Steamworks Creative Information

As I sat comfortably and listened to all of the incredible performances this past weekend at Steamworks Creative , it made me think back to the very first night we opened the doors for live music (Jan. 2018). At that time I wasnt even sure we would last a full month let alone 3 years. Well, before I talk about the birth of our all volunteer community listening room, I want to thank the incredibly generous, hard working and talented folks who made it all possible; Kim Coles , Gene Titus , Dennis Frankovic , Skipp Barr , Martin Munoz , Linda Kearney Leddon , plus my dear friend Mary Lou Scherder who was with me from Day 1 with her weekly open mic sessions. I dont say thank you enough to these wonderful people. They run the entire venue and keep everything in tip top shape, on a 100% volunteer basis ! So back to the beginning. It was a very cold and icy mid January night ( 1/15/18 to be exact) in Pittsburgh. Together with my pals Mike Hammer , and Ronny Moondg Esser , we went to see John Oates at a certain club in the city. We parked about a 1/2 mile away from the venue only to be warned that we might get towed (ugghh), so I walked all the back to move my car to a different spot, even further away. Once we arrived inside we realized there was no seating, the vast majority of the audience had to stand for the entire evening. Now back in 1985 that would not be an issue but the average age of this audience was around 60. To make things even worse we couldnt get near the bar to buy some extremely over priced adult drinks, can you say sardine can ? We stood next to a couple of very nice but shorter women who drove all the way from Columbus to see the show. They had one huge problem, they really couldnt see the show. Everybody else was a bit taller and no matter how hard we tried we couldnt create a visual lane so they could see the stage. So these ladies paid top dollar for tickets, travel, hotel , meals and this is what they dealt with. Honestly it pissed me off, plus my feet and back were killing me ! Yes, Im old ...