Once you got past the burly bouncers on the other side of The Decade door, the next challenge on a busy weekend night was weaving through the people two or three deep at the front bar to get to the middle stage room. Sometimes it seemed to take 20 minutes.
On Jan. 26, 1990, I had worked my way through and was at that spot near the famous copper plates that contained the scribbled roll call of national bands that played there. The Frampton Brothers were on stage, opening for the Boston band The Neighborhoods.
Navigating that narrow corridor, I got to a lean long-haired gent wearing a black biker jacket. I put my hand on his back and said, “Excuse me,” and when he spun around, I was face to face with Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and what a face that was. He was headed for a back-bar table to hang with the boys. I told him to “walk this way.” (Actually, I don’t think I said much of anything.) Aerosmith had played the arena the previous night, and while they declined the offer to jam with the Framptons, to the ridicule of frontman Ed Masley, they jumped on stage with the Neighborhoods.
It turned out to be one of the many historic nights at a place that was unlike any rock ’n’ roll club in the world. Sitting at the corner of Atwood and Sennott streets in Oakland, from 1974 to 1995, The Decade was the stomping ground for all walks of Pittsburgh life and the culture-clashing center of the city’s musical universe.
As Gabby Means writes in “The Decade: Images of Modern America,” “On any given day a mailman could be sitting with a punk rocker who was chatting with a surgeon who earlier bought a drink for a college football player.”
In her new photo-driven 95-page book (Arcadia Publishing, $22.99), Ms. Means, the granddaughter of former Decade owner Dominic DiSilvio, chronicles the emergence of Pittsburgh’s original rock scene in the ’70s at The Decade, recounts the many crazy nights there and depicts the colorful characters who made it more than just another hole-in-the-wall rock club.
Mr. DiSilvio, a Pitt grad whose father was a prominent surgeon and whose mother had a radio cooking show and homemaking advice column, named the bar for his beloved ’50s but ended up setting the stage for Pittsburgh’s rock renaissance of the late ’70s. In the City of Champions era, The Decade became home to the Iron City Houserockers, The Silencers, Norman Nardini and the Tigers, Billy Price and the Keystone Rhythm Band (all of whom signed to major labels), while also opening the door to such Electric Banana punk upstarts as Carsickness, The Five and The Cynics, aka “Banana bands.”
The energy of the music, the hard-nosed staff, cramped spaces, cluttered decor, lack of a bathroom door (!) and the uneasy convergence of students, punks and blue-collar locals made it a place where anything could happen.
“When I first started,” John Fareri, the late bartender, says in the book, “it wasn’t unusual at the end of the night to take all the bar towels and pass them out to wipe up the blood after all of the fights.”
But there was a lot of love as well in the way the DiSilvios operated The Decade as a cheap lunch spot and rock club, and that’s why everyone wanted to be there.
Thanks to a partnership with promoter Danny Kresky, the Ramones became the first national act to perform there, doing consecutive nights in March 1979. They were followed by breakout acts U2 (just about to blow up) and The Police (whose frontman Sting complained about the size of the stage), The Pretenders (who drew the fire marshal), The Replacements (drunk as usual), Cyndi Lauper (a week before “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” hit), and acts that were near and dear to Dom like Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Buddy Guy, Marcia Ball and the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz.
Police drummer Stewart Copeland is wearing a Decade T-shirt in the band’s 1979 “Message in a Bottle” video, and Double Trouble bassist Tommy Shannon sports one on the back cover of the “Texas Flood” album.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers played there soon after releasing their second album, “Freaky Styley,” in October 1985, to just a handful of people who have bragging rights. Rock writer Dewey Gurall recalls that at Lollapalooza at Star Lake Amphitheatre in 1992, singer Anthony Kiedis asked the crowd if anyone saw them at The Decade show, and when they responded with a roar, he said something like, “Liars! There were like 10 people there!”
Some of the biggest artists to pass through The Decade came by surprise. In addition to the Aerosmith pop-in, Bruce Springsteen hit the club with Joe Grushecky in September 1984 for a spontaneous jam with Bon Ton Roulet, and Norman Nardini lured Jon Bon Jovi there for a full set after his arena show in 1987. Comedian Sam Kinison did a surprise late-night set there after learning that his manager canceled The Decade show to book him at the larger competitor Graffiti. Among the Hollywood stars to stop in were Bruce Willis, and Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito to see Billy Price and Otis Clay.
Ms. Means also devotes generous space to the locals who made The Decade so funky, like Wiggy Walker, the goth girl who lived upstairs, and roadie Bob Boyer, whose ashes were buried beneath the stage. And then there was Dom, “The Godfather” himself. No Decade memoir is complete without the very telling Meat Loaf story. It was a Halloween night with the Houserockers when the oversized “Bat Out of Hell” rocker was part of a large contingent crowded into the kitchen. Dom wanted everybody out, and when someone said, “Dom, don’t you know who that is? It’s Meat Loaf,” he shot back, “I don’t care if it’s linguine and clam sauce — get him out of here!” (Note: The dish changes with every retelling, but Mr. Grushecky insists it was the linguine.)
Had there been cell phones back then, we might know for sure. Certainly, there would be some great videos on YouTube right now, but most would agree that The Decade was a better place without the digital distraction. Fortunately, some of its best moments were caught on Instamatic and can be found in the book’s many rarely seen photos.
When it closed in 1995, the other two clubs in Oakland’s Bermuda Triangle — the Banana and Graffiti — were still standing, and Club Laga was just about to open down the street, but The Decade was its own beautifully twisted world, never to be replaced — not even close.
The book will be available in stores and at www.arcadiapublishing.com.
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg.
First Published: October 13, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
