The downstairs bar at the Bluebird Theater was already three people deep Tuesday, and it wasn’t even 10 p.m. As opener Randy Rogers led his band through a set of rowdy country originals, a herd of bartenders navigated the bar’s guns, taps and liquor wells as tall men in cowboy hats and snap-button shirts waved bills in their faces.
Tuesday nights aren’t normally like this at the Bluebird. But Southern rock band Cross Canadian Ragweed was playing, and with the Texas- and Oklahoma-based band come its fans and their reputation as hearty consumers of alcohol. They have been known to guzzle a bar’s entire beer supply.
“Ah yeah, beer drinkers and hell raisers,” frontman Cody Canada mused a few hours before showtime, sitting in the theater’s balcony with his bandmates pondering the connection between his group’s no-rules music and bar-busting liquor sales. “They’re the same.”
“They go hand in hand,” said drummer Randy Ragsdale, prompting guitarist Grady Cross to wax philosophical: “It’s just what everybody does.”
It’s no secret that young fans drink at rock shows. But sometimes they binge, and while it’s occasionally coincidental, most of the time the behavior is directly linked to the band rocking the stage. Alcohol is the lubricant expanding the conduits of emotional interaction between fan and band.
History offers precedents: Bluesman Robert Johnson was a barkeep’s dream in Delta juke joints, bourbon flowed when Hank Williams played the roadhouses, and Frank Sinatra certainly rang up sales of single-malt scotch in Vegas.
Today, whether you’re a black-clad Goth quaffing merlot or a metalhead chugging Miller Genuine Draft, certain bands drive their fans to drink. And club owners love it.
Early on a recent evening, as Cross Canadian Ragweed got ready to take the stage, Bluebird assistant manager Jamie Koch was in the box office talking to his staff about removing the Miller Genuine Draft keg and replacing it with a second Miller Lite keg.
“This is just crazy,” he said in the office, just a doorway away from the madness at the bar. Miller Lite subsidizes Ragweed in return for advertisements and product placement. (The Ragweed musicians drink a case of Miller onstage every night.) And it works. MGD wasn’t moving, so they ran two lines of the Miller Lite all night long and emptied 3½ kegs.
“The more inexpensive, domestic beers are usually the faster movers,” Koch said the next afternoon, still amazed to have sold that much liquor with only 419 people in the house. “If you have to change a keg once a night, that’s good. But we really came close to selling out all of our Lite, which is a lot.”
Where the money is
Nobody can explain exactly why some bands set the taps to flowing and others leave the bar a lonely spot. There is no question that venue operators value people drinking: The bar is typically their main source of revenue. (Ticket sales traditionally pay the musicians.) But Koch has an idea why the Ragweed show was one of the best Bluebird bar nights in recent memory.
“It seems to be that throwback rock, that Southern country-laced rock that really brings out that fun-lovin’, good-time crowd,” he said.
Longtime Denver bartender Fil – he goes by one name – remembers ringing up more than $2,500 by himself at a George Clinton show. While the party band was a good, busy time, some bands are guaranteed to produce a line at the bar.
“Definitely the punk-country and the alt-country bands are in there,” Fil said. “Slim Cessna shows were always super-busy. Supersuckers and Hank III, too.”
Bill Murphy works both sides of the bar. As a bartender at the Hi-Dive, he can pick out which crowds are big drinkers.
“Munly has a big-drinking crowd, a whiskey crowd,” said Murphy. “(The Photo) Atlas does too, PBR. And I don’t know if you can see Lucero or Drag the River and not drink a lot, whiskey preferably.”
But as the lead guitarist for post-punk rockers The Swayback, Murphy sees it all from a different, elevated perspective.
“We have a definite drinking crowd, bars have told me that,” said Murphy. “We love to (expletive) drink, and we certainly attract them.”
There is clearly a connection between heavy metal and drinking – mainly Jagermeister, largely because of the liquor’s marketing and band sponsorship.
“Local metal bands always have big bars,” said Jim Norris, a stalwart in the local live-
music scene who just opened the newest rock club in Denver, the Three Kings Tavern on South Broadway. “But one of the biggest bands I’ve ever worked with continually is Super Diamond.”
When Norris calls Super Diamond “big,” he doesn’t mean it’s selling out the Pepsi Center. The Bay Area-based Neil Diamond cover band has worked its way up in this market, from the 500-seat Bluebird Theatre to the 3,600-capacity Fillmore Auditorium, all the while setting the bar high for bar sales.
“Super Diamond is an experiment in how much 21- to 25-year-old college students and post-college kids can drink,” Norris said. “Literally, everybody is drinking $50 a head. They’re the biggest bars I’ve ever seen.”
Kimmy Danner has tended bar at the Bluebird for more than nine years, but she’s also a familiar face at rock clubs throughout the area as a fan. When she’s not working, it’s the brash guitar-rock bands that put her in the mood to drink.
“It’s the heavier shows,” said Danner. “Anything at the Larimer – he gets so much good rock there – like Nebula and Early Man … and the fans are professional, all-varsity drinkers.”
Scott Campbell owns the Larimer Lounge and is one of Slim Cessna’s biggest fans.
“There is no question that the crowd at a Slim Cessna’s Auto Club show drinks a lot,” Campbell said. “It’s an added benefit when you book that band: You know that you’re going to sell a lot of alcohol. Their music is just conducive to drinking. The songs are all about drinking.”
Cessna concedes the point: “Years ago, it may have had more to do with content,” he said earlier this week from his home in Pittsburgh. “We were singing drinking songs almost on purpose.
Battle of the (booze) bands
“In the old days, when we would play the Lion’s Lair, we would break the bar’s sales record and we had this battle going back and forth with this band … and it was always going back and forth between us. I don’t know who has the record there now. Now I don’t care about those kinds of records.”
But some people still care. They’re the same people who know that emo, jazz and adult contemporary shows don’t make for big-ticket bars. Nor do some country acts.
“Junior Brown is always gonna sell out,” says The Three Kings Tavern’s Norris. “But it’s all old people who only come in and drink one or two. Six-hundred people drinking one or two drinks isn’t that much. Jeff Healey is that way, and so is Stanley Jordan. They sell well, but the bar doesn’t.”
Some bands and genres are predictable enough that bars can prepare for the shows. Matt Labarge owns the Hi-Dive, and he prepped for the recent Planes Mistaken for Stars show by stocking more bottled Budweiser than usual.
“We always stock accordingly,” said Labarge, “with PBR being the indie beer du jour and Bud as the old-school tried-and-true anti-hipster beer.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
