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Nothing can wreck the mellow vibe of wasting your Sunday afternoon in a dive bar shooting pool and listening to the Misfits like news that your property may at the moment be on fire. I learned that lesson yesterday when I got a couple of calls from people asking whether my band still practiced at CPE Sound (MySpace page here) on Hoyne and Carroll, as the building it’s in had been burning for part of the day. At this point details are pretty sketchy. The police and fire departments haven’t let anyone into the building, party for safety reasons, partly because of its current status as a police scene, probably to investigate whether arson was involved. The fire department told one of the space’s managers that our floor didn’t take much fire damage, but that it looks like there was a lot of water in there. How much equipment will be salvageable remains to be seen, but I know that we had a lot of stuff with pretty heavy sentimental value–an vintage Yamaha organ that the Make-Up used to use, a heavily-modded Gibson Melody Maker that I inherited from the old Kalamazoo hardcore band Jihad–that can’t be replaced, and I’m sure everyone else in there could say the same.
