I was rooming with Gene, my boss, by this time, and I told him I was a little spooked by the whole incident. I wanted to stay in the bar business, but maybe tone down the rough stuff a few notches. Gene knew me pretty well by this time. He understood I had people skills as well as toughness, and he said, “How’d you like to tend bar?”
“Seriously? You’d let me do that?”
“Why not? You learn to mix the drinks, be friendly with the clientele, keep things lively so they keep ordering—you’d be good at it.”
In the nineties, everybody wanted to be like Tom Cruise’s character in Cocktail, the rock star of the bar with worshipful customers all around him. I’d been paid to fight for a while; now I was going to be a paid class clown, and still in a place I associated with good times. Not bad.
We had a setup like the one in the Cheers TV show, with a central bar, a dance area to the side, and a back bar area. But naturally, I was given the back bar, where nobody went. They passed by on their way to the bathrooms. It was pretty dull, actually, not to mention how poor the tips were. After a couple of weeks I began to beg for my shot at the main bar. “You know I can handle it,” I said.
I’d actually gotten a little bit of experience as a radio DJ during college. A buddy of mine had a show, and he let me sit in and learn how he selected songs, spliced and edited bits of audio tape together, connected with the listeners, and that kind of thing. One night when a guy called in sick, I even got to be the main guy. I loved it. Now, as a would-be star bartender, I had an idea for a kind of bar-DJ mash-up, where I could be a little more of an entertainer, setting myself apart.
I had a friend named Matt, and we had great chemistry in doing comedy. Gene took it under consideration and finally said, “Matt, I’m going to let you have your own night of the week to do anything you want—you two guys. Test the boundaries. See what works and doesn’t work. Go ahead and have some fun.”
“Great! I’m ready now—which night am I on?”
“Sunday.”
“Sunday? Is the bar even open on Sundays?”
He knew that nobody goes to a bar on Sunday night—well, except maybe the really hard-core drinkers, and that wasn’t the crowd I was going after. I needed the party atmosphere that comes with a weekend, or almost any night other than Sunday. But he was willing to open on a normally dead evening and see what we could do.
On our first Sunday night, Matt and I did our thing, then split a buck-twenty-five in tips at closing time. It was that grim; nobody showed up. A week later, it was pretty much the same scene—a few really somber drinkers, and our act was going nowhere.
On the third Sunday, in a moment of inspiration, we saw a few guys over at the pool table. I grabbed the mic and began to announce the shots as if we were on ESPN.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, welcome to the Green and Red Eight-Ball Championship Match. I’m your host, Robby Gallaty. With me is Matt Jones.”
Matt jumped right in with me. “Guy with the cap is chalking up, has his eyes on that three! Do you think—”
“No way! No way, Matt. Three’s a sucker shot. He’s gotta cut that five into the side first!”
“He’s doing it! I can’t believe this! He’s aiming at the three! No pressure at all, guy with the cap!”
“Pandemonium, Matt. Sheer pandemonium. The place is going crazy!”
“Cue ball careens off—it’s going . . . going . . .”
“SCRATCH! CAP GUY SCRATCHES! IT’S OVER!”
There was no crowd going crazy, of course, except the three guys over by the pool table. They were doubled over, unable to shoot from laughing. At the bar and the tables, people were starting to look up, look at each other, chuckle . . .
This was something nobody had seen at a bar. The next week some of them were back to see if it happened again, and a few of them brought friends. Word-of-mouth began to build interest. We did sportscasts of all kinds of stuff, then we’d take breaks and chat with the people at the bar.
“I think we ought to take this to another level,” I mentioned to Matt as we closed up the bar.
“You think anyone will come for that?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Matt and I decided to give it a whirl. We needed to do a whole program. I went out and bought a bunch of video equipment, and now we could actually bring in the comedy instead of fabricate it. Our potential was as wide as our imagination.
I was like that amplifier in Spinal Tap with the dial that goes to eleven instead of just ten. I do everything full blast—and we fully had a blast. Our model was Tom Green, who was a new hit on MTV in those days with his form of “guerilla humor,” going out and making funny things happen, sharing it with his audience.
We went all over New Orleans and into the bayou, filming—imitating intrepid crocodile hunters stalking an obviously fake, inflatable croc and rubber snakes falling from the tree branches. We’d walk through the French Quarter, asking crazy questions—the kind of thing now commonplace on late night TV, but very new and fresh at the time. All of it would go up on the screen at the bar, and people would stop to watch, laugh, applaud, and leave generous tips.
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