Last Friday I was walking down the avenue–Riverside Avenue, to be exact. I was, at the time, admiring the marquee at the old Viking Bar, which read “Gone Fishing”; and I’d remarked to the boyfriend about that. But, because he’d never been to the place, I started going on about how much I’d always liked it there, and how sad I was to see the place go. Mike, the guy who owns the Viking, and who’d taken it over from his father years before, was walking by just then and he must’ve overheard me saying something nice. He invited us in.
The boyfriend was given a beer. I was kindly given a root beer for being a teetotaler. We were then told stories about how the smoking ban had hurt the place, ultimately driving it out of business… And how angrily Mike had responded when he heard a couple of KARE 11 announcers bantering about the Viking Bar’s closure during the next morning’s news. (Mike was still there, with the TV on, cleaning up during the broadcast.) Mike said the newscasters were speculating about crime having driven the bar out of business, something he insisted wasn’t true… Nevertheless, he said, he has since received an outpouring of love from friends and old regulars. He’d been cleaning the place up. He hoped to reopen.
But, for now, Jackson’s Juke Joint, a regular Viking Bar happening, has skipped over to the Eagle Bar. In fact, Randy Weeks and The Front Porch Swingin’ Liquore Pigs will play a concert, celebrating the new Weeks CD release, there tonight.
On Saturday, I plan to stop by the Hexagon Bar to catch High On Stress. I’ve never seen or heard these guys play before. But I went to college with the guitar/keys/harps/vocal player, Ben “Country” Baker. He was a Chinese Language and Literature student back then. (He helped spawn a hunger strike over the program’s under-funding, remember?) He was also a guy with a passion for truck driving songs–and it wasn’t at all ironic. He left a permanent mark on my musical preferences by playing Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” track (something I remembered my dad playing) just before switching to The Dead Milkmen. I used to go down to Jitter’s, back when it was downtown, to catch Ben’s band, Martin Melville, twang away. My favorite song, I can still remember, was a catchy one called “King Of The Country”–an homage to the tradition of truck driving songs.
Ben was a very close friend back in those days, and I’m very sorry to have lost touch with him. So, I guess I’ll see him on Saturday!
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