“Pffft!” -- The Chapel Hill Sound: Chapel Hill, Carrboro, & UNC

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donbosco said:
"
We had our chance, you know. We had our chance to make a deal with the devil. We danced with him, we flirted a little, maybe we even led him on. But I’m not so sure we ever took his offer. Here’s how it went down.

It was the summer of ’92 and scores of magazine reporters and music-industry types, looking like robotic ravens in their standard-issue black T-shirts and jeans, sweated hiply in the Chapel Hill heat. They came to see what sarcastic locals had named the Big Record Stardom Convention. They came to see 49 North Carolina bands over four days.

Late one night, when all the shows had ended and the after-parties were in full swing, a reporter from Spin magazine was holding court, dissecting our local culture, trying to find its essence. “What is the Chapel Hill sound?” he implored partygoers.

“Pffft!” Someone opened a beer can right in his face. “That is the Chapel Hill sound,” came the response. Laughter erupted. “Pffft!” This was our answer to the devil."

The Rest of The Story is at the link...

indyweek.com

Running with the devil

We had our chance, you know. We had our chance to make a deal with the devil. We danced with him, we flirted a little, maybe we even led him on. But I’m not so sure we ever took his offer. Here’s how it went down. It was the summer of ’92 and scores of […]
indyweek.com indyweek.com
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I see I’m mentioned on that article.
 
donbosco said:
Nicely Done - do you remember the parking lot where Davis Library now stands?
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Wasn’t it Orange County gravel? That grainy orange-hued stuff that was some sidewalks before they were bricked over? Or, was it regular gravel?

I’d swear that the parking rows were marked out with railroad ties (the rows, not the spaces).
 
Zoo_View said:
Wasn’t it Orange County gravel? That grainy orange-hued stuff that was some sidewalks before they were bricked over? Or, was it regular gravel?

I’d swear that the parking rows were marked out with railroad ties (the rows, not the spaces).
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I think the railroad ties recollection is correct. And there was gravel but about as often there was mud.
 
Zoo_View said:
. . ., some sidewalks before they were bricked over? . . ..
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Once, when I was a student in graduate school at Pitt and as I was walking (on a bricked surface) to my first class of the morning, I noticed a middle-aged man in a business suite get out of his car and walk, ACROSS THE GRASS!, to get to his building. Immediately called out to him and pointed out he was walking on the grass while I was staying on the bricks. Then I gratuitously added that I had attended undergraduate school at UNC and UNC had a whole team of people dedicated to bricking over the short-cuts student made through the grass. This man, hung his head in shame and confessed that not only was he a new hire at Pitt, buy he had been hired away from UNC. He retraced his steps to his car and took the bricked in path to his building while promising me he would preach the virtues of bricking where students actually walk rather than hoping students would walk where the existing brick paths were.
 
05C40 said:
Once, when I was a student in graduate school at Pitt and as I was walking (on a bricked surface) to my first class of the morning, I noticed a middle-aged man in a business suite get out of his car and walk, ACROSS THE GRASS!, to get to his building. Immediately called out to him and pointed out he was walking on the grass while I was staying on the bricks. Then I gratuitously added that I had attended undergraduate school at UNC and UNC had a whole team of people dedicated to bricking over the short-cuts student made through the grass. This man, hung his head in shame and confessed that not only was he a new hire at Pitt, buy he had been hired away from UNC. He retraced his steps to his car and took the bricked in path to his building while promising me he would preach the virtues of bricking where students actually walk rather than hoping students would walk where the existing brick paths were.
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Long ago, UNC needed to make the stone walls a lot higher; maybe as high as 5-feet.
 
Zoo_View said:
Long ago, UNC needed to make the stone walls a lot higher; maybe as high as 5-feet.
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Mending Walls by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
 
donbosco said:
The passing of Clyde A. Hutchison, III


“Both involve a lot of strict thinking, where you have to follow the rules. And they both then involve the necessity to have some loose thinking, where you’re not concerned with the rules. I think of jazz as kind of a rebellion against the man. So you have this song that has a set harmonic progression and a melody, and the music’s kind of a theme in variations. But then you start improvising on the harmonic and melodic content of the song, and you may get fairly far away from the original thing.” — That’s the answer given by Dr. Clyde A Hutchison III when asked, “How is cracking a genome similar to cracking a Duke Ellington piece?” (2019 interview, ‘La Jolla (CA) Light’)

Once when walking across the UNC campus in the 1990s I ran into Clyde. He was deep in thought and I had to hail him from his profundity. “Yo Clyde! What are you thinking so hard about?” He replied, smiling wryly, “Creating life. See you at the Bistro.” And off he went. He was talking about ‘Henry’s Bistro’ where I worked. And he was serious about the creating Life thing. Clyde often played piano in a trio that went by ‘Hutchison, Hoole, and Price.’ (Hoole being Brunson, and Price being Paul) I very much looked forward to working nights when that collection of friends played. Looking back the utter sublimeness of those evening hours in that place and time - that world - wells up inside me as simple, burning joy.

I’m recollecting these things with sadness because another super-musician friend, Groves Willer, messaged me yesterday with the news that Clyde had passed on. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s Clyde was a jazz man about town. He was a little older than us restaurant bar scene folks - he clearly had a good job and if you talked to him much you could perceive a mildly veiled professor vibe - but he fit in to the general eclecticism of those times rather seamlessly. He wasn’t at The Late Nights nor throwing back PBRs mind you but his presence also wasn’t incongruous in “the club” whichever one that might be.

As a extra-curious bartender I ‘discovered’ Clyde’s secret but mainly kept it. I wasn’t the least bit surprised, only bemused, when he made his “creating life” quip - because the truth was - that was his “other gig.” You see, Clyde A. Hutchison III was the co-inventor of something called ‘site-directed mutagenesis’ — the first technique designed to intentionally alter DNA at a specific location (i.e., site) — literally making modern genetic engineering possible. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1993) was awarded to Michael Smith for developing site-directed mutagenesis — work that Hutchison co-led and co-authored (Clyde got shafted on that but by all accounts never griped about it - clearly the Science World knew of his work and celebrated him).

Clyde played regularly at ‘Henry’s Bistro’ but also at ‘Columbia Street Bakery,’ ‘Irregardless Cafe’ (in Raleigh), and in the subterranean confines of ‘The Cave.’ I can’t find any evidence of it but I swear I remember him playing at ‘The Hardback Cafe’ too - He was a familiar face there and where I met him. I remember something about his negotiating actual dollar payment for the trio instead of beer and food (Hoole and Price seemed content to eat and drink their earnings away). Those shows wherever they went down were masterful jazz exhibitions put on by three brilliant minds at their instruments - the brainpower collected there was so indicative of Life in Chapel Hill - where your wait is a translator of ancient indigenous astro-meteorological texts, your chef a published novelist, the cashier ringing you up an editor at a publishing house, and your piano man a trailblazing world-renowned geneticist.

Clyde departed Chapel Hill in the early 2000s, heading to California to continue unlocking the secrets of life. It’s always made me glad to know that he continued playing ‘out there’ with regular sets at a place called ‘Manhattan of La Jolla.’

Clyde was 86. Above is an obit that a friend in California worked up for his passing. Maybe Clyde has all the answers about genetics now but I’d bet his first stop in The Hereafter was at The Jazz Bar.
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Beautiful tribute @donbosco
 
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