Gonna be honest with you – it’s Friday afternoon and I don’t feel like writing about Philly sports. The Eagles are interviewing some people they may or may not hire. The Flyers lost their fourth straight and the Sixers got hammered in Indy last night.

So let’s switch gears. Let’s talk about the RZA, the GZA, Old Dirty Bastard, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon the Chef, U GOD, Ghostface Killah and the M-E-T-H-O-D man.

Apparently it’s the 30th anniversary of Wu-Tang playing some Montco nightclub I didn’t even know existed, via Tony Di Domizio at North Penn Now:

In a small town that was worlds away from the gritty, Dirt McGirt streets of Staten Island, a seismic shift in music and culture took place as the iconic rap group Wu-Tang Clan descended upon Lansdale (technically, Towamencin) on Jan. 15, 1994, to perform at Jumpers Teen Club.

…

The club was located in Lansdale Village Shoppes, a strip mall at West Main Street and Oak Boulevard that had Acme, the Lansdale Beef and Ale House (which had a 7-hour hostage situation this week in 1995) and Philly Finest Water Ice. New Station Pizza was there in the mid-90s, as was the Lansdale Jaycees’ annual Haunted House and a Blockbuster Video. Today, it is the site of Lidl & Total Liquidators.  

The club catered to ages 15 to 20. It had music, a sports entertainment center, and a snack area. It was open Thursday through Sunday, 8 p.m. to midnight. Nightly crowds estimated at 200 to 500 people, said former owner Stephen Pennington.

“Jumpers started as an all-ages club in 1993,” said Pennington, now a lawyer and CEO of the Center for Disability Law & Policy. “Wayne Fields, my partner and I, decided to have Wu-Tang perform after we started to book local groups and wanted to expand. I had a contact with connections to the group and we booked them to perform in early January 1994.”

…

“The members of Wu-Tang were great guys. No hassles at all,” Pennington said. 

Of course they were great guys, because Wu-Tang is and always will be for the children.

But yeah, early January, 1994. That was two months after the release of 36 Chambers, so this is EARLY Wu Tang, before any of the solo albums first came out. They probably just played a set straight off the debut record, so Bring Da Ruckus, Chessboxin, CREAM, Clan in da front, all of those classic tracks. I would have given an arm and a leg to see that show. I didn’t even know Lansdale had a nightclub, let alone one that hosted the WU in their prime. When you listened to the radio back then, all they ever advertised was Fuzzy Bunny Slippers playing Egypt nightclub for the ten thousandth time.


By the way, thanks to everybody who read my story, “If Every Wu-Tang Clan Member was a Philadelphia Athlete.” I’m told it’s up for the Pulitzer Prize.