"Love For Sale" at The Charleston

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One of the more frequented live-music venues of GTB was The Charleston on Bedford and North 7th in Williamsburg. It had a divey, old-man appeal and a built in crowd of drunk confused hipsters after hours but mainly it was preferred because it was literally down the street from the band's rehearsal space. In this show, taped by long-standing GOD supporter Bowls MacLean, the band opens the show with one of their infamous frozen poses before launching into "Rock Around With God" (herein shortened for length). But here it is Rollo Royce who is given a moment to shine with his punk rock inspired performance of the Talking Heads song "Love For Sale." While this run of the song was in its early stages, it still gives a clear indication of the sexual potency of Rollo's energy onstage. It also documents the extremely annoying and arbitrary "light show" that the owner of The Charleston would run by flipping a bunch of switches in the back regardless of its appropriateness to the song at hand. Even so, it's sad to report that The Charleston recently closed its doors for good presumably because of the skyrocketing costs of rent in the area... though it also seems likely that they finally ended up getting sued by someone suffering from an epileptic seizure caused by the overbearing strobe effect in their light shows.