MUSICOLOGY 101

Losing My Dive Bar Virginity

My first taste of beer and punk rock in a dive bar

What is a dive bar? According to Wikipedia, the 21st Century’s Library of Alexandria or Encyclopaedia Britannica, a dive bar is:

typically a small, unglamorous, eclectic, old-style bar with inexpensive drinks and may feature dim lighting, shabby or dated decor, neon beer signs, packaged beer sales, cash-only service, and a local clientele.

That almost sums up the dive bars that I’m talking about. For me, the other requirement is that they have live entertainment. Bob’s Country Bunker is the perfect film example of this bar, chicken wire optional.

This is the story of me and my friends popping our dive bar cherries, when we were just 17. The story below happened, as described. However, this being 40 years plus after the fact, everything may not have happened on the same night, or with the same people. But it happened. And I still sort of remember it.

My first foray into this type of establishment was to the infamous Cedar Lounge, in London, Ontario, in 1980, when I was 17. At least, over 40 years later, that’s what I remember. A carload of high school buddies had headed down on a Wednesday (I think) night to go to The Cars concert, with the always high energy Max Webster opening, at London Gardens. Afterward, we had agreed to meet up with a couple of older guys at the bar from high school that had turned us all onto punk rock. The concert was OK — I wasn’t a huge Cars fan, but they were OK.

After the concert ended, we headed over to the bar. We were all underage but had the bravado of youth and the naivety of small-town boys on our side. For some unknown reason, they let us in, even though we were pretty obviously well underage. The drinking age in Ontario had just risen from 18 to 19, but we all looked 12 when I look back at photos from that era.

12 on a good day, if we hadn’t shaved (and I’m not sure all of us needed to yet)

So, there we were, the four of us 17-year-olds and our two older friends, Pete and Dick, sitting in our first bar, with an unremembered punk band loudly playing. The waiter or bouncer or bartender came up to the table to take our order. Pete and Dick ordered first, and then the order went around the table. Everybody had exactly what Pete and Dick had ordered, just to be on the cool side of the fence. Everybody, except one guy. He was always the one that did something just a little out of the ordinary. A little off-kilter.

Remember this important fact — we’re underage in a punk rock dive bar when you could still get beaten up for having short hair and stovepipe jeans.

It’s not a roadhouse. It’s not a greasy spoon. It’s not a fast-food restaurant, what few there were back then. It was a dive bar. They served bottled beer. They served whiskey. They served draught beer in 6oz glasses by the tray. They did not, as my friend attempted to order, serve hamburgers, fries, and a coke.

He tried to order a hamburger with a side of fries and a coke in a dive bar when he was two years underage. He may as well have had a huge neon arrow pointing to us, flashing UNDERAGE. What a fucking idiot.

We slunk into our chairs in unison. Pete chuckled, and Dick just shook his head in disgust. Fortunately, they didn’t require any training to work there. Or even require the staff to be sober. And fortunately, the waiter or bouncer or bartender wasn’t too sharp — or maybe he was far sharper than we were — and he just looked at Pete, and laughed, “What’s your friend on?” Pete kept laughing and said, “Just bring him a beer. They dropped him on his head as a baby.” (Or something similar)

The waiter brought us our beers, and we paid. Back then, it was likely a buck a beer, but that was when we didn’t have too many bucks in our wallets. We drank our beers silently while watching the band perform, thanking the gods of drunken underage fools that they didn’t throw us out on our asses. The gods did smile upon us that night, and when I started university a year later, it was my go-to place to drink and raise hell.

I wrote this after reading Terry Barr’s piece on Jackson Station. This isn’t my only story, or even my best story, about The Cedar Lounge, where I spent many drunken nights, but it is my first.

Paul Mansfield is a writer, a photographer, a guitar player, a philosopher — some he does well, some not so well, but he still tries them all. You can follow him on Twitter @pmansfield.

Here is another of his stories on music.