary reason, or perhaps the liberal politics of the university student body led to the decision. Whatever the cause, for local bands who played there, it was a sad day indeed.

THEM CHANGES

Mudcrutch continued to perform at university gigs, in the bars and clubs around the area, and as far north as Grant’s Lounge in Macon, where they left a demo tape at Capricorn Records that was rejected as sounding “too English.” The band played at a country music bar in Lake City, at Katy O’Malley’s in Tallahassee, and at the High Springs Tobacco Festival.

In the summer of ’72, however, Mudcrutch could generally be heard at Dub’s, as Petty continued to develop his songwriting, with the band slipping originals in the set along with their usual mix of late fifties rock, country songs, and danceable Top Forty favorites. “We’d book six weeks at a time,” drummer Randall Marsh recalls, “five sets a night, six nights a week. It felt like my second home; we were in and out of there quite a bit.”

During one such night at Dub’s, Mudcrutch guitarist Tom Leadon altered the course of his musical path while attempting to defend the honor of the band.

In his own words: “We were at Dub’s, and he had told us that he wanted to lay us off after the next week, and he told me in a nice way, but he was up during the miniskirt contest, saying, ‘I’m gonna expand the room, and get bigger and better bands in here.’ All he was trying to do was promote his expansion and drum up business, but I was hearing it like he was putting us down, saying he was going to get bigger and better bands. I was just thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to

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