Don’t Hang the Bartender

This is the system. The same-old same-old strives to achieve the status of a law. If you want to see this principle at work, visit several Seattle bars in one night. What do you hear? Mostly the Rolling Stones. “Honky Tonk Women,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” Gimme Shelter,” and so on and so on for what seems to be forever. And if it’s not the Rolling Stones, it has to be Fleetwood Mac (“Dreams,” “Gypsy,” “Go Your Own Way,” “Little Lies,” “Rhiannon,” and so on and so on). And it’s not only Seattle bars that suffer from this super-lame sameness. Go to New York City, the capital of the creative universe, and you will hear it all over again: the Stones, Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits, and, if you are lucky, very lucky, a Talking Heads tune, particularly “Psycho Killer.”

You have been in these bars. You know what I’m talking about. So, let’s ask: What’s to be done? We can begin with the understanding that progress will not be made without the resolution of these desires: One, we love bars; two, we love to discover or rediscover music in bars.

Indeed, the bar experience that has no match is found when, near last call, a forgotten tune brings back what the great Jamaican crooner Gregory Isaacs once called ” sweet, sweet, memories .” (A Stones tune has no such power because it can’t be forgotten; it smothers our past and so can’t be regained in the poetic sense of ” madeleine de Proust .”) We do not want to hear what we’ve heard to death. You will never rediscover a Stones tune because it’s always there, always hyper-present, always these geezers again.

“I’m required to play this music by my boss,” one Seattle bartender told me not too long ago. “He doesn’t want to scare customers away.” I also heard this exact explanation, in of all places, the East Village. “Sorry, can’t change the music,” a young bartender told me this fall in a watering hole that’s not far from where Bad Brains recorded their first album in 1981: 171-A Studios. To be sure, the Stones were rebels back in the day, but they are entirely harmless now. It’s now impossible to be scandalized by the line: “You make a dead man come.”

What a waste. Bartenders, particularly in this city, are often musicians or artists, and have very original tastes in music. Forcing them to play music that we keep hearing all over the place is like pouring way too much water into the pot of a plant. It soddens our imagination. We are bloated beyond boredom when we hear “Burning Down the House” for the gazillionth time. Growth is only possible with forgotten music, or music whose new ” sounds… give delight .” Music we must Shazam, capture like an Ariel in the air, and add to a playlist. (For me, the playlist is called Bar Beats.)

This happened to me in 2018 while drinking and eating at the International District joint Fort St. George. My man Mike Ni was bartending, and for reasons that were, to me, truly numinous, he played “Wonderful” by Pastor T. L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir. It was released back in 1971. It had in it the deepest and even most cosmic sense of “church”—the musty smell, the Black faces, the choir, the pianist, the finger-snapping deacon. It was all there. Upon asking about the song, Ni gave me the breakdown. The whole history of the recording, which took place in a Chicago church. The choir of 40 or so young people. And how Seattle’s Light in the Attic re-released the rare album, Like A Ship… (Without A Sail) in 2010. And so the moment in 2019 when I heard “Wonderful” during the finale of the first season of what I rate as the greatest comedy show of the previous and present decade, South Side , I had an experience that was not only transcendental, but was owed entirely to Ni. He made it possible. He took me there.

Ni is also a musician (he plays guitar and saxophone for Brent Amaker and the Rodeo and bass for Caitlin Sherman ) so he can be expected to know his stuff, but there are bartenders who just play great music. Indeed, one, Matt, who worked with Ni at Fort St. George, but moved to Vietnam before the pandemic, introduced me to what I can only describe as soft hiphop—it comes from Japan and is nowhere near as awful as soft jazz. Listen to Nujabes ‘s “Luv(sic.) pt3,” a classic of this genre, and it will become apparent that this branch of hiphop can stand on its own two feet. It’s as rich, as deep, as moving as anything coming out of NYC during the first half of the ’90s.

Matt left a mark on me. And so did, many years later, Gabriel Bogart, who worked at the College Pub Inn before the lockdown. That brother always dropped the dopest hiphop. True, Kellen at Lottie’s Lounge never fails to play A-list boom-bap, particularly the absurdly underrated People Under the Stairs , but Bogart was on another level. When he was behind the bar, it was like opening a door to another dimension.

I must also mention Shea at Post Pike Bar & Cafe , a joint across the street from Nacho Borracho, which, itself, is a bastion of nothing but the best when it comes to tunes (to be fair, there are few bars on Capitol Hill that submit to the Stones’ most obvious hits). Shea is into what I call post-dub, and, to boot, is an MF Doom head. Not too long ago, she played a song that, when I took Link home (Post Pike is next to the Capitol Hill Station), was on repeat. It’s “Keystone” by Sumac Dub featuring the Maucals). I leave you with it. And I leave you with the plea to let bartenders DJ their drinkers.