Last week we went out for a girl friend's birthday. I wanted to go to a bar downtown where I knew they played euro-pop. They wanted to go the local meat market. Yummy, nothing like middle age divorcees with mullets. Needless to say, I was out voted.Lethbridge, where I live, is a town of about 80,000 people. We are not big enough, nor is any venue here hot enough, to justify a cover charge. In Calgary, I can understand this. Calgary has over a million people and they have some really trendy bars. There is not a bar in Lethbridge that could fairly be referred to as cool. Lethbridge is still primarily a farming community. The only thing people wait in line for here is Rodeo tickets. Armed with this certainty I was shocked and angered to have to pay a cover charge to hang-out in a place I didn't want to be at to begin with.
The cover charge, I was told, was to pay for the band that was playing. To which I craned my neck to peer at a band that looked like they would play for food, let alone money. I sighed, I had an evening of being bumped and shoved ahead of me, with only the sweet strains of Led Zepplin, and the Eagles (if I was really lucky) to look forward to. I am nothing if not an optimist.
Yet, it isn't just the fact that they didn't play anything original or originally recorded after 1978, it was that it had to be played so loud. As if they were afraid that you would be sad if you couldn't hear it in the bathroom, behind the stall door. Sonic boom loud. Because if there is one thing about bar bands, they have to play it at 11. This is just to let you know that whatever it was you did wrong in that past life, the time to atone is now.
1 comment:
Absolutely Right. I still have my eardrums in tact and I would like to keep them that way. The other day I went to my favourite restaurant and had to ask them to turn the music down--no one could talk over the loud music. Who needs it--stay at home and eat.
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