CAT’S CRADLE
DANIEL COSTON
Narrow bleachers on
the sides of the club,
plus two small platforms on the side
and back, provide
seating —
otherwise, it’s standing room only.
I sleep on a bed of nails
Barefoot on burning trails
This kind of torture pales next to love
How can you be so sure that what you have
is pure
What are you waiting for, get to love
The rest of the band came in with pulsing, driving energy, and the crowd ate it
up. “All the girlfriends and wives are standing in the front,” Simonsen recalled. “
People were shooting video, people were
recording. It was a scene, a multimedia
scene.”
And it only got better. When they did a
number in Mandarin Chinese, Haskins
recalls, someone in the audience yelled “I
love you” in the same language. When
they came out for an encore, the crowd
sang along on Pennsylvania, a tune from
their first record. “That’s one of the biggest
thrills I will ever have is looking out on an
audience and having people actually
singing my words back,” Haskins said. And
the crowd wasn’t ready to let them go yet.
“We had kind of an all-star jam at the
end when both bands played together,”
Haskins said. “With Roman Candle we
did a cover of Crazy, the Gnarls Barkley
song — a fun song, something we didn’t
think people would expect us to play. And
Skip, their singer, and I traded off lines on
one mike. Their guitarist Nick Jaeger came
over and played a solo on my guitar — I
strummed it, and he fingered it. It was all
silly, a Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame kind of
jam.”
Afterward, they left the stage and the
crowd went crazy, insisting on another
encore.
“For the band it was like a mountaintop
experience,” Simonsen said. “After years
and years of sleeping on people’s floors and
really paying your dues as a musician, it’s
nice to have a little payoff like that every
now and then.”
A cultural beacon
In recent years, Heath has branched out
beyond the Cradle walls and presented
shows in other venues in the Triangle and
beyond, including UNC’s Memorial Hall.
Even as he expands, he remains proud of
the consistency of the Cradle’s bookings and
the club’s positive relationships with bands
and agents, its audience and its hometown.
The value of taking care to build long-standing bonds is something he says he
learned in part by watching Dean Smith.
Cat’s Cradle, Django Haskins says, is one
of the cultural beacons of the Chapel Hill
area. “It brings in people that you would see
in a much larger venue in New York — or
wouldn’t be able to see because they’d be
sold out.” John Bemis, who attended dozens
of shows there as an undergraduate and
later, says the Cradle is the last place you
can see someone before they get big. Then
he qualifies that because so many highly
successful musicians continue to return.
‘It brings in
people that you
would see in a
much larger
venue in New
York — or
wouldn’t be able
to see because
they’d be sold
out,’ Django
Haskins says of
Cat’s Cradle.
