It is very sad to see the Fireside go, it was the place to go for us punk kids in the early-mid nineties. After narrowly missing the heyday of Club Dreamers and Medusa's, The Fireside was a godsend.

And its location was anything but inconvenient, a few blocks from the Blue Line and the 74 Fullerton bus basically dropped you off online with the other drunken stoned kids, what else could you ask for?

And I'm more than certain that I caught quite a few 21+ shows there, well that was about five years ago, so maybe they turned into an all-ages club during that period.

The dingy and grimy appearance both inside and outside of the building is part of what made the Fireside so great, kids just needed a place to play and or catch great local and national bands; The Fireside provided it all.

andteater wrote:

dre wrote:On top of it all, it was a pain in the ass to get a show there!

this isnt the first time i heard this and i never quite understood what the problem was. i never had a problem getting a show there. all you had to do was be persistent and eventually brian would just throw you on a bill...once i played there a few times all i had to do was say "can we get on this show?" and usually the answer was "yes"

andyk

The problem was that it was inconsistent, in one of my bands I had no trouble, it was as you describe. Persistence and good promotion paid off. In another we would rarely get a reply even though the few times we played there we got 60+ people in the door. It was pretty infuriating.

And by inconvenient, I mean inconvenient for me. I'm just whining, noplace is inconvenient for everybody. Mostly my complaints are with the organization of the booking and the way the shows are run. And I was sorta trying to be tongue in cheek (i.e. "man this burger is horrible, and the portions are so small!") but maybe it didn't work so well... oh well.