Long before we imagined we could ever bring superstar acts like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Toad’s, local bands were our lifeblood, helping us pay the bills and keeping us in business. Even after we began booking nationally known bands, we continued to offer our stage to local musicians, often as opening acts. We learned our audiences didn’t demand acts who were on the cover of Rolling Stone to spend an evening with us; they were happy to enjoy the homegrown talent we shared with them. Peter Menta formed the Ten Years Late Jug Band in 1975 (our first year), but he also booked bands for us from 1975 until 1978.

“We were the house opening act for Toad’s,” Menta said. “We got in from the ground up. We opened for the heavyweights of that time: Willie Dixon, Aztec Two-Step, NRBQ, and George Thorogood. In the early days, the local bands were important to the survival of Toad’s Place,” he recalled. “Local bands had draw.” The members of some of the first bands to perform at Toad’s laugh as they recall the conditions back in 1975. “We played on a stage that, to my memory, was plywood up on some cinderblocks, or some such primitive thing,” remembers Christine Ohlman, called “the Beehive Queen” because of her amazing tower of platinum blond hair. She was a founder of the Scratch Band, described by Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone as playing “contemporary rock R&B.”

Rob Jockel, co-founder and singer of Eight to the Bar, recalls the night Big Mike told the band, after they played their four forty-five-minute sets, that Toad’s was “closing for a couple of weeks to do some renovations.”

“We’re expanding into the back warehouse space,” he said. The bands had been using that area as a dressing room.

“When the doors closed and the patrons left,” Jockel adds, “we were all given hammers and large tools of destruction and told we could help tear down the walls and get them started on the new room. I have no clue why we were game, but we did chip in. There was plaster, wood bits, and dust all over the place. We stayed a few hours, drank beer, and left around 3 a.m.”