On a different note, there’s the Trip To Jerusalem which claims to be the oldest pub in England (1189). Of course there are as many of those as there are Ray’s Pizza’s in NY, but it makes a fairly good case for being on the same site as the closest thing they had to a pub in 1189, a brewery, where Crusaders may very well have stopped off to get wasted on the way to do god’s work. Plus some of the rooms are dug right into the rock face behind it.
I had a buddy that went to U of A, and he told of a bar where the owner called himself “God” and you drank for free if you got a tattoo of the bar logo. The best part though; there is a condom machine in the ladies room, but it is wired to the rest of the bar. When a girl buys one, the bar area erupts with flashing lights and air raid sirens. When she comes out, a spotlight shines on her and the patrons clap and hollar.
I think this could very well be the same place.
I’ve heard tell of a place in New Orleans where you drink for free if you come in with a lady who weighs over 300 pounds. And they have a scale to check. Can anyone confirm this?
We went to a bar, for lack of any other word other than ‘rave’, but I don’t really comprehend what a rave is.
It was an abandoned farm house ( not like some American Gothic thing here. It was a couple hundred years old, built out of stone with a thatched roof.) Middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
It was about 50 20 somethings drinking and listening to blaring soulless technopop until the sun came up.
I got extremely shit faced on the only drink that the ‘bar’ had that wasn’t beer: Vodka.
Haven’t touched the stuff since. Lost a day of my life in bed sleeping it off.
This sounds like 37 different bars in Montana.
The Mare Inebrium You just end up there and don’t know how.
A sampling:
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Vanzo’s Mine Run University in Edwardsville IL. No longer there but it had five different rooms with bars in each. The ceilings and walls were covered with everything and anything. One of the ceiling hangings were a pair of the largest pair of jeans I’ve ever seen (a BIG waist). It was across from the courthouse, so you were just as likely to be sitting next to a judge as a rough looking biker.
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On the Isle of Capri, there was a bar that was in a cave that you had to walk down this winding path to get to.
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In Phildelphia, there used to be this bar that had an organ sitting above the back of the bar where this older large blond woman would play. So, sitting at the bar, you would look up after you order a drink and there was her ass, moving around as she played.
I think I’ll stop here, lest you all start to think I might have a little problem.
Angelo’s Lounge, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
I could write about this place for hours, it is so surreal that the day after you go there you begin to wonder if it was all a dream.
The bar itself is a decent sized place with a few tables and a small stage in one back corner, with a couple of keyboards and some lights and a microphone. it is the cast of characters that make this place unique.
Let’s start with Angelo, the owner. He looks like Robert Goulet’s brother and the word is that he hung out with the Rat Pack in the '60s. He takes turns with a few others in singing at the stage. He belts out Vegas-style Sinatra and Martin type stuff and is actually pretty good. He sells mixed drinks, makes great martinis, and only sells beer in the can. All the beers are the same price, makes it easier for him he says.
Next is the Bartender /waitress Bonnie. She has been dating Angelo for 17 years and is among the most foul-mouthed women you will ever meet. Usually within 5 minutes of your arrival she will tell you all about their relationship problems, and how the bastard won’t marry her. She will also sometimes just appear at your table with a tray of shots, gratis, just so she can drink with you.
Usually Angelo’s daughter, Marcella, is there. She also sings at the little stage and has an incredibly beautiful voice. She usually sings jazz standards and sings them very well.
A few other performers are usually around, but this is NOT a Karaoke bar. YOU are not allowed to sing.
One night last year there was a scruffy, almost homeless looking, old guy in a trucker cap that took the stage. We wondered how he persuaded Angelo to let him sing. He calmly turned off the microphone, moved it to the side, and began singing an operatic aria in a voice so powerful and beautiful that it silenced the entire bar. Someone said he was the former director of Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera company.
I don’t know if I am conveying the true oddity of the place, but if you are EVER in downtown Milwaukee on a Wed-Sat night, you have to drop in at Angelo’s.
I don’t know if this is unusual but while I was in Rome I ate at a bistro/bar that was 1 or 2 levels below the basement. It was originally a house dating back to the Roman Empire. Sort of like an X-shaped stone quonset hut. Really cool.
The Haunt in Ithaca, NY
The Rongovian Embassy in Trumansburg, NY
Froggy Bottom in Northfield, MN
Back in college I worked on the campus newspaper. After we put the paper to bed one late night, a bunch of us decided to hit a bar. I don’t remember who had the idea, but we ended up at a cafe in West New York, NJ, called the Cave.
Very appropriately named, this place. The interior was lit with a very dim, pale blue light, and the temperature was a good twenty degrees or so cooler than outside. The walls and ceiling were completely covered in sculpted white plaster, with various body part shapes popping out, arms, legs, ears, faces, etc. The entrance was marked by a raised plaster dais with a reclining nude woman sculpted into the top, sort of erupting out of the floor. Benches were molded into the walls too. Not many tables; the place was quite small. Of course, they played gothic music and punk. Fairly typical urban punk/goth crowd. We had a pretty good time, from what I recall.
About 10 years ago, my friend and I were on a bicycle trip. We stopped in Duschene (sp?) Utah for the night. We decided to make a trip to the local bar. We walked in and the bartender and the other two guys in there just stared at us.
We walked up to the bar and after we got ID’d, the bartender asked what we were having. I said “What do you have?” He looked us both up and down, then said simply “No foreign beers.”
I looked down the bar and noticed that all three men were drinking Budweisers. I said “How about a Budweiser” and his face lit up like a Christmas tree!
Then he played a song about a “pecker” and we started laughing hysterically and he said innocently “It’s just a song about a woodpecker!” Then I kicked their asses at pool.
It was great.
Wow, I’m so glad you confirmed that this place is real. Everyone I tell about this place thinks I’m big fishing the story. Armed with a name, I was a
damn.
With the name of the place I was able to look it up on the internet. It seems there is a pipe smoking club that meet in the joint, which is a really bad idea, in my book, as there is enough crap in the place to create a real fire hazzard. Actually, the fire marshal in Ghent must have a sense of humor to let the place stay open to begin with.
The first place that popped into my mind. Actually, the bar was closer to Bird Creek than Girdwood. And those were boneless chicken dinners, $.25 each or three for $1.00 (many is the customer who didn’t do the math). For the uninitiated who came in and sat on the side of the bar that tilted (one sat on a stump, not a chair), the bartender would slap your beer down and if you missed it, it would slide to the wall to either be caught or to break. In either case, you had to pay for a replacement.
They had a disconnected telephone under the bar. When someone (who was usually set up by someone in the know) would ask to use the phone, the barkeep would just slap it on the bar and turn away. The person trying to make the call would realize there was no dial tone and the barkeep would say, “hey, we’re 20 miles from Anchorage, it’s real faint, just dial.” People fell for this always. After dialing, they’d complain that there was no connection, to which the reply was “they’ve answered, just yell so they can hear you.” Worked every time, and was a source of endless amusement.
The owner would sidle up to newbie (and nubile) young women and challenge them to shots of tequila. When they tossed the drink back, he would grab a boob. He occasionally got slapped, but not often. Women were constantly ripping off underwear and donating it to the ceiling. It was a favorite ski bum hangout and got pretty wild.
We used to go to a beer bar in North Richmond CA back when it was safe to go in that area. We had to go through a tunnel to the water (bay) and the bar was on a barge, complete with gangplank. It was a popular place that served deep fried shark for free. They also had a clock right at the end of the bar that we almost always set back a half hour at about ten to two am so we could drink for anothe half-hour.
Almost always stopped by there after a trip to SF to listen to jazz at the Blackhawk. Fun Times!
The Blue Moon in Seattle. It’s a dive, pretty normal for a dive. The weird part, is I’ve been in there three times in my life, at about 10 year intervals. The second and third time, two guys called me over to ask where I’d been.
They were at the same table all three times, and I think all I ever said to them that first time, was to ask where the bathroom was. That, somehow, translated into being a long lost friend. :dubious: Except, I don’t think any time had passed for them.
The most fun/weird bar was the Pink Flamingo, in New Orleans. It had no door, just a bead curtain. The menu was 40 some pages, with drinks that cost $20-$100. They were various mixtures of alcohol, and a “free” piercing. The price was predicated on the body part to be pierced.
Recently, I needed to take some things I was giving away on craigslist to someone. She works in a place called the Chapel. It’s a goth bar in the converted enbalming room of an old funeral home. Freaked hubby out royally.
Lessee…
We have the Drunken Monkey . It’s a jungle themed bar, and instead of barstools they have swings. They also have a cage up near the dance floor that they will ocassionally lock a patron in if they get out of hand.
There is the Little Bear in Evergreen, CO. Tree stumps for barstools. Kinda dark and seedy looking place, but some pretty big name bands play there…often unscheduled. There motto is “If you can’t get picked up here, it isn’t going to happen anywhere”. Gotta be careful not to drink too much though…the ride down the mountain can be a bitch.
We also have the Mishawaka, located out the Poudre River Canyon. Little dive place, right on the river. There’s a guy that always seems to be in there who has a nine foot braided pony tail that he can use as a whip (he also was allegedly a roadie for the Grateful Dead). They also have a few cats running loose in there which will walk right across the top of the bar. They are pretty polite though…never stepped in my nachos 
My first real job was in a mailroom for a small government agency. One of the other guys worked there during the day and at night he went over to Maryland to manage his roadhouse. Anyone who’s been around Andrews AFB probably knows of The Villaige Barn. The Barn was a Country place, kinda done up like a hunting lodge and looked like something one would normally see in a movie, like small Country Bunker and without the chickenwire. Set a half-mile from Andrews, it attracted a lot of Air Force personnel.
I was only there a few times but I’d get free food and drinks if Tom, my friend from work, was around. Tom once offered to hire me as a part-time bouncer in exchange for letting me live on the second floor. There were drawbacks to the offer, other than the noise: nowhere to bathe and no public transportation.
Tom used to know Donna Dixon’s father through mutual business contacts. I heard that she and Dan Aykroyd once stopped by and Dan even got onstage to do a Blues Brother set with the house band.
As far as dive bars are concerned, this one was pretty ordinary. The strange part was that The Blind River Bar was in the middle of the Louisiana Bayou, and accessible only by boat. It was 7 miles over water from the nearest solid ground.
One of the guys who took me there is also on the professional barbequeing circuit, and one time he loaded his truck and pit trailer onto a barge to take it out there for an event, and left it overnight. He got a lot of mileage from being able to tell people who knew about the place that he parked his wheeels there overnight.
“Must have been a hell of a ride…”