It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXXXII

It was Friday, July 8, 1988.As usual, I was working at City Limits, an innocent-looking hellhole of a bar in Rosemount.

It was a typical night at City Limits – “Slims”, as we at the sleazy DJ service referred to it. It was a bowling league night, so I’d play background music while bowlers filed through the place buying a steady stream of pitchers to carry out to the lanes. Then, as the leagues let out, bowlers would grab tables for an after-league beer and a burger. They’d mostly have filed out of the place by 10-ish, leaving a thin film of regulars at the bar, and – on a lucky night – some local girls who wanted to dance or, rarely, couples who would dance. The staff adjusted accordingly; after about ten, the place filed down to one bartender (a guy who looked and sounded just like Kevin McDonald of Kids in the Hall, but with frizzier hair), a waitress (Tammy, a cute, amazingly dizzy 18 year old – underage cocktail waitresses being legal in Rosemount at the time), and a “bouncer”, a 5’8 guy who ran maybe a buck forty and who, with his long stringy hair and spotty teeth, looked like he was fighting a meth habit.

Now, there were four kinds of male customers at “Slims”, ever, back then (aside from employees):

  1. Bowlers.
  2. Barflies – a group of maybe eight or ten guys who were there every night, occasionally to bowl, but usually just to hold down a stool at the bar and BS with the bartender. Most of them had tried and struck out with every female that walked through the door.
  3. Bikers. At least, in the summer it was bikers. In the winter, they’d switch to snowmobiles. Either way – same crowd. They talked loud, they started fights, they acted like they owned the place. And they occasionally surprised me – although we’ll get to that in a much later episode.
  4. Rednecks. It might be hard to see, going through the area these days, since the suburbs have completely engulfed the area in the past fifteen years or so, but in 1988 that area – Dakota County 42 and South Robert Trail – was still rural, teetering on the south edge of then-exurban Rosemount. There was a big rural clientele – guys who worked at tractor-parts stores in Farmington and feedlots near Elko and all the other niches in the semi-rural ecosystem that I remembered from North Dakota, and hadn’t seen much of since then. Rednecks and bikers frequently intermingled – but bikers travelled in groups, and “rednecks” travelled in ones, twos and fours, usually.

Anyway – things were going well. It was around 11PM, and for a summer Friday, it wasn’t half bad. There were maybe eight or ten couples – almost all girls, naturally – out on the tiny dance floor. I’m told it’s a Twin Cities thing; girls’ll hit the floor if there are no guys available (or worth bothering over). Not a big “floor”, but useful for marketing, since seeing a bunch of drunk twentysomething girls on the floor gave some of the drunk twenty/thirtysomething guys at the bar and among the tables something to hope for.

The key to keeping the girls on the floor? Play music they can dance to. In 1988, that meant dance music; Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, “Word Up” by Cameo, Run-DMC’s version of “Walk This Way”, Beastie Boys…all the Top40 dance stuff that was current at the time. It was simple; if you play music that drunk girls can dance to, they’ll dance. The music set the hook; I would then beat-mix it together so the beat didn’t stop for half an hour a time – making them hotter, drier, and more likely to keep beering up. This helps business.

This made the bartenders (and the bar’s owner) happy; girls who are dancing, and guys consumed by unrequited lust, drink. A lot. And in Rosemount, they might even leave a tip.

The key? The music.

Around 11:30, four rednecks walked in and sat at the table next to the DJ booth. They ordered Budweisers. They looked at the girls out on the floor. And one of them -wearing a sweat-stained white T-shirt and a scruffy beard that made his face look like Eddie Rabbitt, shuffled up to the booth.

“Hey”, he said, his breath smelling like a party that’d started after work and had just kept going, “you know what’d really get people on the floor?”

“Huh?”, I said, shuffling through the records, trying to set the hook a little deeper in the wan little crowd on the floor.

“If you got this n***er s**t off and played some white people’s music”.

I carefully controlled my face, not so much out of anger as to control breaking out laughing as I looked at the guy. His eyes were flitting around in that unfocused, jerky way of the very, very drunk.

“Whaddya mean?”

“White people’s music. Not this n***er crap. I bet everyone on the bar gets out on the floor if you play some white people’s music”.

I thought for a moment. “White people’s music? You mean, like Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry?”

“Yeaaaah!” he said, his head jerking forward like he was losing his balance, leaning against the formica tabletop around the booth.

“I’ll see what I can do”, I said.

I was not going to see what I could do, of course. Playing “Can’t Get Enough” or “Slow Ride” or “All My Rowdy Friends” would empty the floor – and drunk twentysomething girls don’t just leave the floor when the beat stops; they hit the doors and find a bar that won’t kill the buzz.

So the beat rolled on.

It took maybe fifteen minutes, but Eddie Rabbitt came back, bringing his friend – a nondescript, stubbly, potato-shaped man in a seed cap and a sweat-stained wife-beater.

“Hey” said the potato. “Didn’t we tell you to get the n***er s**t off?”

“Yeah, I’ll get to it – the girls are dancing, man”.

Potato looked at me; he looked angry.

“You’re a faggot”.

He and Rabbitt glared at me as they slunched back to the table. The four of them looked at me and shared a vicious sounding chuckle as I pondered a safer exit from the place at the end of the night.

As it happened, I didn’t need it. Another group of rednecks came in. One of them was apparently diddling one of the first group’s cheating girlfriends or ex-wives or something. A fight broke out. Meth-Head the bouncer hid behind the doorway to the bowling alley as the seven of them went at it. Tables and chairs flew, and I grabbed the sawed-off pool cue that was standard equipment in most DJ booths back then, just in case.

The police came in about ten minutes, hauled the whole lot away, and left us…

…with Tammy, the bartender, Meth-Head and I, along with one old regular who probably hadn’t noticed the fight in the first place. The fight had cleared the place.

I played nothing but requests the rest of the night. Tammy loved Madonna. The bartender wanted country. I beatmixed an impromptu Springsteen medley. The bartender let everyone but Tammy have a round of drinks even though none of us was supposed to drink on the job. We’d all earned it.  Except the bouncer, but hey, we were all in the same miserable boat.

I checked the parking lot carefully on my way out at 1AM, and started the long drive up South Robert back to Saint Paul.

One thought on “It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXXXII

  1. Pingback: Straight Outta Freakytown | Shot in the Dark

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