Down at the Crown

With the good ol' days of late-'90's Baltimore on the mind as a result of last week's post, here's one for you-- "Down at the Crown".  The song is a mash-up of sorts, taking it's name from the first practice space the Dillo band ever had, in the wonderfully decrepit and spacious Crown Industrial Park along the Highlandtown-Greektown border on Baltimore's east side.    The compound is one of those great holdovers from its industrial heyday that Baltimore specializes in.  Our room was huge and lit by a wall-full of frosted windows.   It was a pretty quiet/ sparsely populated facility.  There wasn't a lot of noise bleed.  Load-ins/ outs were a snap.    Assuming you didn't get inadvertently locked in the Crown compound, blocked in by a slow-rolling or (even worse) stopped freight train, you could still make the quick hop up the road to Samos for some fine Greek vittles, and maybe stop by Fell's Point for a cool beverage if it were late enough and you were taking the crosstown route back to Federal Hill.  The Crown was (and is) also the home to Invisible Sound Studios, where Dave Nachodsky recorded a couple batches of "hit rekkids" for us (including "South of Lombard"), somehow making us sound quite nifty in the process.  Perhaps more on that later.

Content-wise, though, "Down at the Crown" is fully sprung from the fetid loins of Mum's on S. Hanover St., which at the time and for several years thereafter was the center of social, musical and alcoholic operations in our Fed'l Hill/ South Baltimore world.  If you've not stepped foot inside Mum's, it's not hard to get the picture of the way it was back in the day: a dark, impossibly smoke-infused "Cheers" for a broad swath of white-/ blue-/ no-collar locals, post-shift tradesmen, barkeeps and restaurant workers, tattooed punkers and artists, sundry humanity and foolish youth overflowing from the Cross St. Market, O's games, street fairs and other downtown adventures.  The jukebox was good, live music was present on the weekends with fair frequency, the pool table had a pronounced warp but was playable...

The song itself dates back to '02 or so.  Like many of 'em, I've tried to nail it down a few times.  This version is probably the closest to true, even if it lacks the handclaps and "Exile On Main St."-era Stones horns that I hear in my head, and even if the tuning on one of the guitars is tenuous.   It's a solo affair, this particular attempt, so quality control is more likely to suffer.

"Down at the Crown":