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GREENSBORO — After two decades in the Greensboro music scene, Chuck Folds saw The Blind Tiger come full circle.

It happened when he played a series of daytime shows there with Big Bang Boom, his band that performs parent-friendly children’s music.

“It would be filled up as good as it would be with a good band on Saturday night, except there’s strollers parked in the corner and kids eating Cheese Doodles and drinking out of juice boxes,” he says.

“All the parents in there had spent their days in The Blind Tiger drinking and picking up people or whatever, and here we are back 15 years later.”

Established in 1988, when Lady Gaga was 2 years old and Ronald Reagan was still president, The Blind Tiger has survived into the era of smart phones and President Barack Obama.

Now, the popular music club is approaching a new era.

It’s scheduled to move from its location on Walker Avenue to a larger site a few blocks away on Spring Garden Street.

“We’re in the current location till the end of the year,” says co-owner Don “Doc” Beck. “We’re shooting for New Year’s Eve at the new place.”

The club’s legal capacity will triple from 146 to 480 when it moves to its new location at 1819 Spring Garden St., Beck says. He hopes to start attracting bigger bands while maintaining the flavor of the current club.

“We’re going to still try to do local music, but the touring band is what we’re going for,” Beck says.

“The bands that play Asheville and Raleigh, hopefully they’ll come here in between — or instead.”

For a while, The Blind Tiger’s future was up in the air.

One of The Blind Tiger’s original owners, Neil Reitzel, has shifted his focus to restaurants in recent years, opening Fishbones and Sticks and Stones. Earlier this year, he bought the building that houses Fishbones and The Blind Tiger, serving notice that the club would have to vacate the premises. Reitzel has not specified how he plans to use the space.

A host to rising stars

Other clubs around town have appeared and disappeared during The Blind Tiger’s long run, including the Miracle House, Fuzzy Ducks, the Zoo Bar, the Turtle Club and the Flying Anvil.

But The Blind Tiger outlasted them all, hosting a series of rising stars and veteran performers along the way.

“I always tried to do a bunch of different genres, just because people don’t want to hear the same thing night after night, and you try to get different people out each night,” Beck says. “Whether it was original rock or ’80s music or funk, it’s kind of what we tried to shoot for.”

Hootie and the Blowfish once played a benefit at the club, Beck says, long before the band’s album “Cracked Rear View” sold millions of copies and spawned a series of hit singles in the mid-1990s.

Bernie Worrell, keyboard player for Parliament-Funkadelic and Talking Heads, played a solo show there.

Chuck Folds’ older brother, Ben Folds, who played in Majosha with Evan Olson, debuted his band Ben Folds Five at The Blind Tiger.

That appearance came about four years before the band hit the charts with “Brick” and performed the song for a national television audience on “Saturday Night Live.”

“I remember Ben Folds wheeling in his little baby grand piano,” says Beck, who started working at The Blind Tiger Tiger in 1993, then bought out one of the partners in 2000 to become a part owner of the club.

“A little while later, he was on HBO, and they were saying, 'We understand your first gig was in Raleigh someplace,’ and he goes, 'No, actually it was at The Blind Tiger in Greensboro,’ and he said the same thing to (David) Letterman, so that was kind of cool. He mentioned us on both shows.”

Ben Folds moved on to a career as an internationally known recording artist, but the club has thrived for more than two decades on the strength of local working musicians playing there year in and year out.

“It’s one of a handful of top-tier music clubs in Greensboro,” says Dan Bayer, who mixes sound part time at the club and has played drums there with the Raving Knaves and 8 Eyes. “I put it up there next to the Somewhere Else Tavern, which has been around 30 years.”

Bayer characterizes The Blind Tiger as “more of a listening room than some places. It’s an actual music venue as opposed to a bar that just happens to have music,” he says.

Memorable nights

Local musicians and fans say recurring shows by local and regional artists provided some of their most memorable nights in the club. Chuck Folds played bass in Bus Stop, a band fronted by Olson that packed The Blind Tiger during its heyday. The band drew raucous cheers when it reunited briefly a

year ago during the “Snuzzfest” benefit concert to help guitarist, songwriter and singer Britt “Snuzz” Uzzell with medical expenses.

“For a number of years, we had to play two nights because there would literally be a line out the door down past (the) grocery store (on Walker Avenue),” Chuck Folds says.

Several people gushed about weekly shows in the early to mid-1990s by the Messengers, featuring Chris Carroll, Chuck Cotton and Sam Frazier, who now plays with Uzzell in the Numbers.

“My best memories of that place are the early ’90s, when Sam Frazier would play the Wednesday night thing,” says Clay Howard, who has performed at The Blind Tiger as a member of multiple bands,

including his current band, Stratocruiser, and earlier bands such as Diggin’ Taters, Crushed Velvet Jones and Barely White. He met his wife, Nicole, at The Blind Tiger in 1996 during a show by a funk cover band from South Carolina called Freakapotamus. Howard and his wife now have four children.

In recent years, Stratocruiser has performed at a series of Joe G’s Cover Band Explosions, benefiting the N.C. Humane Society and staged by Decoration Ghost drummer Joe Garrigan. Howard has sung the songs of Neil Diamond and Rick Springfield during those cover shows. Garrigan’s brother Mike played in

Athenaeum, an alternative band that performed at The Blind Tiger regularly before signing with Atlantic Records in 1996 and scoring a minor hit, “What I Didn’t Know.

The Triangle band Hobex, led by former Dillon Fence front man Greg Humphreys, a Winston-Salem native, and featuring Greensboro’s Andy Ware on bass, made The Blind Tiger a home away from home during the second half of the 1990s and the first half of 2000.

“Hobex really played there from the beginning of the band,” Humphreys says. “It’s been one of our longest relationships with a club.”

Although the band stopped touring in 2007, Humphreys and Ware still perform Hobex songs at the club regularly in a configuration they call Qbex, backed by drummer Jeff Sipe, a veteran of Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.

“They’ve been great to us,” Humphreys says. “They put our music on the jukebox.”

Giving back

The Blind Tiger has also been good to the community, says Chris Roulhac, who for the past 11 years has hosted “The North Carolina Show” on Guilford College’s radio station, WQFS 90.9 FM. Roulhac helped organize the Snuzzfest benefit at The Blind Tiger in 2009, one of many such events she has staged at the club.

“They’re not just out to make money. They have nice hearts,” says Roulhac, who has been going to see bands at The Blind Tiger before it was The Blind Tiger. She attended shows at the club in the mid-1980s when the bar was called Logan’s.

Roulhac has also put on benefits to raise money for victims of Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti. She once did a fundraiser for the late Jack True Sr., “the Santa Claus of Greensboro.”

“They’ve always let me have any benefit there I wanted to, and they’ve hosted lots of other benefits for sick musicians, employees of other businesses on the Walker Avenue corners who have had health problems,” she says.

Musicians and fans express mixed opinions about whether the spirit of one of Greensboro’s oldest clubs will survive the move.

“It’s a neighborhood bar,” says Chuck Folds. “I think wherever it goes, some of that magic will be gone.”

But Bayer thinks the tradeoff will be worth it.

“The plan is to move to a bigger place where we can get bigger acts,” he says. “I’d like to see that because it would kind of move the whole music scene up a notch.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com