Studio Peaches

TCM Location Scouting - Pitrats

Added 2022-11-23 23:29:45 +0000 UTC

I had the opportunity this week to poke around my old stomping grounds and decided to make a little photo journey to show y'all. As a younger person, I used to frequent the Underground at a venue called The Nile. The Nile's entrance was in a bricked back alley that usually had the smell of weed, piss, and rotting garbage and I first started seeing shows there as a minor still in high school.

My parents were... kind of middling on the authority scale but while they never let me go alone, they did let me go with my cousin, who was about 10 years older than me and about as garbage punk as you could get. Under his "supervision" I saw tons of underground bands, learned mosh etiquette, experienced a grown man stage diving onto me, fights, and having to go to school the next day smelling like cigarettes, stale beer, and sometimes sporting black eyes. (Yeah my parents were called a few times).

As I got older, alcohol was added to the mix and weekend shows at the Nile really became a college staple for me and where a lot of my love for punk ideals and culture were formed.

A number of years have passed since that time and unfortunately, the Nile has been scrubbed mostly clean of character as the neighborhoods around it are slowly sanitized and rebranded as "hip" with coffee shops and family friendly bars. The Nile has been refurbished inside and out, unrecognizable as the underground den of bad habits and loud music I remember and maybe that's not totally a bad thing. It's a sizable venue now, letting the area attract larger acts and a peek at their show calendar shows a lot of local and off brand metal/hardcore sets. So maybe not all is lost but the Nile as I knew it exists now as Pitrats, tailor made for someone like Mori.