Photo by Alex V. Cook
Vintage and Vibrant: BJ’s Lounge preserves the best of what the Bywater used to be.
The drive into BJ’s is in many ways a descent into New Orleans’ core, cutting through layers of time and class structure and progress. It is how I remember my first visits to some of the neighborhood’s haunts decades ago. Canal Street gives way to Rampart which gives way to St. Claude and at each juncture, some of the tourist sheen of New Orleans is stripped away.
The Bywater is quickly transforming from a storied ramshackle back corner to a trendier, friendlier place, much in the way Brooklyn was once New York’s gritty core and is now considered an epicenter of hipsterism. I’m not knocking it; I like chi-chi restaurants and groovy record stores as much as the next guy trying to defy his cultural inertia, but part of me misses the dives. I miss that grit.
BJ’s has it. It sits on a darkened residential corner; so nondescript it practically is hiding in plain sight. Once upon a time it was called George’s and you were let in speakeasy-style: you pressed a buzzer and they peered through a slot in the door. Not out of exclusivity as much as safety; the Bywater was once a more dangerous place than it is now. They now have a couple of closed circuit cameras on the corner feeding monitors behind the bar, but otherwise BJ’s bears the patina of its vintage.
It is still cash only. The jukebox is a CD jukebox, but is loaded with classic new Orleans R&B. The strings of holiday lights dimly reveal its eccentric décor: the wall of snapshots of former patrons, the racecar suspended over the pool table. In one corner near the old upright piano is a curious tableau of a box fan, a glossy portrait of Fats Domino and a mounted deer head.
I stepped out to survey the beautiful corner. The building looks softened with age. There is a beat up leather-upholstered chair just outside the door, and I wonder what sort of social ladder one must ascend to confidently sit on that throne. I must have looked suspicious, rhapsodizing the possibility of becoming the mayor of Burgundy Street or something, for a pickup trained its headlights on me for a minute and didn’t move. Eventually, a guy hopped out with a beat up amp and a giant red beans pot. I figured that must be Jimmy.
Jimmy Horn fronts King James & the Special Men, a hit squad of musicians who love New Orleans R&B at a very root level. They play it loud, loose, even a little sloppy, but in a good way. The way a band having too good of a time plays the music they love. They play every Monday night and Jimmy brings the red beans.
A Utah native, Horn learned the fine art of New Orleans red beans from Antoinette K-Doe, wife of Ernie K-Doe, but in the few years since her passing, Miss Antoinette’s role in the idea of what it means to “be New Orleans” is as integral as Ernie’s. “It’s not her recipe,” Horn is quick to point out. “It’s inspired by her recipe. She’d never tell me exactly how she made hers anyway.” It’s a great rendition of soul food red beans, not as creamy as the creole-style one readily associates with New Orleans dining, but the soupier kind you find in hole-in-the-wall diners and lunch plate houses. Like Antoinette’s, Horn’s recipe has a guarded evolution. “The one thing I will say is there’s a whole lot of neck bones.”
Soon the band started filing in and the club was filling up. I knew their piano player Casey McAllister from his playing in virtually every band in New Orleans (and we are friends besides that) and I could tell by the wry smile that he relished playing that old rickety piano. He pegged out a couple Professor Longhair licks just to make sure it had the right punch. Jimmy strapped on his guitar and the two caught a momentary groove.
I’m not even sure there was a formal line between playing and not playing—I was helping myself to a second bowl of red beans—but suddenly there was a bassist and horn section and the Special Men were full tilt. I’d call what they play R & B & D, rhythm and blues and drunk, for they become an alcohol-fueled funny car of old school New Orleans blues. I ran into two different musicians I knew (one in a metal band, another a tango guitarist), newspaper reporters, and neighborhood fixtures. One of them lives nearby and tells me there is a breakfast crew that is hanging on the stoop when they open up in the morning and that in the middle of the day, this is where cab drivers come to catch a beer.
The little shack of a bar grew thick with New Orleans, old and new, the past and the present hitched together like the train cars that still roll through the middle of the Bywater. I wanted to hold out to the end but I had a drive back to Baton Rouge, just as the Special Men got wilder, King James growing hoarse chanting “All Night Long.” It seemed they might just go that long, and then keep on going.
Details. Details. Details.
BJ's Lounge
4301 Burgundy Street
New Orleans, La.
(504) 945-9256
Cash Only.
King James and the Special Men play every Monday night at 10 pm; free red beans and rice. Little Freddie King plays there regularly as well. Plate dinners available on Wednesday nights.
