Ramones Live at CBGB 1977 album sleeve beside the red vinyl Record Store Day pressing.

Ramones Live at CBGB 1977: Cheap Rent and the Long Road to Nowhere

November 11, 2026

— Lou Waxman

Lou is often asked by his legion, no, his coven, maybe his horde of . . . Pardon. Let Lou gather himself for a second. Ok, all better. Lou is often asked by his small handful of readers: Lou, what makes you tick? What is the fuel that powers the 1976 purple Gremlin that is your mind? Good question. When you scratch the surface of Lou and you stare at the dead skin and grime on your fingers and you take a sniff, your eyes will water, because when you scratch the surface of Lou, you are really, in fact, peeling the onion of Lou soul. Are you picking up what Lou is putting down? And at the bottom of Lou soul is not PBR ooze or cigar smoke or vinyl flakes or even Shake n’ Bake country style pork rib grease, but the enveloping smell of B.O. Reader, check yourself! Lou is talking about the odor of books here. Book odor. That musty musk that drives people crazy. Not women per se. People. Ok, sad, lonely dudes.

Everybody who fakes like they are bibliophiles talk rapturously about the smell of an old book. Or they go into a tedious revery about high school and the smell of the mimeograph ink on their test papers. Lou is here to tell you that mimeos do not smell. That is a spirit duplicator. It is a different printing technology, similar but different. Spirit duplicators printed test papers and church ephemera and science fiction fanzines. This is the stuff that smells and it smells like the shit it is.

What Lou is trying to say is that when you journey to the center of Lou’s mind you are going to find yourself in Borges’s Library of Babel: Endless stacks of books and magazines stretching as far as the mind’s eye can see. Friends, Lou is at heart a reader. Sure, Lou listens to music and loves vinyl and writes about this shit on the Vogue blog, but when you Burroughs to the core of Lou there is stuff to be read.

So, not surprisingly, Lou read a bunch of books in the last few weeks, and they all happen to deal with music, more specifically, music in New York City. The books are as follows: This Must Be the Place: Community and Vanished Places in New York City by Jesse Rifkin, No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene by Adele Bertei, and Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011 by Lizzie Goldman. Have you noticed that the subtitles of non-fiction books are getting longer and longer every year? Currently they are like the trailer to a movie that shows all the good parts, so you feel like you don’t even have to see it anymore. Reading those titles you don’t have to read the books. But Lou did anyway. Lou loves books that much.

As Lou sits here and types away, there is another book of a similar vein staring at Lou from the shelves. St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun. Once again, typing the title is like reading the book. In any case, Lou has high hopes for St. Marks Is Dead. Lou likes the stylings of Ada Calhoun. Lou has read her book of essays Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give and her memoir about her father’s relationship with the poet Frank O’Hara Also a Poet. Calhoun’s father happens to be art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl. Lou is a big fan of Schjeldahl, and Lou has read every book of art criticism he has ever published.

Calhoun is great too. As Lou has said repeatedly, since nobody listens, Lou will say it again: Lou has a fetish for women non-fiction writers. He loves them. Calhoun is one. Olivia Laing, Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, Ellen Willis, Jessica Hopper . . . Notice the ellipsis. That means you get the idea. Surely, by now, dear reader, you get the idea. Lou is not some fucking sexist Neanderthal. That said, just as women are not great stand ups, they are not great novelists. Sad, but true. If that is priggish or piggish so be it.

All the books Lou mentioned above have a similar theme. Aspiring youths of a creative bent who have graduated or dropped out of high school or college or art school or film school or graduate school leave institutional learning behind and try to find themselves and their art in the crucible that is New York City.

Why has New York City had this pull over creatives for seemingly forever? Let Lou pause here for a second and say that Lou’s New York City days are over. Lou to City: Drop Dead. It is not the crime or the crowds or the high prices or the filth. Quite simply, it is the apps. Lou is done with apps and to do anything, from public transportation to going to a bar or restaurant or museum, you need to download a fucking app. No more apps. Lou wants tokens and quarters and paper tickets and paper receipts. Lou wants to fill his wallet with paper junk!! Lou is done with cities in general. Even Portland, Maine. Even Bangor. They are full of apps. Currently, Ellsworth seems free of apps. At the very least, you can park without downloading shit. If that changes, Lou is moving up north to Canada. Maybe Labrador. This has nothing to do with Trump. It is the overwhelming tide of apps.

Where was Lou? Yes, why New York City’s gravitational pull? Reading these books the simple answer might be New York City is where the drugs are. There just are not good drugs in some small, single stoplight on Main Street town in the Midwest. Now, Lou would tend to disagree. There are drugs everywhere, especially in the rural Midwest. They may not be the drugs you want, but there are definitely drugs. Is meth made in a double-wide in rural Ohio an example of a good drug? Probably not if one is to judge by the timeline of mugshots of meth heads from rural Midwest police stations. You may as well be taking Krokodil and be done with it.

Be that as it may, New York City is a teeming bazaar of drugs. It is well known that Lou is not a drug guy. Lou is on the Nancy Reagan-side of things. Like with apps: Just Say No! In addition, there is nothing more tedious that dealing with drug people. They are exhausting and dangerous. But Lou is passionately devoted to drug culture. These tedious, boring people just so happen to create the exciting and engaging art in all its forms. Lou firmly believes that drugs are a fuel that has the potential to create great art. Unfortunately, this is true. Destructive activity is incredibly creative. This fact has destroyed many a life while making an artist live forever. That is a para-Oxycontin for you English majors out there. So, it could be argued that the New York City depicted in all the books Lou is reading is so seductive because of the easy availability of drugs.

On a less transgressive note, there are also all the great venues for artistic activity. That is the basic premise of Rifkin’s book. Creativity needs space. Head space and physical space. Particularly, music venues: CBGBs, The Mercer Center. The Fillmore East. The Ritz. The Mudd Club. Danceteria. Madison Square Garden. In short, New York City is the place to go because it has an incredible infrastructure for the creation of music from clubs to bars to music halls to rehearsal spaces to recording studios. And on and on.

Again, in terms of music venues, this is not for Lou. Lou loves live music. Live music is Lou’s jam. But not in the wild. Strictly on vinyl. If Lou hates hanging out with drug people, he hates even more hanging out with drug people in a club listening to a band on drugs. This is hell. Cue up the Sartres, an alt-folk band who opened for the Moldy Peaches before the Moldy Peaches opened up for the Strokes in 2002 at the Mercury Lounge. The Sartres sang were best know for “Built for Speed,” which strangely was a song about Jill Kelly and not Jenna Jameson. The lyrics went something like:

If you don’t
Like Jill Kelly
You can kiss
Her ass
Rebuilt for speed
Rebuilt to last
But before
Her boob job
Jill’s body
Was unsurpassed

Lou forgets the rest.

Maybe some another band opened for the Strokes with the Moldy Peaches, but it is pretty clear to Lou that in his youth if Lou happened to live in New York City from 1965 up to the present day, he would not be involved with any of these scenes because Lou despises being among large groups of people in any confined setting. By large we are talking double digit people. From bars to movie theaters to airplanes to trains and buses to restaurants, Lou hates them all if they are crowded. If they are empty that is another story. Lou absolutely loves an empty bar. That is heaven. Without a doubt, a robust infrastructure of venues is key to the enduring allure of New York City to creatives. It is also why Lou never lived there.

Drugs and venues are all well and good, but the real reason New York City has been so attractive to creative people for so long is because it had cheap rents. Real estate is the number one killer of creativity. It isn’t drugs or lack of talent or a soul crushing job. Or Ronald Reagan. Or the global corporate media. It is real estate. Lou suspects this fact is the central premise of St. Marks Is Dead and it is an underlying theme of all the books Lou has read recently on New York City. The Big Apple was a mecca because it was cheap to live there.

If Lou had one piece of advice for anybody trying to start a business of any type from a bookstore to a restaurant to a bar, it is own your own building. If you want to run a Vinyl Vogue, before you spend a penny on having any vinyl, save all your money to buy a small space for your store. Control the rent by any means necessary. Rising rents kill. Always and forever.

Forget the drugs and the venues, living cheap is something Lou can relate to, and living cheap is what Lou did as a young man coming out of college and initiating his entrance into the world at large. Lou did not go to New York City. No, like a loser, Lou went to Washington, D.C. It is a long and boring story, but the major draw was that Lou found an extremely cheap place to live.

Lou’s first job out of college earning him less than $20,000 per year, so making rent was a thing. For years until Lou finally had to grow up a little and act like the Jeffersons and move on up, not to a deluxe apartment in the sky, but to a rowhouse in the burbs, Lou’s rent was a constant $300 a month. Lou was adamant that he was not going to go a penny over that. As a result, Lou had to live in absolute shitholes.

All the books on the New York City talk about living in squalor. And it is not a horror story from the likes of Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair. For creative people, living in squalor is a rite of passage and a story with a romantic, sentimental flavor. Lou really vibed with these elements in all the New York stories. For Lou’s first year out of college, Lou lived in a drug house. Remember Lou does not do drugs and does not love drug people. But Lou loves paying $300 a month in rent, more than anything he hates. At the time, Lou would have considered living underground with the Mole People in order to keep his rent down.

Arriving in DC, Lou lived near George Washington University in a nice part of town. By no means is Lou suggesting that at any point he lived in an Alphabet City-type of atmosphere of danger and menace. Lou did not take his life in his hands getting home at night, but George Washington students needed to get their drugs somewhere and a few of them got them from my roommate, who also sidelined as a pool shark. Another roommate was a DJ for a radio station somewhere in the city. Lou thinks the station was like 10-Watts and broadcast in a two-block radius. It was so small as to be non-existent.

Her room was filled wall to wall with clothes and pizza boxes and DJ equipment and tons of other shit. There was a bed in there somewhere, but Lou never saw it. The third roommate was a revolving door of composite individuals who may have been paying for the room by the hour for all Lou knew.

Lou kept all his clothes in his office and took a shower and got dressed there. Lou was never sure if an episode of Cops was going to break out at his house. There were pot seeds and stems everywhere. Lou shits you not; there were pot plants growing out of the carpet. The carpet in the living room was also an ashtray. Maybe the ashes served as soil for the seeds? The bathroom was something out of CBGBs. It was crazy. The shower was a cross between a murder scene and a science experiment. You could catch a nasty virus just by passing by it. But it was $300 a month. In addition, the cherry on top was we did not pay any utilities. There may or may not have been utility bills. Lou never saw them. Lou never paid them.

Lou’s mother and grandmother came to visit at one point, and Lou’s mother walked through the rowhouse and actually started crying: “How can you live here, Lou? This is disgusting.” Lou’s grandmother thought it was quaint and charming. That was the moment we realized that Lou’s grandmother had lost her fastball. She was out of it. Or maybe it reminded her of the Depression.

The fear of the police battering through the front door was so overwhelming that Lou moved out after a year. He then lived in a basement in a great rowhouse near Georgetown Hospital. It actually was charming and quaint. Not for Lou. He offered to live in the basement and, when Lou moved in, there were these hideous mutant cricket/cockroach creatures everywhere. The floor, the walls, the ceiling. Every available space was crawling with these insects. It was a scene out of Aliens. Or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or that room in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There were no spikes from the ceiling, but living there was a constant war of attrition against the growing horde of creepy crawlies that threatened to pick the flesh from Lou’s bones. But again $300 per month. Good enough for Lou.

Before Lou had to grow up and play house with a girlfriend, Lou rented a room from a young couple that was rehabbing a typical white picket fence-type place and hoping to make a few extra bucks to defer expenses and make the mortgage. Lou was not allowed to go anywhere in the house but his room, which had its own entrance/exit. No living room, no kitchen. Lou had access to a bathroom that was being redone and worked on extensively so it barely functioned. Needless to say, Lou stayed most nights at his girlfriend’s with her three roommates. They were thrilled, of course. Say it again: $300. Lou would do anything for cheap rent.

So cheap rent is a major theme of all these New York City books, and they tell the tale of chasing the elusive, always moving target of cheap living space all around the City. All through lower Manhattan then over to Brooklyn. Then boroughs even further away.

Besides cheap rent and available drugs, all these young creatives in New York City were also on the look out for a place to drink. Bars are of vital importance. In Lou’s adventures, he has hung out at some of the bars mentioned as playgrounds in these books. Lou has mentioned the 7B before. It is no Milano’s, but Lou gives this bar his seal of approval. Manitoba’s across the street, not so much. Lou has been to The Library several times. Despite the name, the bar did not capture Lou’s fancy. It was fine, not a place for Lou to hang out.

Meet Me in the Bathroom mentions Mars Bar several times and that bar made quite an impression on Lou. The aura around the bar was legendary by the time Lou went there. It had a reputation of being extremely scary. The type of place with blood on the bathroom walls from people shooting up and the bartenders and customers were not to be fucked with. Lou went during a dive bar pub crawl with the Polish girlfriend of a friend of his. Lou made sure to hit the Mars Bar when it opened up in the morning or early afternoon, and not to venture in at night. It was still plenty rough around the edges during the day, but the Pole thought it was quaint and charming. She definitely had not lost her fastball; she was throwing heat at 100 miles per hour. As the pub crawl continued, she, like Lou’s British companion on the Circle Line pub crawl in London, got bored with the beer and started drinking straight Vodka. It didn’t faze her a bit. Lou eventually fell asleep at dinner at a high-end steak restaurant. There is something in the blood of these foreigners that makes them immune to the powers of booze. Impressive.

When Lou moved to down to DC, the first order of business after nailing down that $300 a month shithole was finding a local bar to truly make home. This bar turned out to be The Big Hunt. Until Lou went to graduate school, The Big Hunt was where Lou spent all his time, besides at work. Lou lived there. When it first opened, and Lou happened to walk in that glorious first day, The Big Hunt was a true dive bar. But one with a twist. It was a dive beer bar. It had hard to find craft beers on tap. That was its hook.

The heyday was when it was just one room with a bathroom in the back along with a short bar away from the street entrance and a massive TV resting on the end right before the door to go in the kitchen. For those in the know, there was a bathroom in the basement that was open to patrons. Lou used it if the bar was packed for a quick piss. It was also a great place for a quickie. Lou was a quick piss guy, not a quickie guy, but he knows a girl who was a quickie girl. This is true Meet Me in the Bathroom shit. This is the stuff the members of the Strokes did. Or more accurately the what the models who listened to the Strokes did. It was probably also a great place to do blow. Lou wouldn’t know. Maybe ask the quickie girl.

The bar was soon moved to the middle of the room and got lengthened with several more taps. Eventually, The Big Hunt proved so popular that it expanded into the space next door. This is when The Big Hunt jumped the shark. More specifically, it jumped the shark when the second room took up the décor of being in the belly of a whale complete with whale ribs arching up the walls and onto the ceiling. It was like if Whalefall merged with Barfly. The Big Hunt went down with the ship after that.

The Big Hunt was not the first bar Lou went to when he arrived in DC and was searching for his home away from home. The first bar Lou went to, and it was on his first Saturday in DC, was Samantha’s. Lou quickly deduced that Samantha’s was shit, but the bar will always have a special place in Lou’s heart, because it was here that Lou finished reading Moby Dick, actually “The Chase” chapters to be precise. (Has anyone ever commented that the ending chapters of Moby Dick are “The Chase” and they are based on The Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex by Owen Chase, First Mate, published in 1821. Was Melville leaving an Easter egg in the chapter name for his source? Surely, everybody knows this. It just occurred to Lou right this minute. Lou is not that sharp.)

It was one of the great reading experiences of Lou’s life. To be honest, Lou had been struggling with Moby Dick for quite some time. This was Lou’s fifth or sixth attempt to read it and he always stopped at the moment Ahab stepped on the main deck to address the crew. Enough!! What is with all these chapters on the mizzenmast and the pulpit and whale sperm? What is this shit? Then Lou read Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, one of the great works of creative criticism ever written. Olson got Lou charged up for Moby Dick and Lou geared up for another go at it. Previously, Lou had Moby Dick in mass market paperbacks. The print was small and the bindings tight, so the book did not open up. Olson was adamant that Moby Dick was all about space. The text of Moby Dick is about space, and it needs space to be read. So, Lou got a copy of Moby Dick published by the University of California Press, which happened to publish Olson as well, with lots of white space in the margins and bright pages that were slightly oversize with great illustrations. This format, along with the Olson commentary, made all the difference. Reading Moby Dick, previously a chore, was an absolute pleasure. A supreme pleasure. Finally, Lou understood why Moby Dick was the Great American Novel. Space had much to do with it.

Olson has another famous pronouncement—Olson was one of the great talkers in poetry with young apprentices sitting rapt before him as he went on for hours into the night, into the early morning—which is form is an extension of content. This touches on the various formats of Moby Dick. Take The Beatles’ White Album. Cassettes and 8-tracks and CDs are like the mass market paperbacks of Moby Dick. They are too small, too compressed. An album like The White Album needs space. The vinyl version is like a University of California Press edition. The Beatles just sound better on vinyl. It has nothing to do with the acoustics of it, but with the physical object itself and the physical process of listening to that object. Handling the vinyl. Putting the needle down. Turning the record over and dropping the needle again. The pops, the crackles, the hisses. Like a fire in the fireplace. It is just comforting and warm. The warmth of vinyl is not just about how it sounds, but how it is listened to.

Lou finished Moby Dick at Samantha’s drinking pints of Guinness. It was quite the space for a few hours but not for Lou. He had to move on in his quest. The back door of Samantha’s opened up into an alley and in that alley was another bar: Mr. Day’s. Immediately upon entering Lou knew Mr. Day’s was not for him, but Lou spent quite a bit of time there over the years. Watching football of all things. There was a time when Lou was a football fan. A Packers fan to be exact and Mr. Day’s for some reason was a Packers bar. Lou would go every Sunday during football season with a friend to watch the Packers. The great part about that had nothing to do with the football or the infectious experience of watching football with a frenzied bar crowd with cheers and chants. No, what Lou loved were the buckets of Miller High Life ponies that were on special. By the end of the game there would be a tower of buckets on the table and Lou would stumble out of the bar ready to face the cricket creatures in his basement room in Georgetown.

The alley area behind Samantha’s and Mr. Day’s was famous for The Rally in the Alley. It was a block party that was immensely popular. A true event in DC. Lou would tell you more if he knew anything at all about it. Lou does not do live music venues and Lou does not do block parties. Or parades. The Rally in the Alley was a combination of all the stuff Lou hated. The best part about The Rally was that The Big Hunt was a ghost town when it happened. Lou could drink for hours all alone. In bliss. For Lou, all the losers went to The Rally but in reality the real losers or loser were at The Big Hunt listening to the Breeders “Cannonball” on repeat.

Near Samantha’s and Mr. Day’s were The Mad Hatter, The Sign of the Whale, and Rumors. This was known as the Herpes Triangle since tons of college kids and young twenty-odd year olds working their first jobs flooded the area on weekends. The fact that there were two strip clubs, including Camelot, right there did not hurt its bad reputation. (Cue up the Joan Jett song. A pretty good tune for a strip club if you think about it.) Lou often went to The Mad Hatter, the hypotenuse of The Herpes Triangle. The Mad Hatter offended Lou’s sensibilities as did the whole area, but Lou, due to a friend who was not merely a regular, but a bar legend, could drink free for all intents and purposes.

One of the bartenders at The Mad Hatter opened his own bar around the corner called Porter’s. The space was haunted. This had nothing to do with ghosts or anything supernatural, but more with the fact that it was cursed. Bars seemed to open and close at that location on a weekly basis. Porter’s lasted longer than most, but it closed like all the rest after a couple of years. Porter’s wasn’t Lou’s jam either, but he was there all the time because again he could drink for free.

It did not hurt that Porter’s had some of the best wings Lou ever ate. Well, Lou should correct that. For a couple months, Porter’s had awesome wings. They were always fucking with their recipes and advertising new and improved wings. It was weird. If a bar is going to have food, and it is not necessary that a bar do so, mind you, the one food that must be top-notch is the Buffalo chicken wings. It is essential. The Big Hunt happened to have exceptionally good wings. For a brief moment in time, the wings at Porter’s were better. The chef at Porter’s was a drunk, who always came out of the kitchen in the basement with a pint glass asking for vodka for a “recipe” or a “sauce”. The dude was definitely sauced. Lou does not know if those elite wings had a vodka-based sauce, but they were intoxicating. Lou ate them constantly. Then they were gone like all the lesser wings at Porter’s before them. The chef caught lightning in a bottle, and he should have bottled that sauce and sold it, but he lost his mojo and changed the recipe. It was like a drunken master in a kung fu movie who drinks himself into greatness for a brief moment and then goes back into a stupor.

For what it is worth, Lou makes a damn good Buffalo chicken wing. Lou uses Frank’s Hot Wing sauce and mixes in a bunch of Kraft grated parmesan with pressed garlic. So, a Buffalo garlic parmesan wing rather than a pure and simple Buffalo wing like you would get at The Anchor Bar in Buffalo. The secret is you coat them liberally with baking powder before you cook them. Also make sure the wings are patted dry before you apply the baking powder. You air fry the wings in the oven for 25 minutes at 425 degrees and then flip the wings. Then air fry again for 25 more minutes. Then you toss the wings in the sauce. The wings are crispy, but the meat is not dry, and the sauce is from Flavor Town. Lou will not buy a single order of wings from anywhere in Ellsworth. They are all shit. A bar cannot bake a wing for 50 minutes. They just do not have that amount of time. You have to have a deep fryer to make a good wing in a bar. The skin on a wing absolutely must be crispy. Non-negotiable.

The bar legend friend knew the owner at Porter’s, of course, as well as another bartender who became a legend. Tim Walsh, the name might ring a bell. Tim was a legend to Lou because he was the type of bartender you followed their work schedule intimately. Whenever Tim was working you stopped at Porter’s. If you were alone, you drank for free. If you came in with a group and drank all night, your tab would be like $20. You tipped $200 and called it a night. And you wonder why that spot was cursed?

That is how Lou knows Tim Walsh, but if you are a fan of obscure Reality-TV, you might know him from The Joe Schmo Show, which was broadcast on Spike Network for two seasons from 2003 to 2004. Then it got revised a few times later on. From Wikipedia: “The show's premise is that a target person or people are led to believe that they are contestants on a reality television show; in reality, all of the other participants in the purported show – including the host – are actors, and their actions and the outcome of the purported show are all scripted in an attempt to elicit comedic reactions from the targets.” Kristen Wiig was one of the actors on Season one. Who knew?

Tim Walsh was the male schmo on Season Two. There was also a female schmo. She caught on that the show was fake immediately. Walsh did not catch on, and the show centered on tricking him. Comedian Natash Leggero played a drunk on the show. Long story short, Tim won $100,000 and he promptly opened a bar in DC and ran it into the ground. Lou went there a few times and drank for free. Not a good business model.

Believe it or not, this is not Lou’s only brush with a Reality-TV star. Or stars. In your twenties, you all know that It Couple. Maybe they were high school sweethearts, and they made it through college together. Or maybe they met in college and were giving real life a go in the big city. Living together. Playing house before shit got serious. Maybe it was a couple that met in a bar and made a go of it. These couple were fun and cool. Of course, they were. They didn’t have kids. Every couple is fun and cool until they have kids. Then they are boring and a drag. Most of these cool couples don’t make it out of their twenties together. Life gets in the way.

Dave and Janet were such a couple. Not their real names. Lou is protecting not the innocent but a time of innocence. Like with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall and everything went to shit. Call them Darren and Jaclyn. It doesn’t matter. D and J. D introduced Lou to the seedy pleasures of The Golden Palace, the strip club where Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill danced and a host of other Riot Grrls. J took Lou to Restaurant Nora, one of the first farm to table joints in DC. A pioneer in DC fine dining. By and large, good restaurants did not really sprout like shitake mushrooms until the Clinton Administration. For years, DC was a steakhouse town for power brokers and lobbyists. Places like The Palm and The Prime Rib. The business that went down under the table was more important than the food on the table. Clinton changed all that and now DC is regarded as a very solid food town. When Lou first got to DC, the special night out places were Kinkead’s and Vidalia. The new kids in town for the new kids in town. For Lou, Kinkead’s was the poster child for the Renaissance in DC fine dining of the era. It was huge in DC and a big deal nationally. It made Esquire’s “25 Best New Restaurants in America” list right around when Lou came to DC. Cashion’s Eat Place was another one. Ann Cashion, a James Beard Award chef, was a mover and shaker in the DC food scene. She was huge throughout the 1990sLou has a good story about her. Catch up with him with a PBR in hand for the details.

Well, as expected D and J broke up. Maybe D liked doing Golden Palace type things and J liked Restaurant Nora type shit. Whatever. They grew apart. D moved up to New York City and went to law school. Lou guesses he had other interests than the Golden Palace. J stayed in DC and started dating a new dude. Turns out this new dude’s sister was Rachel from The Real World. You know Rachel. Big eyes. She is still in the news decades later doing whatever shit she is doing and she is married to Sean another Real World tool. The lumberjack guy. He is also still relevant in some fashion. They have both become political wanks or wonks. Who cares? They clog up Lou’s newsfeed for some reason.

Well, before all that shit, when they were just Real World alumni, trying to find their way in the Post-Real World world, they stopped by at Lou’s house when he was having a party. Allegedly. They were no doubt there, mind you. People at the party were all a-twitter. But Lou did not see them. Lou was on the porch drinking beer trying not to fall asleep. Lou was in the presence of greatness and could have cared less. Sadly, Lou knows what Rachel and Sean are doing now as boring as it is, but Lou wonders what D and J are up to. Probably something equally boring. No doubt they have kids. Mayb even grandkids. Yikes.

This brush with the famous happened out in the burbs. Lou couldn’t take living with the mutant crickets anymore and he went into grad school and then he was out of grad school and then next thing you know Lou woke up in the burbs living with a woman who did not like mutant crickets and the joys of $300 rents. Reading all these books about creatives in New York City this is the trajectory of many of the participants. The participants who like Lou did not become famous and did not make it. You chase low rents in shitholes. You live life in those shitholes. Then you move out to the burbs for more space and less mutant crickets.

Lou moved outside of DC and the story of that area for Lou is the store of two steak places. Tom Sarris’s Orleans House and Ray’s the Steaks. For years and years, Tom Sarris’s was the place to go for a slab of prime rib and a kitschy good time. It was fun. And the salad bar was elite. DC food critic of forever, Phyllis Richman, wrote about the place and it was an institution. All things must change. Phyllis retired and Tom Sietsema took over. One of Tom’s first culinary discoveries was Ray’s the Steaks. Now, let’s be perfectly clear, Ray’s was not The Palm or The Prime Rib. Ray’s was a place with stripped down New York strips. No frills. It was high-quality steaks on a budget. In a sense, it was in the tradition of Tom Sarris, a bargain, but without the kitsch and the irony. But with the success of Ray’s in the neighborhood and the rise of Ray’s as a culinary entity with other locations and expansions the writing was on the wall.

You will notice that Lou has not used the word gentrification in this blog post at all. Nowhere Lou lived was primed for gentrification. It was already gentrified. But the degree of gentrification would go into overdrive, like Ray’s the Steaks itself. The prices could go nowhere but up. The guests could only get more high-profile. Until it doesn’t Lou guesses. Turns out Ray’s closed in 2019. Lou was long gone by then. Wonder what happened? Probably over expansion and high rents. Mainly high rents. They kill everything. Real estate kills everything. That is what killed Tom Sarris’s. It was open for more than 40 years, but it was located in a prime piece of real estate. Like prime rib, prime real estate is made to be carved up. And developed.

Along with Tom Sarris’s and Ray’s the Steaks, there were bars in the area. Strangeways. Witlow’s on Wilson. Iota. Not really Lou’s thing. Strangeway’s was the outpost of The Big Hunt in the burbs. Had the same owners. Lou spent most of his time at The Four Courts, a fairly corporate Irish pub in the area. Fairly typical stuff. Irish food. Live Irish music. Lots of “Danny Boy” type shit and bad Pogues covers. Yuck. The Guinness was creamy and delicious. A mean Guinness, for sure. But the main draw of The Four Courts was Sheila, the bartender, who was straight off the boat from Ireland. Lou could listen to her read the phone book. She had that lilt. And a great laugh. Lou was in love with her. She was probably in her early forties, but she seemed much older to Lou at the time. Shelia was like an aunt who told off-color jokes and had Irish roses in her cheeks. Adorable.

For a brief shining moment, Lou camped out at Bardo, a huge beer hall in a former car dealership. An oasis in a desert, Bardo had around 100 taps at the height of the first craft beer revolution. It was very cool if you were into that type of thing. Turns out Lou was. The idea of drinking a pitcher of Anchor Christmas Ale in July was appealing to Lou. What was more appealing was that it was around $6 during happy hour along with a $6 burrito that wasn’t bad. Like The Big Hunt, Bardo jumped the shark too. The death knell was sounded when the brains behind Bardo decided to turn It from a beer bar to a brewery with a bar. They could never get the beer formulas right and they got rid of all the other taps to be exclusive with their own shit. Bardo died a slow death. The bar which held over a thousand people started closing off areas and shrinking and shrinking until it was a single room that nobody went to. Tragic.

The $6 burrito at Bardo touches on something that is a major theme of all these New York City books. Cheap food. Creativity needs protein. For the first two full years Lou lived in DC, he did not go to the supermarket a single time. Lou was an office drone, and Lou ate at the office. Not at the office cafeteria. Lou did not pay money to eat. No, he was a remora that followed the sharks around after meetings in order to feast on their scraps. This is a commentary on capitalism in someway Lou is sure. Like trickle-down economics or something. At the office if you worked overtime, you got a free dinner delivered after hours. You had to work three hours of overtime to get the meal. Lou worked overtime constantly. Any chance he could get. Lou ate piles and piles of the chicken lime tequila pasta at California Pizza Kitchen. And the pepperoni pizza from Geppetto’s.

But sometimes there was no overtime available. Or Lou didn’t feel like working for his food. What to do? Bars. Drugs and booze are great. And bars are a great place to get them. But you can get free food at bars too. All these books on New York talk about free food. It is a staple. Literally. In New York City, Lou had a fondness for the free hot dogs at Rudy’s. Lou has had his share. Many talk about eating the free popcorn offered at bars. And snacks like peanuts or bar mix. Or eating off the plates of other diners.

In DC, you could do better than that. Like with the samples at Wegman’s, free food was a loss leader to get all the kids to drink their faces off. But for the thrifty, like Lou, you went to certain bars for the free food, then went to your regular hangout and drank more seriously on your discount. The Mad Hatter was the best of both worlds. Lou usually drank there on a nice discount but on Tuesdays there was a free taco bar. As Taco Bell proves, taco shit (literally) is basically free, so why not make it completely free. If Taco Bell had a full liquor license, the food would all be free. Free taco nights were a thing in DC. The Front Page had a free Taco Night on Thursdays along with $1 Coronas during happy hour. Lou grew up drinking his stepfather’s Coronas, so this was a bit of nostalgia at a bargain.

Mick’s was another go-to place for “free” food. During happy hour if you bought a beer you could get one free appetizer. There was a nice selection of apps. These are the apps that Lou enjoys in a big city. Free apps. Fried green tomatoes. Yuck!! Chicken fingers. Again, at Mick’s, like elsewhere, the apps trends towards Mexican. Guac and chips. Chili fries. But the big value was the loaded nachos with both chicken and beef (the “Muchos Nachos”) which sold for $6.95 normally. It was a health portion. The move was to show up at Mick’s with a dozen people and order one round of beers. Nurse those beers like a baby and feast on the twelve apps at the table. Sometimes there would be twelve plates of nachos.

Bars with free food must have been doing gangbuster business, because eventually some higher end places had to get into the act. Sort of. McCormick and Schmick’s is a pretty nice chain restaurant. Like a Legal Seafood or a maybe a step down from Smith and Wollensky’s. But definitely a step-up from Outback and Texas Roundhouse, for example. M & S started offering a $1.95 appetizer menu during happy hours. If you were feeling flush with cash or you had a date, you might head over to M & S’s for dinner, or rather, a $1.95 appetizer. The pro move was to get the half pound cheeseburger. Your date would usually get the calamari.

There were all types of scams like this to get free food. The lowest Lou ever went was joining the office softball team in the DC summer league. Lou has zero interest in softball and gave little effort but there was a cooler of beer at the games and win or lose, the team went to a local bar afterwards and ate and drank for hours on the firm credit card.

That reminds, Lou of another . . .

Hey, Lou what fucking record is all this memory lane shit actually about? Come on this is a bait and switch, Lou. This is ridiculous even for you.

Okay, fine. As should be perfectly clear, this is a review for The Ramones Live at CBGB 1977 purchased on Record Store Day from the Vogue. The Ramones came to the City from the suburbs because of the drugs and the venues. They were attracted by the cheap rents. They lived in shitholes and hung out in bars. They scrounged around for free food. And you know what they became legends. Lou did some of the same stuff and he is a nobody. Correct that, he is a Joe Schmo. The Ramones perfected short punk songs. That was their genius. Lou writes long blog posts about stuff like short, 150 second punk songs. This is going to get Lou absolutely nowhere. So, readers, thank you for taking this long road to nowhere with Lou.

P.S. You may have noticed that Lou did not discuss the real reason young artists go to New York City. It is not drugs or venues or bars or free food. One goes to New York City because that is where you get rich and famous. Lou refuses to acknowledge that these motivations exist or have any place in art whatsoever. Thus, they are not discussed. In fact, Lou has said more on this distasteful topic that he wants to already. Carry on with your day.