Ye gads: River Gods mortal after all

River ≠ Rivet

for Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. You remember that one? Grady puts Pedro back in? Most of the crowd had the same reaction I did when that happened: we nearly threw our bottles of High Life at the screen. You know the rest.

I just barely managed to catch the last Red Line train back over the Charles, so I suppose it could have been slightly worse. But that was my lowest moment ever as a lifelong Boston sports fan. I walked around in a dark funk for two weeks. Mercifully, 2004 buried that memory: I was at Fenway for ALCS Games 4 and 5.

I had some happy memories at River Gods, too. RIP.

Any of it. That place was magical and I'm sad it won't be there anymore :(

I used to work around the corner from there. We'd go there after work for drinks some times. That's when I learned that the staff of Harmonix, makers of Rock Band, would bring a fully unlocked set of tracks to the bar once or twice a month and plug it into the projector and let anyone take whichever song and instrument they wanted.

Rocking out with 3 of the Harmonix staff on Coheed and Cambria's "Welcome Home" was one of the coolest geek moments of my life...so far.

Praise be to the River Gods!

I was wondering if something was up when they started having more erratic hours last summer, even closing on Sundays, which is usually a sign of a place struggling. Really too bad. Maybe with Central getting more and more restaurants these days, fewer people are making it down off the beaten path, since you really need to know it to go there--it wasn't a place getting new business out of casual foot traffic. And it was pretty gen-X/children-of the-80's-underground-centric, esp. music-wise, so the niche crowd is bound to thin over the years as people move-on/move-out.