My Adventures With Stanhope
2003 - 2008
It was 1998. A year after I quit Barristers. Once you get in a booking agent’s phone book and they call you to offer shows, you better do one or they’ll stop calling. I didn’t want that, so I went back to putting shows in random rooms around Memphis. For a few months, I booked a small coffee shop called “The Map Room”, a nice place run by nice people but too small for quality rock shows. I was getting restless.
While it was nice not to be anchored down with things like rent, utilities, all the proper licenses, the liability, broken coolers, and state taxes, I was back to dealing with the cons of being a freelance promoter: no control over the calendar, the sound system, the club staff, whether the venue would still be open by the time my show occurred, etc. That got old, so, some friends and I pooled our money together and decided to open our own space.
It was in this window of time when I met Mike Todd. He owned Premiere Palace, a party space I rented when I booked shows around town. Mike related to my rock show booking life. He told me himself that, back in the day, he rented out the local drive-in theater and booked some regional and local bands to play and at the end of the night, he was staring at a pile of money. Mike made his living in construction and real estate. He wasn’t like the rock club owners I was used to dealing with. He was pleasant, helpful, and easily accessible. He also had a new building, which used to be a former club at 345 Madison Avenue, he’d just obtained and was looking for a tenant.
We opened Last Place On Earth in 1999 and closed it in 2001. The trolley line construction that was scheduled to take place directly in front of our building for the next two years was going to kill our business and we figured it best to cut bait. I put on some of the best rock shows I’ve ever done there (Melvins, Sonic Youth) and made some friends that I’ll always cherish. Mike understood that we were grossly underfunded and didn’t hold it against me. I assume he was impressed with what I accomplished because he offered the opportunity to run that venue to me two years later.
In the early 2000s, it was announced that an elementary school, now known as Downtown Elementary, would be built across the street from 345 Madison. Mike knew that if that school opened and he didn’t have a liquor license already issued to his building, he couldn’t be grandfathered in and that building was designed to be a restaurant/bar/club, so he needed to act. Mike approached me about opening a new space he was going to call “Stop 345”, due to the soon-to-be trolley stop close to the place, and what kind of events he should throw.
My suggestion: a comedy club. My realization? I’m a dumbass.
Stop 345 commercial written by me; directed/shot/edited by Nathan Black
The story of Stop 345 is a chapter in my life that I’ll have to save for another time. This piece is how I came to know Doug Stanhope and that happened after I booked him for six shows, one show on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2003, two shows Friday, two shows Saturday, and one on Sunday, September 14. Doug was the first comedian we booked. Even though no one in Memphis had heard of him, we wanted to get in on the ground floor, since he and Joe Rogan were about to take over The Man Show, and, at the time, The Man Show was a big deal.
I picked up Doug at the airport the day before his first show. We knew nothing of each other before then. The thing that stuck out right away was how serious he was. Almost humorless. He wasn’t unfriendly but he definitely didn’t appear happy. I didn’t take it personally, since I’m sure it’s not fun playing Mystery Date with comedy club staff. I dropped Doug off at the hotel, which was a 5 minute walk from Stop 345 straight down Madison Avenue, and we agreed to meet painfully early the next morning so we could promote his six shows on local TV and radio.
The most memorable moment of this promo tour was “Live At 9” on WREG Channel 3, your garden variety local morning TV show the CBS affiliate in Memphis has put on for years. A popular trend in local tv is to shoot the morning show in a shopping mall with shoppers, mall walkers, and temporarily abandoned children loitering in the background and clamoring to be in the shot. WREG had a storefront space they used as a studio and shot in Peabody Place Mall in downtown Memphis five days a week.
Alex Coleman and Mary Beth Conley, the hosts, brought Doug on and started talking about the shows he was doing at Stop 345 and his upcoming TV host debut on The Man Show.
What was the date of Doug Stanhope’s appearance on “Live At 9”?
September 11.
I knew there was potential for disrespect. Doug is far from a patriot. Example quote:
“Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you never met, and to take pride in accomplishments you had no part in.”
Some awful news had come out of nowhere that morning, like it’s wont to do: actor John Ritter had passed away overnight from an aortic dissection, the same thing that killed my friend Alan Bryant. About 2 minutes into the interview, after the initial chit-chat of who are you and what are you doing here, Doug makes this proclamation:
“Alex…I just want to say that I hope that the tragic events of September 11th in New York City don’t overshadow the painful loss of comedic genius, John Ritter…a national treasure.”
Alex and Mary nervously laughed while their eyes darted to off camera direction, then they informed the audience that they’d be right back and they were…Doug wasn’t. We laughed about it on the way out of Peabody Place Mall. My first Stanhope core memory. We hit a radio station or two and called it a morning.
The Thursday, Sept. 11 show was the show we decided to ply the local media with free tickets. All the TV and radio stations, all the print media, and potential sponsors for upcoming shows got tickets. The room was large and could’ve held 200 seated. We had about 100 show up. Most for free. Most were the very same media people we had harassed earlier that day. We opened doors at 6 PM with local Memphis comic Mo Alexander as support.
Mike Todd was in a jovial mood and started partying early. I was the house sound engineer as well as the GM of Stop 345 and I couldn’t afford to be anything other than sober, but I was happy Mike didn’t stress and fret like I do on show day. The event got started and the host, Chris Vernon, a local sports media personality who was in-between gigs when we opened, was the host for Doug’s run of shows and did his tight 5, then brought up Mo, who killed as usual. Doug came up and performed his first show in Memphis, TN and I just so happened to record it right off the mixing board.
Some highlights:
(NSFW) Here, Mike walked on stage with a disposable aluminum food tray filled with sand for Doug to use as an ashtray which then leads to Doug praising our hard work at trying to make Stop 345 into a hip space.
(NSFW)
0.00: Doug laments a female heckler by requesting a small shot of Jaeger and a beer.
0:25: Doug advocates for Stop 345 wait staff.
0:49: Doug receives the beer but not the Jaeger.
0:55: Mike Todd walks on stage and delivers multiple shots of Jaeger on a tray to Doug.
1:08: As Mike Todd exits stage left, he falls head first off of a 3 ft. stage. (All I could see from behind the sound board was his feet and legs sticking up in the air, since he’s quite tall.)
1:30: Somehow, Mike comes out of that fall unscathed but does put his leg through a chair.
Night one of Stanhope was a financial failure but a moral victory. Doug was great and everyone present had a blast. Friday and Saturday night had two shows and one last one on Sunday. A couple of notable events that happened:
Stop 345’s webmaster attended the first Saturday show, got too drunk, wouldn’t stop heckling Mo Alexander, the opening comic, to the point where Doug ran out from the dressing room to the stage, not unlike a wrestling gimmick (BY GAWD! THAT’S STANHOPE’S MUSIC!), jumped on stage and ordered his removal from the venue with volume and conviction. Our kitchen manager, an ex-Navy welder who is a mother of two daughters, came from the back and escorted him out. Outside, he paced back and forth, passionately expressing his displeasure with the situation, then went home and crashed Stop 345’s website.
Doug brought his significant other with him who he referred to as Honey. This was not Bingo, his current and longtime partner in crime. She was very nice and pleasant and by the end of Saturday night, very drunk. Another core Stanhope memory: Doug coming up to me after the last Saturday night show, giving me a big, drunken hug, kissing me on the forehead and laughingly informing me that his girlfriend had just urinated all over the green room couch.
Sunday was the last show. The attendance wasn’t what we needed to break even on the weekend but the people that did attend all appeared to have a good time. The moral victories were adding up while the cash was dwindling down. I proposed a Hail Mary to try to salvage the weekend. Ween was playing the New Daisy Theater that evening and instead of competing with them, we decided to throw an after Ween party. I used my connections and, somehow, managed to get Ween to agree to let Doug go on their stage, make a joke or two, and announce the after party that’s right around the corner.
Doug had recruited a back up band in the form of Josh McClane, Chris Moore and Ansel Jones, who were also the Stop 345 karaoke band for about a month. The show ended up being very informal, much like the last day of school. My ever dependable brother documented some of the evening:
Here’s Doug extolling the virtues of Stop 345 in a very NSFW way:
Here, (also NSFW) Doug sarcastically asks if Ween have arrived. He gets a little surprise when Claude Coleman Jr., the live drummer for Ween, announces his presence in the audience:
Doug left Memphis the next day.
The next time I booked Stanhope was one show in early April 2005 at the Hi Tone Cafe and Doug had every right to cancel the show. His friend, Mitch Hedberg, had died a few days before on March 30, 2005. He confided in me that he’d considered cancelling and, looking back, I don’t remember why he didn’t. It wasn’t like he was getting paid a fat guarantee. It was a door deal. The show could’ve easily bombed; a consistent risk in Memphis. However, it did not.
It was this show that Stanhope became my favorite comic. Doug could’ve easily bailed out, especially since the money was gonna be meh at best and he knew it. I like to think he did it because he liked Memphis. Then again, I like to think a lot of things. At the end of the night, I handed Doug all of the cash from the door in an envelope, he shook my hand, gave me a hug, and bolted out the door. Didn’t even count it.
Show #8 with Doug Stanhope took place at the Hi Tone Cafe on May 5, 2006, as well as show #9 on August 7, 2008, the final show I did with him. One of several reasons I love working with Doug is he’s open to putting on a weird show, just like me. In this time frame, I had visited Nashville to watch my old friends, Automusik, perform at Springwater. The other act that played was something called “The Mattoid”. To describe The Mattoid is a futile gesture but I encourage you to look at this clip to fully understand who we’re dealing with:
I thought that thick Finnish accent was a ruse. It is not. The Mattoid is a gentleman named Ville Kiviniemi from Helsinki, Finland and whoever he recruits to back up his bizarro musical visions. He was hilarious and lot of fun. The perfect opening act for Stanhope. Sure enough, Doug took a shine to Ville and eventually took him on the road for some dates. Doug ate magic mushrooms on stage as he took the mic and still killed. Never seen that before.
The last time I booked Doug (show #9) was a sponsored show. In the 00’s, Camel cigarettes were VERY generous to night clubs with their marketing money. I remember many a night when a young person would come into whatever establishment I was frequenting at the time, decked out in Camel swag, handing out packs of cigarettes and scanning driver’s licenses to confirm the appropriate age and probably some nefarious marketing purposes. Doug is the perfect act to have a cigarette company sponsor. Most of the images in this very post feature him with a lung dart. Doug was getting popular and we needed help to cover expenses. Tickets were $10 when I first booked Doug. Now they were $20 with fees.
Memphis is apathetic to comedy. There is a small comedy community there, even enough to have a scene, but not big enough to support a comedy club on a weekly basis. The biggest comedy exports Memphis can claim would be Chris Hardwick and Chris Parnell and when they got famous, they didn’t bring Memphis with them, nor do they perform their art within Memphis city limits. Financial success for comedy in my hometown is breaking even. That’s why we had to take money from unscrupulous sources.
Show #9 was eventful. Doug is agnostic/atheist and there was a point in his show where he was sacrilegious. A woman in the audience took offense to his remarks, walked up to the stage and challenged him on them. Doug is more than willing to give his hecklers enough mic cord to hang themselves. At first, she was bitching at him from the floor, then he invited her on stage and handed her the mic. I don’t recall what was said but it was apparent that the woman had some unique ideas on Christianity.
She was bothered enough by what Doug had said and what he was saying in response to her, that she got on her knees, looked to the ceiling, and started praying on the mic. Doug joined her on his knees and pressed his palms together in mock prayer.
This went on long enough for the crowd to slightly turn on the woman. What no one knew was that she was not alone. She brought her man with her and he had been playing pool in the other room. He had been watching this from afar but now he made his presence known by walking up to the stage with a pool cue in his hand.
What I didn’t know was that her man was Larry Changes.
I got to know Larry over 10 years earlier at Barristers. Love him or hate him, he is one of those OG Memphis musicians who played with a lot of Memphis music legends. Larry is best described as a combination of Lux Interior of The Cramps and the scary preacher from Poltergeist II. Talking with him is like talking to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. It’s very possible that Larry Changes is not from Earth.
When Doug saw Larry approaching, he turned his attention to him. Larry walked on stage with the cue at his side but not brandishing it. Then, like a thief in the night, Pat Cox, who I’ve written about in this space before, calmly walked up to the stage, reached out and gently removed the pool cue from Larry’s hand, then left him there to be verbally eviscerated by Doug Stanhope. Pat was security for the evening and no one could’ve handled it better. Even Doug was so impressed with Pat, that he wrote about it on his blog at the time (that blog is gone now, sadly).
Larry Changes vs. Doug Stanhope below:
Here’s the thing, though. Doug gave Larry both barrels. It was vicious.
It was also ineffective.
Doug can brutalize a heckler as good as any comedian but Larry is an alien. He doesn’t understand any of what’s happening, he just knows that he’s on stage again and he’s the center of attention. Again. Larry turned to the crowd with an evil grin that made him look like a cross between Conway Twitty and Mr. Burns, stepped down three steps offstage slowly, took his woman by her hand and the left into the night.
This was the last time I booked Doug. Doug played Memphis a few times since then but none of those shows were as fun and eventful as mine.
Current day photo of Los Comales, formerly known as Stop 345, courtesy of Justin Baker:
