Remembering the Bottom Line

The first time I went to a show at the Bottom Line – I believe it was for Lou Reed, during my junior year of college – I was not just excited to see the show but to get inside this particular room. By that point I'd read Dave Marsh's Born to Run from cover to cover multiple times and I worked overtime one summer to get enough money to buy a copy of The Great White Boss.

It was a great room and nothing has come close to replacing it, even if the old NYC City Winery reminded me of it sometimes. (That’s a compliment.) If nothing else it was always a great room for listening to music. The sightlines were good. The sound was solid. The staff were cool with the fans queuing outside, and I always marveled at the efficiency of how they funneled the fans into the club once the doors opened. They treated the bands well. Waiting for hours on that line to get inside was a rite of passage for any music-loving New Yorker.

The Bottom Line was a seated venue, with long narrow tables that extended out from the stage and then towards the back the tables were (IIRC) smaller. (I only ever sat back there once so my memory on this is not reliable.) It was one of those old buildings in downtown NYC that had cast iron columns in the middle of the room (as well as on either side of the stage) and the last thing you wanted was to get seated at a table that would be behind one of them. The pillars also stood on either side of the stage, which was not large. I still marvel on how they fit all of the E Street Band, even though you can see in the pictures that Danny is way back in a corner, behind a pillar.

They did two shows, early and late, and if you had tickets for both shows, they would almost always let you stay in the club for the next show, where if you were strategic, you had the opportunity to improve your seating position after the first show before the line outside got let in. (They’d even holler, “We’re opening the doors now” if people were taking too much time prevaricating about where they wanted to sit and it would suddenly look like a game of musical chairs.) 

There was a bar against the back side wall and they sold standing room tickets for some shows but you could only get them the night of the show, first come first serve. They served bar food, but I never ate there, because that was money that could be better spent on other concert tickets. The servers could be mean if they thought you weren’t ordering or tipping enough. 

The tables down front were long and very narrow and the first thing you did when you sat down was rearrange your chair to get space so you didn’t spend the show jammed up against the table. (If you ever went to the first City Winery in New York City and sat at the tables in the front section, you definitely engaged in this exercise.) When Bruce yells at everyone to get up during “Quarter to Three” during the 8-15-75 broadcast, I always want to explain to him that it’s not quite as easy as he thinks it is to stand up quickly. Like everything in New York, they tried to do their best to fit in as many people as they legally were allowed and that meant sacrificing things like leg room and personal space.

The shows were first advertised in the Bottom Line’s ad in the Village Voice issue dated July 21. Please note the “all seats $5” – this was a premium price, usually tickets were $4. The next week, it was already sold out. You bought tickets for the Bottom Line by going to the club or by mail order. You literally sent them an envelope with a note explaining what shows you wanted tickets for and enclosed a money order or certified check for the total price, plus 25 cents for handling. Real humans had to pull the tickets from a stack and put them into your SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) and yet the Bottom Line only charged a quarter for that effort. There is no convenience fee, no service fee, no nebulous extra charge tacked on that you have no choice but to pay or not see the show. And you could forgo that by just going down to the corner of W. 4th Street & Mercer St. when the box office was open. The shows sold out in three and a half days. If you did mail order for this run of shows you probably got shut out.