The Return of the Crocodile

The back room of the Crocodile Cafe had grimy chandeliers and foam
sheep and other impossible-to-recall-exactly crap hanging from the
ceiling, on top of all of which was a layer of dust so marvelously
thick and unperturbed that you had to wonder if, in the time since the
club’s opening in 1991, it had ever been touched. The cafe area had
dangling papier-maˆché beehives. The room where you watched
bands had suspended snakes and a famously inconvenient post in its
center. Last Thursday night, walking through the renovated
club—now just called the Crocodile—during a preopening
party, it was hard to recall what all had been in those rooms or even,
honestly, where those rooms had been.

Many walls have been knocked down. The false ceiling in the main
room is gone, revealing hidden skylights and enough extra space to
comfortably fit a proper mezzanine with a bar. The capacity of the club
has gone from 381 to 560. The stage is in a different place. The old
cafe area is gone. The walls have gone from pale green to a dark,
flattering red. There’s a long main bar along the south wall, where the
wall of windows looking out onto Blanchard Street used to be. That wall
of windows is gone, but there is a high, unbroken, two-foot-tall
horizontal stripe of windows on that wall now, looking out into
treetops and Belltown roofs—referencing the windows that used to
be there, giving the room depth, granting the crowd privacy, and
reminding you that you’re in the middle of the city. The famously
inconvenient post is no longer in the center of the room. (It’s been
preserved, for hilarity’s sake, but it’s off to the side.) There are
new bathrooms, gleaming white, with marble countertops. The build-out,
done by GHL Architectural Millworks, is gorgeous. Maybe too gorgeous.

“Oooh, it’s too pretty in this bathroom,” a guy said as he walked
into the men’s room last Thursday, surely remembering the falling-apart
bathrooms of yesteryear, which were covered in posters and stickers and
graffiti. He added, “That’ll change.”

Out in the main room, the Crocodile’s booker, Eli Anderson, was
saying to someone who’d just asked about the bathrooms, “We want things
to make people go, ‘Wow.'” Anderson used to work behind the counter at
Sonic Boom Records, once had an internship at The Stranger (he
points out that he was an intern at the same time Robin Pecknold, of
Fleet Foxes, was an intern), and had been employed as the
assistant/local booker at the Crocodile for a year when it abruptly
closed its doors in December 2007. He’s 27, affable, and unpretentious.
Someone at the party asked him for his philosophy of booking, and he
mentioned the recent New York Times obituary of
failed-composer-turned-arts-booster Schuyler Chapin and quoted Chapin:
“If you know you don’t have talent yourself, you try to acquire the
talent of recognizing talent in others.” Anderson continued: “Dude,
that’s like my life in a quote.”

The food at the party was pizza from Via Tribunali, which now
occupies what used to be the Crocodile’s back bar. The pizza seemed
extra delicious, each pepperoni a little pond of salty greatness, and
watching Tribunali employees bring it out was like a science experiment
in how quickly matter can disappear. (The pizzeria is separated from
the concert area by a door that will remain closed. It happened to be
open, though, and I stumbled back to find black, high-backed, rounded
booths, which look very cozy; a tiled wood-fired oven; and, secreted
away in the middle of the premises, a private room that looked built
for committing ritualistic murder.)

The party began privately with an impromptu set by Robyn Hitchcock
and the Venus 3 (Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin), after
which the doors opened to the public for a bill that began with the
Quiet Ones. Before going on, one of the Quiet Ones muttered something
about being nervous playing for “all these celebrities in the room.”
Attendees included Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam), Kim Thayil (Soundgarden),
John Roderick (the Long Winters), Nate Manny (Murder City Devils), and
Scott Plouf (Built to Spill). Many of the club’s owners, including Sean
Kinney, Susan Silver, Peggy Curtis, Eric Howk, and Marcus Charles, were
present. Charles, who also owns a stake in Belltown’s Juju and the
Capitol Hill Block Party, will manage the Crocodile’s daily
operations.

Before much time had passed, the bar was out of alcohol and the
party was effectively over. By Saturday, the Crocodile’s official
opening and first ticketed event, the alcohol scarcity had been
remedied and the club was packed. Sold out. Wasn’t really my thing (a
hippie/bluegrass hybrid) and I left early—the first real party, clearly, will be the dance-plosion headlined by U.S.E on March
28—but on my way out, I stepped into the men’s room to take a
leak and was pleased to see a lonely little sticker stuck to the clean
white wall. It hadn’t been there Thursday.