Philadelphia Weekly

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Joe Tartaglia used to have the high score on the Pole Position machine at Connie’s Ric Rac. Now the music venue acquired the large Atari race car game and already Joe has become quite attached. “I’ve been playing that game since 1982,” he says. But last night, during an improv comedy performance, the game began to emit a loud noise, as it does when it sits idle for too long. So Joe’s brother Frank pulled the plug, erasing the scores. And Joe is not happy.

“I just don’t know why you did it,” the 40-year-old shouts at his brother in a raspy South Philly bellow. “There’s a volume switch on the back. You should’ve called me.”

The journey from grown-up clubhouse to full-fledged music venue has not been easy on the Tartaglia brothers or their partners. But like New York’s Bowery and London’s Camden Town before it, the Italian Market is a neighborhood with a dirty, degenerate charm that’s just begging for a music venue. And after more than five years of drama, the Ric Rac is finally ready to rock.

Connie Tartaglia was just another small business owner among the heart-stopping cheesesteaks and cheap toy guns when she opened the Ric Rac as an electronics store. But in 1996, the neighbors quit buying. Connie turned the Ric Rac into storage space as she moved her business online.

With money he won in a poker tournament, Connie’s son Joe decided he wanted to turn the Ric Rac into a theater. One day, as he was hauling lumber around, his friend Pete Pelullo wandered in off the street and the pair built a stage.

“For a long time, that’s all there was,” Joe says. “But we were so proud of it we kept inviting people over to check it out.”

They would throw beers in the fridge, put on some tunes, maybe play some poker. The Ric Rac became just a place to hang out. But the thing about an empty stage is that it never stays empty for long.

After a short stint writing for MTV turned into 10 years in New York, Joe’s brother Frank returned to Philadelphia. He and former co-worker Rob Ogus started playing music together as the Discount Heroes and the pair decided to make a go of it back in Frank’s hometown.

The pair began jamming their pleasant, mod-rock tunes right into the middle of the city’s rather bulging acoustic music scene. They found themselves hosting a lot of open mics, and after the bars would close, they’d bring whatever crowd remained back to the Ric Rac, throw some beers in the fridge and continue hitting the stage on into the night.

It wasn’t long before people were asking to do shows at the Ric Rac.

So the Discount Heroes—now a full band that included Joe, Frank, Rob and two of their friends—decided they had to build a bar. As they were building, a lawyer by the name of Mark Tulos peeked his head in the door and started asking questions. “He said he did zoning and that he could help us for free. He had all these ideas like making it a school for performing arts, showing movies,” Joe says. “Meanwhile, all these kids were still coming here to check out this stage in a room. That’s really all it was.”

Joint Repair

Midway through the permitting process, Tulos moved to Dubai and the Heroes never heard from him again. With him gone, the Heroes were more determined than ever to make the Ric Rac happen. But first they needed a license. So they did what they do best: They threw a party.

“We had a fundraiser and we got shut down that night,” Joe says. “The cops and L&I came. They thought we were running a speakeasy.”

It took nearly two years to get everything up to code. In that time, the Heroes watched as their neighborhood went from a blighted community to an up-and-coming entertainment district full of bars, luncheonettes and art galleries.

“Since we’ve been trying to get open, people have started to recognize the potential of this neighborhood,” says guitarist/booking manager Ron Bauman. “There was no potential on this block until the Ric Rac was here.”

“By the time we were ready to be open, the whole blight claim was gone,” Joe adds. “The city had spent too much time breaking our balls.”

To this day, the Ric Rac has kept its homey, clubhouse feel. Friends come and go as they please, arcade games line the entrance wall, and patrons can still throw beers in the fridge and listen to some tunes, as the venue remains a BYOB.