Mike Riley (Pulling Teeth, Charm City Art Space) contributed this brief history of the Chop Shop and the first incarnation of the Supreme Imperial. THANKS MIKE !!!
I first heard about the Supreme Imperial space in the spring of 1998 via George from Prisoner of Conscience and later The Convocation Of. A friend of his had been throwing some reggae parties in there from time as it was being rented by a local reggae band as their practice space. They only had access to the upstairs. The downstairs was a garage/storage space that didn’t seem to be used on a regular basis. I was doing shows in the old Commuter Cafeteria at UMBC (now long gone, but was roughly located where what is now the courtyard/patio for the new University Center), but those came to an end when someone else booked a show in there and left the place trashed. George put me in touch with the guys from the reggae band and the Supreme Imperial became my regular spot for booking shows in Baltimore. The first show I booked there was on March 22, 1998 with Ensign, Time Flies, Strong Intention, Reinforce, and Oxboard Drain. Ensign drove all the way there from NJ, saw the place, and made an excuse that their singer was sick so they couldn’t play, turned around and drove home. I’m pretty sure Time Flies also cancelled the show, but that happened prior to the day of the show.
I met Jamie Arthurs while doing shows at UMBC as he had just moved to Baltimore from the Pittsburgh area, where he had been doing shows for a while, when he introduced himself to me and asked if I could point him in the direction of some places to book shows in the area. Once we had the Supreme Imperial as a fairly solid venue, we began booking shows there pretty regularly, both on our own and as partners. That lasted for about six months until the end of that summer when things started getting weird with the reggae band. They were out on tour and left the responsibility of the space to a friend of theirs. We would have to get in touch with him to open the place up for us, which we’d usually organize a day or two ahead of time, but it was getting more and more often that we’d show up to find the place locked and the guy nowhere to be found. We’d call him up and he’d eventually show up and open the place up. It turned out the guy was spending the rent money that the reggae band gave him so it wasn’t getting paid and on September 4th we arrived to open up for a show with Disembodied, Overcast, Zao, and Darkest Hour to find new locks on the gate and a note saying the landlords had evicted the reggae band, who was still on tour, for failure to pay the rent. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we somehow managed to get inside and still had the show happen.
After that I was able to convince the powers that be at UMBC to let me do shows in the Commuter Cafeteria again, but I really missed the Supreme Imperial space as it sounded and felt a lot better than some echoey, stale cafeteria. I called up the reggae band and got the landlord’s number, called them up, and worked out a year-long lease, which included agreements for them to make a lot of much needed repairs to the building. I can’t remember why the people in the garage left, but we ended up getting the whole building which we split with some friends: Jason Molidor, David Hardy, and Dave Manganaro, who were going to get a screenprinting shop going downstairs. Jamie and I rounded up a small crew of friends to share the responsibilities with and we cleaned up, painted, and built a small stage and dubbed the space The Chop Shop, as that is what we always assumed was going on in the garage.
The first show as The Chop Shop was with Living Sacrifice, Six Going On Seven, The Kill Van Kull, and Cheater on November 4th, 1998. We had a great 3-month long run (in which we never had to pay rent since the landlords never fulfilled their end of the bargain in making all of the agreed upon repairs), booking some really amazing bands and shows, some of which kept getting bigger and bigger, until the night of January 22nd, 1999 when the fire marshal and a bunch of cops showed up as the result of a complaint that we were throwing “parties” in a “condemned building”. The building was not condemned, however, there were almost 200 people in that room to see Boy Sets Fire (who only got to play 2 or 3 songs), Zao, the Jazz June, Atom and His Package, Inside, and Tear It Down, and we were certainly not licensed to be doing such things. We never did find out who made the complaint, but our best guess was the owner of a “gentleman’s club” in the neighborhood, as he came by a few weeks prior during a bigger show to complain that there was nowhere for his patrons to park, and he was the only other establishment in the area open at night time, besides the gas station that loved us cuz that’s where everyone went to get their drinks and snacks.
And that was that. The end of an era. A little while later George and Tonie Joy ended up renting the building and turned the upstairs into a really nice loft apartment and ended up doing shows for a brief time in the garage. The best thing to come out of the closing of the Chop Shop was the discovery of the St. Andrews Church in College Park as a venue for our bigger shows. I had had a show booked for Kid Dynamite, Grey Area, Kill Your Idols, Fast Times, and Good Clean Fun at the Chop Shop for the following March and had to scramble to find a new venue for it. Steve Clark and John Mutchler (who were both in No Justice at the time) approached the church about hosting shows and they agreed and it was probably for the best as almost 500 people came out for that one and it would have been way to big for the Chop Shop. That was the first of many amazing shows at that church though it was the last I would be heavily involved in the booking of as Jamie was getting more and more into booking huge shows with contracts and that was an aspect of the scene that I generally shied away from, preferring a more DIY approach.
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