Metro Pulse/Cover/The Drinking Issue

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Knox-a-hol over the Years
The saga of a city growing up with strong drink

Passing the Bar
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Surfer on Acid

Those Buckets O' Blood Have Emptied Out

Drinking Factoids & Trivia

May 8, 1984, City Council votes 9-0 to rescind the ban on open beer containers in public places. May 9, several City Council members say rescinding the ban was a mistake. May 10, Councilman Jack Sharp is quoted as saying "We are writing up a new law to rescind what we rescinded." May 22, City Council votes to reinstate the ban on open beer in public places.

1984: The legal drinking age in Tennessee was raised from 19 to 21.

August 6, 1988: A state law goes into effect banning "happy hours" (serving more than one drink to a customer at a time, discounting prices, or increasing the alcohol content of drinks) after 10 p.m.

In 2002, 27.6 percent of 7th, 9th, and 11th graders in Knox County Schools said they had drunk alcohol. In 2000, the figure had risen to 30 percent.

Average annual per capita beer consumption in the U.S.: 23.95 gallons

Per capita age 21+ beer consumption in 1998: 31.7 gallons
Per capita age 21+ liquor consumption in 1998: 1.76 gallons
Per capita age 21+ wine consumption in 1998: 2.72 gallons

Rank of U.S. among nations in per capita beer consumption: 11

Total annual U.S. beer output: ~195,000,000 barrels

Nationwide, beer sales accounted for 9.9 percent of all in-store convenience store sales in 2001, putting it fourth in in-store category sales (behind cigarettes, food service, and non-alcohol packaged drinks).

All our rowdy friends have settled down

by Barry Henderson

It didn't sound easy, but it didn't sound hard, either. Find the roughest, toughest, meanest bar in Knoxville. It turned out to be much harder. To slip off into the vernacular—there ain't none no more, not really.

Beer joints have changed, markedly, over the last couple of decades.

Time was, you didn't make eye contact on your first two or three visits to several of the town's orneriest honky tonks unless you wanted to hear that question nobody wants to hear: "What in the hell are you lookin' at?"

You didn't wear a ballcap with a team logo. Might be the wrong team. Safer bets were caps with ads for a steel foundry or a tire recapping shop. You kept the cap's bill low and kept to yourself. You didn't order a light beer. High-test only.

Women who frequented such dark spots wouldn't order a light beer. It could ruin a hard-earned reputation.

Gone are those days, and gone are the dirt floors and the plain plywood bartops and the jars of pickled pigs' feet. Nobody even throws sand down to soak up spilled fluids any more. Today's beer joints all have names, for gracious sakes.

The research required to make this determination was exhaustive, covering all corners of the city and county. Stated simply, there is no modern-day equivalent of the Fandango out on Asheville Highway at the county line, open after hours. There's nothing out there like the Outsider was, welcoming all late-night drinker-brawlers from other counties at Dixie Lee Junction.

Clinton Highway's gone tame. So have Rutledge and Old Maryville Pikes and Chapman Highway, North Sixth and Western Avenues. Bob Booker, who knows about such things, says there's no place left in which to make frightening trouble around Five Points.

Happy Hollow on Central Avenue is a ghost of its former bottle-slinging, can-crushing, tooth-loosening self. There was a place there called Michael's that burned about a dozen years ago. J.J. Jones, the former Metro Narcotics Squad honcho, former chief of Knox County Sheriff's detectives and current member of the Knoxville Police Department's "cold case" [that's not beer; that's unsolved major crimes] squad, remembers that Michael's had the chairs lashed with wire to the table legs so the former couldn't be raised high enough to swing in anger.

Jones also recalls, almost fondly, the sign sported by another Happy Hollow joint that read: "No marijuana smoking at this end of the bar." He says the patrons of Michael's accused the cops of torching the place to keep from having to send four or five cars there on a routine disturbance call—three or four officers to quell the disturbance and another just to watch their backs.

Now the only place down there, Toots Little Honky Tonk on Anderson Avenue is clean as a whistle, bright inside, and has mauve Corlan� counter tops.

The last of the real head busters may have been the Circle Inn on Central across from the bus station. Now a parking lot, it was shut down in the mid-'90s by the beer board after the sheer weight of fights, assaults, hustles, thefts and hookers on the make just got to be too much for the city fathers to bear.

There are still beer joints with rap sheets, so to speak. Some of the thickest files are built on the Cumberland Avenue Strip. But those are college kids' tussles, never contended among drinkers who "have nothing to lose." That was one of Lonnie Green's best pieces of advice ever to aficionados of low honky tonks. "Don't mix it up with anyone who has nothing to lose."

Lonnie, who's quit the business, used to attend places where the burglar bars were bolted on the inside of the windows and where the pool tables were seemingly only installed to support the nearby rack of 5-foot hardwood lance-cum-bludgeons that most people call cues. Mr. Green's retired altogether, along with a lot of other us'ns.

In the course of this Metro Pulse investigation, the name of Memaw's Tennessee Tavern came up. There have been a dozen or more calls for police service there in the last several months. Fights, disturbances, etc. To look at the place from the outside, it sort of fits the image of a tough joint—the flat roof, the peeling paint, the interior cloaked from view from the outside (in the Baptist way of keeping drinking invisible). But its location is suspect. How could a real nasty joint maintain a menacing presence right at the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Beaman, directly across from the west gate to Chilhowee Park? And inside, it shows itself to be an ordinary, half-decent, cement-floor place with a menu that includes a passable cheeseburger along with the obligatory fried bologna sandwich.

It does stay open until 3 a.m., according to its own signage, but it hosts karaoke sessions Wednesday, Friday and Saturday evenings.

Karaoke may make you want to pummel the singer about the head and shoulders, but it is hardly the mark of a mean establishment.

The Tennessee Tavern's patrons include darts teams that participate in the year-round leagues organized by some taverns. They use the electronic boards with the plastic-tipped darts where the boards themselves do the tabulating and scoring. The latter is important. When steel darts are the mode of choice, not only are they marginally dangerous in their own right as missiles, but arithmetical arguments over scoring can lead to bruising or bloodshed among members of the wrong crowd.

And if karaoke and league darts aren't convincing, a sign just inside one of the two front doors, which flank pots of scraggly petunias, reads: "Anyone caught doing drugs on this property will be barred. No exceptions." No self-degenerative bar would plant petunias, and drugs are a necessary accessory, at least in the parking lot, of a joint that poses any kind of an everyday threat to the peace or consistent danger to its drinkers.

In short, there is no place left in the Knoxville community where one can scare the bejabbers out of one's own self simply by quietly entering the door and ordering a beer.

Blame it on aggressive law enforcement of drinking and driving laws; attribute it to the rise of crack houses and crystal-meth emporiums that appeal more to the nothing-to-lose element than do a dozen 12-ouncers of beer and a couple of tokes of grass and pokes in the eye for the fun of it. Tell yourself that the confiscation of pay-off pinball machines and video poker consoles helped reduce the temptation to violence; whatever.

There is not a beer joint in these environs worthy of the title "bucket 'o blood" any more. Forget the quest. Settle down. Have a sip of India Pale Ale or House Porter or even a Bud Light. Listen to the karaoke. And go on home. It's late.