The Old Brick Room Stirs: 123 Pleasant Street's Fall Comes Into Focus

The Ruby has carried this summer on its riverfront shoulders, and God bless it. But the Ruby closes with the season, and when the students pour back into town and the nights get a little cooler, the live-music center of gravity migrates back downtown — to a 135-year-old brick building at 123 Pleasant Street. The fall calendar is starting to fill in, and it's exactly as gloriously deranged as it should be.

The two dates already on the board tell you everything about this room's booking philosophy. On August 24, the Murder Junkies — the notorious former backing band of GG Allin, an act whose reputation precedes it by roughly a mile — take the 250-cap stage. Six nights later, on August 30, psychobilly legends The Reverend Horton Heat bring their hot-rod twang and upright-bass fury to the same room. One weekend of gutter-punk infamy, one weekend of Texas psychobilly royalty, all in a building that has seen far stranger things.

Because it has. This is the point of 123 Pleasant Street. The structure went up in 1891 as an apartment block; by 1982 it was the Underground Railroad, Marsha Ferber's legendary underground room, whose story took a genuinely dark turn with Ferber's unsolved 1988 disappearance and the venue's 1989 closure. It cycled through the Nyabinghi Dance Hall in the early '90s, got condemned in 1998, and was hauled back from the dead that same October under the 123 name. Original tin ceilings, two bars, a policy of booking "national, regional, and local talent of ALL genres" — this is the room that has absorbed every phase of Morgantown's musical life and kept the doors open through all of it.

Which is why these fall bookings matter beyond the novelty. The Ruby is a triumph of civic programming, but it's seasonal and it's curated for the broadest possible crowd. 123 Pleasant Street is the other, older engine — the year-round, no-guardrails room where a Murder Junkies show and a Reverend Horton Heat show can share a week, where 18-year-olds see their first sweaty club gig, and where the touring underground still reliably stops in North-Central West Virginia. A scene needs both. The riverfront gives you the spectacle; the brick room gives you the spine.

So enjoy these last Ruby Fridays — Hanson hits the amphitheater this Friday, August 14, believe it or not. But keep one eye downtown. The old room is clearing its throat. By the time the leaves turn, Pleasant Street will be loud again, and Morgantown's music year will have come full circle, right back to the building that's been doing this longer than any of us have been alive.

Sources: 123 Pleasant Street events (JamBase); The History of 123 Pleasant Street; Legendary music venue 123 Pleasant Street reaches 25-year anniversary (The Daily Athenaeum)