Rick Waldroup
Well-known
High Noon at The White Elephant Saloon - Fort Worth, Texas - Summer, 1992
The camera was an Olympus XA
The camera was an Olympus XA
Dogman
Mentor
Luckenbach, Texas, on a cold Sunday afternoon in the early 2000s. This before it became "Luckenbach Texas, Inc."
Canyongazer
Canyongazer
X, do you have any pictures or memories of Nashville's Exit/In Club?
CG from Austin
x-ray
Mentor
No photos but Nashville had some cool places. I’ve not been back to printers alley in more than thirty years but Printers Alley was an area for entertainment. It was sort of like a redneck Las Vegas strip with the gambling behind closed doors.
Thirty or forty years ago country music hadn’t caught on in the general population so a big country star wasn’t anything like today. Some of the big names had clubs in the alley and performed there and brought in acts like one I went to. I don’t remember the club but a “fan dancer” was performing. I don’t remember her name but she had been a big attraction in clubs in the 50’s. Entertaining but she was so old the lights were kept very low so you couldn’t see how old she was. She had the ostrich feather fans and tassels and knew how to use them.
Tootsies in those days drew more locals and country celebs would drop in and perform a song or two. I was never in there when any dropped by but that was the story.
Not a club but a bar where the locals went was the Gerst House. It was part of an old German brewery and hadn’t changed in the better part of a century. I used to go in there every time I was in Nash and get a beer and sauerbraten. The bar was a ancient hand carved piece of art and Willie, an old black man about as old as the bar, served up the beer. If you had a red star on your cash register receipt the beer was free. The waitresses were career waitresses that had been there most of their adult life.
The place was dark and I don’t think the floor had been swept in decades. That might be why it was dark.
On Friday and Saturday nights there was a polka band and the audience joined in doing the chicken flap.
Unfortunately it sat where the city wanted to build the Titans stadium and it was torn down. A couple years later it opened again but in a large steel building near I-24 but just couldn’t sustain so it closed.
I have a lot of B&W negs of the old Gerst House on a Friday night. I’ll try to find them and post a few. It might take some time but I’m sure I have them.