“I wanna go to a country bar, but I know you don’t like them, so we can go wherever.”
How accommodating is my cousin Marky-Mark? He’s the one vacationing in Colorado, taking a break from his seven-days-a-week contract-labor job in Iraq, and there he was on the phone telling me that I should pick the den of depravity for the evening.
But I wasn’t having it.
“Dude, no. We’re going to a country bar. You just tell me where to meet you.”
And so an hour later we were at the Buck Wild Saloon, the massive countrified dance club space in the Denver Pavilions. It wasn’t a weekend, but the bar (erstwhile Beyond) was a decent scene. The dance floor was more packed than the bar – line dancing takes concentration – and so there was more room for drankin’, as they say.
Marky-Mark had been gone for nearly a year, and the reunion was awesome. He told me about his thoroughly bizarre life in the Mideast. I told him about some new bands he had to check out before going back. I got to meet his very cool girlfriend, Cassie. And he got to meet my hotness, Nichole. We told the story of him locking me out of the house while babysitting him.
And the Buck Wild acted as a fine place to play catch up. We had cocktails on the tabletop Pac-Man or Galaga machine and took turns running to the bar for quarters. People who knew all of those complex line dances were enjoying themselves, but the space is so cavernous that it made for an unusual Western bar. There’s hardly any intimacy, although it can be created if you find the right corner.
The music was hilarious – an alternate reality for all of us. I Western bars and honky-tonks, but they have to be legitimate, dirty, intimate, thrown together. (A recent trip to Nashville acted as a guide to the best honky- tonks, and no, Tootsie’s doesn’t count, anymore.)
Marky-Mark hadn’t bought a new CD in nearly a year, but it didn’t matter. The music was so old, tired and played- out that he knew all the songs – and the dances that went along with them!
But he refrained from boot- scooting. Instead we hit the nearby 15th St. Tavern for a quick and intimate nightcap – and reality check.
| Buck Wild Saloon
500 16th St. in the Denver Pavilions; 303-623-9663
Funky: The sound system is killer in there.
Skunky: The space isn’t ideal for a country bar. There is, in fact, a tear in my beer.
