Dive Bar Jukebox with Brett Martin
"He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.'"
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Welcome back to Dive Bar Jukebox, where every Friday bartenders, writers, chefs, musicians, and a host of dynamic people answer the question: If we were hanging out together at a bar and I put ten credits on the jukebox, what songs would you punch in and why? Their answers reveal thoughts on their favorite dive bars along with a hand-picked, annotated 10-song playlist for your weekend listening pleasure.
Please welcome today’s special guest…
Brett Martin
Brett Martin, a correspondent for GQ Magazine, is a three-time James Beard Award winner and his work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others, and on public radio's This American Life. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed 2013 book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution. A new tenth anniversary edition will be published this summer with an updated preface.
I’d followed Martin’s byline for years and it was just my luck that when I moved to Brooklyn, the native New Yorker was leaving the borough for New Orleans, where he now lives with his partner Kira Henehan and their two young daughters. While we had communicated via social media for a while we didn’t meet in person until the spring of 2012 in New York at a Southern Foodways Alliance luncheon prior to the James Beard Media Awards. We rode the subway back to Carroll Gardens together and have kept in touch ever since.
Later that summer we planned to get together while I was in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail. We did meet up, but it was under unusual circumstances the afternoon after the Hubig’s pie factory fire, which was next door to Martin’s apartment. By sunrise, there wasn’t a Hubig’s hand pie to be found in New Orleans. I had happened to buy a few of them on my way back to my hotel the night before, and it only seemed appropriate to share them with local friends.
If you’re new to LAST CALL, I encourage you to revisit “Hubig’s Pies: After the Fire,” one of my first dispatches here that chronicles that occasion. One addendum to that story since it was published is the good news that Hubig’s pies are once again being baked in New Orleans, though Martin informed me that he still hasn’t had one as the Metairie Zuppardo’s gets them in three days a week at 7 a.m. and they’re sold out by 7:30 a.m.
Martin was also one of the first people I reached out to to ask to sit in on Dive Bar Jukebox. He wanted to wait to see a few of them before committing and I made a note to check back with him. And then we recently ran into each other at one of my favorite spots, Rolo’s in Ridgewood, Queens, and he said, “Hey, when can I do a Dive Bar Jukebox?” We’re glad he’s here.
Read on as Martin gives one of the best answers yet to “What makes a dive bar a dive bar?” and offers a very personal playlist composed of songs from the catalog of his own home jukebox.