Named event or history
The club, the labels, and the bands that brought national attention to the Chapel Hill–Carrboro music scene.
111 indexed records are connected with this event.
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Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
"North Carolina has always produced extraordinary music. From Charlie Poole standardizing the bluegrass form in the 1920s, to the creation of an entire diaspora of Black musicians which included Thelonious Monk, John Co…
Death Chick and the Caveman : 1987 to 1989 -- Wet behind the ears : 1989 to 1991 -- Where's your patience, dear? : Matt Suggs, Butterglory, and White Whale -- The popular music : 1991 to 1993-- Signals that sound in the…
Video compilation of Chapel Hill-area bands. "Seventeen videos interspersed with clips of our most famous and not-so-famous locals."
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Posters, 1997-2006.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 24, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 24 in the chronology →
Cat's Cradle opened in 1969 as a tiny basement music club near the UNC campus, named for Kurt Vonnegut's novel. After moves within Chapel Hill it settled at 300 East Main Street in Carrboro in 1993, where it became a regular stop for touring acts.
Subject: Cat’s Cradle
The club left its first home, a basement room near campus, for 405½ West Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill, its second location.
David Robert and his partners sold the Chapel Hill club to Frank Heath and Richard Fox in 1986; Heath became sole owner in 1987 and still runs the club.
People: Frank Heath
Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance started Merge in Chapel Hill in 1989, the year they formed Superchunk, to put out their own band's and friends' records on 7-inch singles and cassettes.
People: Mac McCaughan · Laura Ballance
After leaving the small 320 West Franklin Street room known as the shoebox in August 1988, the club reopened at 206 West Franklin Street, its fourth location, where it stayed until 1993.
People: Frank Heath
The Chapel Hill band, whose early singles had launched Merge Records, issued its self-titled debut album on Matador; Merge put out the band's later albums from Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
People: Mac McCaughan · Laura Ballance
Nirvana played the club's West Franklin Street room ten days after the release of Nevermind; Pearl Jam also played the Cradle in 1991, to about 100 people.
Glenn Boothe opened Local 506, an all-ages rock club for emerging and local bands, at 506 West Franklin Street and owned it for about a decade.
After working out of several Chapel Hill houses, Merge took space at 120 East Main Street in Carrboro, upstairs from the Armadillo Grill; it moved to a Chapel Hill house in 1996 and to Durham in 2001.
People: Mac McCaughan · Laura Ballance
The Superchunk singles collection Tossing Seeds (Singles 89–91) was Merge's first full-length release and its first CD.
People: Mac McCaughan · Laura Ballance
The Chapel Hill quartet's first album came out on Merge in 1992, followed by Today's Active Lifestyles on Merge in 1993.
Spin's December 1992 feature "Robbing the Cradle," its title a play on the Cat's Cradle, looked at Polvo and other local bands as record scouts hunted for the next big thing after Seattle. By January 1993 the Daily Tar Heel counted about six publications calling Chapel Hill the next Seattle, and Details and Time followed that year.
A 1993 Entertainment Weekly article proposed Chapel Hill as Seattle's successor and questioned whether Superchunk wanted the role; Rolling Stone the same year floated Superchunk as the next Nirvana.
People: Mac McCaughan
Jim Mathus and Katharine Whalen, who had moved from Chapel Hill to a farmhouse in Efland, started the band in summer 1993, played their first show that November and signed with Mammoth Records in 1994.
After about six months dark, the club reopened in the former Nice Price Books space at 300 East Main Street, a standing-room hall holding about 750.
People: Frank Heath
Subject: Cat’s Cradle
Details followed Spin with a February 1993 piece on the town's bands, and Time the same year named Chapel Hill as a possible alternative-rock boomtown.
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