By Angus Stump
A decent bar tells you pretty quickly whether you’re in the right place. Sometimes it’s the music. Sometimes it’s the people who are already there. Sometimes it’s the pricelist, and sometimes it’s three seconds of the bartender.
I can never tell whether I’m deciding or the bar is deciding, but the outcome is never especially mysterious.
I don’t drink. That’s a long, uninteresting tale that I won’t tell here. The key takeaway is I’ve spent a lot of hours in bars without drinking in them. Because bars are where bands play, and therein lies a whole damn library of tales I’ll not tell here. Let’s just say I know a thing or two about bars.
Albuquerque. Day two. Looking for a bar.
I headed out on foot for The Copper Lounge, an old-school Route 66 cocktail bar with a Rat Pack reputation. I had built a small evening around the idea of it.
I was escorted in by a guy in the hall. The whole vibe felt tightly curated. The lighting was calculated, low-wattage amber designed to make everyone look like they belong in a noir detective novel, reflecting off a bar top that is altogether too shiny. There’s no scuff on the floor, no lingering ghost of a cheap spilled beer, no earned character. Just sleek, plush booths and a meticulously engineered vibe I’d describe as innocently hostile. Honestly, I bet it’s pretty cool when it’s full of its people. But it was empty, and I wasn’t one of its people. Some rooms can tell in advance that they don’t need you.
I went to the sorting hat guy in the hall and made a sad face. He didn’t blink. He walked me across the hall to Los Conejos, the agave bar that shares the same building. It sported turquoise walls, pink couches, DJs on weekends, and is designed to serve a young Albuquerque crowd that had not yet decided whether it was going to bother showing up at all tonight. I walked in anyway. I was a turd in the punch bowl and I knew it walking in: middle-aged white guy, tote bag full of paperbacks, into a room that was twenty-three and beautiful and not in the mood. The good news: it wasn’t especially busy, so my presence wasn’t especially annoying.
Fake-name Carla was bartending. She started out skeptical, then warmed about three degrees. I watched her decide to be interested. She absorbed the pitch and its time travel, romance, heist, buddy flick, sentient tech that will probably rule us all, breakfast recipes, the whole rockin’ carnival and took the copy I handed her. The book was Veronica. Carla looked at the book in her hands, wondering what exactly the hell she was supposed to do next.
“Surprise me,” I said. “Tell me something about you that would shock most people.”
She thought briefly, then said “I was first chair clarinet all the way through middle school.”
I hadn’t seen that one coming. “Wow!” I said. “Not me.” And then we both looked at each other for a moment and I left.
Inconvenient detail: I went back later, because I had forgotten to pay. They emailed me and I saw it hours later.
I was grimly reminded of my looming lesson: if you want to be mysterious, you have to go away. It really wrecks a vibe when they have to come looking for you.
So I reversed the Uber back into Los Conejos and squared up with Carla, who smiled stiffly as I paid up. The tip was better than decent.
I still hadn’t found a bar that was happy to see me.
Sister. Finally. A bar that was happy to see me.
Four-oh-seven Central Avenue Northwest. Sister is a first-rate joint hosting three hundred and sixty bodies, thirty-seven beers on draft, fifteen pinball machines along the back wall like a row of well-maintained antique teeth, and national touring acts. Sister is the real thing.
All I knew about the band was what I read on the web: Sister’s audience was psyched about the pending return of one of their favorite acts, Sgt. Splendor. It sounded just right to me.
Sgt. Splendor is Kate Vargas and Eric McFadden fronting four pieces out of New York.
tl;dr – They kill.
Vargas sings like the room owes her money and she’s here to collect.
Guitarist McFadden is, quite simply, an assassin. He plays through a shocking bandwidth of styles, never quite landing squarely in any of them and generally steering his own distinct cloud of sonic grace and terror. He played with George Clinton. He played with Eric Burdon. He has toured with Joe Strummer. These perfectly mismatched examples are mere shavings from his astonishing resume. That guitar has been talking nonstop since 1978 and has never lost the thread.
They call it an alt-funk, desert roots, dirty blues rock thing. I wouldn’t argue, but there’s also a wheezing Tom Waits-ian carnival heart to it that’s hard to pin down.
I didn’t know any of that when I bought the ticket. I just followed the voices of a few folks who’d heard them and wanted other people to hear them too.
I went in late and alone. I wasn’t looking for a conversation tonight. I wanted to hear this band.
Still, I tried to take a photograph of the book with the band in the background. Imagine if the book took a selfie. Yeah, that’s the picture.
This is harder than it sounds. The book is paperback. The room is purple, then red, then blue, then some more purple. It is way more dark than bright. The band moves, and the crowd moves. I’m holding the cover up at arm’s length, trying to get it and the stage in the same frame, and producing various interpretations of regret and a blurred smear of someone else’s shoulder.
Someone poked me in the rib.
“Do you need me to hold that book for you?”
Her fake name is Kaya. She was young, small and had kind eyes. She took the book, a tipsy helper angel sent from heaven. She held it up Vanna-style, framing the cover toward the stage.
I asked her to hold still. She did her best, but dancing won. I was no better. This band was unholdstillable. The picture I came away with is objectively perfect.
I thanked her. I gave her the book. Hi! I’m Ed the Plumber. I gestured at the book, pointed at the synopsis, waved my hands and rolled my eyes and gestured broadly to the room as I handed her the book, bowing deeply. She caught the general shape of the exchange, I think.
Then I left.
She didn’t have a purse or a backpack. She had a beer in one hand and now a book in the other. It was a paperback she had not bought and couldn’t return, and a kickass band she had paid to dance to, and an old guy in a hat fading into the crowd.
The last I saw of her, she was still dancing.
Alone.
With a book.
The bar was perfect. The band was better. Thanks, universe.
