In a subnotorious open letter to a man named Smith Hutchings (two last names?) Larry derided, to great effect and equal controversy, the good name of the Man in Black.  I’m kind of a lonely sort.  He, and Nick Drake, and Belle and Sebastian are just about the only things that can peel me off my grease palate of a bed, with its jewelry of empty sleeping pill foil cards, and whatever cd cases corresponding to last night’s drunken listening.   I remember reading something a little tragic about Little Richard in the liner notes to the King Hannibal cd.  But it’s foggy.

Well, as Larry duly pointed out, whether you’re into that sort of thing or not, you don’t go ambling up to Polish Hill thinking you’re hot shit and, with a beak full of booze, commit a dollar or two to the illustrious Gooski’s jukebox only to subject us all to Johnny Cash.  You see it’s not eclectic.  Nor is it melancholy in the sense that you think it is.  It’s a fucking nuisance. But really Larry already covered all of this.

I grew dizzy the last time I heard the Man.  I was frying up some pierogies and doing whatever else it is I do in the kitchen of the Goose, when I heard Him.  There was this humdrum repentance about having shot a man in Reno “just to watch him die”.  Now I know this is what the literati like to bandy about as metaphor.  But at 11:16 on a Friday night on Polish Hill, where a truly hot woman in the corner has more tattoos than I have hair follicles, well metaphors just don’t exist.  I look at her a little, just to let her know that I’m looking.  All the same she’s glancing back from time to time, nodding to a guy beside her with a look that says to me “this isn’t my fucking chauffer amigo!”  And now I’m being eyed with no small amount of disgust, in my stench, and grease-rotten kitchen shirt like I was just some Polish Hill street dog, having come a beggin’.  A dog that hasn’t eaten in weeks, mind you.  And to be fair to myself I really haven’t eaten in weeks.  It’s not a metaphor for amorous desperation or anything like that.  Evenings feel like the flu so I don’t eat much.  Plus when you’re on the clock for the express purpose of feeding other people you don’t much care to eat yourself.

So never mind the one about me being a dog, or evenings feeling like the flu.
 

Bob is a regular at Gooski’s.  At any moment you pass him in his flannel.  He’ll have a pool cue, like a scepter nine times out of ten in one and hand.  In the other he’ll never not have a Busch pounder.   As regulars go he’s my mentor.

And as bars go Gooski’s eschews competition.  Many Pittsburgh bars, or bars anywhere for that matter, have an ephemeral quality, something that redefines them from night to night, based on the crowd.  But while the crowd of Gooski’s has a tremendous diversity its essence is something that never really wavers.  Down the bar on any given night stands a black corridor of reposed elbows and talking faces cut against a myriad arrangement of colored light in the window.  It’s only a matter of time before the place has songs named after it, paintings, movies about the mundane and divine shit that goes on inside.

I was half asleep on the bar when I heard an Eddie Bo song and gave a start.  It was Eddie Bo!  Who even knew this guy?  He was a sort of regional r&b personality in New Orleans three plus decades ago.  Outside that city he was known almost exclusively on compilations, and at that infrequently.  I got lucky hearing him on a Soul Jazz comp—those fuckers are great!  Marcus shot his eyes down the passage to the back room where some folks were playing pool, where Bob was circling the pool table like Napoleon would’ve, lording over the map of available Europe.  “Bob suggested this one.”  Dark in the corridor of elbows I bobbed for a while, thrilled as much with the music as I was with how it got there.

Every record seems to have its own eccentric story of how it made its way into the jukebox.  The thing is megalithic in its capacity for detailing the minutia of drunkards’ lives.  It growls the Sonics’ “Psycho”.  It pants naively to the Strokes.  It genuflects to the vocal presence of Exene Cervenca.  It plays what punk feels like.  The dirty skin texture, the way tattoos do the week after you get them.

The jukebox sits diagonal from a Cherry Master machine, barring the way to the men’s room.  It is a well-lighted and friendly piece of commercial technology, and has a queer soul that knows everyone in the place at any given moment.  Its native language is punk: Stooges, X, the Damned, the Go-Go’s, the Clash, the Gun Club, Television, Black Flag, Husker Du, the Misfits, and the like.

From there it goes in a number of directions.  There’s plenty of Swinging London to show where punk came from: the Kinks, the Stones, the Yardbirds, and sundry British borrowers of the Blues.  Better yet are the Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf (a relatively recent addition), and Carl Perkins titles.  What punk became is represented as well.  Sleater-Kinney, Clinic, and Blur represent like young gangsters, churning out an anxious sound.  Nothing unproven holds a slot in this machine.

 If New York City 1977 marks the peak of punk’s furious tidal wave then Gooski’s jukebox duly demonstrates where the swell began (and how it wound up).  As a history lesson this jukebox is no more esoteric than it is thorough--the Repo Man soundtrack one minute and Belle and Sebastian the next.  The erratic quality of it sums up the presence of the bar.  No constant has a shape you could draw.  But to imagine it reveals it instantly.

Tim crosses the floor with money, and a song from the Replacements rewards everyone in the place, a sad song the like that any pilgrim wishes to have to sever the pain of a lost place, and acquaint himself with a new one, a song about regulars.   I have a shabby sense of geography and origins, so I end up along the bar, watching the obstructions of colored light warp my disappointments, and sometimes mould my hope.   That line in the Mark Eitzel song returns to me, “Outside this bar, well there’s no one alive/Outside this bar, Tell me does anyone survive?” Christ, if anyone does they’re cheating death.

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