The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Authentic dive bars
Six joints that hit all the marks: history, regulars, good music and cheap drinks,
The dive bar’s obituary probably has been written a thousand times, sometimes with an eloquence that would baffle the average coot who shuffles into these black holes, looking for a shot and a beer before the clock strikes noon.
And yet, the ratio of dive-bar listicles to dive-bar obits must be about 10 to 1. Either the dive bar’s demise has been greatly exaggerated or the definition of such watering holes has become so loose and unmanageable that it encompasses just about any place that doesn’t serve a $20 Manhattan.
So, can we characterize the American dive bar in a way that everyone agrees on the definition? In short, we can’t. Even the owners of some of the country’s most beloved dives don’t consider themselves divey. A dive, it becomes clear, is in the eye of the besotted.
Still, we needed a loose working definition as we cruised from bar to bar, searching for the most authentic dives in America. After arguing over their qualities, we agreed that true dives possess a handful of basic attributes:
They must have history. There is no such thing as an instant dive bar.
They must have regulars. These loyal barflies will inevitably cast a suspicious eye toward strangers.
They cannot be expensive. If you pay $9 for a draft, you’re not in a dive.
They cannot have craft cocktails. If the bartender makes his own bitters, you’re not in a dive.
Practically everything else is gravy.
A dive bar is personal. You’re loyal to it for its plain-spoken pleasures and its working-class spirit. A dive bar is where friends gather, drink and argue loudly — and still walk away as kindred spirits.
Little Longhorn Saloon
5434 Burnet Rd., Austin. 512524-1291. thelittlelonghornsaloon.com
Beer and ticket in hand, the faithful gathered around the chicken coop at Little Longhorn Saloon to cheer on the contestants, a pair of colorfully plumed hens by the names of Loretta Lynn and Little Ginny. The birds were pecking away at the seeds scattered inside their pen, oblivious to the exhortations of the patrons all around them.
“C’mon, baby girl!” yelled one dude, urging the birds to strut over to square No. 38 on the bingo board, which serves as the floor of the coop.
“Drop the deuce! Drop the deuce!” shouted another as a band cranked out boot-scootin’ honky-tonk music in the background.
Rarely had so much been riding on a fowl moment. Every Sunday at Little Longhorn, patrons lay down their own deuce — $2, that is — to purchase a ticket for what the bar dubs “chicken (expletive) bingo.” Winners take home $114 each, which isn’t exactly chicken scratch.
This game of bird-drop bingo was first conceived by Dale Watson, the silver-pompadoured Texan better known for producing fine country music. In 2013, Watson and his sister, Terry Gaona, along with her husband, David, bought the former Ginny’s Little Longhorn from Ginny Kalmbach and gave the place a muchneeded facelift. The new owners built a stage for their full schedule of bands. They added beer taps. They even installed a window in the once sunlight-deprived honky tonk.
In 2015, Watson sold his share of the saloon to the Gaonas, preferring to spend his time on the road, not inside a dive bar.
Year founded: The stand-alone building that houses Little Longhorn Saloon dates back about 100-plus years, says co-owner Terry Gaona. Before becoming a bar circa 1940, the building was a farmhouse, a gas station and, briefly, a restaurant.
Interior: Family roadhouse. The chicken coop is located in the back, under a Lone Star Beer light that would typically hang over a pool table.
Music: A busted Wurlitzer jukebox sits by the door, right across from the stage where bands assemble six nights a week.
Worst day: Gaona doesn’t like to focus on the negative, but she does choke up if you ask if any chickens have died under her nurturing gaze. “I’ve had two chickens die. Those are sad days,” she says. “But we know they go to chicken heaven.”
Nancy Whiskey
2644 Harrison St., Detroit. 313962-4247. www.nancywhiskeydetroit.com
Nancy Whiskey’s history is a microcosm of Detroit in the 20th century. The Irish bar, a converted general store tucked away on a side street of the historic Corktown neighborhood, got its liquor license in 1902. It survived Prohibition, allegedly as a speakeasy. When the city’s economy roared, it became a hangout for Teamsters, including former union president Jimmy Hoffa, who used a phone booth near the front door to conduct private business. Members of the Detroit Tigers baseball team used to come in after games to drink until the wee hours, since the bar was only a 10-minute walk from Tiger Stadium.
When Detroit began its welldocumented decline, Nancy’s did, too.
“When I first started here, around 1992, this was a really bad neighborhood,” says bartender Sheryl Grogan, who grew up in the neighborhood with her brother, Gerald Stevens, the bar’s current owner. Things got worse in 2000, when the Tigers moved to a new stadium across the city and a neighborhood full of large, vacant parking lots began to languish. “But this is a big city copand-fireman bar, so this bar would be full all the time, with the shift changes,” Grogan says. “Through the rough times, I think that’s what kept the bar.”
Boarded-up windows and caved-in roofs appeared on houses on surrounding streets. A devotion to R&B, blues and Motown, with jam sessions and live bands on Fridays and Saturdays, continued to bring crowds to the bar, propping up the slow nights. And during the past few years, as Detroit has begun to rise, Grogan says, she has begun to see a change.
“All the young people are moving back, buying up all the houses, redoing them,” she says. “Our night business has changed. It’s young professionals, hipsters —
just a big difference. We sell more craft beer now.”
Year founded: Nancy Whiskey’s liquor license is from 1902, and the bar boasts that it’s the oldest continually operating liquor license in Detroit.
Interior: Standard unpretentious Irish bar, with walls covered with signs advertising beer and whiskey and old photos.
Music: An Internet jukebox plays a lot of Irish music and classic rock, but R&B, blues and Motown bands take over on weekends. Worst day: An electrical fire in October 2009 destroyed much of the first floor, and kept the bar closed for almost a year. Restoration became a community effort.
Lone Star Saloon
1900 Travis St., Houston. 713757-1616. No website
Squatting on the corner of Travis Street and St. Joseph Parkway, the Lone Star Saloon, you could argue, is a barnacle on the gleaming ocean liner of downtown Houston. The bar is a small brick structure, the color of Texas ruby red grapefruit. A pair of wooden signs, each cut in the shape of Texas, are affixed to the facade. The signs look like they were made in shop class, circa 1980.
The Lone Star is a rare fossil from mid-20th century Houston, a town not exactly known for preserving its history. The bar’s drab rusticity is easily overshadowed, not only by the modern Metro transit center across the street but also by the tall field of striking, sun-dappled skyscrapers on the north side of downtown. How the Lone Star has avoided the wrecking ball all these years is a mystery — until you meet the owner, Joe Lee Thomas, a man with three first names.
If you had to develop a prototype of the classic Texas male, he’d look a lot like Thomas. He’s lean. He speaks with a drawl. He sports a gray beard that reaches to the middle of his chest, ZZ Topstyle. He’s also 83 years old and not above installing a new door on his old saloon.
Over the years, Thomas has made some concessions to gentrification and the modern drinker. He has added craft beers. A bartender has, sort of, created a list of “specialty cocktails,” several of which are merely classic drinks slapped with an Old West name, such as the Cattle Drive (a whiskey sour) and the Chisholm Trail (a margarita). But Thomas is not yet ready to let developers bulldoze his place in the name of progress.
Year founded: The bar opened in 1945 under the name Duffy’s. It was re-christened the Lone Star Saloon in 1979 when the business changed hands.
Interior: Texas dive, heavy on beer signs and steer skulls.
Music: Internet jukebox. The weekly karaoke nights have been replaced with a Saturday night
jam session.
Worst day: Two of them, actually, both tied to drivers who rammed their vehicles into the saloon, knocking serious holes into the building. The first was an attempted robbery. The second was a reaction — an overreaction — to a slight. “He was upset with the bartender. The bartender had cut him off,” Joe Lee Thomas says.
Double Down Saloon
4640 Paradise Rd., Las Vegas. 702-791-5775. doubledownsaloon.com.
James Messina is perched on a stool at the Double Down Saloon, the dive bar equivalent of an open wound, a place that has been poked and probed so often it remains raw and angry. It’s late afternoon, but Messina has not rolled into the Double Down to lose himself in the permanent midnight of the bar.
A bassist in a local punk band, the Gashers, Messina is not checking out the competition, either, which won’t even assemble on stage for another seven hours, maybe later. He’s come here to be among his kind, the Vegasarea punks who consider the Double Down their second home.
“I’m just a local. I know half the people sitting here,” Messina says. “I got to get out of the house every once in a while, just talk to some friends.”
Owner and renaissance man P Moss (author/musician/bar proprietor/tiki mixologist) didn’t set out to cater to Sin City’s underground punk community. He backed into the scene in 1993 when Man or Astro-Man? — a sci-fi surf-punk band from Alabama — needed a venue and the Double Down reluctantly stepped in. Since then, the bar has embraced its uniquely Vegas mission to mix video gambling, punk rock, cheap drinks and a DIYbumper-sticker aesthetic in an round-the-clock operation that attracts both hardcore
punkers and tourists with soft underbellies. The Double Down even serves as a black-ops party zone for celebrities, including Prince Harry or comedian Dave Attell, who either want to hide from curiosity seekers or promote the bar’s noisy, sticky appeal.
Year founded: Started by P Moss, then a “struggling writer’” who decided to enter the bar business, in December 1992.
Interior: Sticker shock. Practically every square inch of the place — the once-white walls, toilets, sinks, stage, everything — is covered in stickers and/or graffiti, save for a wall by the bandstand where a sign reads in large block letters: “SHUT UP and DRINK.” Music: CD jukebox and live bands, heavy on punk. The Double Down rarely, if ever, charges a cover. Worst day: In 1995, before the Double Down hired professional bouncers, Moss asked a patron not to bring package beer into his bar. The owner ended up in a hospital. He says he nearly died.
The Frolic Room
6245 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 323-462-5890. No website.
The first time owner Robert Nunley restored the Al Hirschfeld mural inside the Frolic Room, he was perhaps overly optimistic about how patrons would treat the touched-up caricatures of Chaplin, Groucho, Marilyn and others from Hollywood’s heyday.
The customers at his legendary watering hole on Hollywood Boulevard did what dive-bar dwellers have always done: They defaced those famous faces. “It was real bad,” Nunley remembers. “The language wasn’t very nice.” So the second time he decided to refurbish the late Hirschfeld’s mural, the owner ordered a pane of glass to protect the reproduction of the artwork that has graced the Frolic Room for a half-century.
In 21st-century Hollywood, a gentrified landscape with million-dollar condos, millennials have little connection to the old matinee idols and starlets, let alone the many ups and downs of this historic community. In this void, the mural helps the Frolic Room trace a line back to the Golden Era of Hollywood, when movie studios ruled the town, not developers.
The Frolic Room began as an elegant bar with soaring, 40-foot ceilings. It was a private watering hole for celebrities during the Academy Awards, which the neighboring RKO Pantages Theatre, as it was called when Howard Hughes owned the venue, hosted from 1949 to 1959. It eventually added a drop ceiling and devolved into a biker bar during the 1980s and early 1990s, when drugs and prostitution took hold of Hollywood.
Year founded: Officially licensed in 1934 as part of the Pantages Theatre, but the bar was reportedly a speakeasy for several years during Prohibition.
Interior: Narrow, dark and nostalgic. The Hirschfeld mural adorns one wall, complete with a legend to identify the long-gone glitterati. The bar dominates the other side of the room.
Music: Internet jukebox, heavy on classic rock and jazz. Worst day: Bouncer Pete Rodkey recalls a drunk woman who “got really angry at a guy who would not go home with her.” She got into Rodkey’s face. “She looked like she was going to swing, and I decked her,” Rodkey says. Turns out, she met up with the guy anyway, the bouncer says. “We found out a day later that they got into a fight. She had punched him. He hit the ground, he hit the concrete, he fell into a coma and died.”
Candlelight Lounge
925 N. Robertson St., New Orleans. 504-906-5877.www.facebook.com/Candlelightlounge925
Candlelight Lounge owner Leona “Chine” Grandison, who grew up in Treme, knows what role her bar plays in the neighborhood. It’s not just a cheap watering hole. It’s the place where neighbors and friends gather to celebrate life’s major moments, like when former president Barack Obama was first elected. It’s the place to dance to the horndriven heartbeat of New Orleans brass bands, which once pulsed so strongly in Treme. It’s the lounge where those displaced by Hurricane Katrina can return and still recognize their old stomping grounds.
“When you see these people come back, everybody says, ‘My God, Chine, things really have changed.’ … I have a lot of people I missed that didn’t come back to this city, can’t come back ‘cause they can’t afford the rent,” Grandison says. “They always got a place to come here.”
Theodore Joseph Jarreau doesn’t need a special occasion — or a tease from the “Treme” series, which aired for four seasons on HBO — to make a trip to the Candlelight. He’s a frequent visitor. He shuffles into the bar, one hand clutching a bag and the other shaking uncontrollably. Grandison invites him to grab a beer from the cooler. When I ask him to recount his early days at the bar, he offers a demonstration instead. He stands up and starts scratching his feet across the concrete floor, chicken-style. Then he breaks into “Little Red Rooster.” And sings every verse by heart. Year founded: Circa 1979 as a bar called Grease. Current owner Leona “Chine” Grandison started running the bar in the early 1980s and purchased the place around 2002, about three years before Hurricane Katrina hit. Interior: Grandison began to renovate her bar in 2015 but ran out of funds before it was finished. The new plywood roof gives the place a barnlike quality, while the cinder-block walls, painted midnight blue, suggest cooling Gulf waters, which is good. During renovations, thieves swiped the Candlelight’s air-conditioning units. Grandison has been soliciting funds to complete her renovation, including a new kitchen.
Music: Internet jukebox, and brass-bands every Wednesday. Worst day: August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina landed and the levees were breached. Grandison evacuated to Texas, where she lived for many weeks. When she finally returned to the Candlelight, “it looked like a tornado had just passed through and ripped it.” She had no flood insurance.