It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Part LXX
By Mitch Berg
It was Saturday, January 16, 1988. A bitterly cold night.
And I was on my way to Fridley.
Well, I was on my way to try to find Fridley.
I’d gotten a call from Scott at the DJ service; they had a different bar for me to try, and they figured I’d be perfect for it. The bar was “George Is In Fridley”, usually pronounced “George’s In Fridley”.
“The place is kinda funky”, Scott said. “Weird crowd – kinda half brothers, half northeast-side rednecks. It’s also kinda a weird situation; the dance floor is also restaurant space; your first two hours will be playing dinner music. Then they clear it off, and it’s dance time!”
“And the owners…” he said, describing the family that ran the place.
We’ll get back to that.
It was Saturday. And in two and a half years in the Twin Cities, I’d never once driven to Northeast Minneapolis, other than whizzing through on 35W. Not knowing the freeway connections at all, I drove down University for miles and miles, eventually hanging a left and going over to Marshall which, just at the Fridley/Minneapolis border, turned into River Road.
And was where the bar stood, inches north of the inter-city border. Across River Road stood the huge FMC plant; you could see brand-new naval gun turrets, bound for the Navy’s latest class of destroyers, sitting on rail cars, the haze gray paint job standing out under the yard lights against the dismal industrial background. George’s looked like a big pole barn, with a gravel parking lot and shabby doors covered with beer ads.
I walked inside, and found “Tony”, the boss. He was a padded, businesslike-looking Greek man. “You are Mitch”, he said, sizing me up. “Mitch Berg”, I answered, shaking his hand.
We walked through the bar into the main room; it looked like it’d been a ballroom in the forties, with a slick wooden dance floor surrounded by raised restaurant seating on three sides (and covered with tables about 2/3 full of diners), and, at the far end, a DJ booth towering high above a raised stage that looked like it was big enough to hold a small “big” band at one point.
We walked to a long table, at the head of the room, set aside from the bar and across the floor from the booth. There were chairs only on the side away from the booth. At the center chair sat an elderly, swarthy-looking gentleman, who was talking with a couple of women in waitress uniforms and signing some piece of paperwork, looking a bit like Richard Blaine in the opening scenes of Casablanca; the diners got progressively younger, the farther from the center you went.
“This is my father, George, the owner of the bar. Papa, this is Mitch…Berg?” he said and asked. I nodded, and shook his hand.
“You do good job for us? This should be good night!” he said, smiling, in a manner that implied that it wasn’t a question.
“You bet!”
And then someone else – looked like a kitchen manager – got the floor, standing before Papa George as Tony led me to the booth. We climbed two levels of risers and a final set of steps – the floor of the booth was a solid seven feet above the dance floor – and he showed me how to turn all the equipment on.
“Hokay, you can do this. One thing”, he said, turning to me before climbing back down; “you will get people coming up here telling you what to play. You are the only one who decides, hokay?”
“Gotcha”, I replied, smiling, puzzled.
———-
I started out the evening playing dinner music – quieter stuff, light jazz, doo-wop and some slower oldies. After half an hour, a pudgy, scowling woman in a white service jacket threaded through the tables and climbed the risers with some difficulty.
“I’m Jessica, the assistant kitchen manager. And you have to play some danceable stuff. You gotta start getting things going here…”
“Er, we have about half an hour of dinner left…”
“I’m not asking! I’m telling! Get things moving!” she said with executive finality as she turned and climbed back down the risers.
Remembering Tony’s dictum, I changed nothing.
About half an hour later, as the diners on the floor finished up and started dissipating, the bouncers and bussers started clearing and removing the tables from the floor. Another woman – taller, thinner, younger, in a white shirt and black skirt and with long auburn hair – climbed the risers. “You’re the DJ”, she asked. A name-tag on her blouse said “Tanya; Asst. Bar Manager”.
“Yes, Tanya, I am”.
“Hokay”, she slurred as I smelled booze on her breath, “I’m the assistant bar manager, and you need to slow things down so the people can eat”.
“Will do”, I said, as she turned and hopped down the risers. I changed, again, nothing.
As the floor cleared, I started picking up the pace – more rock ‘n roll, a little accessible R’nB – and watched Papa George at the head table. Tony had joined him, sitting at Papa’s side. Another guy – looked like another of George’s sons – sat at the other side. Other couples flanked them all – there were probably a dozen people, all sitting on the same side, all facing me across the floor. It felt a little like playing to the Corleones.
Oh, I knocked it dead that night. Tony climbed the risers around midnight. “You good!”, he said, nodding approvingly at the packed dance floor and the crowded bar behind it. “You real good”.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I always find interesting these little hole-in-the-wall bars you’ve been describing. They don’t sound much like places I’d go to, so I always wonder, how to these places get people to come in the door, or become regulars?
What are the owners trying to accomplish with their bars? Why did they make this bar their life? What are the people who come in looking for?
In a way, it’s like blogs, talk shows, or what have you. Anything that’s chasing after patrons. (Not that I’ve ever got the hang of figuring out how to get people to visit a blog.)
I’ll trip across a blog I’ve never heard of before, and see it gets, say, a thousand visitors daily. How did they do that?
Who drives past a grungy bar for the first time and thinks, I’ll give that a try.
There’s a great mystery to convincing people to giving you their time and money.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Reminds me of the many great (and lame) parties, dances, anniversaries, reunions, and clubs… if you’ve got an employee or organizer with ideas on how a party works, you can be damn sure they’ll tell you how to do your job.
Of course, just as often as not they don’t really know what you’re doing.
When doing weddings, I always used the rule that if the Maid of Honor or the Mother of the Bride gave frequent (and unneccessary) instructions… the evening was going to be lame. Control issues and micromanagement tendencies can ruin an otherwise fun evening.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Ah, “George’s’. I went there a few times with friends back in the day. The family that owned the place reminded me of one wing of my own family. We always had a good time there, but the overriding memory is of flames: flaming cheese, flaming ouzo – and flamboyant waitstaff shouting “Opa!” everytime they combusted another comestible.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Wow, Mitch. I worked as a hostess at George’s while attending college (a classmate was one of the sons who worked there, George Jr.). I loved Papa George, who always hung with me and told me where to seat guests (“Nancy! Tables! Sit them in the middle. Why you always put them in the booth?”). I learned a little Greek, ate some fabulous food and learned how to fold napkins. George Jr. and I would share laughs (out of range of customers) when the kiddies cried at lost flyaway helium balloons when they accidentally let go of them. The DJ working there at the time got me into the DJ biz, my first gig at Blackie’s in Oakdale.
Thanks for the memory lane trip!