Musical Memories of a Pub Without Music

There's no jukebox McSorley's Ale House, but the legendary NYC watering hole has been rocking my world for 35 years.

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

Sorry for the longer than usual downtime between offerings. I have something in the works for my paid subscribers that’s taking me longer to fine-tune than expected, and I made a last-minute audible to bop down to NYC on Wednesday. (More on that in a sec.) Also, the next episode of CROSSED CHANNELS, the Substack-only music podcast I do each month with my friend and colleague

Tony Fletcher

, has been delayed a week due to various work and life conflicts — but since this episode will be focusing on the righteously rockin’ MC5, I’m pretty sure you’ll find it worth the wait.

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McSorley's Old Ale House. Undated photo courtesy of Wikiwand

Now then, where were we? Ah, yes… New York City.

Ever I first started going to bars in the mid-eighties, the presence of a well-stocked jukebox has always been a major draw for me. Whether it was that charmless, now-forgotten Upper Broadway dive that my freshman roommate in college introduced me to — its three main selling points being that they offered really cheap pitchers of Michelob, they didn’t card you if you looked anywhere north of sixteen, and there was a 45 of Question Mark & The Mysterians’ “96 Tears” on their jukebox — or the East Village’s late, lamented Lakeside Lounge, whose co-owners Jim “The Hound” Marshall and Eric “Roscoe” Ambel stocked the CD jukebox with an encyclopedic array of raunchy raves from the forties, fifties and sixties, my choice of a quaffing spot (in NYC and everywhere else) has often been dictated by the guarantee of quality tunes.

On the other hand, McSorley’s — one of New York City’s most historic bars, and the NYC watering hole I’ve probably visited most often over the past 35 years — doesn’t have a jukebox or play music of any kind. Not that the place needs music; it’s more than loud enough in there at lunch or during the evenings, and in quieter moments the lack of beats and melodies really accentuates the “frozen in time” ambience that the East 7th Street institution exudes. The place opened in 1854; and despite the city-mandated cleaning and dusting it underwent about a decade and a half ago, it still has the cluttered, cozy and unvarnished feel of a classic 19th century American pub.

The bar’s lack of music is certainly in keeping with tradition. According to Joseph Mitchell’s delightful 1940 New Yorker profile “The Old House at Home” (anthologized in his essential 1943 collection McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, one of my all-time favorite books), Old Bill McSorley — who inherited the bar from his founding father, Old John — was so annoyed by noise of any sort that he would violently ring a fire gong whenever his patrons began arguing too loudly. And yet, McSorley’s nevertheless features prominently in some of my favorite music-related memories, as well as some lovely music-related friendships.

These thoughts came rushing to the forefront of my consciousness on Wednesday afternoon, while I was enjoying an absolutely lovely McSorley’s hang with Australian musician Tim Rogers. I’ve been a big fan of Tim’s music ever since the 1996 release of Hourly Daily, the third album from his band You Am I, so I was pleasantly taken aback last year when I discovered that he was both a paid subscriber to JTL (Thanks, Tim!) and a big fan of Big Hair and Plastic Grass, the first of my three books on baseball in the 1970s.

A friendly social media correspondence ensued, and when I recently ascertained that he was heading eastward after spending some recording time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I threw out the possibility of us getting together in NYC to bend some elbows and wag some chins. Not only did Tim enthusiastically second the notion, but he also suggested that we meet up at McSorley’s. Ah ha, I thought — truly a man after my own heart…

McSorley’s has long had a reputation for being overly “touristy”. The rep is deserved, though as with my two favorite places in my former home of Los Angeles — the Farmer’s Market and the La Brea Tar Pits — McSorley’s is the sort of tourist attraction that also still serves as a comfortable and welcoming destination for locals (and local-adjacents like me), at least if you time it right. And it’s a place whose old-school magic is still so profound and genuine, no amount of slack-jawed yokels or annoying college kids can ever truly diminish it.

Coolness isn’t the point of the city’s oldest surviving Irish saloon, and never was. You go to McSorley’s not to pose or strut or make the scene, but to commune with New York City’s rough and ready past, to sip from mugs of light or dark ale (no IPAs or sours or cocktails here, pally) at the worn wooden bar or at an equally worn wooden table, and cast your wondering eyes over many of the same decorative items that were hanging from these walls and ceilings back when Joseph Mitchell was first “researching” his piece on the place — items like leg shackles from the Civil War’s infamous Andersonville prison, the carved wooden sign warning “Be good or be gone” (commissioned and hung by original proprietor Old John McSorley), or the framed 19th century photos of The McSorley Nine, the establishment’s baseball squad. According to Mitchell, the team’s contests on the East River’s North Brother Island were mostly just an excuse to hold gluttonous clambakes and get drunk outside for a change.

My first visit to McSorley’s was in 1989, a few months after I’d graduated from college; I was meeting up for drinks with some fellow grads, and they suggested we get together there after they’d finished work. Packed and noisy, the pub’s ancient charms were not fully apparent to me during this particular visit. I dug the glorious clutter of old paintings and photos on the walls, as well as the five-foot-tall urinals in the men’s room — each with a built-in porcelain shelf to rest your tankard on — but I didn’t have the space or quiet necessary to truly appreciate the place.

That chance came during a visit to NYC the following year, when I stopped in for some liquid refreshment one afternoon after loading up on some vintage wax at Finyl Vinyl, the small but excellent (and now sadly long-gone) record store that was just a block away on 6th Street at the time. The pub was quiet and mostly empty that day, and I was able to sit back and really absorb the visuals and the atmosphere; one of the chairs at the table where I was sitting was occupied by one of the establishment’s cats, which further endeared the place to me.

Thereafter, at least for the next decade or so, I would always set aside one day per NYC visit where my itinerary would look something like this:

1. Around 10 a.m., take the subway from my dad’s place on the Upper West Side down to the East Village.

2. Make the late-morning rounds of the neighborhood record shops, especially Tower, Finyl Vinyl and Sounds.

3. Pick up a stack of new fanzines and old Creem and Trouser Press issues at See Hear.

4. Grab a couple of slices at one of the nearby pizza joints.

5. Repair to McSorley’s, grab an empty table, order a pair (or two) of “darks,” and spend the next several hours reading my new ‘zines and looking at my new records.

6. Head back to the Upper West Side around 4 p.m.

Those were always sweet days indeed, and the McSorley’s experience was made even sweeter for me around 1991, when my dear friend Jim Saft introduced me to the work of Joseph Mitchell. Jim and I had bonded in high school over the music and lyrics of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Joe Jackson, and now we were re-bonding over a shared fascination with New York City history and the pre-WWII writings on the area from the likes of Mitchell, A.J. Liebling and Herbert Asbury, all of whom Jim (who’d relocated to NYC from Chicago after graduating college) generously hipped me to.

Jim had a real nose in those pre-internet days for finding the old dives, buildings and blocks in Lower Manhattan that had remained relatively unchanged since the 19th or early 20th centuries, and he took me to quite a few of them. Oddly, I don’t think we ever raised a glass together at McSorley’s; but by lending me a copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, he made the history of the pub really come alive for me in all of its smoke-stained glory. (Yes, it’s absurd that McSorley’s observed a staunch “Men Only” entrance policy until 1970, but Mitchell certainly felt no qualms about poking fun at the risible misogyny of the owners and patrons in his history of the place.)

The “Five Points” slum buildings and Chinatown opium dens of Asbury’s Gangs of New York may have been long gone, and ditto for Liebling’s penny-ante prizefighters, gamblers and grifters; but after reading Mitchell, one could still walk into McSorley’s and easily picture a bunch of older gentlemen in handlebar moustaches heatedly discussing the latest doings of Tammany Hall, or Old Bill McSorley lovingly doting on the bar’s many cats. Indeed, some of the light fixtures looked like they hadn’t been dusted since Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner. Jim sadly left us in 2017, but I never go into McSorley’s without thinking of him, just like I can never listen to Graham Parker’s “Watch the Moon Come Down” without feeling him in the room.

"McSorley's Cats," by John Sloan (1929). Property of the Huntington Library

McSorley’s played a role in another wonderful friendship of mine; for it was where I was first introduced, back in the summer of 1992, to Ugly Things publisher and Loons frontman Mike Stax. Not that he was actually there at the time — but a copy of Ugly Things #11, the one with The Monks on the cover, certainly was. I’d never heard of Ugly Things until I picked the issue up at See Hear that morning; but upon reading the mag while sitting at a McSorley’s window table on a sunny, sleepy afternoon, I was blown away by the passion and intelligence with which Mike and his writers served up all kinds of arcane info on cool 1960s bands, most of which I’d never even heard of at that point. I thought I was fairly deep into US and UK garage and psych, but this mag was opening up whole new worlds to me…

I never missed an issue of UT after that (still haven’t), and after about two years finally got up the courage to write a letter to Mike offering my services as a record reviewer. He responded by calling me up for a chat, and I was so nervous — between UT and him having played bass for the The Crawdaddys and The Tell-Tale Hearts, I figured he was probably thee coolest dude in the world, right? — that I could barely string a coherent sentence together.

It turned out Mike was the coolest dude in the world, but also one of the kindest, funniest, genuine and most down-to-earth people I’d ever encountered: a total mensch, in other words. Mike and I wound up getting to know each other quite well during my two-plus decades in Southern California; he and his awesome wife Anja are the only people who’ve actually managed to get me out to a NFL game in the last 40 years, though that’s a story for another time. It’s almost unfathomable to me that I haven’t seen them in nine years at this point, and I really hope that changes soon…

Of course, time has a way of blowing right by you, but it’s still mind-boggling for me that the last time I sat across the table from Tim Rogers was during the second Clinton administration. We were seated that day in a comfy booth at Swinger’s coffee shop on the ground floor of West Hollywood’s Beverly Laurel Motel, and I was interviewing him for one of my freelance outlets about You Am I’s #4 Album. It was early in the afternoon, but Tim was more than a little bleary-eyed, having played (and presumably celebrated) a corking set at Spaceland the night before. I immediately liked the guy, and we had a good chat about American country music — which came as a pleasant surprise to me, as I’d mostly picked up on influences like The Who, The Kinks and The Stones in his band’s records. But I could tell he was struggling a bit that day, so I kept our conversation short and sweet.

There were no such issues on Wednesday at McSorley’s, however; in fact, if Tim hadn’t already made dinner plans with his lovely daughter Ruby — who, now that women are rightfully allowed inside the joint, joined us about halfway through our hang — and wasn’t flying across the Atlantic today to handle lead vocals for Australian punk legends The Hard-Ons on their latest European tour, I’m pretty sure we’d still be gabbing away at our window table.

Lubricated by a steady delivery of dark ales, our gloriously free-associative conversation giddily hopscotched across such topics as Catfish Hunter, Tim’s Phillies phandom, You Am I’s disastrous CBGBs gig, meeting Ray Davies and Pete Townshend, the Beverly Laurel, Ann Arbor in the 1970s, Tulsa in the present day, Ball Four, college football versus pro, being history-obsessed guys in our fifties, being longtime city boys now living in rural towns, cringe-inducing encounters we’ve had with hardcore Grateful Dead fans, the current political insanity in this country and the rest of the world (Tim thankfully arrived too late to be subjected to the unhinged and thoroughly gong-worthy pro-Trump rant spewed by one of our fellow customers shortly after I sat down), whether or not Golden Earring were from The Hague, and my obsession with Elvis Presley’s obsession with the Fool’s Gold Loaf sandwich. I’m sure we both had about a hundred things we wanted to ask or tell the other that we never got around to, but it was nonetheless a chinwag par excellence.

We also bonded over our respective long-running fondness for McSorley’s Ale House. Like me, Tim has been visiting the place for over 30 years now; and like me, he’s not at all put off by its “touristy” reputation. Some folks definitely are, however — Tim tried to convince a well-known NYC music figure to join us on Wednesday, but noted with some amusement that said musician’s initial enthusiasm for the meetup noticeably cooled as soon as Tim mentioned that our destination was McSorley’s. Ah well, more dark ales for us, then.

We likewise got a big kick out of it when the bar’s lone waiter — who’d originally acted a bit sniffy towards me when I first arrived — totally lit up at the sight of my first edition copy of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (which I’d brought along to reread on my bus down to the city) and thereafter treated us like VIPs. “I met Joseph Mitchell,” the waiter told us proudly, and while that’s a story I’d certainly like to hear sometime, in that moment I was far more interested in finding out how the hell Tim became such an ardent baseball fan from halfway across the world. (Short version: His dad worked for a time in the US, and developed an interest in the game while he was here.)

For the record, we did not exchange hair care tips, though in retrospect we were both bringing our “A” games that day…

We eventually surrendered our table around 5:30, right as the place was really starting to fill up; Tim and Ruby had dinner in Brooklyn to get to, and I had a bus to catch. But both of us were grinning widely as we left the saloon, buzzing from the dark ales and the mutual, life-affirming kick of recognizing a truly kindred spirit — and in the setting of an all-time favorite watering hole, no less. Hopefully we can reconnoiter soon at McSorley’s and pick up where our conversation left off… and hopefully I can finally get myself down to Australia one of these days. Safe travels, my friend!

Oh, and the rest of youse: Check out “Thumbs,” the new track from The Ferguson Rogers Process — Tim’s collaboration with Lance Ferguson of The Bamboos — and a soulful taste of their forthcoming album Style And Or Substance, which drops November 15. It’s kinda different than anything Tim has done in the past, but I think it’s pretty cool…

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