Now I've Heard Everything

The Lakeside Lounge doesn’t look like much.  Two adjacent stores in a depression era building over on Avenue B.  The bar area, where you enter, looks like it was probably a classic New York City candy store at one point, with the bar in the exact place where a counter and soda fountain would have been.  The second store is joined to the first in the rear by a short hall which contains a 50s style four picture strip photo booth and a jukebox crammed with interesting and obscure records.  The second store, the music room, contains a few round tables with chairs, a bench against the rear wall and a window seat in the left front window.  Set up against the right front window is a stage with a drum kit.  The stage is raised only inches above the floor.  On the walls behind the bench and behind the stage are faded paintings extolling the Lakeside Lounge which look like they might have graced a bar with that name in the Midwest and were picked up for a song years later.

The Lakeside Lounge was opened in April, 1996, by Jim “the Hound” Marshall and Eric “Roscoe” Ambel.  But The Lakeside did not reach my consciousness until eight years later when I went there to see Amy Rigby.  Amy played all over the city in those days, but I quickly noticed that her Lakeside shows were her better ones.  “We always have a good time over at The Lakeside,” Amy said one night when she was mentioning an upcoming show there.  Indeed, she, and the audience did.

The cheeky spirit of the place is captured best, I think, on their Band Information page which includes the following:

• The band does get to drink for free, but that means the band – not friends of the band and/or girlfriends/boyfriends.
• You don’t get a sound check (the Beatles never sound checked once in their career).
• What we don’t book…anyone influenced by REM or U2.
• drag out everyone you know — especially alcoholics.

There must be hundreds, if not thousands of bands which have played at The Lakeside over the past 16 years.  I won’t even attempt to list them.  But I can share my personal favorite times at The Lakeside.  They include the 2005 four week residency of Steve Wynn and The Miracle 3 watching them hone the material that they would record on their record …tick…tick…tick, the recent shows by the re-formed Del-Lords, the endless residency of Jim Keller, any and every show by Spanking Charlene, and the time Amy Rigby fed the audience hot dogs and potato chips passing around a bottles of mustard and ketchup noting “that with squeeze bottles you can have condiments.”  Probably belonging in a separate class was the Sunday night two years ago when Eric Ambel and his wife, Mary Lee Kortes, came in to celebrate their anniversary, with Mary Lee joining Tandy for a song.

Nothing lasts forever.  Bars and music clubs certainly don’t.  Sixteen years is a good run.  Bravo Mr. Marshall and Mr. Ambel.  We were richer for having The Lakeside Lounge, and will soon be poorer without it.