The Night of the Atomic Cafe
Gregory Pat Scandalis
(June 2, 1990)

Where do I begin telling the story of the "ATOMIC CAFE"!! Yes, this is the name of the cafe that we went to in Akaroa, New Zealand, but is also the name of the weirdest party that I have every been to/played at.

The Free Band has not been playing much, but we did play this very strange party put on by the Cacophony Society. It was called the Atomic Cafe. It was a simulation of a Post nuclear gathering in an Abandoned Bomb Shelter in a building in SF.

We didn't know much about the gig, but they told us that they would show up with a truck at Free Band Headquarters and that they would take us to the gig. Marla and her friend Marsha wanted to go to. The plan for them was to meet at this bar downtown, and the Cacophony people would take every one to the party.

The guy shows up with an enormous rented moving van. First we got a little lecture. They were going to be taking us to an abandoned building in the City, we would not know were this building is. We would be entering the building, probably illegally, and we would proceed to have this weird party in the building's bomb shelter.

They told us that that had done this type of thing many times and had encounterd the police twice in 15 years. Once, in 1976, they were helping Mark Pauline (Survival Research Laboratories, SRL), modify billboards (Clearly illegal). No one was arrested. The other time they entered an unfinished skyscraper in formal wear (tuxes, gowns white gloves). The proceeded to have a VERY FORMAL dinner on an upper floor of this partially finished skyscraper. Some one wandered out of the area that they had certified as alarm free and set off an alarm. Well the police showed up and found 20 veeeery proper people in dinner wear, dining in this mess of a sky scraper. Again no one was arrested, and they were asked to leave. The point of this lecture was to warn anyone with a warrent (unpaid tickets), that it would probably be best to not go.

The rules of the party were bring your roller skates, nonperishable bomb shelter food, and once the doors close at 9:00, the war will begin, no one can go out until 12:00, when the war is over.

Well I decided that this was a bit to heavy a scene for Marla, so I tried to call her to warn her about how strange this was really going to be. No Luck...

Well we get in the back of the truck, and the guy tells us that our radio rendezvous is at 8:00 sharp??! He also tells us that when he bangs on the truck 3 times, we must be perfectly quite. This is when we will be entering the building.

Well finally the truck stops, we must be in the building. The back doors of the truck open, and we can see that we are in a very dark loading dock garage. there is a staircase that leads down, that is illuminated by lots of candles on the steps.

We unload all the band gear and work our way downstairs. They've put lots of candles all over the floor so that we can see our way through the building. We are in a very large basement/industrial building. We can see long vaulting hallways, the kind that you would drive a forklift in. Lots of side passages, and off in the distance 2 doors are open with a little light and music pouring out.

When we get to the room, it's pretty surreal. This is an old Civil Defense Bomb shelter. Its quite large, about the length of a gym, but half the width. The Cacaphony people have been coming in here for several days to decorate. They have placed a generator in a room in the corner, and have rigged a very clever ducting system to port the exhaust to the outside through a window. There are some dim lights lighting up the room. They set up a 5 foot (that's 2.66 meters to you bub) stage at the end of the room for us to play on. They found about 40 prosetic legs and arms that were stored here. These are hanging from the ceiling. They have also hung these radio active hazard signs, and these "Warning Land Mines" signs. At the end of the room opposite the stage is a food table, that has some old army rations food, lots of 5 Gal bottles of water that are bubbling with dry ice.

Well the party hasn't started yet. We have to set up the band, and the Cacophony people need to go to the bar and get the "guests". We get the band set up. We've rented a fog machine and a bubble machine for the evening (to give the band that post nuclear Lawerece Welk look). We also have the white toxic Waste suits that we worn at the gig that the Japanese magazine wrote about.

We hear the truck roll up, we fire up the band. We're playing this funk version of Freedom Jazz Dance, sounds like the David Bowie song "Fame". The guests have to go through "decontamination" before they enter the shelter, and the doors are shut. We see people start to drift into the shelter one at a time. By the time everybody was "decontaminated" and the doors were shut there were over 100 people in the shelter!

The party was pretty weird, people in radiation suits were roller skating to the music. Peter the Hippie was go-go Dancing. Turns out that Marla and her friend Marsha never got my message. Marla though it was weird, but her friend Marsha got claustrophobia.

Well midnight comes around, and they loaded all the guests back in the truck and wisked them into the night. We tore down the band, reloaded all the gear, cleaned up the room (no evidence that we had been there), backed out all the candles, and slipped quietly away.