The Moroccan Revisited

From Issue 200, August 2005

“I never wanted to be the earthquake,
but to be the pebble [that] would cause the fault line to slip,
never wanted to change everyone’s mind, just the people who would make the earthquake happen,
Ether was never about changing everyone’s mind,
it was about changing the right people’s mind.”

–Derek Fonnesbeck. member of Ether and ex–manager of Moroccan.

Scenes thrive around a center, be it a band, label or venue. Salt Lake venues have long been the catalysts fueling the city’s fire. One of Salt Lake’s greatest, most influential and most unknown venues of the not-too-distant past was the Moroccan, and barely anyone under the age of 24 here knows about it. The Moroccan began as a practice space in 1996, transformed into a thriving, illegal all-ages venue in the late 90s, then back into a practice and recording space until recently. Now, the Moroccan has finally closed its doors forever, and its closing marks the end of an era.

The Moroccan was hard to find, even with an exact street address. It’s down the narrow alley and behind Guthrie Bikes in downtown Salt Lake, in a dirty, nondescript gray building. The only thing out of the ordinary is the Arabic writing above the metal door.

Inside, under the 30-foot-high skylight and over-head fan, there is a loft area, decrepit stage, scuffed cement floor and the Moroccan’s trademark: several pre-2005 curlicue wood cutouts decorating the space about the stage.

“I think a space retains the energy of the events that took place there,” says Dan Thomas, drummer for Tolchock Trio, Red Bennies, The Breaks and Smashy Smashy. “As soon as you walk intothe Moroccan, you immediately get the sense that, ‘Wow, here is a place with a history,’ that a lot of interesting, momentous, creative things happened here.”

“When you were inside, you didn’t know what city you were in, and that’s how we wanted it,” says Riley Fogg, head of Ether, an experimental noise band that started in the mid-90s, and current leader of Ether Orchestra. Fogg was th Moroccan’s leaseholder for almost 10 years. “It was something exotic in a city that was bland. The place itself was an event.”

I was in Salt Lake for a visit, and stopped by the Moroccan for a show,” says Thomas. “It turns out we had mixed up the nights of the show, but I heard this band practicing there that blew my mind. To find a band with that level of quality, musical knowledge and passion from Salt Lake made me see the city in a different light—like there was this whole underground, secret thing going on that no one knew about. I later found out that was Ether.”

“Ether wasn’t like a band, they were an event,” says Derek Fonnesback, longtime business manager of the band and the Moroccan and then sotre manager of the U of U location of Graywhale CD Exchange. Derek currently produces Form of Rocket material. “There were always at least two firebreathers, different costumes and themes at every show and film projectors. Ether stood by the ‘art first, entertainment later’ ethos.”

Ether opened for Fugazi at Bricks and released their third album, Music for Air Raids, on Extreme Records in Australia.
James Acton, Ether’s drummer and future drummer for Ether Orchestra, was a waiter at Cedars of Lebanon and asked to rent the Moroccan from his boss Raffi Daghlian, owner of the buildings behinds the restaurant. Once used to house Daghlian’s rug-cleaning business, Ether gutted the space and transformed it into a practice space and community art co-op.

“We wanted a place where we had the freedom to do whatever,” says Fogg. “Experimental art, performance, music. We started out doing some parties and private shows, and it evolved into an underground all-ages venue.”

When the Moroccan began, the last unofficial, illegal all-ages venue, the Hate House (Appropriately named after the late 80s local band Hate X9), had closed due to constant police harassment.

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