Fern bars (6)

It's funny that they call it adultery because it makes people act like children. (an old one liner)

When I was still under-aged, I went to a fern bar called Brandy's and a woman tried to pick me up. It made a big impression on me. At seventeen I was so sex-crazy that this might have seems a dream come true sort of like what kids dream of a world where everything is made of candy.

I was seventeen and all alone because none of my friends would have been caught dead in a fern bar. She was in her late twenties and was an employee of the federal government. She was wearing a slinky red dress that clung to her in a  way that made it obvious that the dress and a pair of strap sandals was all she was wearing.

And we talked about relationships. Well, she did. I was keeping my mouth shut because I had no idea how to behave in adult society and was certain that I would soon be spotted as an impostor and told to leave if I did try talking.

The sentence that has stuck with me all these years was when she said, "The thing I insist upon in a relationship is absolute freedom." Even at seventeen I knew that was a great steaming pile of crap.

I'm not sure she was trying to recruit me for "a relationship". Thinking about it now, I think maybe she was really trying to explain why the relationship she was in (and which she incorrectly assumed I might know about) was not a barrier to our having sex together. She was old-fashioned enough, however, that she would not make the key move. She dropped hints and expected me to pick up on them and make the proposition (it was still called "making a proposition" then).

And that wasn't going to happen. I didn't go through any set of logical steps and fear probably had more to do with it than prudence but I wasn't going to go there. That was the right decision even though I replayed other options in my mind many times afterward. There was a time when I used to regret things I could have done but had not. Nowadays, I'm far more likely to thank God for what I didn't do.

But boy did I love it. Just being in a setting where that sort of thing might happen felt so grown up. I don't regret that at all. I especially don't regret that I ignored the cult of youth and spent my youth looking forward to adulthood.

Fern bars (5)

This all started on the night of Saturday June 12. I was making an Old-fashioned and when I pulled out the bitters I found the bottle was empty. So I went to the corner store looking for some. I live in a neighbourhood immediately adjoining a university and the convenience stores here cater to university students' needs. That means lots of bar supplies and sometimes you can get a  bottle of Angostura bitters there.

Unfortunately, I could not get any that night.

What I could have purchased if I'd wanted to, however, was Pina Colada mix. There were more than twelve quart bottles of mix from three different makers. There was more Pina Colada mix than there was milk at that store! And if you were too proud to use a mix, there was Coconut cream and pineapple juice.

And I regretted not having rum at home. I don't like to admit I like Pina Coladas but I do like them. I always have. By the time I had my first, it was already much sneered upon. I remember that a woman named Nadia and I were in a bar together when I had my first. It may have been her first too. I certainly lied when I implied I'd had them before.

The thing was, we both had to make a point of being ironic when we ordered it. Admitting that we actually wanted it wouldn't have done. It had to be a joke.

I also remember her advancing a theory that you might get herpes from bar mints. In those days, many bars and restaurants would have a little bowl of after-dinner mints near the door and I scooped some up and ate them on the way in end Nadia said, "Aren't you scared of getting herpes?" That struck me as bizarre but she went on to outline her theory of how it could happen. I'll save it for some other place.

In any case, it was a fern bar and we sort of had to have a Pina Colada because they were the fern bar drink.

Purists sometimes say that the only thing a Pina Colada is good for is getting alcohol into the bloodstream of young women who do not like the taste of alcohol. That may not be the only thing but it certainly is one of their uses. I can tell you, however, that in the years I worked as a bartender I never saw a man encourage a woman to order one. That is significant (to me anyway) because the purists often suggest that it is evil men seeking to get women drunk who buy them.

As near as I can tell, however, it is the women themselves who choose the drink. Back in the day, if the woman you were with ordered white wine you knew you had to work to get into her good graces. If she ordered a Pina Colada your attitude was more, as the old song had it, "if I don't do it somebody else will". The Pina Colada is a form of self-medication favoured by young women seeking to lower their inhibitions.

I'd bet it still is. It's hard to think of anything less cool than a Pina Colada and yet the students at this campus obviously drink a lot of them. And I imagine that when young men in my neighbourhood see a group of young women showing up at a house party with a bottle of Pina Colada mix and a bottle of rum, they still think the kinds of thoughts we thought back when.

Fern bars (4)

But here are some of music's pioneers
That time will not allow us to forget
For there's Basie, Miller, Sachimo
And the king of all Sir Duke
And with a voice like Ella's ringing out
There's no way the band can lose

That's from Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke. I like the stylized spelling of "Sachimo" here. That is the way Stevie says it I suppose. It got a lot of play everywhere not just in Fern bars but it is a good example of the sort of music that got played in Fern bars.

The people who picked the music for these places couldn't just pop a tape of Top 40 music of the day in the player because a lot of it wouldn't fit. It had to feel sophisticated to the people who frequented these places and 1970s pop music—1970s just about everything—was the opposite of sophisticated. The people who went to fern bars weren't sophisticated either but we wanted to be.

Even people who eat nothing but junk food have some notions of what gourmet food is like. And even people in the 1970s who'd grown up on the Led Zeppelin and Elton John had some notions about sophisticated music. There were two choices really: classical and jazz. Jazz was the choice. Well, not really jazz because really jazz meant John Coltrane and that wasn't music to socialize with. But there was music that, while not really jazz. was sort of "jazzy".

The music in fern bars was jazzy music and it came with a certain attitude about jazz. You can see it in the pantheon of greats that Stevie Wonder selected above. I think of Glen Miller as jazz but lots of jazz purists would not. In any case, if those are the names that matter: Basie, Miller, Satchmo. Duke and Ella, then you can be sure you are in jazzy world where John Coltrane. Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins need not apply. And, while she is welcome, Ella Fitzgerald would be well-advised not to scat.

The jazziness of the fern bar owes most not to Stevie Wonder, however, but to Van Morrison. He was the guy who put a jazzy veneer on pop music in 1970 with his record Moondance. That record was the soundtrack for fern bars and restaurants in the style. Only the first side of it. I never heard the second side played anywhere and even when I bought my own copy, I don't remember ever listening to the second side beyond the first disappointing listen. But you couldn't get away from the first tracks: And it Stoned Me, Moondance, Crazy Love, Caravan and Into the Mystic.

It produced a style that, while never intended for anything like a fern bar, fit in perfectly. It expanded to include all sorts of stuff. Stevie Wonder, Boz Scaggs, George Benson, Seals and Crofts, King Harvest, Jimmy Buffet, Chuck Mangione, Weather Report and Rashan Roland Kirk. It was, like the decor elements, stuff that was just lying around waiting to be put together almost like a soundtrack that someone might assemble for a period movie only we were actually living in the period.

The style extended not in any direct way from jazz but sounded like it had been suggested by it, as Phillip Larkin said of other jazz-like music. And I think it had echoes of an era that we (I mean those of us who rejected youth rebellion and aspired to adulthood) were nostalgic for even though we'd never lived it.

Fern bars (3)

One of the popular novels in the '50s was a book called AUNTIE MAME by Patrick Dennis. It was about a guy growing up in the '20s and '30s. There's a wonderful chapter where he talks about how he and his friends are in college and they all worship Fred Astaire just like people would later worship Elvis Presley. They want to dress like him, talk like him, light cigarettes like him. They all walk around in this absolutely hilarious, unknowing parody of sophistication and adulthood. That's exactly what people in the '40s and particularly the '50s were not doing. They were not in any way imitating or acting out adulthood. They weren't like little girls putting on their mother's dresses, high heels and lipstick. The rebelliousness that was everywhere perceived and what has today become a cliche wasn't about politics. It wasn't about changing society or addressing injustices.

The rebelliousness was the insistence of young people of all kinds on autonomy, on being able to act as they wished for no particular reason and engage in play or delinquent activities that weren't going to lead into adulthood or jobs or family or responsibility.

Greil Marcus from a 1997 interview

There is something sort of, but only sort of, right about what Marcus says above. I don't think there was anything particularly new about it for starters. You can find the same attitude in the letters John Dos Passos and his friends write to one another just before they go to take part in World War 1. Marcus is being a typical boomer here and imagining that his generation had experiences that no one before them had or could have had.

And, much as Marcus pretends otherwise, the 1960s rebellion was mostly an elite thing that played out in a small number of elite universities of industrialized nations.

It was in the 1970s that our society was finally wealthy enough that the entire middle class could take part. Some of us didn't want to. And thus the appeal of fern bars. They may have been a poor example of adulthood but they were an example and, in the town where I grew up, they seemed to be the only part of the culture where people went who looked forward to growing up. They were a place where some people, people who didn't feel like they fit in with the whole youth rebellion thing, chose to, as Marcus puts it above, "walk around in this absolutely hilarious, unknowing parody of sophistication and adulthood."

They didn't create this sense themselves. Like any cultural moment of any significance at any time anywhere, the bars put together elements that were already lying around just waiting for someone to put them together in the right way. My mother in those days wanted to have a wing chair and a Tiffany-style lamp for her house. And she did have all those things because she could afford to. I suspect, although I don't know, that a lot of people who went to fern bars could not afford such things.

But they aspired to them.

Fern bars (2)

Some Fern bar history
One of the many downsides of being self indulgent is that you forget to give other people background. Here I have been talking about Fern bars and I haven't said what they are. I mentioned old blue laws in previous post, for example, and that may have been confusing because Fern bars dated from decades after the blue laws were passed.

Fern bars sprung up in the early 1970s. In some ways they were typical of the era and in other ways they were a reaction against it. Before they arrived, there were two, maybe three, kinds of bar culture. There was the cocktail lounge that was created in response to prohibition. And there was the working class pub which had become the rock and roll bar. In some places, there were still Tiki bars too. [Update: There was also gay discos which would soon have a big influence but were unknown to most of us in the early 1970s.]

I'll start with decor because they were very much a backlash against 1970s design. the 1970s was characterized by two styles. One style was very modern design. Furniture, lamps and carpets came in shapes and  colours and fabrics that had never been seen before. There was a lot of artificial colours like orange and greens like you don't find in nature.

The other style you saw a lot of in the early 1970s was earth-mother  simplicity. Here everything was very much in colours you'd find in nature. A lot of browns and natural fabrics. Spider plants in macrame plant holders abounded. If anything was dyed it was dyed using old-fashioned techniques, tie-dying or Batik. All stains and paint was removed from wood furniture so that the supposed beauty of the natural grain would show through. This was even done with woods that don't have any noticeable grain such as pine.

The Fern bar (I have no idea why I keep capitalizing this) was a rejection of both those styles. They were decorated more like some little old lady's living room.

Walk into a fern bar and the first thing you would see would be a lot of old-style furniture. There would be wing chairs and Tiffany-style lamps. The chairs were arranged around low tables and on these low tables there would almost inevitably be a backgammon board. Backgammon was very big in Fern bars.

Actual ferns weren't  a necessary feature. The most important thing was that there were no spider plants. The fern was often there because it was an excuse to put it on a Victorian-style plant stand that was, again, not unlike what you might find in the living room of a upper-middle class widow in the 1970s.

Fern bars were quiet. All the fabric on the furniture and the floors absorbed sound. There was a dance floor but it was usually isolated, partially walled off and music was kept at a low volume until after 10 o'clock at night. The dance floors were also quite small with no where near enough space to hold even a quarter of the people present. The assumption was that people came to sit and talk.

What did people drink in these places? Mostly rum- and Vodka-based drinks with various citrus fruits to soften and maybe even to disguise the presence of the alcohol. Screwdrivers, Mai Tais, Cuba Libres and, above all, Pina Coladas were served. The Harvey Wallbanger was often talked about but rarely actually ordered. Women would often drink white wine and often only one or two glasses over the evening.

At the beginning there was very little attempt at being any kind of connoisseur. People would just ask for the drink and not typically specify what brand or variety. Thus, a glass of white wine would be ordered "I'd like a glass of white wine" and no one particularly cared whether it was Chardonnay,  Riesling or Pinot Gris. In practice, it was usually Kressman. Towards the end, people had started to rediscover the Martini and Grand Marnier also became popular.

Never make fun of society dear, only people who can't get into it do that
Fern bars had a mixed reputation that recalls Oscar Wilde's quip I have used as the heading above. Fern bars had dress codes. Jeans were absolutely forbidden.

That may not seem like a big thing nowadays but it was a big barrier at the time. In those days, most people wore jeans anytime they weren't at work. Having a no-jeans policy was turn away most people from the get-go. People had gotten used to thinking they could just drive downtown and wander in and out of any club just to see what it was like. To wander into a place only to be greeted by some doorman who said, sorry we have a dress code rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

But more than that, Fern bars didn't advertise their presence. In order to know which one to go to, you had to already be one of the people who knew which one to go to. When a Fern bar got too well known all sorts of people would come to see it. Everyone usually included a lot of single men looking to meet sexual partners. Anytime this happened, the people who really liked Fern bars would decamp and find a new place. And the sort of new place that would appeal to them had to be a place that wasn't advertised.

Okay, that sounds snobbish and it was but there was a certain logic to it. A decade ago now, the Serpentine One and I were in a club that recreated the atmosphere of New York's 21. Every detail of the decor was perfect but the customers weren't. As the Serpentine One astutely noted, "It's easier to recreate the room than it is to find people who know how to behave in it."

Getting laid
Sex had a lot to do with it. People went to Fern bars looking for sexual partners. Now, before you sneer, it's important to remember that that is also why people went to every other type of club in the 1970s. As I've said before, it felt like there were no consequences. There were only two sexual diseases, both of which were rare and even if you got them they were curable.

People didn't hook up in those days. Hooking up is what you did with friends. People went and met strangers in bars and went home with them. But even then it was nice to know that there was a place where you could go and meet the right kind of stranger—a stranger who had the same cultural background, manners and moral values that you did.

And while you wanted sex, you didn't want to go to a place full of desperate people looking for sex. These bars appealed to people who liked to socialize with members of the opposite sex. To meet and talk and if something happens, something happens.

I'll be blunt here, the bars appealed to people who knew they could get sex if they wanted it. They were more interested in the right kind of partner than just getting some. That is why the worst thing that could happen to a Fern bar was for it to get known as the sort of place to go meet people.

Rejecting the 1960s
Without really knowing what they were doing, Fern bars were one of the first steps away from the 1960s and towards the Reagan era. And here is where some people really objected. Fern bars appealed most of all to people who rejected the culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Not in any terribly overt or political way. Back in those days everyone, and I mean everyone, saw themselves as a liberal politically.

A writer back at the time, I forget who and I'm not going to look up the reference, called it "the new normal". After a decade in which people affected to be part of different groups—hippies, working class, flower children, Jesus freaks—a lot of college-educated people started wanting to be normal.

Only no one knew where to turn to find normal. Your parents weren't normal. They had joined the spirit of the times just like everyone else. Your grandmother's house looked normal and the kind of manners and talk you found there was appealing. But your grandmother lived there and you couldn't count on meeting the sort of young men and women you wanted to meet at your grandmother's place.

So the solution was a bar decorated like your grandmother's living room. If your grandmother was of a certain class.

You might say that the Fern bar was the first step to democratizing the idea of class. Anyone could join provided they learned how to dress and behave the right way. And provided they could afford the bar tab and the bar tab was noticeably higher than it was in other clubs.

Fern bars

NB: What follows is pure self indulgence. I'm starting a new book, writing not reading, this week and I mean to centre some of the action around a fern bar. This is the first of a series of posts in which I will just spill out what I remember about them.

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the vening in a quiet bar‚that's wonderful. 

As spoken by Terry Lennox in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye

This is, as I say above, about what I remember, and what I think I remember, about fern bars. I mostly missed the fern bar thing because I was too young to drink legally during their heyday. I say mostly missed because many fern bars were also restaurants and I remember going for Sunday brunch with my parents in the early 1970s. Something about the atmosphere intrigued me. When I first started going to bars as a slightly under-aged drinker, I made a point of going to a fern bar, "Just to see what it was like."

When I could go in legally, fern bars were past their best before date. People made fun of them. I actually worked in one them briefly as the doorman—which is to say bouncer.

Here in Canada, there were once laws governing licensing bars that forbade institutions selling liquor from having windows you could see through. The idea was that if they couldn't ban alcohol consumption altogether, they could at least hide it from public view. Long after authorities stopped enforcing these laws, bars continued to be built such that you could not see into them. Even if the bar windows could be seen through, they were generally set up high enough that the patrons inside were not in direct line of sight of passing pedestrians.

Fern bars were the first bars in my town to break this barrier. They were set up so you could see right into them. They had to be if the ferns were to get enough light for, while ferns don't require a lot of light, they require some sunlight. As I remember it, ferns weren't de rigueur in fern bars. But even if it didn't have an actual potted fern, a good fern bar had to feel like it could have one if it wanted to.

I think the thing about them for me was that they seemed adult. One of the first ones to open in the town where I grew up was decorated like a library in an English country house. Or at least close enough to fool me—I've never been in an English country house. The other choices in my town were dives, pseudo-pubs, rock and roll palaces and discos. It just fit into a different category.