Saying Goodbye to Waking Windows and (Maybe) Nectar's

Nectar’s in Burlington Credit: File: Luke Awtry

As I climbed that old familiar staircase, darkened save for the afternoon sunlight that filtered through the rock club’s open front door, I studied the posters on the wall. Decades’ worth of shows lined the ascending curve like photos of kids and family reunions in a deceased relative’s house. The place felt haunted, making me feel as if I were on my way to view a body lying in state. The lapsed Catholic in me reflexively put on a properly pensive expression.

The comforting tang of wood and cleaning supplies greeted me as I stepped into the empty space that for years was Club Metronome, recently rebranded as the Lounge at Nectar’s. I was there to talk about the future of that club and its iconic downstairs sister, Nectar’s. Rumors of the Burlington venues closing had reached me a week or so earlier.

Fittingly enough, I had been standing in a well-carpeted North Carolina funeral home, staring at a photo of my father, Barry, that sat atop a simple wooden urn, when I felt my phone vibrate. (I’m not sure when it became normal to have a phone in your pocket at such times, but at some point I became a person who looks at emails during a funeral.)

“I think Nectar’s is going to close,” the email read. “Can you believe it?”

I was surprised by how unsurprised I was. Of course I believed it. Even if I hadn’t been writing stories about brutal insurance rates for music venues and declining alcohol sales and the sheer difficulty of touring in the post-COVID-19 live music landscape, I’d seen the situation downtown. Construction everywhere, crowds nowhere.

“Checking the score?” my late father’s broker said to me with the neutral smile of a man trying to comfort a stranger.

“Work,” I said with a shrug. “I don’t know why I’m checking.”

“Well,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his tan trousers, his eastern North Carolina accent making a meal of the word. “I think with death, it’s just normal to keep it grounded, right? To look for a little normalcy, I suppose.”

Later, I thought about that exchange as I stood alone, staring at the darkened Metronome stage — I just can’t call it “the Lounge,” sorry — and trying to conjure a thousand memories at once. So many shows with so many bands.

I know for many, Nectar’s will always be the house of Phish and a jam band mecca, but that was rarely my experience with that club or Metronome. Metal Mondays, KRS-One, Ween donning wigs to play Led Zeppelin covers with Led Lo/Co on Halloween are all highlights for me. But it’s the slew of Vermont acts I saw cross those stages that sticks with me. At their best, the two clubs were the true bellwethers of the Burlington music scene.

I was sad, yes, even if it felt like a remote kind of sadness, as if I had borrowed it from someone else. But it was the same kind of sad I had been at the final Waking Windows festival in Winooski the weekend before. Nostalgia was everywhere, all but demanding I give in to long reveries and staring off into the distance. I did a few times, just to feel appropriately moody.

Chris and Barry Farnsworth Credit: Courtesy

Occasionally, I would remind myself: Your father is dead. He’s not here anymore; I can’t call him to remind him the Celtics are tipping off in 20 minutes or hear him feeding half of his lunch to the dog while my mother shouts from the kitchen. What does it mean that this is the last Waking Windows and Barry Farnsworth is gone? It did mean something to me, I just couldn’t figure out what.

I was a little surprised to find myself leaving the fest after only the briefest of visits. The music was great, the vibe was good, but I didn’t want the nostalgia that was clawing at me. I didn’t want to see Waking Windows ride off into the sunset any more than I wanted to stand in an empty Metronome and force myself to reckon with more than 20 years of memories. (And no, even I don’t need my therapist to tell me why, thank you very much.)

Bruce Springsteen, the world’s poet laureate to kids born in Freehold, N.J., wrote “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.” I’ve been grappling with those lyrics ever since I heard “Atlantic City” as a child. I can see my father, still in his shirt and tie, fresh from his commute home, clutching his old Gibson acoustic guitar, gently crooning “On the Road Again.”

Barry is on the road again.

And isn’t that fucking weird? How strange that he existed and lived and laughed and yelled and ate bad takeout and loved his dogs, but now he’s a creature of memory. He’s now the empty room I talk to.

Waking Windows is gone. And yes, all I have are memories, but they’re the kind of memories you hold onto your entire life: falling in love in real time with a girl while Pond played one of the greatest sets of music I’ve ever witnessed; Dan Deacon starting a dance battle in the middle of the street; Rough Francis turning the Monkey House into one big mosh pit. Hugging friends like we hadn’t seen each other in years, even though we all lived within a 20-minute radius of one another. The pizza parties to close out the fest…

Soon, perhaps for good, Nectar’s will be gone as well. I truly believe something new will fill these voids and that the Burlington music scene will carry on being its weird, beautiful and confounding self. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take stock of what we’ve lost. I guess I’m just not quite ready to do it yet.