Musicians often wax nostalgic about the glory days of the Valley music scene, and they often point to the 1990s as its pinnacle. It was a good time for music, to be sure, and Northampton’s scene, centered around the Bay State Hotel (now the site of the three-story complex containing Sierra Grille, Mulino’s and Bishop’s Lounge), was hopping.
As someone who spent some hours on the Bay State stage myself, I tended to accept that assessment. But the more I found out about the upcoming recreation of an earlier version of that scene, the more I realized I may well have missed out by a couple of decades.
Guy DeVito, bassist in the band Fat, filled me in. “In the early ’70s, the Rusty Nail was a little Polish farmer, blue collar, shot and beer bar out in the tobacco fields of Sunderland—just this little one-story building that had a little stage in it. It only had music one night a week or so.
“Peter Newland and I had moved here from the Cape, and it was right around the time of our first record. We were looking for places to play locally. We heard about the Nail from the guys in Clean Living. We went down there and talked them into letting us play and charge a dollar at the door.”
Fat quickly became one of the main bands that drove the Nail scene. “It was the perfect storm,” says DeVito. “The drinking age was 18. Music was not quite as prevalent as it is now—back then it was a special thing. The Nail became a destination in no time. In a couple of years, it was doing so well they put this huge addition on the place. It was probably five times as big as the original building. It had raised seating on the sides and a dance floor in the middle, a really nice stage, and a dressing troom. It was a really nice facility to play in.”
DeVito explains that Fat, then a regularly touring act, always hit the stage at the Rusty Nail when it returned from the road. “We played hundreds of times there. I don’t know how many times. We headlined there ourselves, played with Valley bands, and opened for a lot of touring acts—Taj Mahal, NRBQ—a lot of bands. I mean, Howlin’ Wolf played there!”
Jack Dunn, Rusty Nail co-owner, says he found himself chatting at a show one evening with a guy who turned out to be the head of the well-known blues record label Alligator. Making that connection soon enabled Dunn to bring some major blues players to the Valley. “My first big booking was John Lee Hooker,” Dunn says.
And things stayed big from then on, with major blues players from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughan stopping by. The Hooker show, says Dunn, was so unexpectedly big that the Nail had to turn people away (fire code said it could hold, Dunn says, around 600, and often, it held more than that).
Among the Valley mainstays of the Nail scene were Fat, the Mitch Chakour Band, Clean Living and Real Tears, and most of the members of those bands will be on hand for Rusty Nail Revisited, the second installment of the Northampton Arts Council’s Four Sundays in February, on Sunday, Feb. 12.
DeVito says things have, naturally, changed a lot in the Valley. “You drive by where the Nail was, and it’s tract houses. It’s a totally different vibe—the malls weren’t there. The Valley—not to be a curmudgeon—has become almost Anywhere USA. Northampton has a fertile scene, Amherst has UMass. There’s a lot of great young musicians as well as established guys who’ve gotten involved as faculty as UMass and other schools. But it’s not like it was 30, 40 years ago.
“This was one of the pockets, I think, on the East Coast that had the elements that it took to make a fertile scene—colleges, the culture, the permissive attitude to a point, the artistic attitude—there were a lot of institutions that were just starting up, and a lot of energy being put into these things. Jack and [Rusty Nail co-owners] Ed and Kathy Stefan saw an opportunity to capitalize on that and create this incredible scene. They had the resources and the blessing of the town, though it got a little dicey toward the end. It was just a cooler, kinder, gentler scene—people were a lot more relaxed,” says DeVito.
The end of the Rusty Nail came in the ’80s, when the building burned. Dunn had by then sold his share of the Rusty Nail to the other owners.
Clearly the loss of the Nail didn’t stop music-making in the Valley, and plenty of places stood to inherit its mantle to varying degrees—Sheehan’s, the Bay State Hotel, The Elevens, the Iron Horse. Still, it’s remarkable to know just how long the Valley has been an important spot on the musical map.?
Rusty Nail Revisited features Fat, Real Tears, members of Clean Living, and the Mitch Chakour Band. Feb. 12, 2 p.m., $15/advance, $20/door, Academy of Music Theater, 274 Main St., Northampton, www.northamptonartscouncil.org.
