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Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Rules on the Books
The rationale for this ban was that the band is employed by the bar while on stage, and therefore should be bound by the same rules as bartenders and wait staff... which was a fine justification for restrictive, puritanical bullshit. Remember: until 2002, Seattle actually had a poster ban justified by the danger of utility workers injuring themselves on rusty staples on utility poles (I swear, I am not making this up)-- rather than try to honestly stop posters in the city, Seattle managed to back-door-ban postering due to the danger of staples.
...but I'm straying from the point. This is a cause for celebration because, like the poster ban before it, this is another bit of unnecessary, 1950s conservative, life-choking bureaucracy just got culled from the books... not the kind of thing people associate with Seattle, but it is part of the cultural make-up here.
This is what I'm going to call a Moral Victory, simply because the "no drinks on stage" rule was almost never enforced. Pretty much every member of every band had a beer on stage and they were never held accountable unless the liquor board was on the rampage... and that only happened when the obnoxious ordnance was up for review. Even then, the worst consequence I ever saw was a sound guy yelling at the band: "Hey! No drinks on stage!"
So today is a win for yanking a useless rule off the books that 1) never made any sense and 2) was never enforced.
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