Singing karaoke, NYC to Phoenix
IWAS in a friend’s small, bright, WNYC-soundtracked Brooklyn apartment when I first heard about Santa’s in Nashville. They serve only beer because things got too crazy when they served liquor, this friend told me. Yes, it is Santa-themed, and you can still smoke inside. And there is karaoke every night.
My plan was to drive solo from Brooklyn to Los Angeles – where I hoped to live for the foreseeable future – taking a southern route through Richmond, Virginia; New Orleans; and Austin, Texas. In Brooklyn, karaoke was always one of my favourite evening activities. Hearing about Santa’s planted a seed: Maybe I could find a karaoke bar in every city I stopped in. I hoped it would offer a way to briefly get a sense of each place I passed through, and get out any pent-up energy. A few days before setting off, I spent some time on Yelp and plotted my route of songs through the South, happy for a secondary purpose.
My warm-up came in Richmond, at Babe’s of Carytown, a lesbian bar that offers karaoke every Wednesday night. At first glance it appeared empty: Nobody was at the long bar near the entrance, where I bought a $2 draft, but then I heard music and headed to the back room, which was slightly less empty and covered with the previous week’s Halloween decorations.
As I huddled near the songbook, I felt the singular anxiety of being in a foreign bar, alone and purposeless. I launched into a song – Macy Gray’s I Try. Halfway through I started laughing, at myself and the quiet room and how nice it felt. The absurdity cracked my anxiety, and I sang another song and then another before I grew tired. A staff member followed with Alice Cooper’s Feed My Frankenstein, complete with plenty of lusty thrusts and guttural yells, then quietly trotted offstage and back to work.
Where Babe’s had been quiet, Santa’s, housed inside an old trailer set up on stilts, was bursting. I brought along a high school friend, and we ducked into the crowded, smoke-filled room lit up with Christmas lights and neon. The walls are one step up from plywood; those who prefer fresh air with their cigarettes can loiter on the wooden porch outside and check out the Santa-theme mural on the clapboard siding. Like any good karaoke bar, Santa’s transcends irony.
Out-of-towners and oldtimers intermingled without resentment or shame; we were all there for the same ridiculous thing. A few minutes after my friend and I entered, the entire place broke into a mass wailing of Elton John’s Your Song, each face contorted with joy. Santa’s is a karaoke bar where you participate.
I assumed I would do a whole lot of singing in New Orleans, but I did none. My first night, a friend obligingly took me to the Cats Meow on Bourbon Street, a sprawling two-level bar where you can watch suburban mothers sing Madonna. Drinks come in large, multicoloured plastic cups with stars shooting off each letter of the word “cats”. We left after a particularly off-key bachelorette group took the stage, realising we were perhaps not drunk or bedazzled enough.
The following evening, I dragged another friend to Kajun’s, which I had heard was the place to go for actual karaoke. This proved so true that we were 33rd and 35th in line after putting our names in, even though it was a slow night thanks to an LSU game on the televisions over the bar. The place itself is extremely regular: a long, wooden, almost-horseshoelike bar in the middle, a handful of electronic games against a wall, a few large TVs, plenty of cheap whiskey for sale. The crowd was a mix of woo-woo-ing women celebrat- ing a birthday, college students, and a smattering of regulars.
Texas’s capital city made up for my dry spell in New Orleans with Ego’s, a divey karaoke bar tucked inside a parking garage. Even on a Monday night, the crowd of mostly locals swelled to 30-plus by 11pm, gathering either by the bar or the pool tables or around tables in dinette chairs. The now-familiar glow of Christmas lights gave the room a cosy artificial comfort. A longhaired gentleman named Nick, there by himself, belted out All the Young Dudes, even the backup parts. I was captivated. Everything at Ego’s was just slightly stranger and warmer than everywhere else.
I brought along a friend, and after my third beer, we sang Jesse’s Girl, off-key and screeching on the high notes. I did a few high kicks; we were really getting into it, our own little dance party onstage, egged on by everyone else in the room. It was the friendliest place I had been in since Santa’s, the energy both casual and vibrant, and by this point I remembered that all I could hope for was a song going over pretty well or just being fun. At karaoke, perfect continues to be the enemy of good.
I found Brigett’s Last Laugh in northern Phoenix, a sort-of sports bar with good Buffalo wings where the songbook was laden with songs overplayed on the radio during the past five years. I saw a woman sing the hypersexual Pony by Ginuwine, by herself, interjecting her own expletives. A group of women sang Goodbye Earl by the Dixie Chicks, which one of them later explained is a nofail option for women.
I chose Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe; a local aerobics instructor named Em grabbed me by the arm and told me with wide eyes how much she envied my confidence. As I walked out, a woman was singing I Touch Myself as the crowd went wild.