If you saw a band before it got big, you probably saw it here
Ask anybody who was in a Charlotte band between 1995 and 2015 where they played their first real show. A lot of them will say the same thing. Tremont. 400 West Tremont Ave, right where South End runs into Wilmore, in a plain brick building named after nothing fancier than the street it sat on.
It was loud, it was cheap, the floor was sticky, and it was the best live music room this city had. Then South End got expensive and the city paved it into townhomes. This is the story of the room.
The room Charlotte was missing
Penny Craver opened Tremont in 1995 to fix a problem nobody was fixing. Touring bands hit Charlotte and found rooms that were either way too big or way too small, so a lot of them just skipped town. Tremont was the middle. Southern Culture on the Skids helped christen the place, and for the next 20 years the doors stayed open for anybody worth hearing.
There were two rooms under one roof. The Main Hall held about a thousand people and got the national tours. The Casbah, tucked back by the bar, held around 350 and got the three-band local bills, the all-ages kids, the openers nobody had heard of yet. That second room mattered. My Chemical Romance played it. So did about a hundred Charlotte bands you loved and half the city forgot.
Cheap beer, loud amps, and a woman who slept in the building
Craver ran the place like it belonged to the bands, not the promoters. She refused pay-to-play, and her Wednesday New Faces Night put unknowns on stage and let them keep the door money. Some of those nights pulled 300 people to watch bands nobody knew. That is how you build a scene instead of buying one.
She also nearly killed herself doing it. Craver worked 20-hour days across three shows back to back and slept in the venue when there was no time to go home. When she finally sold in 2004, she said it took two weeks for the stress to leave her body. That is what Tremont cost the person who built it, and she would tell you it was worth it.
The kind of night you only half remember
Iggy Pop played here. Green Day, Megadeth, GWAR, Fugazi, John Mayer before he was John Mayer. Owner John Hayes once got up and played guitar with ANTiSEEN, Charlotte's own gloriously filthy punk legends, at his own birthday show. He said he was nervous before and floating after.
And then there was the parking lot. Everybody who went to Tremont remembers the parking lot. The show would end and nobody would leave, just cars and cigarettes and people arguing about the set until somebody's ride finally showed up. The venue closed at last call. The lot ran a while longer.
December 19, 2015
The end came the way it always does now. South End property values went straight up, the building owner sold for redevelopment, and Hayes looked at buying the place but the number was impossible. The Fillmore had opened over at the Music Factory in 2009 with Live Nation money and started pulling the national bookings a room like Tremont used to get.
So on December 19, 2015, ANTiSEEN played the last night. The same band that had played the anniversaries came back to close it down, which is about as fitting an ending as a room like this could ask for. Today 400 West Tremont is a block of townhomes. Nice ones, probably. You cannot hear anything from the parking lot.
Lost, but not forgotten
Tremont was the room where Charlotte bands learned to be bands, and where you saw somebody great before anybody else did. The city decided it was worth more as apartments. We think it was worth a shirt.
Wear the room South End paved over. The Tremont Music Hall tribute tee is in the shop.