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TNR’s Tales from (Across) The Road

By Staff | Mar 11, 2008

If you keep up with the happenings of the greater Morgantown area, the news of a large fire in a small bar called McFadden’s probably still slipped through the cracks of your consciousness.  It’s probably not a place you’ve ever been, so it probably didn’t seem like a big deal. To The New Relics, however, it was almost devastating.

You see, TNR Home Base — also known as Blues Alley Records — is in a building that sits right across the street from McFadden’s bar. It’s where we record our albums, where we park the bus, and where we do all of our day-to-day work to keep the band on the road every week — so when we got the phone call that the neighborhood was on fire, we rushed down to make sure our portal to rock-stardom wasn’t going up in smoke.

When I pulled up, I was stunned. The parking lot looked like a battlefield: The side wall of the bar had blown out, chucking bricks and debris into the side of our Big White Van.  Greasy smoke rolled over Gertrude the Bus, caking it with black soot and ash. Needless to say, it was a mess.

Luckily for us, the Relic-Mobiles only sustained minor damage, and the studio was left unmarred, so after we politely coerced one of the fire trucks to rinse some of the greasy soot off of the bus (after the fire was out, of course), we went ahead and trekked down to Harrisonburg, Va., to a great pub appropriately named “The Pub.” It was hard to shake the feeling that we dodged a bullet by escaping the fire with minimal damage … but we did our best to blow it off and do our thing.  The crowd was a lot of fun and the bartenders were smokin’ hot, so it all turned out A-OK.

Pulling back into home base on Sunday morning, the surrealism of it all hit again: we came really close to being a band without a means to be a band. Writing songs is the easy part — the hard part is all the behind-the-scenes work that goes on at Blues Alley Records. This weekend, it almost got a lot more difficult.

Contact The New Relics at letetrs@graffitiwv.com