Whether or not they’ll tell it in the interests of protecting the guilty, every Raleigh club-goer of a certain age has a Kenny Hobby story.
Here’s mine, from way back in 1991, when a rumor went around that R.E.M. was playing “secret” shows under a pseudonym. Raleigh’s Brewery nightclub was supposedly on the itinerary.
The night it was supposed to happen, a capacity crowd showed up and a bad scene broke out when R.E.M. did not turn up. Things got contentious enough that I wrote a column about it for the News & Observer. When I sought out Brewery owner Hobby to ask if he knew how that rumor got started, he laughed for a long, long time.
“Nope,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “But I hear AC/DC’s gonna be in here next weekend with Mojo Nixon.”
Similar stories have been going around town this week following Hobby’s death on April 3, from an array of health problems. He was just short of turning 72 and lived some high-mileage years.
“He had congestive heart failure, and that caused a lot of other things,” Lisa Thompson, his partner of three decades, told the INDY. “There was deterioration, and he just wore out.”
A native of Durham, Hobby played drums in bands through high school before moving to Raleigh in 1971 to attend NC State. While his field of study was textiles, his real education came from haunting local nightclubs.
Hobby got involved in running a number of local nightspots, including The Silver Bullet (which later became Goodnights Comedy Club). But it was the Brewery on NC State’s Hillsborough Street main drag where Hobby truly made his mark. He owned and operated it from 1983 to 2004, through several momentous eras of local music.
“Every bar owner in town stands on Kenny’s shoulders,” said Van Alston, a longtime Raleigh nightlife impresario who was Hobby’s business partner at the Brewery for several years in the 1990s. “He was a guy who cared about the bands, the sound, making sure everybody was happy, even though he was not the most astute businessman. But he had a great product, sold what people wanted.”
From outside, the Brewery was a frankly unsightly plywood box, and you wouldn’t have called the inside a comfortable room. Yet it had a great dive-bar vibe, and the best sound in town. I lived a two-minute walk from the Brewery through the 1990s, when I was the News & Observer‘s music critic, so I was there several nights a week for years.
The list of national acts that played the Brewery on their way up is formidable. I saw The Cranberries and Sheryl Crow playing there for miniscule crowds, not long before both blew up on MTV. And I also saw Blind Melon, maybe the worst band ever to earn a platinum record, playing a month-long Sunday-night residency during their brief time as local residents. They were terrible, but they did send Hobby a platinum record after hitting it big. He kept the Blind Melon plaque on the wall behind the bar, taking it with him when he sold the club in 2004.
In the 1980s, the Brewery was a prime spot for hardcore shows with bands like Husker Du, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and local heroes Corrosion of Conformity. The club’s other most notable peak came in the second half of the 1990s, when it served as home court for a generation of local alternative-country acts.
It seemed like The Backsliders, 6 String Drag, 2 Dollar Pistols, or Whiskeytown were playing the Brewery every weekend back then. The Backsliders recorded their 1996 live album From Raleigh, North Carolina at the Brewery on a hot Saturday night in July of that year. Connells-drummer-turned-director John Schultz set a key scene there for his 1997 movie Bandwagon. And one night, Whiskeytown fiddler Caitlin Cary began singing in the Brewery’s women’s room with Tonya Lamm and Lynn Blakey—and Tres Chicas were born.
Keeping the party going was hard on everyone, of course. Jac Cain said working as soundman at the Brewery “turned me into a raging alcoholic,” and he wasn’t the only one (of note, he got sober years ago). But the foundational role the Brewery played in local music is undeniable.
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Hobby finally sold the Brewery in 2004 to Tom Taylor, and it kept going until 2011, when it was torn down to make way for the student housing complex Stanhope. Hobby retreated to the Coast and kept working, most recently at the Ocean Grill and Tiki Bar at Carolina Beach (which hosted a celebration on April 9, his birthday). Meanwhile, so much of Hillsborough Street has been torn down that it’s unrecognizable from the Brewery’s heyday.
“It’s a shame Hillsborough Street as it was no longer exists,” said Alston. “In a perfect world, Kenny would have been there until the end of time, running that bar.”
Plans are in the works for a Kenny Hobby tribute event in Raleigh this summer, probably at the Pour House.
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