Eulogy for Jay's Upstairs

Dang! In the course of perusing the Jay's website, I came across these photos of Humpy from 8/10/01

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I got an e-mail Saturday morning from a drunk and slightly despondent-sounding Rusty Smetanka telling me that Missoula landmark bar Jay's Upstairs would be closing, its liquor license having been bought out by an Olive Garden. Fuck man, I never thought I'd live to see the day Jay's died. I mean, hell, it's like trying to kill a fucking cockroach.

Jay's Upstairs and the whole lifestyle associated with it had a huge part in shaping who I am today, no doubt about it. And I imagine many others would say the same. What follows then, is a hodge-podge of various fuzzy reminiscences about that place. Please feel free to add your own. And if you've got photos in digital format, by all means, send them to me (yalestar@gmail.com) and I'll put them up here.

You know how some bars, you walk in them, and you just feel this overpowering need to get fucked up? That sums up Jay's Upstairs perfectly. Yet it was the singular place around which the entire Missoula rock scene rallied, and rallied fervently. A place where any, and —I mean ANY— ragtag assemblage of derelicts with instruments who bothered to putatatively call themselves a band could easily line themselves up a show and have a receptive audience, which thusly entitled them, as performers, to the standard —ahem— "three" free beers per band member. A place where the idea of a bartender cutting somebody off for having imbibed too much was a bygone relic, or at least only a quaint formality that applied only to the yuppie bars down the street.

I'm going to go out on a limb and state for the record that I believe that my old band Humpy played more shows at Jay's upstairs than any other band in the history of that bar. As a conservative guess, I'd feel comfortable tossing out the number 300, although at one time, it was thought to be as high as four or five hundred shows. If ever there was a Jay's House Band, we were it. Sure, there were lots of other local bands that played there all the time, but we were the only ones who'd play at the drop of a hat. Anytime a band cancelled, we'd have a slot, since most or all of us were typically at the bar anyway, and since we left our equipment there pretty much full time. We played shows where the place was so packed that you essentially got to third base with everybody in the place, just sheerly by dint of propinquity. But the vast majority of our shows were on like a Tuesday night, with the bartender, the soundguy, and like four people in the audience, one of whom might be a rummy septuagenarian sitting slumped over at the bar, sneezing in his beer.

During my eight or so years as an Active Missoula Rock Participant, I cultivated a pretty clear-cut love-hate thing with Jay's Upstairs. I loved it because I knew I could set foot in there any night of the week and swill beers with my beloved and respected comrades-in-rock and watch some semblance of exciting live music. Even if I only had five bucks in my pocket, Robin the (early) bartender would make sure I got my fill and staggered out of there properly addled. I loved it because —chortle if you must— the place had an authentic feel of community going on. Everybody was somebody at Jay's, even if (and perhaps especially when) you were a sociopathic asshole.

I started hating it only toward the end of my time in that town, when it seemed like Jay's —and the scene that propped it up— really became a sort of temple of groupthink, where a band could only pass the collective muster based on how much they "rocked," as though that were the sole criterion upon which live music was evaluated. I also began to hate it because it became such a predictable thing to me; the behaviors of scenesters and all the severe levels of drunkenness and the partner-swapping became observable ritualistic conduct. It seemed like people were far more interested in acting out their Melrose Place dramas than participating in an active rock scene. Admittedly, much of my latter-day distaste for Jay's was brought on by one particular personal experience, and toward the end of my tenure in Missoula, I full-on refused to set foot in there altogether.

But aside from my own episode, it was no secret that the "Jay's crowd" was widely regarded as a fickle and insular bunch. I heard essentially the same complaint from several different people starting bands: in order to get your band off the ground in Missoula, you really have to be part of this secret society that gets blackout drunk five nights a week and fucks each other's girlfriends and if it doesn't sound like Nashville Pussy or Zeke or Murder City Devils, then nobody will like it. Of course, most of that was sour grapes and hyperbole and so forth, but still, people wouldn't lodge those complaints so consistently if there weren't at least a little truth to it...

Anyway, probably one of the most remarkable things about Jay's was the oddball line-ups they had. It was not at all uncommon for Humpy to play on a bill with some hippie jam band, or somebody's dad playing acoustic guitar. This is a practice most venues would never dream of, but it's one of the things I hold dearest about the joint. When we first started playing there in '93, the lineup was usually some permutation of Humpy, the Oblio Joes, and this awful metal band called Shades of Reality, who kind of regarded us and the Oblios as petulant amateurs in dire need of mentoring. Shades of Reality always insisted on playing last (the titular "headliners"), which was fine with us; we'd finish our set, chug a bunch of free beer with the Oblios and laugh at Shades of Reality for a while, with their falsetto vocals and their light show and all that, then go down the street to Charlie B's to finish out the night. But the Shadesters were cool guys, and it became immediately apparent how valuable it was to have that diversity going on.

The downstairs of Jay's was a sight to behold, especially in the early days. To go from the upstairs to the downstairs of that place was like some sort of time warp in which you become transported to some really sketchy Bakersfield kegger circa 1982. Since I've left Missoula, I hear that the downstairs has become kind of a second stage affair, so that action goes on upstairs and downstairs on any given night. But for the bulk of the 90s, the downstairs was a place you tried not to go. The typical habitue of Jay's Downstairs was a bellicose parolee whose sole mission for the day was to get blinding drunk. It was not at all uncommon for someone to start drinking there at 8am, pass out at the bar for a while, then come back to life only to get even more hideously drunk. Lots of catfights too.

And I have nothing but hateful memories for some of the filthy ex-Spokane-hookers that used to tend bar downstairs there in the mid-90s. We'd go in there on Sundays to practice or to go fetch our equipment for the rare non-Jays show, and we'd have to go ask the downstairs bartender for the keys to the upstairs. So you'd go sit at the bar, and those hags would see you and make a really obvious effort to ignore you. They'd sit there on the phone, smoking cigarettes and telling some interminable anecdote about their boyfriend's meth lab or something, and when they felt like you'd sat there waiting long enough, they'd sidle over and act really inconvenienced that you were asking for the key, and then finally exert the grand effort to walk over to the register and fish the keys out of it.

More recently, the owner Jay LaFlesch has seen the light and taken to hiring more amiable bartenders (including Mrs. Justin Lawrence), which went a long way toward bridging the gap between the upstairs and downstairs of that place.

And perhaps the most unusual thing about Jay's Downstairs, and the source of most amusement for outsiders was the fact that the bar had its own laundermat in it. Why anyone would schlep their laundry into that place and go to the trouble of washing it just to have it shrouded in that inimitable Jay's smoke/beer/puke cloud is beyond me. But people did it.

Of course, any proper Jay's reminiscence would be remiss without mentioning Robin Dent. Robin was a native of podunk Superior, MT and had come to Missoula to study classical piano and voice at the university, and like so many others, found it far more lucrative to drop out of school and tend bar. She had worked at Connie's, a similar bar a few blocks away, and ended up at Jay's somehow. And it was entirely her doing, as I understand it, to start having local and touring punk rock bands play at Jay's Upstairs. Because, as you may know, before Robin, Jay's was a haven for metal bands, which really didn't have much of an audience in the early 90s. So Robin transformed Jay's from a sparsely attended hole in the wall into a hugely popular venue for the burgeoning punk rock scene in Missoula. I've often wondered about the chicken/egg scenario there: did the scene explode so much because of Jay's, or did Jay's take off so well because of the scene exploding? Probably a fortuitous combination of both, but one wonders how much of an explosion there would have been without Jay's. There were predecessors, sure, like the aforementioned Connie's, the god-awful Trendz, Luke's Bar much earlier, the more biker-oriented Top Hat, and various Elks and Moose lodges, but none of them really had the je ne sais quoi that made Jay's such a happening place.

And much of that is owed to Robin. She had a way of making bands feel very welcomed and appreciated, mostly through the miracle of free beer. The official policy was three free beers per band member, but we all know that was a joke. You never left that place until you had as much fucking PBR as you could force down your gullet. And there was never any of that hipster bartender hubris you get in most rock clubs; in fact, most times you didn't even have to ask for the beer: you'd walk up to the end of the bar and she'd be waiting there with a full frosty mug and a big grin.

I don't know the circumstances surrounding it, but Robin eventually got fired. The speculation was that she was either skimming from the register, or the free beer started to eat into the revenues a little too noticeably.

Any Jay's reminiscence would also be greatly remiss with out mention of the Corral. The Corral was this bizarre and highly ill-advised wooden fence built around the perimeter of the stage at Jay's, and much like the laundermat downstairs, the Corral was a source of great amusement to touring bands. Almost every band that came through there had at least one member who climbed up on the Corral in some sort of Nugent-channeling exercise.

But perhaps the most storied night in the pantheon of memorable Jay's events is forever known as The Night The Corral Came Down. That poor edifice endured more abuse than any structure in any bar. More shit spilled on it, more cigarettes put out on it, more pressure holding up rabid rock fans. Finally one night in about 1996, the Hanson Brothers were playing to a crowd so thick you couldn't see straight. If a fire inspector had seen that throng, he'd have made Swiss Miss in his pants. Johnny Hanson worked the crowd up into such a rabid froth that the sheer pressure of bodies leaning on that Corral caused it to topple. It was very much analogous to the bringing down of a goal post at a football game.

As mentioned above, from about '96 on, Humpy started using Jay's Upstairs as its practice pad on Sunday mornings. This made a lot of practical sense, since our bass player Justin worked there as a soundman and general rock'n'roll ombudsman, and since we hardly played anywhere else, we usually just left all our equipment there.

Being at Jay's on a Sunday morning is about as depressing an experience as I could possibly recall. They had this extremely greasy night janitor that looked like he just got out of Soledad, and his strategy for scouring Jay's clean of the ample stale beer and cigarette odor was to just douse the whole place in bleach. So you'd walk up there and the janitor would be just finishing up, and you get this big waft of stale beer and smokes mixed with bleach that, in my perennially hungover state, almost always elicited a gag reflex. In the course of the previous night's proceedings, there would invariably be so much beer spilled that the carpeted part of the place would be all spongy and the wooden part was like walking on upturned duct tape.

Then we'd start practicing, and almost without fail, some skeeze would stagger up from downstairs, drunk since '85, and flash us the time-honored horn-hand (la mano cornuda) and start bellowing out Sabbath song titles. So we'd stop and listen to this barstool philospher ramble on, and get back on task. Good times.

Sheee-it, man, this whole thing has me a little misty and wistful. Even though I don't know that I would have ever had occasion to set foot in there again anyway, and I'm sure a worthy replacement will swiftly fill the vacancy, it still is a pretty goddamn sad thing to think about. And even though some of my memories of the place are bittersweet, I know that the stuff that went on at Jay's was a major part of a lot of people's lives. And perhaps the best part of it is that none of that will be lost on younger cats who hang out there nowadays; I'm sure they've been imbued with enough historical perspective to be able to appreciate the unique and ptomaine majesty of that place.

In more recent times, and since I left Missoula, there've been a number of new contenders who have realized the vast potential of the rock scene in Missoula and have attempted to capitalize on it, such as the Ritz, the Blue Heron (which I've never been in), and the more volunteer-oriented Boys & Girls Club, Buck's Club, etc. I have no idea what the status of those venues is these days; I'll have to let somebody else weigh in on that shit.

I will say this: The fact that the Jay's liquor license would be sold to an Olive Garden has a bit of reassuring irony associated with it: the lumpenprole slobs that will chip their teeth on (what passes for) garlic bread there will never know the levels of hedonism and honest good times associated with that liquor license so far abstracted from the bottles of White Zinfandel on their table. As it should be.