~

Because sometimes the blogger has something inane to point out and he/she uses the blog to crow about it.

In this case, I know this is stupid, but there are a couple of people who were part of this project and would like to see the final result, which I finished this morning. And any of you who saw the “before” picture on this project are going to have to be impressed with the difference.

Ladies and gentlemen, my newly finished, fully repainted garage. (I still need to replace the side door, the gutters and the downspouts.)

Thanks to Mikee for his week-plus of hard work scraping and priming and showing me how to make the final result good. And thanks to my friends Sherwin and Williams for giving me 15 percent off the paint that still wound up costing $180 (just for the blue stuff).

At least this paint job should outlast me.

Here are a couple of BEFORE pix:

Back in 1980 or 1981, the record “Rock and Roll Enforcers” by The Silencers came out. I bought it, as was my habit at that time, based on nothing but the title, the cover art and the track listings.

But c’mon: This one had the Peter Gunn theme. I don’t care if it’s 1960, 1980 or 2008, that’s cool.

It turned out to be one of my favorite records, and that remains the case today. One of the reasons I bought a CD recorder was to transfer one of my five (!) copies of this LP to pristine CD.

Upon further study over the years, I learned that the band was from Pittsburgh, part of a great movement from around that time that also produced Donnie Iris (Ah Leah) and the Iron City Houserockers. But I could never find the video that I had seen only once — only one goddamn time — on MTV back in the day.

It was a video mash-up of three Silencers tunes from the first record. It was kind of astonishing at the time because the rock video had barely been invented — this was the year MTV came on the air for the first time, remember — and this band was forward-thinking enough to want to do an entire full-length movie of every song on their record. They did three songs (cut down) as a proof-of-concept but never got the movie made.

Finally, about a month ago, the long-form video showed up on YouTube. It was posted — naturally — by Frank Czuri, the Silencers’ lead singer. I am such a obsessive prick that a few years ago (right around the time I figured out how to burn the LP onto a CD), I actually tried to find Frank’s address online to beg him for a copy of this movie. Now it’s here for all of us to enjoy. Thank you, Frank.

Some might recognize the Peter Gunn theme as the music I use to introduce myself at comedy shows when I have the good fortune and technical capability to be able to have a CD play me onto the stage. It’s perfect. I last used it at Spaceland in LA last month.

Here’s some more Silencers music: “Shiver and Shake” from the first record. (They also put out another record, “Romanic,” that wasn’t bad — the title track was excellent — but it didn’t catch on and the band disappeared.) Note that this isn’t a video so much as a photo of the record cover with a song playing behind it.

One more note: After the Pittsburgh-based Silencers faded from the scene, another band named “The Silencers” enjoyed some moderate success. This was a completely different group that came from Scotland. However…

The singer for the other Silencers, Jimme O’Neill, was also the leader of an earlier band that I discovered and loved back in the days of my youth. That band was called Fingerprintz and put out three records. There are a couple of videos from them on the Old Grey Whistle Test TV show over on YouTube, but they don’t allow embedding here. Here’s one of their songs from their first record — by far not one of their best songs but go ahead and look ‘em up on YouTube.

Apparently there also was an L.A. punk band named The Silencers, but they only put out a split record with another band before fading away.

That’s what I called it back when my pals The Wizenhiemers were playing their cowpunk music all over south-central Wisconsin back in the 90s. They were tremendous fun, talented, crowd-pleasing, and there was always a lot of beer nearby.

So when work sucked or life sucked or both, I would hop in the car, sometimes with a buddy, sometimes not, and I’d catch the Wizenhiemers. I saw them in such outposts as Milton, Verona, Paoli, Belleville, Dodgeville, Fontana, La Crosse and a couple dozen other places.

I always felt better afterward. The reset button. And in between gigs I’d have a CD to listen to — they put out four of ‘em, all very good.

Butch Vig — hmm, maybe you know him as the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind, or the Smashing Pumpkins, or his work in the band Garbage — is longtime friends with a few of the Wizenhiemers and always hired them to play his annual golf outing. When Madison people voted the Wizenhiemers as Madison’s top band, with Garbage ranked No. 2, Butch just smiled and nodded.

Once, Cheap Trick heard them and asked them to open a Midwest portion of their tour. They let me hang backstage in Aurora, Ill., before a show and I saw Bun E. Carlos walk past. Good times. The boys also played at CBGB’s before it closed.

Brik, the guitar player, went to college with me and we made friends in a strange way. Our fake band (you could call it an air band, but we had instruments and all, we just didn’t play ‘em) was booked as headliner for the campus spring festival, and Brik’s band, The Scandals, was passed over. He wrote a letter of complaint to the school paper — of which I was editor. I felt bad and called him and offered his band our spot. He declined but asked me to come visit Scandal House. We became fast friends and remain so to this day.

Sam, the singer, played offensive line for the local high school football team in my college town the year it won a state championship. That didn’t stop him from visiting our bar, and the only reason I noticed him was that I covered the team for the neighboring city’s newspaper. Whatever. He was quite a singer and songwriter even then, and he soon joined Brik’s new band, “The Reaction,” on the bass. They opened for the Romantics when those guys were at the height of their popularity, and I got to introduce both the Reaction and the Romantics.

Anyway, life and age have a way of eroding everything, and so it was with the Wizenhiemers. After about 10 to 15 years together in one form or another, they broke up about six years ago and didn’t really talk much for a while there. They started other bands — a couple of them even played on my 21st Century Crusher CD — but nothing captured the original magic of the Wizenhiemers.

A few years back, they got a big-dollar offer to get back together and they did. It was fun, and they let it be known they’d be open to playing a couple times a year. Even after marriages and breakups and personal issues and a little acrimony and everything else, they kept it going. Because when they played, a couple of hundred die-hard fans would show up from all over the Midwest and enjoy the shit out of life for a couple hours. The reset button.

Such a day was today, when the boys played Riley Fest for the eighth time. It’s a party hosted by the Riley Tavern in the unincorporated town of Riley, between Madison and Mt. Horeb and at least a dozen miles from the nearest stoplight. Bikers, computer programmers, hot chicks, MILFs, young and old, they’re all there. Riley Fest is a trip. I’ve had some memorable days there.

The boys were supposed to play two hours but gave us almost three. Hip replacements, beer guts, deadened brain cells, none of it mattered to the band or the fans. The reset button.

They sounded a little tentative early, but caught their stride by the end of the first set and pretty much scorched the place for the first half of Set Two. They wore out a bit by the end but still made it fun and clicked a few hundred reset buttons before heading their separate ways again — perhaps forever, but maybe not.

Lots of photos here and here.

These videos aren’t going to do them justice. The first one sounds shitty because I put the camera behind the main speakers, so all you can hear is Brik’s monitor, and the view of the tits is blocked by some of the speaker. The others are shaky handheld shit. Fuck you. I had fun and I’ll treasure these.

Here’s Corky, their usual next-to-last song and kind of their signature tune. Everywhere they played, even back before Stanhope ruined pussy with the Girls Gone Wild thing, they would always get at least one girl — but usually it was a bunch — to show their various parts. Same deal in 2008.

Need a closer look at the good parts? Of course you do. Look here, adults.

Unfairly, the rest of the clips are of cover songs. They do about 8 original tunes to every cover, but I usually was bouncing around too much during the originals to think to tape.

Next to come is their version of Georgia Satellites’ “Keep Your Hands To Yourself,” sung by DeForest, Wis., product Rockin’ Rick Murphy. When he sings this tune, Madison’s own Pete Fuckin’ Gill takes over on bass.

Here’s the end of their Go-Go’s cover, “Our Lips are Sealed,” notable because of Murph’s falsetto singing during the bridge.

Finally, they do “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister to close their first set. These covers are all meant to be ironic, btw.

And here, shot by Kimberlee, is the last song they might ever play live, their high and low point combined and a national hit in 1996, Go You Packers Go.

I’ve pulled the plug on the Wednesday night open mic at The Stage. The crowds were basically the same four civilians and the same six open-micers, and we’re all getting a little bit too used to each others’ jokes. It was serving no good purpose anymore. Thanks to those who came and to The Stage.

UPDATE:
Already, just one day later, a promising new possibility has cropped up. Could be a true winner. Stay tuned.

First off, thanks for all the visits and great comments/debate on the previous post. More than 600 unique visitors from all around the world. Some people do care about comedy. If you haven’t, go read the post and the comments, and add your own thoughts if you wish.

The overall response is much like the local response: About a third of the people think I’m a walking douchebubble ass-banana. A third think I’m principled and fighting the good fight. And the rest think that while I am no doubt standing up for what I believe in, it’s easy for me to stand tough because it’s just a hobby for me and as such, my goals are different and also that it’s kinda prickish that my stance is hurting other people’s chances to make a living.

I understand each point of view. I won’t apologize for my actions. If you let it be known that people can shit on you, you will forever be a whore in a brown shirt.

Upon further reflection, it struck me that one of the reasons I responded so vigorously to this club owner’s poor treatment was because I’m used to so much better. The first (and really only) comedy club and owners that I have worked at/hung out at/gotten to know are at the Skyline Comedy Cafe in Appleton, known as one of the nation’s great locations. They bring in their share of yuk-yuk vendors just to fill the seats, but they save a few weekends a year for the Unbookable types and give them a shot and their freedom. I suppose it is silly for me to postulate from that that every club is like that — or, more accurately, SHOULD be like that. Thank you, Cliff. And then there is the amazing Lakeshore Theater in Chicago, which isn’t a club per se but is a supportive, loving home to the good stuff. Thank you, Ritters.

It is exactly because of that that I developed the approach that the it’s the people who make the scene, not the location. And I accept that this will probably just be a hobby for me, because to do it for money would mean changing what I am and what I believe is good and true, and at that point there’s no joy and no sense in doing it anymore. That doesn’t dampen my drive to improve or the thrill I get when things go well. It simply recalibrates my expectations and allows me to adjust my approach and behavior accordingly. And sleep at night.

That said, I’m very happy with how I am starting — in the smallest, slightest way — to pick up a little bit of steam in figuring out how this works. I came up with a 15-minute chunk for the Spaceland show last month that was 90 percent new, by doing three open mics a week and thinking a lot about what works and what doesn’t and why. I even came up with a character that worked so well, I kept the bit even when I found out that it had been done once before in a similar fashion. I was convinced I had to drop it until each comic I asked said to go ahead. (I finally saw You Tube of the other guy. My lines were much better.)

Then, on the plane ride back from L.A., I got a spark and started scribbling out a way to pull together this new chunk, which ties together what I have been struggling to figure out a way to make funny for months and months. (Some of my highly accomplished pro friends might recall the e-mails.) It all came out in a big blurt, seven new minutes and I did them that night to a rousing reception, and I’ve done it on stage five or six times now and it gets more clear each time.

After the Thursday debacle, I wanted to find out for sure if the bit had something or if it was just my friends being polite. So I went to Chicago and signed up for the “Our Sunday Best” open mic at Schuba’s. This open mic had about 40 comics, 3 to 4 minutes for each, and the majority of them were working pros, entertainers of some sort. A tough but fair crowd. The anticipation was nerve-wracking and tremendous fun.

And the bit… it worked. Much better than I had hoped, considering it was in a strange room and I knew only two people in the place and I was from Milwaukee, the junior varsity of Chicago (according to them). They got the point AND they laughed. No Dice Gay, no shit-in-your-hand jokes. Just an old, fat guy talking about why the world is fucked and being thankful that his time here is almost up.

So thanks to Schuba’s for providing the acid test and thanks to the suburban strip mall point for firming up my reserve. I hope you haven’t created a monster.

UPDATE 8-19-08:
After one dark week, apparently some local comics have talked the club owner mentioned below into reviving the Thursday night open mic. Gee, another thing for me to not do on Thursday nights.

- - - - -

So now I’m pissed. I shouldn’t give a flying fuck about this, but I’m pissed. And as a result here I am, torching a bridge.

Here’s the tale:

Tonight, a friend shamed me into joining him at a suburban comedy club for the second installment of their weekly open mic night.

I was hesitant. For one thing, it’s at a fuckin’ comedy club. The LAST place to advance and enjoy the art of stand-up comedy these days is a comedy club – especially a suburban strip-mall comedy club located next to a massage spa. Neither place is likely to provide a happy ending.

But there was another reason. I actually went to this joint’s inaugural open mic a week ago. I learned they had decided, for some odd reason, to put the open mic’ers up AFTER the headliner – and AFTER a 15-minute break to give people a chance to settle their tabs. The result: Everyone left. It went from 125 people (no doubt all “lucky free-ticket-contest winners”) to six, then four, then nobody but the open-mic guys. And all this after all the open mic’ers had sat around for almost two hours, drinking $4-a-copy beers (which is quite likely the main reason the owner decided to hold an open mic in the first place). So I told the host to scratch my name and I walked out. And this week I was curious as to whether the situation had improved.

Here are some other things I observed last week: The place, which has been open for a couple of months now at its current location, has a nice space and a decent stage setup. But the sound was iffy, and the backdrop behind the stage was nothing but three print-shop vinyl banners, seams a’-showin. It reminded me of one of those suburban McMansions that the family overpaid for, so much so that they couldn’t afford to finish furnishing the place.

And the mic stand – the only mic stand in the place — was broken. Someone apparently had tried to fix it the week before with a bunch of epoxy gunk, but it had broken again. I distinctly overheard the owner promise to get a new mic stand by the next week. There’s a Radio Shack less than 2 miles down the road, so it would be a 30-minute errand at worst.

Flash forward to this week. It really wasn’t that hard for my friend to convince me to give the place another try. For one thing, I actually have two “paid” shows coming up this month and next, and I have a whole new seven-minute chunk that I’m working on as a potentially excellent learning experience.

Plus, I’ve grown to enjoy hanging out with a lot of the open-mic people who make up the scene around here. Their talent levels vary. But I find something funny and interesting in each and every one of them. God dammit, they’re trying. And I knew they’d all be at this club because, let’s face it, they’re all hoping to get an offer for a paid hosting gig.

So, what the fuck. I’ve really been enjoying doing open mics around the area as a hobby and a chance to dump the poison, and it’s been going pretty well. Mondays we’re at the Bremen Café, Wednesday is my own show at The Stage near my house, and some Fridays find us at ComedySportz (they cut back to once a month).

So I’m there, and this time 13 open mic’ers showed up – a great turnout. And some of the crowd stuck around. Promising.

Here’s something that was not so promising: The mic stand was not only still broken, it was in pieces. It was lying on the floor on the edge of the stage, beyond repair and unusable. I guess Radio Shack is a tough place to get to.

I was about No. 8 or No. 9, and I went up there and did pretty well with the brand-new chunk. Some of the tags I wrote while waiting in the bar worked, some didn’t; that’s what the open mic is for. But for the first time, the whole bit seemed to be coherent, with a certain start, middle and end and an unmistakable message. I was happy, and my buddies went out of their way to congratulate me, so that was nice.

I hung around to the end, because that’s the right thing to do. The host had decided to put this new kid up last. He’s in his very early 20s, a smart kid (sometimes too much so) who has some good ideas, is comfortable with himself, and is a sponge for suggestions and constructive criticism. A while back someone told him he was rambling far too much, and within two weeks he had cut his set down to a tight four minutes.

And then I went and told him to be balls-out brave and always say whatever was on his mind. Seems he was listening to that advice, too.

He goes up there and says, “So this is life at a real, live comedy club. You pay full price for overpriced drinks and go up to a broken mic stand. Nice.”

I laughed, but I noticed the owner didn’t. He was sitting near us with the weekend’s headliner – the type of guy who’s so textbook vanilla that the crowd doubtlessly not only forgot his jokes on the way out the door, they forgot his name.

Then the new kid told a story about how he bought six kamikaze shots (on special, $1 each) and poured ‘em into a tall glass to save $4 on the price of a drink. And that’s when the owner walked over to the control booth, turned off the mic, turned up the house lights and cranked up the radio. Show over.

What a cunty move. The only surprise was that he didn’t take a minute to consult his marketing gurus before making the decision. This place has “comedy club consultants” written all over it. Like a Funny Bone owned by a guy who couldn’t afford a Funny Bone franchise fee.

Now this kid, whom we have kind of taken under our wing, is likely to have zero confidence for a good, long time because of this thin-skinned owner.

So I walk up to the owner and the headliner – both of whom I had made a point out of NOT introducing myself to.

I said: “Do you honestly think that was funny? Or even cool?”

The owner barely looked up and let his buddy, the headliner, do his best imitation of a punked-out chihuahua at the dog park.

“It was absolutely the right move. I’ve been in this business for 15 years and you never – NEVER – walk onto a guy’s stage, grab his microphone and belittle his club.”

“He had to grab the mic,” I said. “There was no stand to leave it on.”

There was a lot more blah-blah-blah-any-chance-you-get- to-learn-is-worth-it-blah-blah-15-years- in-the- business-yak-yak yak. I answered by saying that when you’re paying for drinks and working for free, you have to be free to say whatever the fuck you think is best. And that that is why the real pros, the creative ones, the icons, are fast moving away from the cookie-cutter comedy clubs and into alternative spaces where comedy can be treated like an art form, not a fucking commodity.

He strongly disagreed. First, he tried to intimidate me with his road credentials, and when that (puh-leeeez) didn’t work, he just tried to out-talk me, Bill O’Reilly style.

I briefly considered turning out this particular guy’s house lights. But I didn’t even know the douchebag’s name, and it’s not worth going to jail for a botany student to try and punch some culture into a ditch digger.

Finally, he stormed away to give a piece of his comedy-whore mind to the crushed kid. And I said to the owner: “I distinctly remember you saying last week that you’d get a new mic stand. You didn’t. That’s worth a rip.” He shrugged his shoulders. I walked out, drove home and tried to find the funnyman’s info on the Internet. After 15 years, the only Web reference I could find to him said, simply: “No bio available.”

UPDATE:
I found the guy’s web site. It has a .biz domain, apparently because he has been in the biz for 15 years. The web site consists of a single page with 63 words and three postage stamp-sized photos, all in black and white. It was last updated in 2002.

EPILOG:
This story dovetails well with a development that came to a climax early this week. Part one happened two years ago in February, when Doug Stanhope did a Bob-and-Tom gig in South Bend, Ind., and spent five minutes ripping a club – the South Bend Funny Bone. The blast came because the club fired Sean Rouse mid-week, over a customer complaint about a bit. The club left Sean with no money and no way to drive back home to his pregnant wife.

Long story short, Doug got the crowd to chant in unison: “The South Bend Funny Bone raped my baby!”

Turns out the manager of the South Bend Funny Bone was in the crowd. And the Funny Bone is a heavy advertiser with Bob and Tom. Suddenly, Doug was fired from the tour and blackballed from Funny Bone gigs everywhere. This was a major impetus behind his decision to take his act to punk-rock clubs and other alternative establishments, where he recently blogged that he plays to sellout crowds 95 percent of the time. The decision has increased Doug’s weekly income by leaps and bounds, and his sense of freedom by orders of magnitude.

And over the weekend, the South Bend Funny Bone went out of business.

Perhaps they will put their mic stand up on E-bay.

POSTSCRIPT:
At 10:11 this morning (Friday), the guy who MC’d the aforementioned show posted a MySpace bulletin entitled “Attention Milwaukee Comics: Sad News.” He stated that this particular club’s open-mic night had now been cancelled.

“We just can’t have nice things anymore,” he wrote.

Wait. When was this a nice thing?

I mean it: Any place that hosts an open mic is offering nothing but a blank slate. Especially if they ask you to show up 90 minutes early to buy their drinks and sit through the sets of their achingly mediocre middle and headliner. It’s a city park ball diamond on softball league night. The game is what matters, not the location, and if the infield is a mess or second base is missing, the players have every right to bitch about it. After all, they’re buying the park’s concessions and so are their friends.

To put it another way: When you look at a painting, you generally don’t consider the quality of the canvas it’s painted on. And if you own a restaurant, you don’t make your cooks go two weeks with a broken fry pan. Not unless you don’t give a shit about how good your food is.

And if the comics are willing to roll over and play lap dog to a thin-skinned club owner just because they don’t want to risk their occasional $175-a-weekend hosting gigs, then they are getting exactly what they deserve and things will never change.

So this club owner has decided to take his ball and go home. Good luck on your suburban quest to commoditize art. One request: When you go out of business, I’ll give you 100 bucks for your broken mic stand.

Just back from L.A. Monday afternoon… got up at 4:50 a.m. to catch the early flight and went straight to the office. I’m very pleased I left a day before the earthquake. Someone might have made a joke that I fell down and registered a 5.8.

The Spaceland show was a lot of fun. The attendance was a little more sparse than last time (February), but still much better than I’m used to and a lot of fun overall. Thanks to Amy and Gina, Sebastian, and Drumwild and Junior for coming out. The set went quite well, especially the Dice stuff that I had been worried about. Three open mics a week have helped. Now, after my confidence pretty much went down the shitter last May, I have built it back up somewhat. The regular jokes are still pretty formulaic and predictable, but they’re also kinda funny sometimes, in the right situation.

The rest of the show was excellent with:

– The Abe Lincoln Story (a nine-piece band!) The video below is from a previous Spaceland visit…

–The hilarious, extremely off-beat Ron Lynch (we both recalled that we met last fall at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago)

–Rock master J.P. Hasson the American Sheriff (shown below as half of Pleaseeasaur)…

–And, of course, Neil Hamburger. He didn’t do any country singing, but this clip was too good to pass up.

News flash: Neil has a new CD coming out in the fall with cover art by one of my all-time favorite musical icons (who is also an accomplished artist)… I will leave the artist’s name out so that Mr. Hamburger can have the scoop, but let’s just say I never fail to be impressed by the talent level of people drawn to work with him (Tenacious D, Tim and Eric, Tom Green, Jimmy Kimmel, and now this person). Good luck sir.

I also had a really good time at Doug Stanhope’s shows Friday and Saturday at the Downtown Comedy Club. Three shows were all sold out in advance and many Panamints made the journey. Sean Rouse was the feature, and the host was Garrett Morris of the original Saturday Night Live cast, a part owner of the club. I spent a lot of time chatting with him in the wings both nights; what a terrific guy. He absolutely loved Sean and Doug, and was overheard saying that it was the best show they had ever had at the club. I was really impressed with Mr. Morris.

Sean had some really strong new stuff on war-vs.-global warming, wind farming and fatherhood. And Doug, once again, had practically an all-new set with stuff on quitting smoking, why people suck, health and age, overpopulation, etc. It’s too bad I have such a thin skin because he could probably include me as an example of shitheadedness in some of these bits. From what I could tell through past observation, these bits are about 60 percent worked out in Doug’s mind. The punch lines are big and great and the setup patter is coming together pretty well. The logic and likability he projects — despite the often brutal subject matter — is pure, one-of-a-kind Stanhope.

Also in the crowd over the weekend were NBA great Kevin Willis, Family Ties stroke-off instigator Justine Bateman (actually I didn’t start to whack it to her till she played bra-less bass in that movie ‘Satisfaction’), and Richard Pryor’s widow. Each one is a fan of Doug’s. I didn’t think to talk to any of them because I was having more than enough fun with other friends there, such as Shawcroft (who couldn’t decide if I was an asshole or a dick until she decided I was mostly both), Costa Rica Kevin, and others including those mentioned above.

Also I threw caution to the wind last week and e-mailed an invite to Kim Shattuck, leader of one of my favorite bands, The Muffs, to come to the Spaceland show. (Someone mentioned they thought she lived nearby). Even though she was out of town and couldn’t make it, she was nice enough to respond, and that was fun to see.

I’ve received a pity invitation to do some time at Neil Hamburger’s monthly show at Spaceland in Los Angeles. The show is 9 p.m. sharp Sunday, July 27 at the great Los Angeles rock club Spaceland, located in ultra-hip Silverlake.

Here’s a link to the show flyer.
I’m first up on the bill with two terrific music-based groups: The Abe Lincoln Story
and American Sheriff featuring J.P. Hasson of the incredible comedy/music/multimedia sensation Pleaseeasaur. The feature is stage and TV veteran Ron Lynch of the comedy duo The Idiots. The headliner, of course, is Neil Hamburger.

Come September, Neil Hamburger will be paying a visit to Wisconsin! Make sure you catch one or both of the shows.
He’ll be at the HIGH NOON SALOON in Madison on Wednesday, Sept. 10
and the CACTUS CLUB in Milwaukee on Thursday, Sept. 11.
Can’t miss these shows!

There is absolutely nothing unusual, strange or spectacular about Wolski’s Tavern. Not a damn thing.

But it’s special, somehow. It’s easy to tell why. Marketing is one reason — the family that runs the joint knows how to market in a pervasive yet low-key way. But there’s another big reason. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

It’s a bar like any other, tucked in a terrific hiding spot along a residential area on the lower east side. The bar is on the left, there’s an open spot in the middle, tables along the walls. In back, you can step up into an area with a couple of pool tables and dartboards. Golden Tee and a pinball. That’s it.

The men’s room sink isn’t in the men’s room, it’s up against the wall in the bar room, next to the men’s room door. If you come out after taking a leak and don’t wash your hands, people are liable to yell and point to the sink and embarrass you.

The bartenders — it’s been the same crew for many years — give you free popcorn, mix a strong drink, and make the rounds with speed and precision. They don’t let you stay thirsty long. They run the stereo and play a good mix of music, depending on the type of crowd that’s there at the moment.

During the early hours of the night, the crowd is eclectic and mixed. Hippie eastsiders, professionals from downtown who are looking for some low-key relaxation, neighborhood people. It’s a favorite hangout of the cops. Visiting celebrities — musicians, athletes, politicians — often hit Wolski’s. There are lots of regulars. LOTS of regulars. If you want to know the inside story on anyone or anything happening in Milwaukee, go to Wolski’s and ask somebody. The stories are tremendous. And even if you let two months go between trips, they’ll still remember your name and where you work. And they’ll also remember you if you were a douchebag on your last visit and tell you to watch your ass this time, buddy; I’ve seen that happen, too.

One of the bartenders was a recent recipient of the “Extreme Makeover” treatment, or whatever TV show it is where they come and remodel your house or makeover your wife, I couldn’t tell for sure. The episode just aired last week and everybody was giving him shit for his Macaulay Culkin impersonation when the big reveal came at the end of the show. Every time a movie is filmed here, there’s a Wolski’s scene. The place is Milwaukee famous.

Later on at night, the place might pack sardine-full with college kids, but cool college kids — the guys with their Dave Matthews and Phish faces and weird hats and hippie beards and the girls who take a pass on the designer clothing and have a laid-back air and a willingness to drink ‘em down and have a little fun. Us oldies never have a problem getting in or getting to the bar. The kids know they’re on our home turf.

Marketing is a key to the success of Wolski’s. Years and years and years ago, the owner printed up a cheap bumper sticker — “I Closed Wolski’s / Milw. Wis.” — and had a bouncer hand them out at bar time. You had to stay till the lights went on, but if you dawdled around too much, the stickers went away. Quite Pavlovian.

The idea took right off. People started making Wolski’s the last stop of the night, just for the sticker, and more and more of them got to like the friendly bartenders and the fair prices and the complete lack of pretense of the joint, and they came earlier and stayed longer.

More stickers followed:

– I’d Rather Be Wolskiing
– Wolski’s Tavern / Adventure, Danger, Romance
– Wolski’s Tavern / Eat Before You Come (Paulie the bartender says: “What? It means we don’t have food, what do you think it means?”)

People started to bring in photos of the “I Closed Wolski’s” sticker in strange places all around the world. One brought his sticker to Tibet on a mountain climb. They’ve got pictures from every continent, I think somebody said last year that an Antarctica finally came in. Someday a Wolski’s regular will be an astronaut and take it to the moon. (Note to self: Photoshop an ‘I Closed Wolski’s’ sign onto the photo of Neil Armstrong holding the flag on the moon. I will get a free beer that night.)

My newspaper did an editorial cartoon when the Polish Pope visited Milwaukee. Interviewer: “Did you accomplish everything you hoped for on your Milwaukee visit?” Pope: “Yes. I closed Wolski’s.”

Someone made a special batch of “I Blessed Wolski’s” stickers for that visit. Father Luke posed for a photo with the last remaining one.

Now there are T-shirts, sweatshirts, bowling shirts, sweatpants, hats, panties, mugs, bottle openers, and the latest is a bandanna with little “I Closed Wolski’s” all over it.

One of my work buddies is the long-running “Customer of the Year” at Wolski’s. He’s 6-5, a former University of Wisconsin swimmer now bulky and big and definitely a guy you want in your corner when trouble brews. He’s there always, so much so that we joke he has a key. He pours his own shots and breaks up fights and hangs around after bar time to restock the coolers (wink wink). And he looks like a brother to everyone in the owners’ family — big galoot with a constant smile, Leinenkugel’s in hand, quick with a joke or a rip, always having fun. It’s a little bit of a ride from downtown, but every once in a while we decide to go to Wolski’s after work, and I never miss those trips because that’s when I know the guys mean business.

The people who come in, who buy the shirts, who bring their friends, who introduce themselves to the bartenders and drink ‘em up and behave and have grown-up fun — young, old or otherwise — they make up the real secret of the place. They’ll never have to put a “No Douchebags” sign on the door because the douchebags understand. They stay away.

Sometimes simple is perfect, and that’s the success story of Wolski’s Tavern.