Volume 3, Issue 25
December 6 - December 19, 2001
by Alex Neth
623 15th St.; 303-572-0822
Pabst on tap, jukebox riddled with punk rock, bartender in leopard print pants -- reputation among national indie bands. Collection of irregulars. The 15th Street Tavern is a local landmark, and we here at Go-Go are diddling away valuable ink on wretched establishments like the Wynkoop. How could Bottoms Up not have turned a bleary eye to this place until just now? Get the sack-cloth. Make sure the ashes are nice and fresh.
But it would be unseemly to gush about a bar like the Tavern. The nature of a scuzzy hole-in-the-wall is not to inspire florid tributes. Scuzzy holes-in-the-wall exist to give dipsos a dark place to sink into a bottle. They don't serve tapas or provide overstuffed armchairs in which to sip martinis. They don't boast celebrity managers or merit the attention of the mainstream. They often don't clean their bathrooms with any regularity. Clearly, a toe-sucking review such as might be found in our own Denver Newspaper would be inappropriate.
So let's focus on what sucks about the 15th Street Tavern. We'll start at the front door, with the cover charge. Sure, the cover pays the band. And bands are the Tavern's chief claim to notoriety-- name another bar in town that has hosted performances by The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and The Queers-- a claim consistently validated by the watered-down level of competition. But still. Paying a cover charge is un-punk. $7 to see some girl who was in a band no one had heard of? There are people who wouldn't pay that to watch Jello Biafra play a recorder in their bathroom. So that's one knock.
Another is the damn liquor. It has this propertyÑ bear with me now-- to cloud your mind and make you stumble into things. If ingested in quantity, it can make you get very ill or join the Army. And this place has bottles of the stuff. Come on now. That isn't very responsible, is it? People just show up wanting to exchange money for precious sips of the stuff, which leads inescapably to loosened tongues, fisticuffs and death. Good job, 15th Street Tavern. Way to get everybody all drunk.
Then there's the people we here at Bottoms Up like to think of as our target audience: snotty young drunks who hang out in sleazy bars on weeknights. Just because these people read our little magazine-- if, in fact, they actually do, which they almost certainly don'tÑ doesn't mean that we are letting them off the hook. Who the hell do these kids think they are with that hit-your-mom-on-the-head-with-a-rake music, to borrow an ex-boss's pithy phrase? Don't they realize that we're at war with all of the evil in the world, and that puppies and little bitty babies will never be safe until we all think and dress alike and report to our home government-cam every two hours? When was the last time one of these little screwups performed a flag ceremony? Or baked a damn mincemeat pie? Or showered? I doubt a single one will make it in The Rapture.
Then, in the bathroom, someone wrote "Burn Down The Lion's Lair." Advocating destruction isn't cool, kids. The floor is dirty. There are lots of stickers on the wall. Some guy in the back was wearing pants that didn't flatter him very well. One of the bands was loud. The guys playing pool wouldn't lose to us just because we were drunk. The ceiling could be a few feet higher. See? The place is practically falling apart.
We can only celebrate a good punk rock bar in the argot of our culture, friends. So let's give a big old upraised middle finger to the 15th Street Tavern, with their cover charge to pay bands and their booze to get customers loaded. Work up a lugie for those blue-collar kids with their good taste in music. We need no stirring recount of our second pitcher of Cheap American, no golden-hued remembrance of thunking drunkenly into the bathroom wall. Save that garbage for eighth grade English and the dithering sports columnists who didn't go. This bar sucks. Let's go.
All Rights Reserved © 2001 Go Go Media, LLC, Denver, Colorado
