Kirkwood Ballers Club at Highland Inn Ballroom starts up this week

After several months of languishing in a state of indefinite hiatus, The Kirkwood Ballers Club is back, this time in its new home at The Highland Inn Ballroom. The call is simple, bring an instrument, a device, a record, a beat, a turntable, a laptop, a prepared piece of music, a song, a voice, a bag of blood, a film projector, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, an agenda, a broken guitar and all your hang-ups for an evening of jazzy, noisy and totally arty open mic. madness.

On the eve. of the rebirth of The Ballers Club I sat down with Randy in the basement where it all began, to talk about the past and the present of KBC and his booking activities with The Tight Bros. Network.

Chad Radford: Now that you’re in the new home you’re not going to drop “Kirkwood” from the title, are you?

Randy Castello: Fuck no. I like the name and I like the neighborhood. That’s where it began.

It started in the house where you live with your Tight Bros. partner Nisa Asokan, correct?

Correct. It was never planned that we were going to start this cool night in the basement or anything, we just kind of started doing it. We would have parties with our friends and everyone here was a musician. This was in ‘97 when we were having these parties and there were instruments set up. We had some cool memorable nights when like my co-workers from when I was working at Eats would come over and everyone would congregate down in the basement and have sessions. There weren’t any huge stars down here or anything. Bradford Cox from Deehunter used to rock out down here, and I remember one night when David Grubbs was sleeping upstairs with his cello player and everyone started rocking out in the basement after the David Grubbs show at Eyedrum and he came down and asked us politely if we could stop.