Dive Bar Jukebox with Michael Oates Palmer
"I just called to check and see if my memory’s correct and you mean a thing to me."
Welcome to Dive Bar Jukebox, a LAST CALL paid subscriber exclusive where bartenders, writers, chefs, musicians, and a cast of cool characters 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 responses reveal thoughts on their favorite dive bars along with a curated, annotated playlist for your weekend listening pleasure. This one is a super-sized dispatch, so if you’re reading this in your email browser, be sure to click on “View Entire Message” to enjoy the whole package.
Please welcome today’s special guest…
Michael Oates Palmer
Michael Oates Palmer has been writing for television since 2002 (The West Wing, Cupid, Condor) and his personal essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in Food & Wine, Vox, and The Bitter Southerner. His most recent work, a profile of New Orleans chef Frank Brigtsen, is featured in the new issue of The Bitter Southerner (Issue 10 with Michael Shannon on the cover).
Like a prodigal son, Michael permanently moved back to his hometown of Los Angeles in his late twenties, but a lifelong wanderlust has kept the writer, producer, activist, music aficionado, and political junkie on the road, traveling to cities across America and abroad to catch his favorite musicians playing live, pay his respects at music history landmarks, stop by state Capitol buildings and Presidential libraries, check in with friends, and explore each locale’s food and drinks scene. He was most recently in New Orleans to join the community of hundreds who gathered together for the memorial service, and one final second-line send off, to honor the life and legacy of our mutual friend, the photographer Pableaux Johnson.
I first met Michael (and Pableaux) years ago in Oxford, Mississippi, at the annual Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium. It’s been a minute since I’ve returned to Oxford, and I missed Michael by a day when I was in Los Angeles for the Last Call book tour, but when I’ve had the chance to meet up with him in person here in New York—ideally over drinks and delicious food—I cherish those hours together talking about writing, life, love, loss, TV, movies, music, and so much more.
We’ve been working together a long time to bring this Dive Bar Jukebox to life, and it’s more than worth the wait. I always welcome snappy answers to the DBJ Q&A and annotated playlist, but I love it even more when a writer such as Michael—creative, nostalgic, romantic, empathetic—is on the aux.
I will share that below the paywall you’ll encounter an excellent cameo from the late, great Stephen J. Cannell—the famed television creator and producer behind The Rockford Files—set at the bar at the Hotel Bel-Air. Not to mention a chance encounter with Jackson Browne outside a boutique on Abbot Kinney. But rather than rattle off a preview of some of the excellent songs and artists you’ll get to listen to and read about in the expansive, double-album worthy playlist below, here is an excerpt in Michael’s own words to set the scene. I really think you’re going to dig it.
“Dive bars are inextricably tied to nostalgia—even in how so many of them are described with phrases like timeless and classic. I’ve put together a playlist that reflects that—especially leaning into the nostalgia of old relationships from long ago. These are songs that are very much about fondly looking back not with anger, not with hurt, but the musical equivalent of raising a glass and wishing ‘em well, wherever they are. These aren’t kiss-offs… It’s just that when you’re alone, especially at a dive bar, it’s easy to think of times when you weren’t.”
—Michael Oates Palmer
Talking Dives with Michael Oates Palmer
What is your favorite dive bar and why do you love it?
MOP: My grandfather, Ray, lived almost all his life in Philadelphia. He worked as a union organizer and then a union official, first for the Seafarers, and later the Teamsters. (And, yeah, he knew Jimmy Hoffa.) When I would visit, he’d take me to his favorite dive bar in the Greater Northeast neighborhood of Philly. It was called the Stop Inn.
This was one of those spots where a beverage distributor would give the bar a free sign in exchange for the advertising they’d get. I’d sit on a stool, and drink one Shirley Temple or Roy Rogers after another, or exhaust their supply of maraschino cherries. And we’d hang with his pals and cronies. It felt like the best seat in the world. It made an impression.
Also, I was 5.
Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time chasing that feeling. I tend to gravitate towards not just a dive bar, but the bars at dive restaurants. Here in Los Angeles, that may mean Chez Jay, The Galley, or The Golden Bull in Santa Monica, or Taylor’s Steak House in Koreatown.
Or one of my favorite spots in Los Angeles County, the Old Place, an impossibly small roadhouse tucked in the hills between Malibu and Agoura that has somehow survived all the fires over the years.
When I lived in Venice Beach for over a decade, a favorite dive bar was Hinano’s, on the borderline between Venice and Marina Del Rey. They make a very good burger, but I appreciated that they never invested in a deep fryer: it reminded customers, look, we’re not a burger joint, we’re just a bar that happens to serve burgers. So instead they served the burger with a little bag of Lay’s potato chips, the kind you’d get in a lunchbox as a kid.
Some other dives I’ve loved in recent years: Pal’s Lounge in New Orleans, which my friend Rien Fertel introduced me to; I was there again just a few weeks ago, and it was a deeply satisfying way to close out a night. Minus the fact that the unisex bathroom had two toilets sitting directly next to each other, no stall or wall separating them.
My friend Allison Inman, as great a Nashville sherpa as one could hope to find, introduced me to Rosie’s Twin Kegs in South Nashville. And I like the basement bar at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, but only if Bill Hearne is playing that night.
I went to Cleveland for a Springsteen show in 2023 with my friend Brett Anderson; we wound up in a bar afterwards that served pierogis and a VHS of Major League playing on an endless loop. That was a very good bar: the Prosperity Social Club.
But many of my favorite dive bars are no longer. There used to be a bar on Mulberry Street—it was actually the only bar on Mulberry Street—in Manhattan called Mare Chiaro, an old Italian social club. It had sawdust on the floor, a great jukebox, oak walls. It’s apparently a different bar now, called the Mulberry Street Bar. I haven’t been. I have a hard time with accepting the new restaurants and bars in the spaces that used to house favorites; it feels like spending time with an ex and her new husband. I can do it if I have to, but if given the choice, I should prefer not to.
Maybe the best dive bars are the ones we can no longer enjoy—whether because they closed or because new ownership changed the name and the vibe and started serving tapas and where visiting them now just feels off.
If that’s so, to me, they then exist in sepia-toned memory at dusk, with light coming in through the window. Even if they were a speakeasy with no windows. Memory adapts.
What makes a dive bar a dive bar?