It was September of 1984 that my first band, The Invisible Party, opened for the Neats at Scorgies (remember them?). That gig was also, believe it or not, the first date I had with my wife Lynne. And here we are, Sunday September 29th, almost 35 years later and Lynne heard through the grapevine that the club’s venerable site on Andrews street was a “crumbling’ down” (please pardon the John “Cougar” Mellencamp reference, slight as it is), dashing all hopes that the club would ever find a new owner. More than a few good folks have left us over the past few years, some noted here, some not. Could the stage that so many have graced will be truly obliterated, never to return? This needed to be investigated!

Lynne and I stopped by this afternoon to take a few pictures of the demolition in process. While it wasn’t apparent at first, given the security gates surrounding the area, Scorgies was not being demolished… it was the building next door at 162 Andrews Street. Whew! I took a few pictures and it wasn’t till later, after reviewing Google street view, that Scorgies appeared to be untouched, albeit showing signs of age and a few cracks. So far, it looks like the “glimmer of hope” I was searching for in my previous post still exists. Who knows. The building lives on, empty as it stands right now, still full of grit, grease, grime and asbestos. Still, I’d like to to retrieve a piece of the old building for posterity’s sake, much like some Liverpudlian entrepreneurs have; just saw an Instagram ad touting fragments of a Cavern Club brick enclosed in acrylic selling for $29 each. Probably no such luck here!

Mementos? We got your mementos, right here in these pages. Plenty of memories from those days. Paul Dodd’s Polaroid pictures, Kodak memories from a ton of folks, posters and (thanks Duane) bootleg recordings. Tons of physical media that has been digitized and shared, as well as the ubiquitous posts on Facebook. I guess for now, thanks to the wrecking ball limiting itself to 162 Andrews Street, we still have the building that housed Scorgies

Hopefully that’s the end of the story for now… here’s a few pictures of the demolition that’s occurring next door:

Front of the Scorgies site

Image 3 of 3

The old front end of scorgies, despite a paint job, still recognizable