The Cattle Club: Heavily Modified, NOT Hormone Free
How two Sacramento promoters shaped a musical landscape
Muffled by a locomotive roar and curtained by a concrete overpass, one Sacramento building incubated a sociological experiment. Alternative music showered an alternative crowd. Music was the great mediator.
The gay demographic had exploded in San Francisco, and homosexuals in Sacramento began to peek through their blinds. At the same time, hip new bands were emerging bayside, and Sacramento was searching for a stage to cultivate its own homegrown talent.
From 1985 to 2004 on a sleepy stretch of Folsom Boulevard, Bojangles and the Cattle Club were that stage; coexisting under one roof as a who’s who hot spot in an up-and-coming era of alternative music.
As a music venue The Cattle Club hosted performances from Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Green Day and Primus, to name a few. On off nights, in the same building, Bojangles was operating as what Sacramento music promoter Jerry Perry believes was the first openly gay nightclub in the city. Live performances throughout the ’80s and ’90s at 7042 Folsom Blvd. turned out crowds that tipped the diversity scale.
In a time when community relations with the gay demographic were tenuous, Bojangles and The Cattle Club relied on a homosexual presence to fuel business and differentiate its product offering. “What I really liked about that room was the fact that it was a gay bar,” Perry said. “Because if you can’t hang with that, you’re exactly the kind of person I (didn’t) want.”
Eclectic was an understatement. The venue’s DJ, Master Bastard, made a habit of inviting unwary souls, like Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic into the booth. He scratched vintage vinyl and abused the power of his microphone, frequently ranting about controversial content from obscure magazines.
The Cattle Club rode a musical wave, but the industry wiped out. National headliners stopped letting local bands ride coattails, and a springboard for Sacramento artists decayed into a commercialized gig spot. But the path to ruin is littered with history. Various owners towed various motives, and the maturation of the city created a petri dish for growth. The masterwork of Perry and fellow promoter Brian McKenna evokes more Pollock than Rockwell, but for almost 20 years a city basked in the brush strokes.
71-year-old Terry Sidie’s calling card is his cowboy hat, but Faces nightclub is his claim to fame. At the intersection of 20th and K streets in downtown Sacramento, the popular night club thrives as an epicenter of nightlife. Faces is Sidie’s second go-round as a gay club owner. Bojangles served as his dry run.
In 1976 Bojangles opened its doors to crowds that, in that era, formed underground. Its wide windows and central location set it apart in a time when gay clubs tended to be password-protected. California’s capital city may not have been ready to embrace the change, but the gay community banded together. “People would go by and throw things at the window, egg us, you know try to beat us up. But we were aware of it, and we were younger then, and we would fight back and they would go away for the most part,” Sidie told Sacramento’s ABC news affiliate in June of 2016. In 1979 Sacramento’s immaturity surfaced with violence. Shooters sprayed Bojangles with bullets injuring several patrons inside.
It wasn’t until Sidie departed to open faces in 1985 that the walls really started to shake. Greg Dean was a 23-year-old mercenary of the music industry; a crew member turned stage manager for various Sacramento production companies. He bore witness to a Sacramento music scene that was starting to implode. Lord Beaverbrooks, a popular midtown watering hole and live music destination, lowered its volume to become Paragary’s Bar and Oven. Sacramento producer Stewart Katz, then of Clear and Distinct Ideas Productions, slowed his bookings as he worked to open Club Minimal, a future South Sacramento haven of punk rock.
“When that whole thing blew apart, which it did around ’85 ’86, there was a big void,” Dean said. “The live music scene had nowhere to go all of the sudden.”
Dean envisioned Bojangles as a stopgap, and pitched the aging gay bar as a potential music venue to the new owner, Randy Chan. Chan welcomed adding a new wrinkle to the club’s identity that would help keep the meter running. Dean and his partner Greg Doughty took on the Friday night gate. “We started drawing a lot of crowds, and crowds that drank,” Dean said. “Basically brought them a new clientele.”
The duo monikered their weekly venture, Club Me! and headlined local talent while exploiting a new niche they’d carved into Bojangles. “We fully knew it was a gay bar, and honestly that was no big deal,” Dean said. “If you looked at San Francisco in that period of time, there was a lot of crossover between straight communities, gay communities, punk rock communities, new wave communities. The music all kind of flowed together.”
Club Me!’s graduation would come early. Doughty and Dean relocated to Los Angeles while Doughty, then a bass player for The Features, chased a recording contract with A&M Records. Dean still freelances as a production manager, currently working as Green Day’s hired gun. Perry and McKenna started promoting shows every other Friday while the Gregs prepped for LA, but would eventually find themselves in the driver’s seat. “We basically left (Perry and McKenna) the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel ready to go,” Dean said. “We said, ‘Hey we gotta bolt. Do you guys want to pick this thing up and run with it?’”
Perry and McKenna shared a vision and naivety just grandiose enough to foster a movement. They formed a collaboration anchored by a love for Sacramento’s musical roots.
“The Cattle Club was amazing,” Dean said. “Jerry and the vision for all those guys was fantastic.”
Club Me! re-branded as The Cattle Club, and alternative acts began to dominate the bill. The club’s diverse identity temporarily kept its toehold. “I really wanted to distance myself from the hair rock, and boneheads and that kind of attitude,” Perry said. “I thought, ‘Aw, man, going into a gay bar is so cool.’ ”
But the gay crowd’s exodus to central downtown ultimately forced the hand of change. Bojangles no longer had the means or the following to survive seven nights a week as a gay nightclub. Perry and McKenna’s every other Friday undertaking evolved into six nights a week of promoting and executing shows.
The bones of Bojangles lent themselves more seamlessly to dancing than to acoustics. A pole blocked fans’ views of the stage, and close quarters bred crowds that were tight even by mosh pit standards. But the bands played on. “It seems like where a lot of the best music things happened were always funky places that were maybe not built originally to be live music venues, but just became that, and in spite of themselves became successful,” McKenna said.
The two transitioned their strategy to welcoming all ages, and saw turnouts jump as the club’s reputation started to build. “The first few shows we did there we were already setting crazy turnout records,” Perry said. Crowds were gathering to support local acts, but on occasion the Cattle Club faithful got an opportunity to witness something special.
“I set up a camera for the Nirvana show not really knowing at all, couldn’t even possibly conceive of how I would know, what kind of show it was gonna be,” Perry said. “When they started, it blew me away.”
Nirvana was touring with fellow Seattle grunge group Tad, and Perry struggled to remember if he paid the two bands $250 or $500 to perform. Perry describes his team’s business decisions in colloquialisms like “rolling the dice,” or “not in any way mainstream,” but his grand design was tactical.
“It really became a stomping ground at that time in the late ’80s and early ’90s for bands that were blowing up coming out of Seattle,” Dean said. Big bands from the Northwest found Sacramento to be the ideal rest stop on their way to Los Angeles. “It was a perfect scenario at the right time.”
Perry kept a savvy ear to the ground for worthy local talent, and McKenna had a knack for luring the bigger fish. Nationally touring acts mentored Sacramento’s less dexterous euphonious youth. “I think that we really complemented each other very well,” McKenna said. “I was definitely more privy to what was going on on a national level, and he was more privy to what was going on on a local level.”
Before long, Beck left its mark at the Cattle Club, then No Doubt graced the stage. McKenna recalled one of his favorite shows as a mashup of Cake, Korn, and The Deftones — a mashup that has since combined to generate 15 platinum and four gold albums (and counting). “Back in those days, we could do more things like that,” McKenna said.
Back in those days.
Cattle Club acts started spilling over to the Crest Theater in Downtown Sacramento. Draws of three or four hundred grew to a thousand, or more. McKenna and Perry started running two shows a night, and the business side of promotion started to gain traction. But change is hard, especially big change.
Booking agents began to manipulate Sacramento’s organic growth model. “The booking agent tells us ‘you want this band? OK you’re getting these other two bands with it,” McKenna said. For Perry, it was time to take a step back. He had aspirations of putting out a monthly newspaper on the Sacramento music industry. “Alive and Kicking” he called it. He took the Cattle Club name with him.
Bookings continued, but Perry’s departure coincided with another changing of the guard. A new emphasis was placed on bottom line, and promoters were turning over at an unsustainable rate. Unique gave way to commonplace, and the coincidental became contrived. “They weren’t trying to nurture anything anymore, they were just trying to make as much money as they could on every single show,” Perry said. “In doing that, they closed the door on any kind of innovation.”
A network with a local mindset found itself replaced by a progressive ownership group with a different vision. Bob Simpson and Trevor Shults, now owners of Sacramento’s El Rey and Malt & Mash, rebranded as The Library Eats and Drinks. Live performances at the Library were drowned out by its growing hip-hop reputation. An age of digital production was leapfrogging to the forefront, and leaving jam sessions behind.
Two decades removed from Master Bastard’s reign, an identity crisis of even more dire proportions ensues. Since Perry’s departure, 7042 Folsom Blvd’s history has been marred by murder, suicide and two dubious fires. In 2007, a stray bullet took the life of a Sacramento State student in the Library’s parking lot. Six years later, club owner Bob Bisla tragically took his own life. Now a restaurant grapples with success. Aptly named Fahrenheit 250 was rebuilt from the wreckage of fire number two and serves a polished barbecue product, albeit from an atmosphere charged with far less emotion.
Bojangles and The Cattle Club hoarded half a century’s glory over a 15-year span.
When Perry and McKenna do go back, which is not often, they’re like original architects inspecting the foundation of a structure fantastically overbuilt. A pole once obscured the stage, hiding the bassist’s fretting hand from 19-year-old Brian McKenna’s view. In hindsight, that pole may have stood right where it needed to be.
“The place was always kind of a toilet,” McKenna said, “but it was the right toilet at the right time.”
Tim Wheeler is a Journalism student at Sacramento State who spends too much time writing about food and not enough time eating it. Currently writing as an intern for SportTechie, a sports technology news outlet, Tim is published on SI.com. Reach out to him here.
