CULTURE EXTRA
15
‘I Hate Charlottesville’ A look back at Tokyo Rose’s glorious basement days
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Atsushi Miura (below) founded an iconic Charlottesville music scene in the basement of Tokyo Rose restaurant, where he launched The Dawning, with goth musicians like Gopal Metro (left).
Cheap and Fake, made with The Dirty Round-Eyes featuring Stephen Barling and Brandon Collins of BC. Professional studio renditions of memorable originals such as “Good-Looking Girl” and “Pancake” share space on the album with a heartbreaking Roy Orbison cover and a raucous, blown-
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out live rendition of “Don’t Call Me Alcoholic,” in which the audience joins in. Miura sold the business in 2004 and returned to Japan, and that marked the end of an era in Charlottesville music. A scattering of shows continued over the next few years; punk locals such as Worn in Red and The 40 Boys performed at Tokyo Rose irregularly through 2007. However, the basement had been re-done with white tile and disco balls, and the bright and clean aesthetic was not quite the same as the dim dungeon it had once been. Bands played in front of projectors showing Korean-language karaoke video footage, as if to highlight the disorienting discrepancy. The music was fun, but the feeling wasn’t the same as it had been in the original space—that crucial cornerstone of the music community, which, along with WTJU and venues ranging from Trax to the Pudhaus, helped pave the way for concerts at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, The Bridge PAI, and venues ranging from the vast Satellite Ballroom to the tiny living room of the recently vacated Magnolia House.
January 5 – 11, 2022 c-ville.com
efore social media, finding other spooky folks wasn’t easy,” recalls Bill Hunt. Then he discovered the goth scene at Charlottesville sushi spot Tokyo Rose. “Descending into that dark basement, I was amazed to see dozens of strangers clad all in black. It was the first time in my life that I was in a room surrounded by people who dressed like me, listened to the same music as me, watched the same movies as me.” In the 1980s and 1990s, sushi chef Atsushi Miura allowed the Ivy Road restaurant’s underground basement to operate as a small music club. Miura hosted (and performed at) folk and indie-rock concerts as well as weekly goth nights that became a cornerstone of Charlottesville’s music culture for decades. A subsequent iteration of the restaurant, operated since 2004 by Helen Yan, who passed away in June, closed in late 2021. “Finding space for smaller, non-mainstream bands to play was difficult,” says Hunt, who became a DJ and bartender at Tokyo Rose. “In a given week I would find myself heading to the Rose sometimes four nights in a row, catching some sad acoustic sets at Shut Up and Listen, some high-energy punk rock, a hip-hop DJ set, and finally The Dawning on Saturday.” According to WTJU DJs Dominic DeVito and Davis Salisbury, visits to Tokyo Rose were crucial in their respective decisions to move to Charlottesville. Tokyo Rose’s basement stage featured local folk singers Shannon Worrell and Lauren Hoffman, short-lived punk bands Gulf Coast Army and The Union of a Man and a Woman, and obscure underground noisemakers Last Days of May and Grand Banks, who shared a bill with nationally touring acts. Among them were Smog, Sleater-Kinney, Cat Power, Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, Sparklehorse, the Dismemberment Plan, the Mountain Goats, Calvin Johnston, Dave Pajo (as Aerial M), Juliana Hatfield, Superchunk,
RICH TARBELL
arts@c-ville.com
Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Low, Palace Music, Helium, the Make-Up, Trans Am, Borbetomagus, the Microphones, Danielson Family, Stars of the Lid, and Animal Collective—all would go on to play much larger stages in later years, if they hadn’t already. One memorable visit by New York art-rockers Oneida saw the semi-regulars open their set with an endurance-testing, high-energy 25-minute rendition of their aggressively monotonous one-chord one-syllable song “Sheets of Easter.” Darius Van Arman, who was responsible for booking many of these early concerts, went on to form Jagjaguwar Records, today home to acts like Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten, and Angel Olsen. Although it’s been decades since Van Arman lived in Charlottesville, he recently reminisced on social media about the venue’s importance to the label’s early years. Jagjaguwar’s recently released 25th-anniversary compilation is bookended by performances by none other than Tokyo Rose’s restaurateur and sushi chef Miura himself. An uncommonly taciturn man, Miura, whose stern-but-sarcastic deadpan disposition was amplified by a shaky command of the English language, slowly became a reluctant regular performer at Tokyo Rose. After sitting in as a guest on the acoustic series Shut Up and Listen, Miura revealed a new side of his personality onstage with a guitar and a kazoo, singing bold and memorable songs that were both earnest and playful. His “I Hate Charlottesville” (chorus: “too boring”) quickly became a popular local anti-anthem. In the final years of his tenure at Tokyo Rose, Miura recorded two albums—one solo, featuring what are reportedly his translations of Japanese songs (“Pooky” is a favorite), which never saw release once he learned about publishing rights (mp3s circulated under the title Live at Tokyo Rose, though it appears to be a demo-quality home studio recording, devoid of crowd noise or banter); and a proper full-length,
HOOK ARCHIVES
By James Keith Ford
