Pink House Forever

The Pink House was like an underground United Nations. Chapel Hill's aspiring artists, musicians, poets, DJ's, activists, actors, writers, nudists, flutists, knuckleheads, and couch-surfers, all living together in (relative) harmony, united by their common bohemianism. Life inside the Pink House often consisted of weird shit happening at all hours, every day, it rarely stopped. And there's something about that place that won't allow the vibe to ever fully dissipate. / PinkHouseForever.org

Pink House. 130 North Street. Back In The Day.

Fellow residents from the 1991-94 years were Clint Curtis, Shyam Patel, Raj Krishnasami, Lydia Craft, Jess Deltac, Kyle York Spencer, Caroline Rivers Hall, Mel Lanham, Michelle Sinnott, Jay Murray, N'Gai Wright, Scott Bullock (who crashed on the couch for a year before finally moving in), Bryan Ellerson, Karen Hurka, Sally Stryker, Ryan Mathias, Charlie Speight, Chris Palmatier, Trent McDevitt, and Steve William.

Besides holdovers and returnees Jay, Scott, Mel (& Laverne!), Chris, and N'Gai, residents during 1995-97 included Ian Williams, Greg Humphreys, Allen Sellars (who, like Jay, lived at both the Pink House and 401 Pritchard), Zak Bisacky, James Dasher, Linden Elstran, Jiffer Bourguignon, Grant Tennille (who first made the scene as a fixture in N'Gai's room circa summer '93), Zia Zareem, Ben Folds, Tom Holden, and Chris "Chip" Chapman.

- Erik Ose

Monday, November 15, 2010

The August Sessions...Unearthed

Recently while visiting North Carolina, N'Gai convinced me to patch together all the equipment I needed to digitize some sound recordings. The occasion was his unearthing of a forgotten stash of cassette tapes documenting the legendary August Sessions. Dating from the infamous summer of '93, the second summer N'Gai lived at the Pink House before leaving Chapel Hill for the Far East, these tapes captured a series of day and night jam sessions held in his downstairs room.

They featured a rotating cast of musicians, including N'Gai on flute, Lem on buckets and various other percussion, Grant Tennille on guitar, Bryan Ellerson on keyboards, Charles Overbeck on the cello, and Karen Hurka on harp. The sound quality is surprisingly clear for having been recorded on an old boombox ("I think the cassette door was broken off, and the tape was just held there by the heads," according to N'Gai), and several priceless, previously unheralded moments in Pink House history have been discovered (like Lem macking on Jyoti). More details will be forthcoming.