The (Pipe) Dreams of Glasgow
What Oasis, Milwaukee Dave, and the City of Dunedin (Fla!) Pipe Band have in common
“Is this a franchise? Are they owned by the same people?”
“Nae,” said the bartender. “I’m pretty sure we just stole the name.”
It was around 4 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon when I walked into King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, and asked how it came to have the same name as a bar I knew of in New York’s East Village. I looked around the nearly empty room: one well-dressed, slightly bemused couple who seemed like they might not be from around here. A pair of downtrodden women, staring silently into their beers. Two guys in late middle age, one of whom bore a marked resemblance to Steve Earle, if Steve Earle had definitively renounced shampoo. Still, I admired the bartender’s honesty.
“It’s open mic,” she said. “You should take a seat.”
I took my beer to a table at the far end of the bar. It wasn’t a huge room, but its walls were lined with posters for an impressive range of gigs: The Black Keys, Suzanne Vega, Father John Misty, Pulp, The Charlatans.
Steve Earle’s buddy walked to the makeshift stage and introduced himself as Milwaukee Dave, the afternoon’s host. With white hair and glasses that slipped a bit down his nose, he was an affable presence, and didn’t seem to mind, or even notice, the sparseness of the audience. He and his buddy would play a short set, he explained, and then turn it over to anyone else who wanted to play. The two downtrodden women shifted miserably in their chairs.
Milwaukee Dave and Steve Earle played Dylan’s One More Cup of Coffee. Then Dave, alone, jammed out on Behind Blue Eyes. He ended his set acapella, with a song about a woman whose husband became so skinny that he disappeared down a drain.
The women, whom I had taken to be drowning their sorrows, turned out to be waiting their turn. Jen and Laura played a slowed-down, acoustic version of Jailhouse Rock, messing up the lyrics slightly, but bringing in some harmonies that made it almost mournfully beautiful.
As Jen and Laura sang, a large group of mostly middle-aged people filed into the bar and headed to the back, through a door I hadn’t noticed before. I asked the bartender, whose name I had learned was Alisa, where they were going, and she told me that King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut is a major stop on a music tour of Glasgow: they were headed to see the main stage.
Alisa had trained as a journalist herself and still wrote music reviews. She had first started coming to King Tut’s when she was 14 (they had under-18 afternoon sessions) to see her then-favorite band, Motion City Soundtrack. Probably the best gig she had heard recently was a local band called The Rarely Social, who had just put out a single. She paused to consider. “Actually, I don’t know if they were really good," she said. “Or if I had just had five pints.”
By now, a younger guy with a ponytail had entered carrying a guitar case, and taken a seat. When Jen and Laura finished (I told one of them–it still wasn’t clear to me which was which–that I liked their music, her face lit up as if someone had thrown a switch. “Did you hear that?” she asked the other. “The lady says she likes our music.”). Dave introduced the newcomer as Ben, and he played through songs of his own creation. After two of them, a repairmen slipped behind the bar and started drilling, but Ben kept going. “This is my best one,” he said as he introduced his final contribution. “But I haven’t practiced it much.”
“That’s okay,” Dave reassured him. “You can practice on us.”
I decided it was a good time for that tour. Alisa led me behind through the door to a staircase where each step was painted with a year or two, and the names of some of the bands who played there then. 90-92: Radiohead, Suede. 99-01: Joe Strummer, The White Stripes, The Strokes. 02-04: Interpol, Amy Winehouse. 2006: Primal Scream. 2009: The Breeders. 2012: Alabama Shakes. 2018: The Killers.
But the biggest step of all, at least for King Tut’s reputation, was 93-95. “That’s when Oasis was discovered here,” Alisa explained, as she took me upstairs to see the main stage.
The story is a little muddled. It definitely entailed Oasis driving to Glasgow from Manchester in the company of an all-girl band called Sister Lovers that was playing a gig there that night. It may or may not have included Oasis insisting they be allowed to play too, an insistence which may or may not have been accompanied by threats of violence. What is certain is that they ended up playing four songs that night, including a cover of I Am The Walrus, and that Alan McGee, who was the co-founder of Creation Records and was in the club that night to meet a girl his sister had told him about, decided then and there to offer them a contract. Convinced, as he later said, that he had just heard “the greatest band since the Beatles,” he signed them four days later.
Ever since, Alisa said, “It’s like, if you can say you’ve played at King Tuts, you can say you’ve made it.”
It made me think about another performance–or really, a set of them–I had stumbled across early that morning. As I entered Kelvingrove Park, a slight, evocative whine came rolling across the grass, and grew louder as I walked further into the park. Eventually, I came upon a fountain encircled by lawn, and on it, several sets of bagpipers and drummers playing in discordant clumps. I approached a woman seated on a bench to ask what was happening: was this like Glasgow’s designated bagpipe rehearsal park, or something? “That’s right,” she said, nodding tolerantly.
“So there’s a part of a city park here in Glasgow just for bagpipe practice?,” I asked, delighted by this bit of cultural specificity.
“Well, yes,” she responded, looking at me oddly. “But just for the championship, you know.”
Kelly was in town because her teenage son–she motioned vaguely in the direction of one clump–was in the City of Dunedin Pipe Band, which had traveled from Dunedin, Florida to compete in the World Pipe Band championship that would be held the following week. Until then, the band spent every morning practicing in the park (this schedule may have tried the patience even of locals; I spotted a few signs very firmly insisting that there was to be no rehearsing before 9am).
I mentioned that she and her son must be quite devoted to bagpipe music to make such a sacrifice. “Oh, but to play in Glasgow?” she replied. “It’s a dream for him.”
I thought about that back in the bar at King Tuts, where Ben was packing up his guitar, and Milwaukee Dave was welcoming Mikhail from Warsaw to the mic. Mikhail too performed his own compositions, though an especially screechy one was loosely based, he said, on a Polish folksong.
Look, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t hear anything amazing (or even consistently on key) that afternoon at King Tut’s. But in my walks around Glasgow, I had noticed how nearly every block held at least one bar promising live music, and how even the barber shops made Tom Waits references. I had seen handbills for bands pasted on walls with an abundance I hadn’t come across since New York in the 90s. Later, I would learn that, after London, Glasgow consistently ranks as the UK’s best city for music. And I had heard from two people in two very different genres that to play there was to know that you had made it.
By now, Mikhail had wrapped his set, and Jen, Laura, and Ben had all cleared out. Milwaukee Dave made the rounds, trying to scare up more performers. When he got to my table, he must have seen the panic in my face because he said, ‘You might feel a little cheekier if you switched to gin.”
If this were a different kind of story–one starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper perhaps–maybe I would have taken the guitar from Dave’s outstretched hand, nervously tuned it, and then proceeded to blow away all five people in that bar, plus the repairman. But making it as a musician was never my dream.
Still, I was glad to have learned that Glasgow is there for those for whom it is. As I pulled on my jacket and waved goodbye to Alisa, I saw Dave pull out his guitar once again, and return to the stage.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been a fan of Skylar Renslow’s smart, soulful travel writing for a while, and not only because our paths seem to be nearly crossing in some kismet-y ways (case in point: did we both take off on 90+ mile walks through the English countryside in September? Stay tuned). In a recent essay for his newsletter The Daily Grog, he brings his characteristic insight to a question I think about a lot here: to plan or not to plan?
And speaking of walking, this piece by Chris Tharp, on a village-to-village hike through the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca, for his newsletter made me want to strap on a pack and head to Mexico. Also to start hanging out in cantinas more.
I recently got the chance to talk about this newsletter for The Colin McEnroe Show of Connecticut Public Radio. The whole hour was devoted to the way travel is changing, and it included conversations with writers of two of the most thought-provoking recent pieces on the subject, Agnes Callard and Ilaria Maria Sala. For my part, I found Colin very enthusiastic about the notion of unplugged travel, which not only was extremely gratifying, but also made me expect to run into him, possibly lost but with his hair smartly trimmed (you’ll have to listen) on some offline adventures of his own sometime soon.
Love this, Lisa - reading it on a drizzling, cold Monday morning and I'm now dreaming of wandering the streets of Glasgow, searching for bars. (And, an Oasis earworm belting out in my head)) Thank you for the recommendation... heading across to read them in a sec xx
Wow thanks for the shoutout and recommendation! Any chance you were in Yorkshire?? Hopefully you managed to avoid the absolute deluge this past Thursday. I'm curious what your route was like - we should compare notes!