Did the Drop, or, as we often used to call it, The Grind, change that much over the years? Sort of. The mid-Aughts frenzy which grabbed myself and my cohorts gripped the DJ circuit running out of the Grind, too. Our peaks and troughs were often mirrored by theirs. And let’s face it, they got more press and got more paying customers at their DJ nights, too. They always treated John and I with a thinly veiled sense of condescension. We were a bunch of art nerds and gentlemen dealers. They spun in circles where Philly and NYC mixed at the highest DJ levels and considered themselves national players, on a level hard (they would’ve said then) for us to imagine. By 2007, however, the most intense part of the fracas was clearly over, even as some electricity remained in the Center City air. Dana Blasconi had stepped onto a full-blooded metropolitan stage— head barista at The Grind— shortly before, and now ruled a bunch of roosts at the place. Whole-grain bread from out of the Bread Basket (Nebraska), but armed with suicide-blonde good looks, tallish, thin, lank hair framing her face in a Cybil Shepherd in The Last Picture Show sort of way, this Jacy Farrow lookalike went whole-hog on diving down into the mung and the scum with the DJs to send The Grind into the air the right way. Then, there were the airwaves ruled by her at the place, and when, towards the end of ’07, she put Black Sabbath and King Crimson together in a heavy rotation, the hipster clientele, including myself, knew that games being played were getting heavy, man, and prices were being paid. My own thing with Dana was a moderate one. She, herself, had aspirations to be a visual artist (and the names Trish Webber and Tobi Simon were by no means unknown to her), but her whole-grained best energies were devoted to The Grind staying afloat at the highest level. Not pugilistic, herself moderate, Dana nevertheless resented seeing me with Trish, Julie (who lived right across the street between Pine and Lombard, in a high-ceiling flat with splinter-granting wooden floors, paint-chips galore) and the rest. She didn’t have a steady hubs guy. I wound up writing an entire book out of this Grind scenario. The more stalwart DJs moved forward. Making Time, the flagship Philly DJ night, continued. Trish Webber always affixed her killer word— declasse— to The Grind. Yet it stood in Center City in the Aughts as a tribute to hipster credentials Center City had then earned— from art nerds like myself, to the film brats at U of Arts, Plunketts and other South Philly goons, PAFA heiresses, Wharton wonks up for a little sleaze, right back to the DJs at the center. Philly had enough pull that Dana plucked herself from the corn and hauled ass right up to it. Jacy Farrow or not, she manned the fortress as a living symbol, or synecdoche, of everything Philly had done right by letting idiots like us run the streets, set up shops, and do our sordid business.
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