Recalling long-gone bars, and two survivors

When I first saw the subject line on the Billings Gazette website—“Retrospective: Closed Billings bars”—I was prepared to be unimpressed.

I didn’t want to be a sucker nipping at “click bait,” those tantalizing packages the Gazette has been running on a regular basis in hopes of generating a lot of Web traffic with a minimum of work.

But damn, this one was irresistible, and I found myself studying every photo and soaking up all the information in the captions. Whoever put this package together did some real work, gathering up lots of history on these old bars, what happened to them and what businesses, houses or other uses now stand in their place.

All of it put me in my mind of longtime Gazette columnist Addison Bragg. I was the Sunday night editor at the Gazette for seven years, meaning I had the first crack at editing Addison’s Monday column.

Some of my colleagues weren’t terribly keen on Addison’s nostalgia columns, but I was a big fan, particularly when he wrote about the once-thriving bar scene in downtown Billings.

I moved to Billings in 1989 and had been visiting here since the mid-1970s, but I never felt more like a Johnny-come-lately than when Addison regaled his readers with tales of taverns gone by, famous and infamous bar hounds and accounts of a music scene that Addison, himself a jazz drummer, knew so well.

So the Gazette’s retrospective photographs brought back a lot of memories—mostly secondhand memories of Addison’s stories about those old bars. But I also realized that though I’d missed out on much, I’m getting so old that I can now pull an Addison myself and tell younger readers about all the defunct Billings bars I once knew.

One of them, featured in the Gazette retrospective, was the Arcade Bar at Minnesota Avenue and South 27th Street. Shortly after I started working at the Gazette, another longtime columnist, Roger Clawson, wrote a piece in which he said the two roughest taverns in Montana were the Jimtown Bar, near Lame Deer, and the Arcade.

It didn’t seem wise to drive all the way down to Lame Deer to conduct an investigation, so a friend and I elected to spend an evening in the Arcade. Without going into all the alarming details, suffice it to say it was one of the most interesting six-hour periods of my life.

We emerged unscathed, my friend because he was one of those Anthony Quinn-like characters of uncertain extraction, and me because the regulars must have figured that such an unprepossessing honky couldn’t possibly be looking for trouble.

I never had the pleasure of spending any time at Al’s Tavern, a notorious bar down by the sugar plant, but shortly before it closed I went down with a photographer to cover one of the last shootings there. Just above the front door, the exterior cinderblock wall was peppered with little dimples from a shotgun blast. I don’t recall whether they were remnants of the shooting in question or of an earlier incident.

A couple of bars not mentioned in the latest Gazette piece were the Empire, where the Empire Parking Garage now stands on Montana Avenue, and the Coulson City Saloon at Montana and North 23rd Street. They were both pretty sketchy, but the Coulson had good pool tables and the Empire had cheap food. Who could resist?

The Empire, at least in its last years, was a haven for a lot of people who now spend most of their time on the streets. Though some people were foolish enough to get 86’d even from the Empire, regulars who could afford only a single cheap beer were allowed to nurse them indefinitely, soaking up the warmth and the camaraderie.

Gramma’s, a midtown bar mentioned by the Gazette, I remember from one visit in about 1975. It may have been one of the first times I saw a big-hair band, and thankfully one of the last. I remember spandex, very loud music and lots of cigarette smoke. I’d prefer the Arcade.

Then there was Sonny O’Day’s in Laurel, the only non-Billings bar in the Gazette piece. That joint closed before I ever got my money back. I was in there on St. Patrick’s Day maybe 25 years ago and won $20 on a poker machine. Somehow, in attempting to pull out my cash ticket, I jammed it back inside the machine.

I explained all this to Sonny, who was swamped with the huge crowd, but he just shook his head and said the machine was locked. “Well,” I said, “couldn’t you just open it and look at my ticket?” “No,” he replied. “They got the key up in Helena.” That cryptic remark was all I got out of him. Twenty bucks was a lot of money in those days, at least for me, but oh, well.

I knew of Casey’s Golden Pheasant only during its last two incarnations on North Broadway. The Gazette mentioned how it started on Minnesota, migrated to Montana and finally to North Broadway. I would like to have been there in the early days.

The Western, which closed a couple of years ago, was the last operational bar on Minnesota Avenue. I had a lot of good times there, none better than the time I visited Billings more than 30 years ago and stumbled onto an impromptu concert featuring Noreen “The Outlaw Queen” Linderman. She was strumming and singing from a barstool for several hours, accompanied by a banjo player and another guitarist

There are two other bars worth mentioning, which were not in the Gazette piece, for good reason: the Rainbow Bar and the Crystal Lounge are still going strong. I used to go to the Rainbow, at 2403 Montana Ave., fairly often, mostly for the shuffleboard, and to take in the wildly diverse crowd. It’s still diverse enough, I suppose, but the renovation 10 years or so ago robbed it of some of its dive-bar charm.

The Crystal, at 101 N. Broadway, hasn’t changed in 30 years. In its heyday, Roy Young did his one-man band thing there five nights a week. Roy hasn’t played there in years, but the karaoke on tap there—and you’re hearing this from someone who is not normally a fan of karaoke—makes for one of the craziest, most entertaining evenings available in Billings.

The people doing karaoke are usually either so good they’re great or so bad they’re good. And the crowd! I wrote about Roy Young in 1999 and described the Crystal scene like this: “As usual at the Crystal, the crowd is impossible to pigeonhole. There are cowboys and Indians, bikers and aging hippies, old couples and young singles, yuppies, street people and everything in between.” That much hasn’t changed.

So there you are. Young people who want to be old people with good bar stories someday are encouraged to cut their teeth on the Rainbow and Crystal. Undoubtedly there are some other good places I’m not even aware of. A man’s gotta rest occasionally.

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