Off Ramp Closes With Local 808 As Final Act

The Off Ramp, one of grunge-era Seattle's top music clubs, will likely close this weekend.

"Nobody's more upset about closing than I am," says Lee Rea, owner of the business and building at 109 Eastlake Ave.

Rea took over the Off Ramp, then a lesbian disco, in 1986, converting it into a live rock club. In the following years, then-unknowns Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played the Off Ramp as the club took off with the Seattle alternative rock sound.

Rea says that at its zenith, the Off Ramp "was one of the top 10 clubs in the country." Five years ago, his health went bad, and he leased out the club - only to take it over last year when the deal went bad.

On his second round, business never approached what it had been in the Off Ramp's glory days. "I'm 70 years old - I'm too old to start this up again," Rea says. He says he has been approached by people interested in opening a new music club at the site, but nothing close to a firm deal has been reached.

Saturday's last stand at the Off Ramp features the up-and-coming rock band Local 808 (9:30 p.m., $5).

MERCURY REV'S NEW SIDE

The title of Mercury Rev's 1995 album, "See You on the Other Side," proved to be a chilling promise.

Before its next album was released, lyricist/singer Jonathan Donahue suffered two nervous breakdowns. Lead guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackiowiak checked into a Jesuit monastery.

It was a time of isolation and intense introspection for the two musicians, and included a change in record labels. When Mercury Rev finally emerged from its Catskill Mountains home last fall, with "Deserter's Songs," it really seemed to have journeyed to the other side of itself.

"Deserter's Songs" is making believers of some who previously dismissed Mercury Rev as an arty, Sonic Youth knock-off. Donahue and Mackiowiak abandoned much of the previous noise distortions, instead creating orchestral pop melodies that call to mind the Beatles and Beach Boys.

Several publications named "Deserter's Songs" one of 1998's best - Rolling Stone magazine dubbed it "the perfect rock album for the end of this century."

The six weeks Mackiowiak spent in the near-silence of the monastery helped prepare the guitarist for Mercury Rev's new vision. "You couldn't play an instrument, you couldn't listen to music . . .

"On `Deserter's Songs,' a lot of times instead of crazy guitar solos, I would write a melody that would have an interesting instrument playing, like a fluegelhorn."

The album, which sounds like David Lynch directed it, also has the spooky sound of the "bowed saw" as a reprise. The music is an appropriate landscape for Donahue's cryptic, soul-searching lyrics. "Catskill mansions buried screams/`I'm alive' she cried `but I don't know what it means,' " Donahue writes, on "Opus 40."

At the end of "Holes," Donahue's near-falsetto concludes: "Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right."

On "Deserter's Songs," this funny little band works perfectly. Mercury Rev will be at ARO.space on Sunday (8:30 p.m., $7 advance).

CD RELEASE SHOWS

Local guitar wizard Omar Torrez celebrates the release of his new flamenco-rock CD on Saturday at the Showbox (9:30 p.m., $10).

Jam-happy local fusion band Rockin' Teenage Combo has a CD release show on Saturday at the Elysian Brewery (10 p.m., $6).

FIVER, SWEET 75

Fiver, one of the most promising new rock bands to come around in quite some time, plays the Crocodile Cafe tonight (9 p.m., $5, with locals Veer and Bellingham's Eureka Farm). This group from central California has an unusually strong, polished debut album, "Eventually Something Cool Will Happen."

This new band sounds like a toned-down Dinosaur Jr., or perhaps Nirvana on Prozac. Echoes of Sonic Youth can also be heard, yet Fiver manages to sound fresh, fun and unpretentious.

Speaking of Nirvana echoes, Sweet 75 emerged from a long hiatus to play the Crocodile on Saturday. This Krist Novoselic work-in-progress seems more groove-oriented and reserved than it was on its somewhat chaotic 1997 debut album. Switching from bass to guitar, Novoselic told the crowd he and singer Yva Las Vegas are working on a second Sweet 75 album.

Tom Scanlon can be reached at 206-464-3891, or tscanlon@seattletimes.com.