In case you don't know what a conker tree looks like - it's a great, big wooden thing. With conkers on it.

i moved to columbus in 1996. my first job was bernie's.
i worked in the kitchen as bitch to dana,
then "kitchen manager" myself,
door dude,
key master.
5 nights a week/ 12 hours a day.
for three and 1 half years.
as well as renting one of tony's roach motels.
(like working in the mines- never paid cash. rent food beer all abducted before it ever reached my hand)
i remember the first time as manager(double duty as door guy this particular night)
that it was my responsibility to pay local bands
and I gave the dudes like almost $300 dollars,
jaws just dropped to the floor.

the i learned about the coke-caine.*
there was the time I tried to kick Jim C. and his men of leisure out of the back room (and bar) for consuming, um, beer & *, um yeah, anyway... Jimmy put his arm around all 130 pounds of me and tried to explain how things worked and how long he had been working under those conditions.
and did I care what he said?
oh, hell no.
then some other fiend , who worked there with me,
who had more control than I -pulled us apart,
and then they explained in all the gory details what it was that you weekend warriors do...
i've never been so disgusted!

but on the other side of things I owe oh so much gratitude to Jim Stone and Don Roth.

and they never really said anything when I almost burned the place down during one of our shows,
and the brand NEW pa was nearly killed by fire extinguisher foam.
those were the days.

in less than 10 years this same discussion will be about CBS.

"time is a matter of fact once it's gone it will never come back, those tears stupid tears bring me down."
-Jad & David Fair.

Underspecialization, you are probably right about bands avoiding Bernies, but Café Bourbon St DID start booking the vast majority of shows I wanted to see pretty much around the same time that Bernie’s stopped booking ANY shows I wanted to see.

Shit, History Lessons from infants like Highben and Van Fleet. Good ones though!

I want to like Bernies, but can't. Played there a couple times, and sound for us is an issue. Bernies has the worst sound in C-bus, hands down. With all the broken speakers they have lying around, would it kill them to get a pair of monitors up at least? Maybe hire a soundguy that gives a shit? I don't know if the same guy is still there, but last time we played there (maybe a couple years ago) my mic wasn't even on. Perhaps he had kicked something when decidin to rest his feet on the sound board. I was waving at him, but he was completely into his comic book. A person that had come to see us had to go tell him. AND he got paid.

we are playing bernies tomorrow night. i don't expect to get paid, i do expect restroom stench. just gotta go into it with the right attitude, i guess....

I haven't been to Bernie's in about a year as well. Seems to be the time when everyone stopped going. I only ever went there to see one band play and that's just because I'm friends with them. Seeing the Queers play there was pretty nice though. Probably the highlight of my "Yeah I've been to Bernie's" lifetime.

Mostly I don't go back because no one I know plays there anymore, probably because they never get paid.

I haven't been to Bernie's in over a decade. After reading all of these posts I feel more motivated to check it out again to see how much it's changed.

Do cell phone signals get down there?