Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street
Great re-issue of a seminal album - you can argue about the sound quality (check the Amazon reviews for extended navel gazing by high fidelity neck beard types), but this is improvement over anything other than vinyl played on a high quality system.
Save Me
Janiva Magness: Devil Is An Angel Too
Nice bluesey vocalist
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I rarely read anything Courtney Love has to say because, well, she's insane. At best. And boring. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw this quote from her and it was pretty funny:
"I have a 17-year-old; I know exactly how she feels. I'll never be cool enough for her. You can never be cool enough for your kid. Keith Richards isn't cool enough for his kids."
I had dinner a few weeks ago in Federal Way with some college friends I hadn't seen in a while. We all graduated from the University of Washington in the late 1970s, had been roommates at various times & were part of a larger clique who all hung out together on campus. It was an interesting group, with some pretty varied backgrounds, but one of the common bonds we shared in college was that we were all dirt poor. Like sharing tips on how-to-eat-for-a-week-for-less-than-a-couple-dollars dirt poor. Dr. Tom, now some kind of fancy surgeon, was known at the time for having come up with a particularly awful routine of using a can of cheap chili from Pay-N-Save along with a box of macaroni & cheese that was often for sale 10 boxes for $1 and stretching the combination for about 5 days. His method also involved only having to wash a spoon - no dishes.
Anyway, in reminiscing over dinner, we started remembering The Duchess tavern, a place we frequented on NE 55th Street in Seattle - up behind U Village. None of us had been there in years, but when we lived in the U District before we graduated, we probably went there 3 or 4 nights a week. I don't know what it's like these days, but even then it was a dive. And cheap. Pitchers were only a couple of bucks most nights, and I sort of recall Thursdays had schooners for a quarter.
At the time it had wood plank floors that I'm sure were original to the building, which was old then. I imagine the building dates back at least to the 1920s & probably earlier. The big U-shaped bar was newer, but not exactly new. I found the picture above on someone's Yelp entry - the animal heads are the same & from the looks of the one skull (bear skull?), probably hasn't been dusted since at least the 1970s. The flat screen TVs are new - back in the day, there was one smallish TV, mounted high up behind the bar.
While The Duchess had what passed for a kitchen, even back then, no one really ate there. They made pizza (badly) and hot dogs & hamburgers. That was about it. Oh, and the jar of pickled eggs. One of the huge old-fashioned jars of pickled eggs floating in opaque vinegar. In the two or three years I frequented The Duchess I never saw anyone order an egg, nor did I see the number of eggs in the jar ever change.
The wood booths and tables on the east side of the interior were covered with graffiti, as was the inside of the tiny men's room. Some of the initials and carvings on the tables and booths were dated - some had dates going back to the 30s. I still remember that someone had written "Sometimes the moon howls and the wolves are silent" in a black marker over the urinal and later, someone had laboriously carved the letters out so the black marker wasn't visible.
Most of the week, The Duchess was a neighborhood bar with only a few people inside. It had three pool tables, only two of which were playable - the one in the backroom was beat up and pretty wonky. No one who cared about pool played that table - too inconsistent. I played pool at The Duchess often, actually it was the real reason I went there.
I played pool a lot, starting in elementary school. We lived in Edmonds then, and a fair bike ride away was a combination pool hall and slot-racing track. I loved slot cars & starting riding my bike the mile or so to the shop that had the track maybe once a week or so. [What a different world it was then - I was probably 10 or 11 at the time. What parent now would let a 10 year old ride his bike, by himself, to a shop more than a mile away, for the afternoon?] I watched the men play pool at the shop and, after a few visits, the man who owned it let me play. I was too short to be able to properly hold the cue, so I hauled a short step stool around the table so I could stand on it.
When I got to high school, I played at least one night a week at a pool hall underneath Darrel's bar on Aurora at around 185th. I don't even know if the pool hall had a name - everyone referred to it as Darrel's, even though it wasn't affiliated with the bar in any way, it was just located underneath it. That pool hall was everything parents were warned against in Music Man - dark, seedy, smokey. They didn't serve alcohol there, only sodas. No food. You'd have noticed that the carpeting was absolute shit if the lighting had been better - as it was, the only lights in the place were the lights over the pool tables, and they lit only the pool tables. All the money went into the pool tables - they were wonderful. High end 8 foot Brunswicks that were covered in new felt every couple of months and had the bumpers replaced every couple of times they were recovered. Green felt only, no purple or red - this was a serious pool hall. It was also a pool hall where no one cared if you played for money. Actually, if you'd been going there for a while and didn't play for money, you were ostracized. If you were brand new there and wanted to play for money, you were viewed with deep suspicion. Anyway, that was the place I started playing pool for money. I'd gotten reasonably good at straight pool. I'd gotten good at 9 ball, but I don't have the nerves to play it well for other than small money.
Anyway, so, The Duchess. I played there often. Often for money. Thursday nights were great inasmuch as it was cheap beer night & the place was often so crowded with drunken frat boys that the fire department would come and order people out. In the late 1970s it was still acceptable to make fun of frats, which we did. At the time, frats were pretty much the province of football players on scholarship and academic losers, both of whom we looked down on. And drunk frat boys don't play pool nearly as well as they think they do. So Thursday nights at The Duchess provided beer money for the rest of the week for me.
At the time, The Duchess was owned by a young-ish guy, whose name I cannot remember. I sort of remember him mentioning that he co-owned with his brother. He tended to work there on Thursday nights and rarely the rest of the week. I think he worked construction during the day - I remember him mentioning that he was married and had one or more small children.
A guy named Steve was the main bartender there and, over the time I went there, I got to be pretty good friends with him. Steve had a BA in philosophy from a good school in the midwest and had been working on his MA at the UW for a few years, slowly. He was a little bit older than us, maybe late 20s at the time. He'd told me this amazing story about how he'd gone to Europe for a graduation style grand tour the summer after he'd gotten his BA and how he'd ended up in Gibraltar at the end of that summer with about $1,000 and his return plane ticket. On a whim he'd cashed in his ticket and taken the rest of his money and departed on the ferry from Gibraltar to Morocco, then spent the next two years hitchhiking around Africa. This would have been in the mid-1970s and Africa at the time wasn't as dangerous as it is now, but still, it was f**kign dangerous.
I didn't believe him & thought the story was entirely made up, until a couple of nights later, on a very slow night at The Duchess, when he said he wanted to show me something. He'd brought in his passport. I'd never seen a passport before - wouldn't get my own for another 5 years or so. His was thick with extra pages glued in, every page a mass of entry and exit stamps from countries I'd only heard of, and a lot of countries I hadn't heard of. Showing me the pages one stamp at a time, he told me some of the stories about his time in Africa. He'd loved it - loved the people, loved the terrain. Even when he was scared, which sounded like it was pretty often to me, he loved the people and their spirit. I asked him his favorite place of all that he traveled to and without hesitation he said Zanzibar - great people - people who took him in and wanted to ask about America, great food and beautiful countryside. He sounded so wistful that I wondered why he'd never been back.
Steve was a great bartender - something I realized because I'd been working for 18 months as a bartender at a dump in Renton. He was really good on busy nights - he shined on Thursdays. And he was an outstanding pool player, the only person I played regularly who could play me to a draw over the course of a night. But there was always something about him that I thought was a little fragile. I could never put my finger on it, whether it was his time in Africa, maybe his parents back in the midwest (what little he'd ever said about his family made it sound like they were one f**ked up upper-middle class family). Anyway, whatever it was I figured he'd never really finish his MA & would probably end up tending bar for a long time.
I almost always spent Sunday nights at The Duchess. Sunday and Monday were the quietest nights of the week and if you just wanted to have a couple of beers, play some pool for fun and gab with the bartender, Sunday night was the night to do it. I missed the night the murder happened in The Duchess. Probably 1979 or so. The story as I heard it was this - Steve had been playing pool with a squirrely stranger that night for a couple of hours. Playing for small money. The guy was a terrible pool player and, over the course of playing now owed Steve around $70. Finally, Steve said he needed to start closing up and asked the guy to pay up. The squirrely guy had no money. That happened every once in a while to me - some guy who thought he was a much better player than he was starts playing with no money, hoping to make beer money for the night. One thing leads to another and he ends up way in the hole. Pool etiquette is that you get to yell at the guy for a while, but you're not going to call the police because betting is illegal. So Steve yells at the guy, tells him what a jackass he is, but ends up giving the guy a beer. Squirrely guy downs it and leaves, leaving Steve talking to the only customer remaining, who was sitting at the bar facing the back bar and with his back to the wall. Squirrely guy bursts through the double doors a few minutes later with a revolver in his hand and, instead of aiming at Steve, shoots the customer sitting at the bar in the back. Right through the heart. And then turns and runs out the door.
The cops caught the guy within a couple of days and it turned out he was some marginal nutball who'd been looking for a place to have a meltdown and just picked The Duchess at random.
Steve never got over it. I talked with him a few times after that - the shooting had changed him. The fragility I'd seen before became a crack - he was a broken man. He felt guilty, thinking that the guy had probably meant to shoot him instead of the customer, who'd totally been at the wrong place at the wrong time. A few months later, Steve quit. The owner told me a little while later that Steve had left town and I never heard another thing about him after that.
I stopped going to The Duchess after that, between the shooting and what it had done to Steve, I couldn't stop associating the physical place with those thoughts. Haven't been back since.
