|
|
|
Reprinted from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 16 August 2000 Stars come out at the Mint
He gets up and sings a haunting rendition of "At This Moment" by Billy Vera and the Beaters. Then he comes back to the bar and promises he'll remember his friends' absence when their birthdays roll around. "I'll forgive, but I won't forget," he says. Cortez isn't the only one who comes to the Mint to croon and lick wounds simultaneously. I've retreated to the world's most interactive queer hangout after bad dates, crushing rejections, and work-related setbacks. It really is that mythical bar where the barkeeps, the regulars, and the semiregulars form a genuinely warm community. After a dozen regulars describe the Mint as their "home" or "family," I'm waiting for the inevitable Cheers comparison. Todd Willis, a programmer-analyst, obliges. "This is my Cheers." When Willis comes in, "they don't always say it, but I know they're thinking 'Todd!' " The only difference is that Cheers didn't let the barflies provide their own entertainment. Karaoke is Japanese for "ironic deconstruction of the concept of pop performance." (Actually, it means "empty orchestra," but I like my definition better.) The Mint is one of several karaoke bars in San Francisco where people can get up and sing pop classics over prerecorded background music; TV screens show the lyrics and sometimes surreal videos. ("Bridge over Troubled Water" is the all-time strangest karaoke video.) "Singing brings people together," says Daddy David, who tends bar and DJs. "People don't just come here to cruise and get drunk." At the same time, "I've seen a lot of matches made in the Mint. Some of them even lasted more than one night." The Mint is one of the few places that provide karaoke seven nights a week and puts people in a single large open space instead of a bunch of small self-contained performance rooms. And the Mint is probably the only "queer" karaoke bar in the city. But what it means to be a queer karaoke bar is anybody's guess. All kinds of freaks – even straight people Nobody quite seems to know what makes the Mint a gay bar anymore. During the most recent Pride weekend, a guy wandered into the Mint and demanded to know if he was in a straight bar. Self-described "Mint addict" Miriam N. Moore replied, "I consider it festive." The author of three "retro disco murder mysteries," Moore does all her best writing at the Mint and is working on a karaoke-themed queer crime novel. For her second novel, Moore based several characters on Mint regulars and wrote a "hot lesbian scene" featuring one Mint-goer she had always wanted to sleep with. Referring to one regular, a "tall drink of water who sings opera," Moore asks, "Can you imagine him getting out of any other bar alive, especially a straight bar?" So maybe it's not just an evasion when I ask if the Mint is a gay bar and regulars respond that the Mint is "accepting." "You can be who you are," says Moore, who identifies as "straight but not fanatical." "It's not like a gay bar," says Chuck Goldstein, a gay man who used to work at the Mint. If a straight man invades a gay bar, "they'll give you a certain look." But not at the Mint. The regulars Sunday through Thursday tend to be queer and talented, then on the weekends the Mint gets "too Marina yuppie" for bartender Jane Super, who stopped working Friday and Saturday nights. "We are fortunate to have mostly really good singers here at the Mint, at least on weekdays," Super says. "Weekends, I used to feel like my ears were bleeding." "We owe a lot to the gay community," owner Vic Hundahl says. "They've always supported us." The Mint has a reputation as a gay bar going back decades, he adds. "Hopefully, we maintained it, and even enhanced it." Daddy David says the Mint gets "all kinds of freaks – even straight people." But he says the crowd is more "mixed" than it was when he started working there seven years ago. "It's too late, the cat's out of the bag." So if the Mint still counts as a queer hangout, it's not because the shifting mix of patrons passes some litmus test of queerness. Whomever they sleep with, the Mint regulars play games with identity. Once you've seen a butch lesbian do John Cougar's "Hurts So Good," or a gravel-voiced tranny take on Elvis, you start questioning the inevitability of fixed identities. Not just gender crap, but every kind of role. Karaoke gives pop music back to the people. The pop music industry feeds images to its consumers, and too bad if you don't see yourself reflected in those images. Karaoke has the potential to yank the chain of the pop machine in a way that Napster never could. Through karaoke, the audience members can interact with their culture and become the creators of pop images instead of just consumers. The songs stay the same, of course. Pros rub shoulders with dreamers The Mint's reputation for showcasing talented singers who mess with pop star roles was enough to draw George Coates there in search of cast members for his karaoke-themed production of Valerie Solanas's long-lost play Up Your Ass. "It's hard to find singer-actors that also have the kind of gender-bending activities that are needed for this kind of production," Coates says. "The Mint was the only place I could look." Coates discovered 2 out of 13 Ass cast members at the Mint, finding the other 11 through traditional auditions. But the actors he found through auditions would also find themselves invited to the Mint for a beer and more subtle vetting. For the production itself, Coates paid homage to the Mint with a "karaoke jockey," or KJ, front and center, and cast members coming up from the audience to sing Solanas's nihilistic vitriol over pop song backgrounds. Up Your Ass is going to New York for 20 performances, and Coates may return to the Mint to look for understudies. Not only that, but Coates is considering sending two casts on tour across the country, and the Mint figures prominently in his audition plans. Owner Hundahl says Dick Clark Productions has visited the bar three times, recruiting a number of regulars to appear on a talent show called Your Big Break. Coates swears he once saw Jewel, right on the verge of fame, come to the Mint to try out her new single. The crowd didn't recognize her, but they "were like, 'Wow, she's great.' " It's easy to find professional and semiprofessional singers at the Mint. One night I run into Alan Richards, who sang lead vocals with the band Chicago for one album after Peter Cetera left. A nondescript middle-aged man, Richards says he likes the Mint because nobody recognizes him there. "People don't go, 'Oh my God, it's so-and-so,' " at the Mint. "To tell you the truth, I would love to start another band," says Richards, who lives off the royalties from songs like the grammar-defying "If She Would Have Been Faithful." Richards says he comes to places like the Mint to "check out the talent." Tim Krol, a member of Grammy-winning vocal group Chanticleer, also visits the Mint regularly. "For me, going to the Mint represents not only an opportunity to get up and sing songs I wouldn't get to sing in Chanticleer, but also a time to watch others get up and do that ever-so-vulnerable act," Krol says. He says he learns something from every performer, although some people teach him "what not to do." Krol always sings songs he doesn't actually know, to heighten the sense of flying without a parachute. That, plus the fact that songs are never in a predictable key, is enough to keep Krol on his toes. "I'm probably the world's only music-major vocal-concentration college dropout who hangs out at karaoke bars," says Bob Orrohood, who lives in San Jose. He'll come on a Friday or Sunday between 4:30 and 6:30 in the afternoon to practice "at least 10 to 12 songs," then hang out and watch the competition. "I think of it as a node on the way to getting a band together," he says. Orrohood is about the only regular who doesn't praise the Mint's friendly atmosphere. "I find there's competition and indifference [from bar-goers who] resent people who might have slightly more musical ability." He sniffs at the "stereotypical gay music," like George Michael songs, that he hears many of the less talented singers perform. Cortez used to work for Carnival Cruises as a professional singer, and now he makes the trek from Hayward to sing for fun. Unlike Orrohood, he's glad to hear "closeted singers" who may not be professionals get up and sing. He says amateurs are less shy than when he first visited the Mint seven years ago, when the same singers would get up over and over again. Now "people don't care what they sound like. Now they know it's not a contest." Not that some performances don't make regulars and employees cringe, particularly certain songs. "That Titanic song used to drive me from the bar," Super says, referring to "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion. "I also can't stand 'The Rose.' " But Super's absolute horror is anything from the musical Grease, especially "Summer Nights," a favorite among nonregulars. "I'm probably not the only one who hates 'Summer Nights,' " Daddy David says. " 'Summer Nights' is a pretty bad one," says Sudsy, who KJs on Sunday nights. He calls it "the only unanimously hated karaoke song." Video killed the piano bar The Mint was a piano bar when Hundahl and his associates bought it in 1987. Since the early '70s, it had been winning a stalwart gay following and a reputation as a high-class steak house. But the clientele was starting to age. "We noticed more and more it was older people coming in," Hundahl says. And only a few diehards actually got up and sang. So as a desperate experiment, Hundahl brought in a karaoke DJ every Wednesday or Thursday night. Right away "the clientele got a lot more interesting." Pretty soon karaoke moved to Friday or Saturday night, and by 1992 the piano was gone. Hundahl says he sold it for $200 to one of the old regulars. The piano crowd disappeared pretty quickly, but within a couple of months nobody missed them. And a few regulars from those days still come to the vastly changed Mint. You can't get steaks any more, but you can get wonderfully greasy hamburgers at the Hot 'n' Chunky next door. Six years ago Hundahl and friends bought out the Hot 'n' Chunky, which shares an inside door with the Mint. Jack, who works in the train maintenance yards right next door and has been coming to the bar for 40 years, remembers when it was called the 1942 Club, for its street address. It was one of the first gay bars in the city. "I've always liked it because of the fact that it wasn't really queeny," he says, just as a man gets up and sings "Our Lips Are Sealed" by the Go-Go's. "I preferred the piano," he adds. A couple of years ago a nearby bar called Martuni's waded into the piano bar void left by the Mint. Krol, who haunts both places, says a "trashier crowd," which he prefers, hangs out at the Mint. "They are so much more honest than the hoity-toity cabaret folk who go 'to be seen' at Martuni's," he enthuses. Krol asked a Mint regular why he didn't go to Martuni's, "where the pianist can follow you, and you don't have to keep up with the recorded music?" The friend responded, "Oh, that would terrify me. I need the words on the video screen." Not only do the Mint's video screens supply the lyrics to
the songs, but they give an idea of each song's tempo by highlighting the word
you're supposed to be singing. More recently Hundahl invested in adding a huge
repertoire of Spanish-language songs. Angela Garcia says the presence of songs
by Shakira and Luis Miguel that you wouldn't find at bars in the Marina was
enough to draw her to the bar from the Mission. And Garcia says a lot of other
Latinos are showing up at the Mint these days. Like a lot of other fans, Garcia
also loves the fact that a lot of women sing songs written by men about
"wanting other women. You don't just have to do Melissa Etheridge" to
express lesbian sentiments, she says. |