I'm not a big bar guy, which is a minor miracle considering where and how I grew up. My maternal grandfather, Bill Gosselin, for whom I was named, owned a suds emporium called The Whippet Club on South Union Street in Lawrence, Mass. for many years and I spent plenty of time there communing with customers, showing off my vast Red Sox knowledge and taking bets I could recite the starting lineup of every team in the American League. Thank God there were only eight of them in those days. My primary job, though, came at closing time when on many days the help would pour my grandfather into my grandmother’s car and I would sit in the back seat holding his hat. I was neither alarmed nor put off by this behavior, it just seemed like the natural order of things. Bill Gosselin died of lung cancer when I was five years old, so who knows---perhaps he had good reason for his frequent escapes from Sobriety Central.
In the 1940s and beyond, New England was loaded with small drinking emporiums call “social clubs.” There was the Irish Social Club, the English Social Club and probably even the Lithuanian Social Club on the other side of the river. Attaching a nationality to these little taverns gave them a veneer of respectability---a man wasn’t going off to booze it up at the neighborhood bar, he was going to “the Social” for quoits and conversation. Even the ladies who wouldn’t be caught dead at Angry Arnie’s Alehouse didn’t mind tipping a few at the Social.
On Sunday afternoons, our parents would take my sister Alice and I to Jenny’s Tavern, no mere bar since it served food and offered a giant TV. While they imbibed, we glugged down orange soda and potato chips and threw quarters into the astoundingly beautiful jukebox with rippling colors. At five o’clock, Super Circus came flashing onto the television and everybody gathered ‘round to watch. Super Circus was the unexcelled top dog TV program of the day and its rapt audience gasped in wonder as the acrobats and wirewalkers and lion-tamers did their things. Occasionally, some overenthusiastic Jenny’s customer showed he’d had a little too much to drink and was gently escorted to the door, but always with a pat on the back and the offer of a cab ride. In all the years of attendance in those Lawrence bars, I never saw so much as a single fight. The closest we came to mayhem was when my Uncle Arthur had to stare a man down for hitting on his girlfriend, Rose. Uncle Arthur, who had been in scads of bar fights in the Navy, said he wasn’t taking any guff from a mere civilian. His rival fled in dishonor and the customers cheered Arthur’s heroism when he bought the bar a round. Having experienced virtually nothing at that age, I was delighted with all the foofaraw. Wow!---who doesn’t love a place like this?
Growing Up
Bars lessened in importance as we got older and took up sports. The coaches, who were like minor gods to us, put alcohol in the category of bad habits a true athlete must eschew. Yessir, Coach. So while juvenile delinquents like Tom Levesque sneaked a few drinks in his basement, we proudly abstained. Nobody told us Babe Ruth was a souse, and we wouldn’t have believed it anyway. Even after high school, I was a non-drinker at Oklahoma State, where beer was as popular as loose women and rodeos. Who wants to drink a beer, I wondered, when you can go next door to the banana-split shop?
Then I went to Texas. Austinite minstrel John Clay wrote a song once which told of a town “where the water tower’s for beer.” That could have been any city in the Lone Star State. In Austin, there was a tavern on every corner and none of them were empty. Business was done in these bars, people met there for lunch, it was almost as if the Socials had been reborn in the southwest. And Texans were, shall we say, enthusiastic about their drinking. Lieuen Adkins, a magnificent writer/punster on the staff of the Texas Ranger humor magazine, was waiting at the liquor store door on the morning of his 18th birthday. Janis Joplin, a mere 19-year-old waif, got positively snippy when the liquor bottles wandered too far away. At a Ranger party celebrating the publication of the first issue of the semester, she snatched the last free bottle of Jim Beam away from a non-staffer and called him a “goddam unwelcome guest.” Ranger Art Director Tony Bell, a serious drinker, opened a chain of saloons after his graduation and eventually succumbed to bad habits. Imbibing was the state sport in Texas, particularly the consumption of beer. When pot became popular in the rest of the country and the hippies haughtily dismissed beer as plebeian, the Austin counterculture jumped right in on the marijuana-smoking activities but not a one of them gave up his beer.
Threadgill’s
There are bars and there are bars. On Lamar Boulevard on the outskirts of Austin, there once lived a Sacred Place called Threadgill’s. It wasn’t much to look at, just a converted gas station that sold beer, cheese and crackers, but it was unique in many respects. First, a large jukebox stood by the door, entirely filled with old Jimmie Rodgers records like “Waiting For A Train,” which pretty much told you right away that this place was the owner’s playpen and not yours. Happy to have you join in, of course.
Kenneth Threadgill, the proprietor, was a big-bellied man who could really yodel. He liked to sing and as time went by he found a few people to join him. First was a small coterie of twangers from the University of Texas English Department, of all places, and then there was the odd collection of post-beatnik characters which would some day soon morph into hippies. Gilbert Shelton, the Ranger editor, discovered this place and soon had his motley collection of friends piling in on Friday nights to listen to the music. One of them was Janis Joplin.
Aside from Wednesday night appearances with her three-man-band, The Waller Creek Boys, at University of Texas folksings, Janis had little public exposure before she demurely followed old Kenneth Threadgill onto his small barroom stage. Ken wasn’t sure what he was getting but his customers assured him he would wind up falling in love with her---and he soon did---so here they were. It might be difficult for rock fans of the sixties to imagine Janis Joplin plunking her autoharp and singing a country song with a yodeling cowboy, but the image is etched forever in my memory banks, high on my Lifetime Top 10 list. Just a notch above it is the moment my first wife, Marilyn Todd, walked into that same bar, looking like something straight out of Hollywood. In the remainder of my existence I have never spent more than a single night with anyone I met in a bar, but that first one was a wowser.
I later ran across Janis at the height of her success at the Atlanta Pop Festival seven years later. “I gotta tell ya, Killeen,” she said smiling in remembrance, “I was just as thrilled to be on Mr. Threadgill’s stage that night as anyplace I’ve been ever since. You always remember your first.”
Threadgill’s was the first bar I associated with live music. Before that, it was just the dependable Wurlitzer. I went back to the old saloon in 2017 and found it still bright and lively, but teetering on the brink due to dubious ownership. Covid and lax management finally did the place in earlier this year, a sad day for those of us who revere the memories. It doesn’t happen very often, but every now and then the planets align and in a single moment a bar becomes a shrine.
Gainesville
I moved to Gainesville in 1963, spent two years in Tallahassee and came back for good in ‘65. It was the dawning of The Age of Aquarius and SDS was in flower. A few blocks from campus on University Avenue, there existed a small bar across from the student ghetto called The Pub. The place was general headquarters for the socially disaffiliated, the hippies-to-be, the orphans and troublemakers and amateur raconteurs like Patrick Kelly, who would sit in a corner and quietly expound on topics of the day, dismissive of anyone who might disagree.
The owner of the place was Helen Bianchi, who was more of a housemother than a barkeep. Helen doted on her flock, seldom referred a discouraging word, took pity on the broke and broken. It’s patrons were so smitten with the place, they still maintain an internet existence today. Sometimes a place is a mere bar and sometimes it’s home. The Pub eventually transmogrified into a kindred spot called Anthony’s and much later into Rancho Deluxe, which I bought a small piece of from owner Dan Iannarelli. During that short interval, I learned it’s much better to visit a bar than to own any part of one.
In the 1970s, George Swinford and a few cronies opened a downtown Gainesville bar in an old music store called Lillian’s. George and the boys were somewhat strapped for funds so instead of buying and erecting a big, expensive sign, they just kept the old one and gave the new bar the old moniker. Lillian’s soon became the place to go for a certain element which considered themselves a rung or two above the habitues of the usual watering holes. The place offered elevated conversation, occasional music and an interesting collection of regulars who would drink nowhere else. As the years passed and lesser establishments fell by the wayside, Lillian’s old guard continued their patronage, the customers growing older with the bar. As for George, he got married one day, divorced the next, opened a restaurant next door, then sold the whole kaboodle to outlanders who kept it going. If you want to drink your beer in a spot unimpeded by foolish young people, listen to a few exaggerated stories about the good old days and imagine how it was way back when, the old bar is still at your disposal. You might even see cantankerous George Swinford, in for an occasional visit, taking the night off from watching some incarnation of the Fightin’ Gators and skewering Republicans. Whatever he tells you, just agree with him. Otherwise, you’ll be there til the place closes and some nights it never does.
Music Everywhere
An interested party can recall the days of Gainesville past in Marty Jourard’s historical book, Music Everywhere---The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town. Marty spins glamorous tales of ancient times in Hogtown when wet-behind-the-ears guitar plunkers like Tom Petty, Don Felder and Bernie Leadon emerged from the primordial ooze to lead rag-tag bands of minstrels from bar to bar in search of sustenance, let alone fame.
Jourard will tell you all about the Dub’s Steer Room follies, the nekkid wimmen of Trader Tom’s barely legal tavern and the undying determination of young musicians to find a place where someone might let them play their songs and even occasionally listen to them. Aside from the aesthetically offensive fraternity houses and a house party here and there, it was the small bars that provided a stage, the smoky taverns with bad lighting and crass customers which lit up the nights. The musicians who played there loved these places and hated them, knew every inch of their funky innards.
You might not be a bar guy but you can’t dispute their value. How can little Marty get from Point A to Point B if someone doesn’t give him a bullpen to warm up in? We have to use a few steppingstones to toddle from Dad’s garage all the way to Carnegie Hall, even if some saloons require a net to separate the band from the flying tomatoes.
Now and then, it’s a dark and stormy night and you’re driving solo through the empty avenues of Roanoke, worn down, at wits end, in need of temporary companionship. Then, as if by magic, an answer appears, a small building lit up like Christmas, cars parked everywhere, music forging through the doors. You stop, get out, savor the energy and the light. The tavern door opens and you are assaulted by the booming offerings of Texas Tom & The Slick Pickers. You can’t help but smile. People call to one another, laugh, dance like there’s no tomorrow. The night shakes its head forlornly and fades away in grudging defeat. It is no match for the glorious wonders of Xanadu.
That’s all, folks….
