Editor's note: This story combines two previous articles by Liza Mitchell about Einstein A Go-Go. Both Liza and I went to Einstein A Go-Go, and it left the same profound mark on us as it left on everyone lucky enough to experience it.
The club is more than a touchstone in Jax Beach's history. It has had a lasting impact on this city, and the reverberations have been felt nationwide: in Riverside and other artistic Jacksonville neighborhoods, built in part by people who came up through Einstein's doors; in the families and lifelong friendships formed there; in the local businesses, careers and lives it shaped; and in music producers now working in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles who found their sound, and themselves, in that tiny club.
Happy birthday, EAGG.
-Jennifer Ashley, Editor
Jacksonville Beach looks decidedly different today than it did when Einstein A-Go-Go sat catty-corner along First Street North. Boarded-up buildings and dingy bars had left their mark. Time and neglect had reduced the city to a shadow of the coastal destination it once was.
On July 4, 1985, Bill and Connie Faircloth officially opened the doors to the all-ages live music venue that would become home to generations of kids. The small dive club occupied a sliver of the oceanfront more than 40 years ago.
“The Fourth of July was what we always considered our anniversary. We closed in February 1997,” said daughter Tammie Faircloth. “It was a good run, especially for an all-ages venue. To last that long is a feat in itself.”
The club was a family operation. Sisters Terri and Tammie ran sound and booked the bands, respectively. Connie was the club matriarch who worked in the music shop while Bill prepared meals for hungry bands, many of whom toured in vans and were grateful for a hearty, home-cooked meal.
With a shoebox stage and speakers suspended from the ceiling, Einstein A Go-Go attracted scores of the era’s top alternative bands and became a haven for kids yearning for a place to belong.
The alcohol-free club gave kids struggling with their identity permission to find their place in the world in an earthy haze of clove smoke and homemade fried chicken. But the focus was always on the both well-established bands and then-unknown acts that later became legends.
Einstein A Go-Go opened its doors to bands on the fringes, before alternative was a “thing.” The club hosted Jacksonville Beach is a decidedly different place than it was when Einstein A Go-Go sat catty-corner along First Street North. With husks of boarded-up buildings and dingy bars, the city itself was a victim of time and neglect, its identity as a coastal destination overshadowed.
From 1985 to 1997, Einstein A Go-Go hosted shows by such well-known alternative acts as 10,000 Maniacs, Henry Rollins, Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana.
Smaller, less mainstream artists like Crowsdell, Love Tractor, Mojo Nixon, Hugo Largo and Fetchin’ Bones also cut their teeth at the humble club and went on to carve out their place in the alternative music world.
Without the proceeds from alcohol sales, the family had to be resourceful to ensure the $20 to $100 a night from sodas and the door could cover the overhead. Rent was nominal, but the club had other expenses, from licensing to insurance. And of course, they had to pay the bands.
The Faircloths were also fair with the bands and fulfilled their contractual obligations. Tammie established relationships with club owners throughout the region and helped bands coordinate the logistics needed to support a tour. All of that helped establish Einstein A Go-Go as a desirable destination, and it paid the bills.
“Florida had a reputation. Bands did not like it. They had really bad experiences, so it was really hard to get bands to come in,” she recalled. “I was very fortunate because my father cooked for the bands and my mom chatted with them. So they had a mom and dad.”
Many of the bands were young and just starting out themselves. They were road weary and tired, living out of vans and away from their families. Bill Faircloth prepared homemade meals to help give them a taste of home. “My dad said they need to feel like they are home,” she said. “We need to provide that for them. So we did.”
The Faircloths owned and operated the full-service Music Shop on First Street in Jacksonville Beach beginning in the early 1970s. It was the kind of place young bands would go to buy their first guitar.
Tammie was a student at Fletcher High School when she discovered her passion for music. In fact, she found she had a good ear for discovering new music that wasn’t in regular rotation on the radio stations.
“When I was 17, I was like the import record buyer. I was very into it,” she said. “We used to walk from [the music shop] down to the club. That actually supported the club in the beginning.”
Music was always a part of the family’s history. Both Bill and Connie Faircloth played piano and organ. Tammie played the clarinet in the school band. “There has to be the matrons and the patrons of the arts, and that’s what I considered myself,” she said. “From when I was almost 12, my parents had the store. I would ride my bike up there and help out before I started to work.”
Early on, Tammie said she dreamed of investing her talents into a live music venue. Her father had a connection with the Martin Williams family of realtors and secured the lease on the building.
“First, it was just going to be a bottle club. But music was always the main feature we wanted people to focus on. I had been looking around, but it fell through the cracks. One day, Dad came up to me at the music shop and said, ‘You got a minute? Let’s take a walk.’ And he walks me down the block and says, ‘What do you think about this for your club?’ I was just blown away.”
Inside, everything was mirrored. The electricity needed work. Bill Faircloth got to work building a stage, a DJ booth and all the furniture, from chairs to bar stools. Faircloth’s sister Terri was a skilled electrician and ran the club’s sound. The stage was just a few inches off the floor.
“I could see it. This is going to happen. We got to take it out of the dream cycle and into reality,” she said. “Between my mom doing the shop and my dad and my sister, it was a nice thing. Every bit of money that came in went right back into the club. We all became very resilient, quick thinking on our feet to repair things. It was a lot of hard work, but it was so worth it.”
In the early 1980s, it was a struggle for new businesses to succeed at the Beaches. Back then, Jacksonville Beach was very much like the Wild West. Permits were scarce, and the city’s reputation as a “blighted district” created a boogeyman effect.
The era’s culture clash was evident, especially down on First Street, where biker hangouts, metalheads, rednecks and skinheads felt free to target anyone different from them. The punks and goths holding court outside the Go-Go were considered easy targets.
Long before the Ritz offered hard seltzer and flavored vodka drinks, it had a reputation for the kind of sideways violence one expects in a David Lynch film, complete with yodeling barmaids.
“It got to be where the bands would ask about it. The big bands. So, where’s this place that we hear about? When X played, the first place John Doe wanted to go was the Ritz,” she said. “It was just so bizarre.”
On the club’s first anniversary, a group of white supremacists marching through the downtown area clashed with locals in their pickup trucks lined up at the dirt lot on Second Street across from the club. Things took an ugly turn after one of the skinheads set fire to an American flag, forcing police to close off a portion of First Street.
“They were marching down, and these rednecks were just watching. They got to about Second Avenue, and as I understand it, one of the skinheads started burning a flag. We were open, and we had a band playing, Horsechild Breakfast, and we saw it starting,” remembered Tammie. “People were running with chains, and we pulled everyone in and locked the door. That was very scary. We wanted a safe place for everyone.”
Einstein A Go-Go’s success wasn’t only about the music that was played, but also how the programming was formatted. Playing music like a radio station was the only way for kids to hear new music.
“We had the right mix of people, and it was the perfect time in music. It was wonderful,” said Faircloth. “A lot of it is due to my work with imports. I was able not just to see the trends but to hear them. Before the club opened, I would go to Big Daddy’s or Thunderbirds and take new music to the DJs and let them play it. People could hear new stuff, so it wasn’t just the same old recycled thing. For me, it was hearing something and knowing this is going to happen.”
It also gave rise to a phenomenon known as the “speaker dance.” Kids would shuffle back and forth, heads down, without lifting an arm, resembling Pigpen’s dance in the animated special “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
“The bands would come in and sit against the bar, and people would say, ‘These bands are so friendly,’” laughed Tammie. “These bands were really into watching these people dance to the speakers. We were talked about in Germany and the U.K.; all over the world, people talked about the speaker dance.”
Faircloth could talk for an entire weekend and never reach the end of the stories about bands who played at the Go-Go. She shared meals, cultivated lasting friendships and made memories, like the time she fed seagulls on the boardwalk with Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction, or the power outage during the first 20 minutes of Camper Van Beethoven’s sold-out show during the heat of summer. The band came back out and played a full acoustic set in the inky blackness, stomping their feet as percussion.
“They played for almost 40 minutes,” said Faircloth. “I was constantly running around, but I stopped and thought, ‘This is pure musicality. The earth could have crumbled away around us, and we would have been oblivious.’”
After 12 years, the music stopped. Faircloth said resources were stretched too thin, and the city never seemed to stop its pursuit to shut them down.
During the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour, frontman Corey Glover of opening act Living Colour gave the little club near the Jacksonville Beach boardwalk a proper shout-out from the Gator Bowl stage.
“The funny thing is Corey Glover and Vernon Reid would always stop in and say hi,” said Faircloth. “It was pretty cool.”
“I really didn’t come back for a while after the whole thing happened. After we closed, we tried to move down the block and renovate the Milliuell building, but it was a money pit trying to take a condemned building and bring it up to code.”
Today, nostalgia for the club is alive and enjoying a resurgence. “Occupancy 250” is a compilation of stories from the artists and the kids who called it home, told through photos and flyers. Allison Durham, Dee Edenfield Marling, Jennifer Curry Compton and Jon Glass co-authored the book, titled after the venue’s limited capacity.
It was a monumental undertaking, sorting through mountains of photos, ticket stubs and flyers from Tammie’s collection. The project took four years from start to finish.
Dozens of artists agreed to share their memories of the experience, from night swimming in the ocean and playing through blackouts to Bill Faircloth’s legendary fried chicken. Durham worked at the club and served as unofficial archivist, taking photographs of the bands and the community of misfits who gathered to dance the night away in front of the speaker wall.
“I had gone to a couple of concerts at EAGG [Einstein A Go-Go] and saw the opportunity to photograph a rock show from six feet away. For Living Colour and Faith No More, I was side stage, which was incredible. To be so close to talent like that while they were creating something was magical,” said Durham.
“I saw and photographed Fetchin’ Bones and Now Explosion in the same week and realized I was in my own musical revolution. That music could be so detached from the mainstream and be so good was a turning point for me. I can still feel some of those moments.”
Dee Edenfield Marling was an EAGG regular and instrumental in orchestrating the reunions and social media pages dedicated to the club. As a graphic artist, she modeled the concept after the 1980s zine format reminiscent of the underground newspaper she created in high school.
“At the time, we were looking at the project as maybe some type of ’zine,” she said of the DIY ethos that inspired the book as well as the club. “We all seemed to like that type of look.”
Exploring the generations that frequented EAGG in the 1980s and 1990s provided a cross section of the scene and the evolution of the music industry as told by the kids who lived it. Above all, the stories reveal a shared reverence for the space. It wasn’t like other clubs. There was a familial vibe. The bands felt it as much as the kids who called it home.
“By opening this little punk club and their record store, the Faircloths gave us so much more. We were drifters, and they brought us into their world of music and art,” said Shannon Wright of Crowsdell. “They gave us something to be exhilarated about, something to look forward to, something to burrow into, and maybe most importantly, a sanctum to be outsiders.”
Einstein A Go-Go was the perfect combination of place and time. “Occupancy 250” captures that lightning in a bottle and throws it onto the page.
“I wish my parents were alive to see [it come to] fruition,” Tammie said. Connie passed away in 2001, and Bill died in 2004. “My parents were very steeped in the music aspect of it,” she added.
The landscape of Jacksonville Beach may look different, but Faircloth drives through the streets with a grateful heart, knowing she helped cultivate the soundtrack for the lives of so many generations of kids who found a home at the Go-Go.
“It was like putting a mosaic together. Every person that came through the door imprinted something,” she said. “We all contributed something. It wasn’t always beautiful, but that’s life.”
