When I Used To Bartend: Part 3. The Kountry Karaoke Klan

I worked at this bar, "Crusadors", from 1995-1999. On Sundays, and this really sucked for the bartenders, we had karaoke. Karaoke sucks for 5 reasons:

1) A very small amount of the population wants to hear some chick trying to sing a Fleetwood Mac song. Even if she is good, it’s still not going to sound like Stevie Nicks. No One Wants To Hear It, EXCEPT HER. Which reminds me…I need to write an entry on all the pretending our population has been doing lately (Guitar Hero, Fantasy Football, American Idol, etc.)

2) The accompanying/guiding music is bad midi (electronic) music or a shitty remake recorded by 13 year olds with ‘talent’. Basically, “Welcome To The Jungle” ends up sounding like Hanson recorded it.

3) The people who run the karaoke had the same intro every night. I mean the exact same intro.

The chick would get up and sing a D version of “Let’s Give ‘Em Something To Talk About” while swaying her 260 pound frame sexily about, and half way through she would stop singing and explain the rules of how their karaoke is run. Then right on money, she would finish her rules and dovetail right into that last chorus.

Her redneck husband would then have to offer up his even redneckier version of the original, “I’ve Got Friends In Low Places”. He didn’t start talking half way through the song, but he made up for it by talking in slow motion to anyone that had the extreme misfortune of making eye contact with him while being within his 15 foot flannel perimeter. Also, he was a close talker. *shivers*.

4) The people who ran the karaoke were country, pushed country songs, and drew a country crowd. Crusadors's was not country.

5) The people who followed this karaoke troop drank, but didn’t tip.

Now to the meat of it.

This guy with long frizzy hair, always pulled back into a pony tail, drank the shit out of Miller Lite cans. He drank so much that I think, by law, Miller had to send him thank you cards on Mondays. Crazy amounts of that shit. At the time, he could buy it for $1.25, which means every time he got a beer (we have established that it was many) he would get .75 cents back. Guess how much he left as a tip? Zero. To make matters worse, he sang a song every half-hour, and yes, they were the same country songs every week. *more shivers*

After a long winter of this thrifty, repetitive, redneck shit, someone found out, I don’t remember who, but someone found out where Frizzy worked. Hallelujah, it was a bar! And Hallelujah he was a bartender in "Villeville" and "Villeville" was only 15 minutes away!

At the time Villeville was pretty redneck. Not so much now, but back then, at their McDonalds drive through, a number 3 combo meal was Skoal chew and a Busch can.

Anyway, we find out that he works Wednesday night, Saturday night, and Sunday day. A good 6 of us* had Wednesdays off. We went in, faked surprise in seeing him and proceeded to order blender drinks, mixers with 7+ ingredients and Guinness on tap, all paying separately. We also called everyone we knew and tried to get them to come in, too. Before the end of the night, we had 15 people in there running Frizzy into a sweaty fury. We all left and yelled to him ‘see you next week, this is a fun bar!” while not leaving him a dime.

Obviously, this story would be perfect if poetic justice prevailed and he came in on that next karaoke Sunday and started tipping, but that is not what happened. Instead, we didn’t see Frizzy the next week. We saw Frizzy and his friends. This went back and forth for a month, and then it fizzled, or in this case, frizzled out.

What did everyone, including Frizzy, learn?

Never underestimate a redneck.
Always tip those who serve you.

What did you learn?

I (and believe me, there are more of us out there than you think) don’t want to hear your version of “Insert Song Here”. Reason number 17 that American Idol isn’t on at our house.

*One winter we went to a movie with loads of beer bottles in our pockets. We saw that movie where Al Pacino is the devil and owns a law firm, I can’t think of the name of it right now. Anyway, we sat in the back and one of us kicked over an empty and it rolled all the way to the front of the theater. I swear it took a full 2 minutes to finally stop. Oh yeah! The movie was The Devil’s Advocate. What was that idiot-sounding guy that was the main character?