This column originally ran in the baiduhai on Aug. 28, 1990.
There are bars and there are bars. Some are just fast-drink emporiums where you grab one before hopping a commuter train. Some are places where you can sit, sip a beer and actually talk to other bipeds. There are mean joints where one cross word gets you a facial scar, and friendly joints where you might meet the girl/boy/mutant of your dreams.
I know a lot about bars. More, I’m sure, than is good for my health. It was my family’s business in the long-gone days when the neighborhood tavern was the working class equivalent of the country club. The corner tavern was — as the theme song of the TV series, “Cheers”, puts it — “where everybody knows your name.”
So I must take a moment to mourn the closing of one of the best gin mills in Chicago. Which is saying something. I doubt that any other city has a bar called “Stop and Drink.” Here, a shot is a shot, a beer is a beer, and a corporate lawyer and a tuckpointer can belly up as equals.
The “Acorn.” Or more formally, “The Acorn on Oak.” Or, as some of us called it: “Buddy’s.”
It’s closed down. Damn progress. Damn real estate prices and rentals. Damn the changing drinking habits of the American public. We have lost one fine bar.
A minute or two after 11 o’clock. Not a.m. If you’re a morning person, the Acorn wasn’t for you.
Buddy Charles would shake a few hands along the front-door bar, let go with his boisterous laugh, and slide onto the bench in front of his upright piano.
A bar wrapped around Buddy’s piano, and it seated maybe 15 or 20. I never counted. All that mattered was the rule: When Buddy played, you shut up.
The first time I went in there, many years ago, I was skeptical. I’d heard a lot of piano bar players banging out junk, second-rate Liberaces grabbing for the conventioneer’s tip.
Then Buddy smiled across the piano. Only one smile like it. With his lean face and sharp-pointed beard, he was the Devil incarnate. Except he wasn’t. The man actually teaches Sunday school.
“Anything special you’d like to hear?” he said.
I threw him the curve. I’ve whipped it by piano-bar players from one coast to the next. They always expect that you’ll ask for “Send in the Clowns,” or some toned-down Beatles banality.
“Yeah, play ‘Black and Blue.’ “
He grinned. “Don’t get many requests for that.”
Then wham, his fingers raced in a flourish from low E to high E, he leaned back, his eyes half-closed, a devilish grin, and his piercing tenor froze the place:
“Cold empty bed/springs hard as lead/pains in my head/feel like Ol’ Ned/ hey, what did I do/to feel so black and blue.”
And that was the beginning of a very fine friendship. During my bleakest years, before I met and married the blond, I spent many a night listening to Buddy. He made them less bleak.
Name the song and he played it. And it wasn’t just the playing. He gave it style. When he played Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, I could imagine them sitting there saying: “Exactly as I intended.”
Some of you reading this have been there. Midnight, 1 o’clock, 3 o’clock. You know what it’s like when you’re feeling low, lonely, miserable, and you want to go somewhere where the dark hours start throwing sparks.
That’s what the Acorn on Oak was. Or, as we regulars called it, “Buddy’s.”
I did a TV show some years ago. Interviewed celebrities and all that nonsense. I twisted the arm of the TV producer — a classic nonentity of his craft — to end the show with a performance and chat with Buddy.
Buddy talked about the kind of people who come into late-night bars to have one or two pops and listen to a piano player. He talked about widows and widowers and the kind of music they liked. Good music. And when the show ended, he slid into “One for My Baby, and One More for the Road.”
We didn’t do another show. The producer said it was too depressing. Being a TV creature, he paid no heed to our rating — highest in our time slot — or more importantly, Buddy’s unique style. He suggested that I replace Buddy with a one-man band — thumping a drum, banging a multi-purpose keyboard. I suggested things that are unprintable.
So the Acorn is closed. The post-midnight gang feels homeless.
What to do? I don’t know. I’ve been writing for a living a long time. Maybe I’ll open a joint. Let me know. Is there anybody out there who appreciates the world’s best rendition of “Black and Blue”?
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