As country as a country bar gets
What to order: Frozen Margarita ($6), Hank-style fries ($8.50).
Location: Overland Country Bar & Grill, 101 Broadway, Oakland. (510) 4190594; www.overlandoakland.com.
Hours: 11 a.m.-midnight Sunday-Wednesday; 11 a.m.-2 a.m. Friday-Saturday.
When I walk into Overland, the new country bar at the edge of Jack London Square in Oakland, my voice changes.
Like many Kentuckians living in California, I normally don’t speak with a perceptible accent. However, when there’s a row of bottle blondes perched on stools snapping their fingers to Garth Brooks, and there are $6 frozen Margaritas and fried pickles on the menu — well, my vowels elongate involuntarily.
Overland’s owner, seasoned touring musician Paul “Sheriff ” Hayward, has put together a gleaming temple to the American South’s most endearing products: twang and fried stuff.
Overland is not country like Townes Van Zandt singing ballads on an empty stage. It is not country like whiskey-sick wailer Gary Stewart, or sneering David Allan Coe, or mournful, bigvoiced siren Sammi Smith. Overland is Tracy Byrd country, big-hat Texas country, “I love this bar” country.
The bar offers up a middle-of-the-road country experience for an East Bay audience, featuring cover bands capable of vacillating between Skynyrd and Dolly, soft booths and big TVs, bingo nights, line-dancing lessons, both Coors Light and craft brews on tap, and burgers stuffed with all manner of cheeses and dubiously complementary meats, such as pepperoni.
Overland’s fryer does great work, although the cracker-crisp breading goes overboard on salt. Salt is why the margaritas served in handled jars funnel down smoother than milk shakes, and why, when chowing on “Hank-style” fries topped with pulled pork and ghost pepper jack cheese, one might drink so fast that a bottle of Shiner Bock appears to mysteriously evaporate. (Those fried pickles are dill spears, not the more customary bread-and-butter chips, and they lack the welcome syrupy brine that the latter possess.)
Some might step into Overland, note the “Wingo Wednesday” and “Taco Tuesday” specials, see the bridge-and-tunnel-looking crowd, observe tattooed and very Oakland-seeming bartenders sporting denim and jaunty cowboy hats, and cringe. This isn’t authentic, they might sniff. This is a tacky parody. A real country bar, they might argue, should have dimmer lights, rough-hewn beams, a rickety stage and fewer TVs.
They might not have visited enough country bars.
While it’s true that fine jukeboxes and fried pickles often lurk in low places, splashy, convivial operations long on hospitality and unabashed gimmickry embody the country ethos no less than dives.
“It is very common for the entire bar to be singing country songs at the top of their lungs,” says Hayward. “There is really nothing cool about country music, and it’s kind of refreshing to nerd out and sing George Strait songs with a bunch of complete strangers.”
Modern country music is flamboyant and heavily produced. Country stars sport absurd hairstyles, suits, hats and gowns. Sometimes the trappings seem self-mocking. The culture is as rich, weird, sad and silly as the land that birthed it. A hearty whiff of tackiness at a place like Overland doesn’t warrant suspicion. It makes perfect sense.