vintageinfants said:Rockadelic said:I pledge to post nothing but music related stuff for the rest of 2013.
id love a repost of that story of the legendary dude you knew back in your NY days who chewed glass among other superhuman feats....???
??????and all other story's of that ilk. i love a well spun yarn.
i feel like this place would operate best if it were an actual bar and everyone took turns bartending. not necessarily the drinking, but the social etiquettes borne of the public house. 'no religion no politics' and miscreants and deviators get shown the door.
Not sure if I've ever posted this here but it's appropriate for this thread all things considered.
THE EDUCATION OF DISCO RICH
I started going to bars when I was 16. Friday and Saturday nights featured Nickel Beer and live bands. We went to Rock Clubs with names like Rumbottoms and Hammerheads to see cover bands that included Rat Race Choir, Stanton Anderson Band and The Bonnie Parker Band. (It was the BP Band that set off some pyrotechnics and burned down Rumbottoms ala Great White, but that is a whole story in itself best told at a later time). So by the time I was 19 I was a veteran of the Long Island bar scene but had no ambition or clue that I would actually wind up working in it.
I had moved out of my folks house in the Winter of '77 and was renting a house with a friend Kevin in Huntington Station. I was working running a printing press and the house was pretty close to my job. Kevin worked in the swimming pool installation business but had landed a job in a Disco during the months where swimming pool work was non-existant during the Fall & Winter months. His life was a party, coming home after the club closed with wayward Disco chicks while I tried to get sleep to make my 8 to 5 schedule work. Even though the drinking age was 18 at that time most of the local Disco spots had a 21 and over policy to try to keep out the younger riff raff with fake ID's. Because of this I had never even been to the club and lived vicariously through Kevin's stories and after hours partying.
Kevin was a ladies man, women just gravitated to him like a moth to light. And he took advantage of this "skill" as any of us young single guys would. This sometimes got him in trouble and one night he came home from the club with his arm in a cast. He said he needed me to do him a favor. The club owner told him he could keep his job as long as he found a replacement for the time he would be out with his injury. He asked me to be that replacement. I reminded him that I wasn't even old enough to get into the club but he assured me all I had to do was show up, ask for Tony, and tell him I was Kevin's replacement. So the following Friday I showed up, introduced myself and got the job. My responsibility would be to walk around the club, pick up any empty glasses and bring them to the bar, and be on the lookout for any trouble which I was to difuse. In exchange I was to get $100, all I could drink and a cut of the tips.
That first night, about an hour in, I walked to the lobby and saw a pretty big dude hitting a woman he had pinned against the wall. I went over, grabbed the dude by the shoulder, spun him around and took a giant fist to the eye. The other bouncers ran over and pounced on the dude while his female victim screamed at them to "Leave him alone". My new boss came over, saw my opening day injury and just shook his head. The other bouncers explained what had happened to Tony and said I had shown some balls even if I was on the short end of the exchange. Tony, out of sympathy I'm sure, said "Do you want to learn how to tend bar" and Disco Rich was born.
The bartenders were all very nice guys and all welcomed me into the fold. There was the older(50?) Irish Kevin who drank more than any human I've ever known and had once owned the club before "selling" it to two guys with vowels at the end of their last name. Once a month the bartenders had to pool tip money to get Irish Kevin out of a DWI. There was "JD" who was famous for mixing drinks while being "serviced" by young lady customers behind the bar. And there were brothers Richie & Norman who were both very serious dudes and damn good bartenders. Norman was the big brother with a big handlebar mustache and he was the one who took me under his wing and taught me the ropes. (More on that later)
The club itself held about 500-600 customers and had live entertainment and a juke box. The house band was "The Super Suds Of Rhythm" who did covers of the Disco hits of the day, Bee Gees, "Brick House", "Boogie Oogie Oogie", etc. The crowd was mostly Italian but did have a diverse crowd of regulars ranging from the ultra rich kids of nearby Muttontown and the working class kids I had grown up with. I learned early on that Italians didn't tip, they OVER tipped as shown in Steve Martin's "My Blue Heaven" flick. It was not unusual to walk out with a few hundred bucks on a great night and to a teen in '77 that was serious money. Upstairs from the club there was a rehearsal room where local bands would practice until the club opened for the night. The fact that I would hang out with these rock bands as much as possible earned me the nickname "Disco Rich" pretty early on.
While I didn't care for the Disco music that dominated most nights, they did have "Oldies Night" once a week which is where I got my first exposure to the music industry and the players within it. We had a regular rotation that included Jay Black & The Americans, Tommy James and by far my favorite, Gary U.S. Bonds (Pre Bruce Springsteen re-discovery). Gary was the most down to earth gentleman I have ever met in the music biz. He would help me clean up at the end of the night and tell me stories about his career that I was very eager to hear. Years after I had moved to Texas my folks went to see Gary perform and my Mom approached him to say that I said "Hello". During the show he dedicated a song to my Mom which I will never forget. In hindsight, Gary may be the guy most responsible for getting me into older music and record collecting. If you read this G, thanks!
The job itself was both hectic and fun. Norman had taken on the chore of teaching me the ropes and taught me how to make the drinks of the day like Toasted Almonds, Alabama Slammers and wildly popular Tequila Sunrise. He also made sure I knew the proper etiquette, how to handle obnoxious drunks and the proper protocol for interacting with customers. he specifically taught me there were 4 things that you NEVER engaged the customers in conversation about. They were Money, Politics, Women and Religion. He explains that the combination of alcohol and any one of those topis would never lead to anything good. On most nights the bar was so busy that we would never have time to discuss anything at all, but I took his advice to heart. Norman was an interesting guy who had been a NYC Fireman and had lots of amazing stories. We usually showed to work at 8:00 to set up the bar and get ready for the crowd that usually began to flow in at around 9:30 - 10:00.....we were open and could serve liquor until 4:00AM so we had some long nights. We also had a crew of waitresses who made the job fun, including Nancy, who became famous many years later on the Howard Stern Show as the infamous Nancy Martling.
On one particular Friday night a gentleman walked in at around 8:30 while Norman and I were standing around just bullshitting. He was dressed in a suit and tie, looked like he had just come from the office and did not look like our usual patron. he looked at me and ordered a double Scotch no rocks. I served it and dude downed it right down and asked for another. I poured him another and he put that one down just as fast and asked for a third. At this point Norman came over and said to suit and tie dude "Hey, you need to slow down, we have a long night ahead of us". Scotch dude just stared ahead and said "Give me another". Norman was a gentle giant of a man and kindly said to him "What's the trouble, people don't usually drink like this unless they have problems". The drinker looked at Norman with a very troubled looking expression on his face and said "This has been the worst week of my life. My wife cleaned out our bank account and left me for our Preacher". I couldn't believe what I had just heard. This dude had hit on 3 of the 4 verboten topics of discussion in one fell swoop. I couldn't help myself. I looked at Norman, then at the drinker and said "I just have one question, is she a Democrat or a Republican?" Norman almost lost it and walked away quickly to hide his laughter and I was there staring this poor guy in the face who was totally baffled by my question. He got up and left. And Disco Rich became "one of the boys" that night.
id love a repost of that story of the legendary dude you knew back in your NY days who chewed glass among other superhuman feats....???
??????and all other story's of that ilk. i love a well spun yarn.
i feel like this place would operate best if it were an actual bar and everyone took turns bartending. not necessarily the drinking, but the social etiquettes borne of the public house. 'no religion no politics' and miscreants and deviators get shown the door.
Not sure if I've ever posted this here but it's appropriate for this thread all things considered.
THE EDUCATION OF DISCO RICH
I started going to bars when I was 16. Friday and Saturday nights featured Nickel Beer and live bands. We went to Rock Clubs with names like Rumbottoms and Hammerheads to see cover bands that included Rat Race Choir, Stanton Anderson Band and The Bonnie Parker Band. (It was the BP Band that set off some pyrotechnics and burned down Rumbottoms ala Great White, but that is a whole story in itself best told at a later time). So by the time I was 19 I was a veteran of the Long Island bar scene but had no ambition or clue that I would actually wind up working in it.
I had moved out of my folks house in the Winter of '77 and was renting a house with a friend Kevin in Huntington Station. I was working running a printing press and the house was pretty close to my job. Kevin worked in the swimming pool installation business but had landed a job in a Disco during the months where swimming pool work was non-existant during the Fall & Winter months. His life was a party, coming home after the club closed with wayward Disco chicks while I tried to get sleep to make my 8 to 5 schedule work. Even though the drinking age was 18 at that time most of the local Disco spots had a 21 and over policy to try to keep out the younger riff raff with fake ID's. Because of this I had never even been to the club and lived vicariously through Kevin's stories and after hours partying.
Kevin was a ladies man, women just gravitated to him like a moth to light. And he took advantage of this "skill" as any of us young single guys would. This sometimes got him in trouble and one night he came home from the club with his arm in a cast. He said he needed me to do him a favor. The club owner told him he could keep his job as long as he found a replacement for the time he would be out with his injury. He asked me to be that replacement. I reminded him that I wasn't even old enough to get into the club but he assured me all I had to do was show up, ask for Tony, and tell him I was Kevin's replacement. So the following Friday I showed up, introduced myself and got the job. My responsibility would be to walk around the club, pick up any empty glasses and bring them to the bar, and be on the lookout for any trouble which I was to difuse. In exchange I was to get $100, all I could drink and a cut of the tips.
That first night, about an hour in, I walked to the lobby and saw a pretty big dude hitting a woman he had pinned against the wall. I went over, grabbed the dude by the shoulder, spun him around and took a giant fist to the eye. The other bouncers ran over and pounced on the dude while his female victim screamed at them to "Leave him alone". My new boss came over, saw my opening day injury and just shook his head. The other bouncers explained what had happened to Tony and said I had shown some balls even if I was on the short end of the exchange. Tony, out of sympathy I'm sure, said "Do you want to learn how to tend bar" and Disco Rich was born.
The bartenders were all very nice guys and all welcomed me into the fold. There was the older(50?) Irish Kevin who drank more than any human I've ever known and had once owned the club before "selling" it to two guys with vowels at the end of their last name. Once a month the bartenders had to pool tip money to get Irish Kevin out of a DWI. There was "JD" who was famous for mixing drinks while being "serviced" by young lady customers behind the bar. And there were brothers Richie & Norman who were both very serious dudes and damn good bartenders. Norman was the big brother with a big handlebar mustache and he was the one who took me under his wing and taught me the ropes. (More on that later)
The club itself held about 500-600 customers and had live entertainment and a juke box. The house band was "The Super Suds Of Rhythm" who did covers of the Disco hits of the day, Bee Gees, "Brick House", "Boogie Oogie Oogie", etc. The crowd was mostly Italian but did have a diverse crowd of regulars ranging from the ultra rich kids of nearby Muttontown and the working class kids I had grown up with. I learned early on that Italians didn't tip, they OVER tipped as shown in Steve Martin's "My Blue Heaven" flick. It was not unusual to walk out with a few hundred bucks on a great night and to a teen in '77 that was serious money. Upstairs from the club there was a rehearsal room where local bands would practice until the club opened for the night. The fact that I would hang out with these rock bands as much as possible earned me the nickname "Disco Rich" pretty early on.
While I didn't care for the Disco music that dominated most nights, they did have "Oldies Night" once a week which is where I got my first exposure to the music industry and the players within it. We had a regular rotation that included Jay Black & The Americans, Tommy James and by far my favorite, Gary U.S. Bonds (Pre Bruce Springsteen re-discovery). Gary was the most down to earth gentleman I have ever met in the music biz. He would help me clean up at the end of the night and tell me stories about his career that I was very eager to hear. Years after I had moved to Texas my folks went to see Gary perform and my Mom approached him to say that I said "Hello". During the show he dedicated a song to my Mom which I will never forget. In hindsight, Gary may be the guy most responsible for getting me into older music and record collecting. If you read this G, thanks!
The job itself was both hectic and fun. Norman had taken on the chore of teaching me the ropes and taught me how to make the drinks of the day like Toasted Almonds, Alabama Slammers and wildly popular Tequila Sunrise. He also made sure I knew the proper etiquette, how to handle obnoxious drunks and the proper protocol for interacting with customers. he specifically taught me there were 4 things that you NEVER engaged the customers in conversation about. They were Money, Politics, Women and Religion. He explains that the combination of alcohol and any one of those topis would never lead to anything good. On most nights the bar was so busy that we would never have time to discuss anything at all, but I took his advice to heart. Norman was an interesting guy who had been a NYC Fireman and had lots of amazing stories. We usually showed to work at 8:00 to set up the bar and get ready for the crowd that usually began to flow in at around 9:30 - 10:00.....we were open and could serve liquor until 4:00AM so we had some long nights. We also had a crew of waitresses who made the job fun, including Nancy, who became famous many years later on the Howard Stern Show as the infamous Nancy Martling.
On one particular Friday night a gentleman walked in at around 8:30 while Norman and I were standing around just bullshitting. He was dressed in a suit and tie, looked like he had just come from the office and did not look like our usual patron. he looked at me and ordered a double Scotch no rocks. I served it and dude downed it right down and asked for another. I poured him another and he put that one down just as fast and asked for a third. At this point Norman came over and said to suit and tie dude "Hey, you need to slow down, we have a long night ahead of us". Scotch dude just stared ahead and said "Give me another". Norman was a gentle giant of a man and kindly said to him "What's the trouble, people don't usually drink like this unless they have problems". The drinker looked at Norman with a very troubled looking expression on his face and said "This has been the worst week of my life. My wife cleaned out our bank account and left me for our Preacher". I couldn't believe what I had just heard. This dude had hit on 3 of the 4 verboten topics of discussion in one fell swoop. I couldn't help myself. I looked at Norman, then at the drinker and said "I just have one question, is she a Democrat or a Republican?" Norman almost lost it and walked away quickly to hide his laughter and I was there staring this poor guy in the face who was totally baffled by my question. He got up and left. And Disco Rich became "one of the boys" that night.
(I aint mad atcha, fuck it) I learned a lot from this place though, good and bad and bought some dope fuckin records from a bunch of you...including the t-shirt, ha!
o it RAJ, VI n self will moderate shit out of the sore thumb assholes up in here
