Ya know, it's funny you should mention restaurants and derelicts. Every band should have at least one cool practice space in their history, and that was ours.
We used to rent the basement of a diner in "downtown" Greeley, CO as our practice space. The little stair I'm sitting on in the picture actually goes to a tunnel that runs under the highway to a basement across the way. As the story goes, it was used for one of two things: as an escape tunnel for the prohibition-era liquor runners that had set up shop there (either across the street or in our basement - not sure which), or an access/escape for patrons of the brothel that was run in "our" basement. I know it was a brothel at one time, but I can't vouch for the booze-running story.
Anyway, the place was dank, cold, and we expected to find bodies in the walls when we were searching around for electrical outlets to plug amps into.
What made it so cool for a hard rock band is that Pete (the owner of the diner), had used the basement for a haunted house the prior Halloween, and had left a bunch of the stuff up (the wizard/monk/whatever guy in one of the pics was one prop). There were fake cobwebs, since it was too bloody cold for real spiders.
Bruce, like I told cowhead: if there's ever a GasHead army, you can pick out your own tank to drive. Hell, you might get a division. \m/
Right now I'm the only one who even owns guns, so "army" might be a forward-looking term
btw cowhead, i might be interested in that cabinet if the price is right - plus if i come out to buy it you can buy me a PBR at your favorite rock joint.