PrettyFakes

Yes indeed. So last night I had one of the more thematically consistent evenings out that I’ve had in a while. The theme? All things tawdry and shambling. With an appreciated assist from the wheels of Dave Ashes, I met Jaysus, Jaxxie, Blaise, and J-Tron (Blaise and J-Tron: I have chosen these pseudonyms at random. Feel free to suggest your own.) at Baton Rouge landmark the Pastime Lounge.

Now, as I still relatively am new to the Red Stick, this was my first time there, but o I assure you, it will not be my last. The Pastime isn’t a theme restaurant, but if it were, the theme would be mob-front chic. Cleverly organized as a kind of Inferno homage, the Pastime first ushers you into a well lit and non-descript room, the sort of place you could bring your kid’s Sunday School class for a pizza party; the intrepid diner will then proceed from this room to a more dimly illumined ante-dining room, and from there to a cavernous bar area, all dark wood, blue smoke, and heavy curtains draped over windows you couldn’t see out of anyway—the sort of room where you’re likely to see the parents of the kids in your Sunday School class, slumped low in a booth with a mate other than the one you were expecting. Yea indeed, the smoky haze was such that I cannot swear to you that the Pastime has a proper ceiling. If your eyes aren’t shifty when you go in, they will be when you leave, and for some people the effect doesn’t wear off. Upstanding pillars of the community go in for a Pastime Pizza and come out with derringers duct-taped to their lower backs and without any good explanation for the deupty sheriff who fills his monthly quota in the Pastime parking lot, smoking cigarettes and reading girly mags while waiting for the doors to swing open again.

The bartender’s name? Lovie, swear to pete, and at one point in the evening, a helpful member of the waitstaff came around with plastic condiment dispensers full of fruit-forward shots, which he proceeded to dispense as freely as mustard or ketchup into tiny rammikins. The food? Delicious. And as an early Mardi Gras parade had just swung through the area, the restaurant was packed with graying revelers determined to pack a year’s worth of dissipation into one evening of drinking, including a fiftysomething fellow who gamely lifted his shirt for us—unsolicited—though we had no beads to offer in return.

From there we proceeded across the street to the Spanish Moon, where the Hold Steady proceeded to cover themselves in a frayed and threadbare glory poorly stitched together from the tatters of the well thumbed and tear-soiled yearbook that your senior class president brought along with him to his first stint in rehab and then left there when he hopped the fence three days later. Their set was a little short for a band that professes to love Bruce Springsteen so much, but the atom of rock they created was packed superdense and ready to explode at any minute, destroying this universe and creating a new one in Craig Finn’s chemistry-teacher-gone-to-seed image. They did not disappoint. Old songs were performed as though they were new, and I was especially tickled to hear them try out at least two new songs: one about poet John Berryman, whose eventual suicide in Minneapolis after long struggles with angels and alcohol makes him pretty much the Hold Steady’s patron saint. Finn introduced the other new (I think) song as being about a horse named “Chips Ahoy,” and was notably mainly for the way that it absolutely melted my brain: keyboardist Franz Nicolay smashes to sonic splinters a door wrought entirely from guitar noise with a synth riff that can only be described as “wicked” and a shout of “Whoa-oh, whoa-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh” and lo, the rock had arrived.

The one downside is that the show wasn’t very well attended, which is bad news for BR. I suspect the parade and the unseasonably cold weather kept some folks away. Ah well. Maybe the HS will give us another chance on the next tour. Don’t give up!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 2:23 pm and is filed under In the South, Professor Fury, Red Stick, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.