Recently Sophie and I have had a couple of chances to hang out with friends in bars, something that we rarely get to do on our unemployment austerity budget. That made me nostalgic for the days when hanging out in bars was part of our regular routine and we allowed ourselves luxuries like paying an extra $2 for a beer that had distinct flavors other than mammal spit. It made me particularly nostalgic for Friday nights at my favorite bar in Pittsburgh, Kelly’s.
Kelly’s Bar and Lounge wears a retro vibe without a hint of pretentiousness. Two-tone booths, purple walls, a large back patio, and a spot right on the border of Pittsburgh’s traditionally black East Liberty and traditionally upper-class, white liberal Shadyside all combine to attract one of the most diverse clienteles of any bar in a city with more ozone than diversity. Kelly’s has several times the RDA of modern-language grad students,1 but also lots of young professionals, old drunks, and the Pittsburgh branch of LUPEC, Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails. Walk into a Pittsburgh bar when there’s not a game on TV, and you’ll find mostly lonely people drinking themselves through the night to get through the next day. But everyone at Kelly’s always seems to be with someone else, having fun. Plus there’s Belhaven on tap, an above-average tuna melt, and an equally above-average jukebox.
You could find Sophie and I planted in a booth at Kelly’s most Friday nights, by ourselves or with friends that I miss. I’d always put a few dollars in the jukebox and always play the same songs. So I created a Spotify playlist with most of them. They’re in no particular order,2 except that “One Step Beyond” always came first and its opening warble of “Hey you!” meant the weekend had started.
I hope things in Kelly’s, and Pittsburgh in general, are well. And I hope that pretty soon I’ll find a job that’ll let me hang out on weekends in a LA bar that I’ll like as much as Kelly’s. It’s out there, waiting. It probably doesn’t have a jukebox.
- “One Step Beyond” – Madness
- “Lust for Life” – Iggy Pop
- “Bring the Noise” – Public Enemy
- “Town Called Malice” – The Jam
- “Love is the Drug” – Roxy Music
- “The Passenger” – Iggy Pop
- “Ace of Spades” – Motörhead
- “Transmetropolitan” – The Pogues3
- “Neat Neat Neat” – The Damned
- “Big Iron” – Marty Robbins
- “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – Devo
- “Bad Luck” – Social Distortion
- “Israelites” – Desmond Dekker
- “Rock Lobster” – The B-52s
- Pittsburgh, after all, has seven colleges and universities in a city of about 300,000. [↩]
- In fact the Kelly’s jukebox had an annoying habit of reorganizing the order of your selections based on the locations of the CD in the machine. [↩]
- This track, and the B-52s song below, aren’t available on Spotify. [↩]
