Goodbye Scala

Scala shut down that weekend. Went out exactly how you’d want—Junior Boys, Shir Khan, Jack Tennis all playing, the kind of final lineup you can’t complain about. No real reason it needed to close. The place was always full, the sound was good, the room had that beautiful ugliness that real clubs have before they get renovated into oblivion.

But this is what happens in Berlin now. Something good exists, people love it, and then slowly it just stops existing. Nobody makes a decision to kill it, it just accumulates small pressures until one day the owner is tired and that’s it. Gone.

I remember the buzz about the closing, the Facebook group, all these plans to show up and make the last night count. Probably I was going to go, probably I meant to. That’s what you always think about venues like Scala—there’s time, I’ll catch it again. Until suddenly there isn’t and you’re looking at another empty storefront and trying to remember what the sound was like in there at three in the morning.