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Great Taste, Less Lame

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To his credit — or downfall, depending upon how you look at it — it wasn't just the moneymakers that fascinated Carbone. A jazz aficionado and harmonica whiz himself, he appreciated musicians who knew how to really rip. Not long after the Dashboard Confessional explosion had moved to bigger stages, a truly innovative force adopted Ray's as a place to let its freak flag fly.

Pygmy's music, Carbone rhapsodized, occupied a sacred space somewhere between Miles Davis, the Band, and Rage Against the Machine. A fivepiece whose members loved to wear blazers, suit jackets, and dress shoes onstage, Pygmy boasted Cuban, Dominican, Peruvian, and New York blood. That tangle manifested itself in free-jazz freakouts with maddening time signatures, chord changes like slalom ski courses, and live shows that lived up to the chaos.

"Our venue," singer Edward Adames affectionately called the club. "Whenever we write a song, we think, 'What's it gonna sound like at Ray's?' We love playing there." The owner, he explained, "completely understands us." "Every time they play," Carbone said, "I walk out from behind the bar because I never know what they're going to do."

With band members scattered throughout Miami-Dade County (North Miami, Kendall, and Westchester), a trip to Ray's ended up costing Pygmy dearly in gas money, and its difficult avant-prog never was good for more than 50 or so fans at a time. The band eventually broke up.

Crazy Fingers, a Grateful Dead cover band that had a Wednesday-night residence at Ray's, threw in the towel a few years ago when other, more popular venues beckoned.

By 2003, Ray's sparse crowds were symptomatic of the general decline of Clematis Street. Shootings and fights had cast a pall over the eastern end of the thoroughfare, and walking around at night suddenly didn't seem like such a good idea, especially when the newly minted McMall called CityPlace — a clean, well-lighted place for the young urban bourgeoisie to get their spend on — was built nearby.

"It doesn't do anything for me," Carbone sniffs, "but then again, I'm different." As bad as business had become, it was going to get even worse.

During the Second World War, the City of West Palm Beach — like many others along the Eastern Seaboard — was under strict blackout regulations. Young partiers could still find posh hotels on Clematis Street where floor shows, singers, or ballroom dancing awaited, but going down to the water for a smoke was sure to bring an angry policeman, warning that enemy aircraft were homing in on the tell-tale orange glow of the cherry.

During the second Iraq War, West Palm Beach is slightly less uptight. But Carbone, critical of Lois Frankel and her well-publicized animosity toward Clematis Street clubowners (especially Rodney Mayo) still sees parallels with the past. Frankel and Mayo regularly scuffle in print, and Frankel once dissed one of his eateries and called him "trash." Complains Carbone: "It's the same story. The mayor sucks, man. I don't know what else to say. She doesn't want the clubs anymore. There's absolutely no help whatsoever for downtown bars — it's like they're trying to get us out."

Frankel declined to comment for this article. But City Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell, whose district includes Clematis, says she understands local club owners' attitude. "I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to look at the street and see that we have a problem down here," she says. But Mitchell thinks the big problem is traffic. "It's really the roads being closed downtown that is killing the businesses."

The most damaging punch from the city was thrown during the spring of 2004, when the City Commission unanimously decided that no one under 21 could enter nightclubs ever again — effectively ending the practice of allowing all-ages shows where adult clubgoers with ID could get a wristband and drink.

"So now, nobody can be in the room while alcohol is being served, so I've lost a lot of my shows," Carbone grimaces. "The bigger national rock shows? Can't do 'em. The people who drink won't come out."

Taking the color out of the club's name was more a sign of the times than anything else, notes Hall. "Once every seven years, the blues becomes hot again," he remarks. "Kind of like Disney DVDs when they rerelease 'em to a whole new generation."

Weekly punk shows that did bring in the numbers also trashed the already bare-boned room. The cash to fix things up was in short supply, but in the meantime, Ray's developed a rough-hewn character that made up in authenticity what it lacked in creature comforts.

"That beaten-down vibe he has there is not being appreciated in West Palm at the moment," Hall continues. "But because the architecture isn't that old down here, there aren't many rooms with the type of history that can dictate a vibe."

While the club was sputtering, the raysdowntown.com website bristled with activity the bar didn't necessarily match. An ill-fated strategy to garner attention, the site became infamous for its collection of soft-core photographs. Part of the hubbub was a forum devoted to posting pictures, which began with patrons' Polaroids but eventually developed into a repository for nude photos found on the Internet. At one point in 2004, it looked like most of the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.redheads archive had been uploaded to Ray's site. Unfortunately, none of the increased web traffic translated into business at the bar.

"I didn't get shit out of it; all I got was grief from women," Carbone gripes now. "I had to get rid of it — it was too nuts. My girlfriend freaked. She said it was degrading to women."

Not only women regarded the photos with wariness. A longtime patron called "bluedude" asked, "How do you stay open? Your club used to play blues all the time, in fact one of my bands used to play there. Then all of a sudden you started playing more rock and the crowd changed. What the hell happened? ... and what's with all the porno stuff? I mean I love tits, but what are you a former porn star or what? Let us know..."

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