Sweaty: that’s how soundman Dinky Dawson remembers The Channel, the rock club once located on the southern bank of Fort Point Channel in Boston, Massachusetts. “It was incredible,” he says. “People loved coming to that funky club.”
Businessman John Cicerone founded The Channel in 1980. The structure, a cavernous industrial building, could hold 1500 patrons and featured a 20-foot, recessed dance floor.
Initially, the club’s music coordinator Warren Scott booked local new wave acts like Human Sexual Response and The Cars. Hardcore punk bands such as Hüsker Dü, Black Flag and Minor Threat drew swarms of teens to the venue during the mid 1980s.
The Channel also hosted a variety of non-alternative acts––B.B. King, James Brown, Meat Loaf, and many others performed atop its stage.
“It was a great melting pot for people from different sectors of society.”
Dawson says the social and musical diversity at The Channel made it particularly special. He recalls coordinating sound for Roy Orbison, suffering through a 148-decibel Manowar set and ejecting Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes for igniting a symbol mid-performance.
“I got hold of him and pushed him right outside with his amplifier and the lot,” Dawson recalls. “I told him ‘You don’t do shit like that in this club.’”
Traditional African musicians, Bible-hurling Christian metal heads, sloshed Irish troubadours––The Channel booked them all.
“It was a great melting pot for people from different sectors of society,” Dawson says. “You had mods and Neo Nazis. You had lawyers and accountants coming into the place in their suits, changing into their gear in the bathroom, and unleashing their aggression in the mosh pit.”
Following a change in ownership and precipitous financial decline, The Channel shut its doors in 1991.
The building was later destroyed during the late 1990s in preparation for the Big Dig.
Sonic Spaces is a series of brief vignettes that touch on key indie rock landmarks in the Boston area.