Deadlines are every Friday for the following week’s edition. (Each Picks Page covers the next 8 days in the Bluegrass.) Submission guidelines are printed at the bottom of the Picks Page, every week.

No phone calls for Listings. No Kidding.

Friday, July 16
THE PAYBACK, WITH CLUB DUB & WALK THE
MOON. Buster’s.
THE BARRY MANDO PROJECT. 10:30 pm.
Lynagh’s pub.
THE REAL NUMBERS, THE OPEN LETTERS
AND ATTEMPT. Al’s Bar
PATRICK MCNEESE. Natasha’s.

Saturday, July 17
NAPPY ROOTS. Busters.
CLUB DUB. 10:30 pm Lynagh’s pub.
ZACK DEPUTY. Cosmic Charlie’s.
REBEL. Southland Bowling.
ALMA GITANA. Natasha’s

Sunday, July 18
The Tall Boys, 10 pm. Lynagh’s pub.
Brassnuckle Boys, Cosmic Charlie’s.

Monday, July 19
CAMERON MCGILL. Natasha’s.

Tuesday, July 20
PETER CASE, WITH WILL KIMBROUGH. Natasha’s
JOAN BAEZ. 7:30 pm, Lexington Opera House

Wednesday, July 21
GERI X. Natasha’s.

Thursday, July 22
ASTOR PLACE RIOT; FAIR CITY LIGHTS; JOSH
EAGLE AND THE HARVEST CITY. Buster’s.
DIRT DAUBERS. Cosmic Charlie’s.
OSLAND/DAILEY. Natasha’s.

CLICK HERE FOR A LARGER IMAGE

CLICK HERE FOR A LARGER IMAGE

pictured is Rob “Big City” Hulsman

[This story appears on page 12 of the July 15 issue of Ace.]

Smashing!
Nine Pound Hammer gears up for 25th anniversary

If you want to see 9 Lb. Hammer, now’s the time, as frontman Scott Luallen says, “this 25th anniversary tour [is] probably the last long haul euro tour we’ll do,” though he adds, “We will play fests and special events forever.”
The current lineup—Blaine Cartwright guitar/vocals; Earl Crim/ guitar; Mark Hendricks, bass/vocals; Rob Hulsman, drum; and Scott Luallen vocals—hasn’t exactly had a lot of time to practice. Hulsman (Scissormen) and Cartwright (Nashville Pussy) now live in Atlanta, with the rest in Lexington. Hulsman says the tour came together with “a lot of phone calls.”
Hendricks says, “we’re ready to do it to it again. Comin’ out with new material and the urge to play it. This next Euro tour will be a long one for us…just shy of six weeks. Something like 40+ shows in 10 countries.”
Asked about the new material, he says, “we take some old and some newer NPH songs and do country versions of them while taking some familiar classic country songs and doing them NPH style. It gives us a chance to stretch out musically in the studio with different tempos and dynamics and instrumentation. Lots of banjo, fiddle, mandolin and steel guitar on this album.”
Luallen says, “the new LP is country covers record with some 9Lb hits hollerfied, Like Dead Dog Highway, Tater Knob.” And they’ve added covers, including “Charlie Daniels, Waylon, Gordon Lightfoot, Cash, BR549, Flatt and Scruggs…”
Now they just have to sell it. He says, “Gonna get out and support this LP for the next year or so. We got babies and new marriages to tend to, so we ain’t callin the shots!”
Hulsman says he and Cartwright re-connected when he moved from Boston to Atlanta a year ago, but he’s been playing on and off with Hendricks for decades.
Asked what part of the tour he’s most looking forward to, Hendricks says, “For me it will be getting to play with Rob again…Rob and I have been in touch for 23 years. We have kept up with each other’s various music ventures since he moved to Boston in ‘01 and left Taildragger.”
Still, Hendricks acknowledges, “time is scarce. Even when your drummer owns a recording studio [Brian Pulito on the album]. We have done the entire new album at Nitrosonic Recording Studio.”

——-
Longtime Ace readers also know Rob “Big City” Hulsman as former Associate Editor in the 90s—in-between hundreds of deadlines and bylines, he’s also remembered for putting together the compilation Ace Holiday CD, featuring all local bands, (he then organized a series of charity shows around its release).
He went on to work at KET before relocating to Boston, which he only recently left. By way of Readers-Digest condensed updates, he says, “I moved from Boston to Atlanta last summer and, in between tours with the Scissormen and now Nine Pound Hammer, I’m a stay-at-home dad and freelance writer/regular contributor to Drum! magazine.” While in Boston he played with Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Dickie Barret, John Sinclair, The Tarbox Ramblers and former members of Morphine.
He adds, “Boston was a great town for me creatively, but I’m very glad to be back down south.” He says the tour will be"the drummer equivalent of the middle-aged movie star’s action movie - I’m forced to get into shape for this. I’m finally gonna have one of those moments where I can say I’m in better shape at 42 than 24.”
He has to be road-ready, explaining, “Nine Pound Hammer is in Europe for the fall and then I’ll be heading out west, playing film fests, to promote Robert Mugge’s new documentary featuring another band I’m in, the Scissormen.”
Luallen, not one to wax sentimental, says he’s excited about “playing these great new songs. Seeing good friends, perhaps for the last time. Cementing our legacy,” adding “Playin at the arctic circle.”
He says, “I’m gonna be a daddy here come fall, so this is it for a good while.” In between, he’s “movin alot of furniture, and doin’ a lot of painting.”

9 Lb. plays Cosmic Charlie’s on July 15.

————————————————————————From the Archives—————————————————————————————
Ten years ago in Ace: Nine Pound Hammer
by JOHN LACY

How many drummers and bass players have Nine Pound Hammer plowed through over the years? Oh, say six and five, respectively. Even by Spinal Tap standards, the personnel turnover seems a bit excessive. Considering the band’s fifteen year on / off relationship, perhaps the math isn’t so fuzzy afterall.

To shave off some of the fuzz, go back to early 1986 in Owensboro, Kentucky. High school chums Scott Luallen (vocals) and Blaine Cartwright (guitar), together with bassist Brian Payne (aka Forrest Payne [Ace memorial issue is archived June 2010]), and drummer Toby Myrick play two shows at the Ross theater in Evansville, Indiana as the Yuppie Mop Dogs. Playing mostly covers such as “I Fought the Law” and “Blitzkrieg Bop,” Luallen describes the nascent performances as “really, really bad.”

At this point, the Yuppie Mop Dogs change their name to Nine Pound Hammer, purloined from the Merle Travis song. Payne moves. Bart, a skinhead of the non-nazi variety, fills the bass vacancy; the band changes its name to the Raw Recruits and sticks to playing mainly in Owensboro and Evansville. They also start hammering out original material and try it out at an end of season party for the Kentucky Weslyan football team held at the VFW post in Owensboro. Luallen remembers saying onstage, “Just pull the plug and we’ll quit. Just don’t throw anything at us.” After the Skynyrd-programmed crowd had finally, and miraculously, been deprogrammed, the band felt the show had actually gone well; so well in fact, that Luallen and Cartwright agreed that being in a band was what they really wanted to do, relocating to Lexington in the latter part of 1986.

Upon arrival, Raw Recruits become the Black Sheep and begin playing so often at the now defunct Great Scott’s Depot that they practically become the house band. “I remember one night that we were playing the P.A. caught fire,” says Luallen. “We were either that bad, or that good.”

Soon, personnel problems would reemerge. Myrick was asked to leave the band and was replaced by Darren Howard, rabidly into Led Zeppelin and Kiss. The Black Sheep would then become forever known as Nine Pound Hammer.

The rechristened quartet was ready to go-daddy-go at full ramming speed. “We were playing a show at Tewligans in Louisville,” smiles Luallen fondly. “That’s when we met Len Puch who was the president of Wanghead records and was also in the Detroit-based band Snakeout. He liked us and our energy, so we started to talk.”

Non-nazi skinhead Bart left to find his last name. Kathey Llewallen was next with a three-month stint. Former Active Ingredients bassist Brian Moore would replace her. But wait. Oh, yeah it’s coming. Drummer Darren Howard was soon to depart. The drum throne was next occupied by University of Kentucky student Rob Hulsman who joined just in time to record Nine Pound Hammer’s first LP, The Mud, the Blood and the Beers, which was released in 1989.

The album was widely reviewed in such publications as Billboard, New Melody Express, Goldmine, and Maximum Rock ‘n Roll.  The Heavy Metal magazine Faces regarded Nine Pound Hammer’s freshman efforts as, “Johnny Cash meets the Ramones in a sparkling thrash debut that alternately sends up and super smartly explains that most misunderstood of cultures, the Midwest, redneck lifestyle.”

Nine Pound Hammer smote the pavement for the East Coast and Canadian locales of interest. One night before a show (uh-oh), Moore and Hulsman shared a fifth of Evan Williams bourbon. Moore, with Luallen in tow, ended up falling down a flight of stairs. Consequently, the rhythm section sounded as if they were working on their instruments rather than playing them. Brian was out; Matt Bartholomy, from a band in Owensboro called White Hiney was in. Finally, a semblance of stability.

“At this point the Wanghead records thing is kind of fading and things were looking kind of bleak until we got a call from Tim Warren, the owner of Crypt records in Hamburg, Germany. He sent us to Brooklyn, New York, to record Smokin’ Taters at Coyote Studios,” says Luallen.

Nine Pound Hammer was then off to Europe to play a masochistic fifty-six shows in sixty-five days. They played to crowds at youth hostels and medium sized halls in Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Amsterdam. The Hammer was evolving into a force on tour.

Then Hulsman left and Johnny Evans took over the skins to fulfill the tour dates.

After a gig in the Basque region of Spain, the band was actually paid with a brick of Moroccan hash. On Christmas night during the tour, Cartwright, Bartholomy, and Evans were assaulted by Algerian dissidents (the best kind) somewhere in France. Everybody got maced by the club owner except the Algerians.

Johnny Evans quit soon after the tour. Cartwright moved to Nashville. Hammer would eventually reunite and add another drummer, Bill Waldron, as they began recording their third album, Hayseed Timebomb, in Glasgow, Kentucky. With the album’s release, more touring of the U.S. and Canada ensued. A third and final tour of Europe included stops in Milan, Italy, and Slovenia during the Balkan war. Waldron, too, would soon quit and was replaced with Adam Neal for added dates in the U.S. and Canada. Waldron would rejoin for a ten-day tour of Japan in 1996.

That was the last time Nine Pound Hammer played together.

If the self-proclaimed purveyors of neo-folk punk rooted in the agrarian lifestyle had differences in the past, they seem to have been reconciled. Of his long time writing partner Luallen said, “Blaine deserves to be remembered as being in the same league as songwriters like Dave Alvin, Springsteen and Chuck Berry. Some critics don’t get it, because they haven’t lived these songs.”

[This Sports Column appears on page 14 of the July 15 issue of Ace.]
PHOTO COURTESY UK ATHLETICS: Turpin over Shaq

by Heather C. Watson

The 1982-83 Kentucky Wildcats are the first basketball team I can remember. 

When you grow up in a basketball family like I did, memories of your team are a part of the family lore.  They become a part of the conversation, a way of establishing each member of the family along the team’s timeline—sort of a generational link to the team’s history.  Memories of big games or favorite lineups are woven into the family history.
My father recalls being a high school basketball player in ’66, catching the infamous loss to Texas Western over his transistor radio.  My brother claims that the Laettner stomp of ’92 is his earliest memory (perhaps a bit of revisionist history, but we’re willing to overlook it for the sake of a great story).  My own very first memories of UK basketball include the names Dirk Minniefield, Kenny Walker, Bret Bearup, Dicky Beal, and Melvin Turpin.  I was in the early weeks of second grade when Coach Hall’s team began their season with a revolutionary midnight practice session in Memorial Coliseum.

I can remember my daddy and granddaddy analyzing those players’ performance after every game.  The conversation around me was so impassioned that it seemed quite important that I form my own opinions.  My favorite player, I decided, was Melvin Turpin.  Mel wasn’t my favorite because of the SEC scoring records he’d go on to break, but for a far simpler reason: he had a kind face.  As a kid who was learning the rules of the game as well as what it meant to be a fan, I simply saw that this was a player that I could look up to. 

Several years later, I had the privilege of sitting behind Mel during a UK game.  My lower arena tickets at the UGA game were already a fantastic birthday present from my cousin. When we took those seats, however, that present became exponentially better. We were not only sitting behind a bona fide UK star, but behind my favorite player! My 20-something birthday celebration now included an appearance from Melvin Turpin!

Sitting behind the big guy was, perhaps, a little obstructive.  He filled the seat in every imaginable sense.  Not only was he too tall and too wide for the seat, but his personality filled up the surrounding rows.  Everyone in the adjacent area was gawking at the sight of a star Wildcat alumnus.  And, truth be told, it was hard to see around him.  But, at halftime, I introduced myself by saying “I was a huge fan when I was a kid.”  It more than made up for any missed viewing opportunities when Mel was gracious and humble and charming in response.  He didn’t have to be so kind to the silly girls who wanted to talk about their own childhood memories of his college sports career.  But he was kind, and he confirmed my earliest belief that he was someone to whom I could look up.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet several Wildcats and to see many more play.  I’ve met former players and those currently in uniform.  I’ve encountered some players of my own age in social settings, and I’ve sat in Rupp Arena knowing that the player who just scored two points for our team would soon be taking his game to an impressive professional level.  But my favorite UK basketball experience will always be the day Melvin Turpin was nice to me on my birthday.

Last Thursday, as I fulfilled an evening obligation, I attempted to surreptitiously check Twitter for a quick update on the LeBron James Media Circus.  My feed brought me far sadder news, as I learned the Favorite Player of my youth had passed.  In subsequent days, I have studiously avoided the blogosphere and the sports papers.  I don’t want to read speculation into the details of Mel’s untimely demise, nor do I want to rehash his NBA years. 

I want to hold on to the simple memory that he was my favorite player.  I want to remember the kind man who graciously accepted the ridiculous rants of a fan. I want to recall one of the sports legend of my youth.

Goodbye, Mel. You’ll be missed.  And you’ll always be my very first Favorite Player.

[This Food column appears on page 13 of the July 15 issue of Ace.]

BY TOM YATES

I’m still patiently waiting for my container vegetable garden to mature and ripen.  In the meantime, our Farmers Market is a beacon of summer’s freshness. I strolled downtown early this morning to pick up fresh produce for a gazpacho supper.

Even at that early hour, it was bustling. Dizzying, even. I usually make a couple of passes through the vendors surveying what is available and what looks best. Stall after stall of bursting ripe vegetables. Almost everyone had their samples sliced open to tempt with their juicy insides. Canteloupe, honeydew, and watermelon from an Amish community in western Kentucky. The same Amish community my parents frequented for their produce.  There were rows of heirloom tomatoes from Scott, Madison, Jessamine, and Casey counties. Dotted in and through the produce stalls were stands selling fresh local cheeses and meats. The corn is apparently in. Big time!  Ears of corn pulled halfway open to reveal their Silver Queen, Peaches and Cream, or Supersweet identities.

The fresh blackberries were huge. Almost the size of my thumb. I wanted to plop several in my mouth with no one looking, but they were looking, of course, so I bought some.

My third pass meant serious business. I needed bulky tomatoes for the juicy base of the soup. As I scoured the stands for not-pretty-but-tasty tomato seconds, I managed to find my favorite farm from Jessamine County selling Big Uglies, as they call them. Big, ugly, and cheap. Score. I picked up purple and green bell peppers that were incredibly fresh. Warm and soft.  Flaccid, in a good way.

Assorted cherry tomatoes from Madison County would be the perfect garnish for my market soup.  A tri-colored basket of Sungold, Black Cherry, Yellow Pearl, and Orange Grape fit the bill.

Next door, I found fresh picked green-topped purple onions from Scott County along with Candied Onions and garlic.  On the other side of the stall, I found tiny cucumbers.  Cornichon size.  Adorable.  Maybe not for gazpacho, but what the hell?  Two pints.  Just down from the wonderfully smelling omlette station, I found good medium sized cucumbers that appeared very plump and ideal for soup.
My bags were very full with eveything I needed along with some things I didn’t need, but simply had to have.
I made it home with my stash and started mincing, chopping, and peeling everything for the gazpacho.
I took the large Uglies and dropped them into simmering water for 5 seconds to release the skin for peeling, pureed them into juice, and set them aside. I didn’t bother straining the seeds. After finely dicing cucumbers, peppers, onions, and garlic, I pureed half for body and left the remainder for texture. Once I quartered the tri colored tiny tomatoes, I combined everything and seasoned it with kosher salt and cracked black pepper.  Olive oil, sherry vinegar, and fresh parsley finished it off.  Some recipes call for canned juice.  The juice from today’s tomatoes was so pure and sweet, I didn’t even want to mask it. I covered the bowl to refrigerate overnight and blend flavors, but not without having a bowl straight away while it was still warm from the summer sun.
Michael walked into the kitchen and said, “It smells good in here.”  And it did. Not from cooking, but from chopping and slicing such fresh market stand produce. The air was perfumed with flavor.
No need for the gazpacho police here. I realize this is not authentic Andalusion gazpacho. I adore the pureed tomato, bread, and garlic version as well as the next person. I wasn’t going for an authentic culinary stroll through the streets of Seville.
I wanted a garden party…..in my mouth.
——-

On Saturday , July 31st the Lexington Farmers’ Market will celebrate their 35th anniversary with the third annual Farm Tour 9am-2pm. That evening, the A Taste of the Farm in the City dinner will showcase recipes from Central Baptist Hospital’s cookbook, “Beyond the Fence: A Culinary Look at Historic Lexington.” Tickets for the dinner are limited and must be purchased by July 26th.  The Saturday market will take place as usual in Cheapside Park from 7am-3pm. In celebration of the 35th anniversary, Mayor Newberry will deliver an address at 10am.

I am a very humble gardener. My successes are always balanced out with great failures…but I persevere. I’ve always loved flowers, hanging ferns, and window boxes bursting with color. We purchased this house several years ago and before we even moved in, I was out digging and tilling the sparse back garden. I had two tons of dry stacking stone shipped from North Carolina to build raised beds and filled the beds with ninety-five 40 pound bags of Barky Beaver top soil. Underneath the soil I buried 80 feet of soaker hose. Against the advice of every gardening book, I then filled the garden to the brim with perennials, spring bulbs, evergreen shrubs, flowering bushes, summer bulbs, and statuary. On the back deck I would have an occasional tomato plant and a huge pot of herbs. I was totally impressed with myself.

The garden is now too full. Plants actually do fill in over time, it turns out.The experts were right. It is overflowing, beautiful, and full. Fine with me. 

My garden philosophy has shifted and changed over the years. I still love growing flowers and watching them change and evolve during the growing season. Growing things to harvest and eat has consumed me. We have limited space and odd light patterns, but that hasn’t stopped me. I want to grow food on our land.  Our urban downtown land. Within reason, of course. No corn fields, pumpkin patches, or winding melon vines. I do what I can— and without room in the perennial garden, I have resorted to container gardening. I am not an urban gardener, by any means. I could not park my PT Cruiser by the side of the road with the latch up and sell produce. Hardly. For a long time I couldn’t even grow a proper tomato. 

Last spring I was inspired by an article written by Chef Dave in AceWeekly about starting vegetables and herbs from seed.  Seemed like the perfect way to quell the late winter wishful garden dolldrums. It was a total miracle. I was stunned and amazed. We had cucumbers, jalapenos, green bell peppers, and tomatoes. I put up 75 quart and pint jars of pickles, relishes, chutneys, salsas, and juices. I was a canning madman!  All from the containers on our deck!  It was garden hysteria.  Obsessed and crazed.

Funny, the more you grow and eat what you grow, the more you want to grow to eat. There is something to be said for container vegetable gardening. The soil can be manipulated and the water can be easily controlled. When the light source changes throughout the course of the season, pots can be moved around to adjust to it. In my case, it made perfect sense.

This year was and is no different.  Peat pots were everywhere in late March, domed with their plastic imitation glasshouses until sprouting.  They seemd so delicate and frail as they poked up through the airy peat. The tomato seedlings didn’t quite survive my haphazard watering spells as well as the herbs and pepper plants. Michael ordered a slew of heirloom tomato plants to compensate. A big slew. Principe Burghese, Pink Oxheart, Abraham Lincoln, and Sunset Red Horizon stand in tow with the standard Big Boy plants. We usually have three tomato plants with cages. This year, we have nineteen! 

The peppers and herbs were hardened outside for a while before planting. When it was safely past the last frost date, I sewed cucumber seeds directly into containers and nestled them alongside the flowers with supports to vine up and through. One is tucked into a bed of daylilies and is winding its way around an ornamental garden cage. The corner of the garage has a pot filled with cucumber vines climbing up through a cage onto a double hung cheap trellis I nailed to the side of the garage. As they blossom, form, and grow, the supports make for easy harvesting. They will dangle and beg to be picked.

The peppers and tomatoes are producing and the herbs flourishing. All in containers lined up side by side or tucked into available space.

We used to sit on the deck and look lovingly out onto our flowering back forty. The tomato plants have totally obscured any view as they grow taller up into the sky and wrap around each other for support.
A small sacrifice for the bounty to come.

Urban gardeners? Nope.

Just trying to grow a few things and live off the fat of our little piece of land.

With joy.

Anyone in Kentucky worth their snifter (or mason jar) knows a little something about bourbon. To char the new white oak barrel designed for aging spirits, you set the inside alight until you’ve got a small bonfire busy defacing the white oak, moments away from ash. After the fire’s out, the woodgrain is no longer pure, but the longer the spirits sit, the more complex the resulting bouquet and flavor, the more lusty in color, and the larger the angel’s share. Regardless of how long it sets, bourbon is not bourbon unless it first dwells in something that knows what it means to burn. To be steeped in the “mountain soul” of Sunday Valley is to find yourself a vessel holding onto a slurry of flame.

Many fans of Sunday Valley are notorious for their nigh-ecstatic/berserker fervor during shows. Maybe it’s a combination of heat and sweat rising from bodies clustered at the foot of the stage meeting the waves of heat coming from the instruments and voices under the lights. Whatever the reason, it becomes clear, that much like a tent revival, the spirit will really start to swing the further in the congregation is willing to go. In fact, it’s no surprise to hear someone call out to a friend or stranger, “They’re takin’ me to church!”

This is a dynamic reemergence of the band’s unique timbre which garnered them the title, “The Kings of Cowpunk” and got them voted “The Best Band in Kentucky” in 2007 by Louisville’s Leo Weekly. Now a trio, with Sturgill Simpson on guitar and lead vocals, Gerald Evans on bass and vocals, and Edgar Purdom holding down the drums, the band seems to embrace the concept that change is the nature of the universe and that the more recent changes are positive. Most importantly, as a group of friends first, Simpson feels they’re “doing the only thing that makes sense…trying to make the most honest, heartfelt, and pure music.”

Balancing a full plate of shows throughout the state and with a new “top secret” album in the works due out late summer/early fall, Simpson is enthusiastic about what Sunday Valley has to offer audiences, “In terms of musical development, we’re still exploring and are nowhere near exhausting the sonic limits of the unit. As a songwriter, it couldn’t be more exciting because I’m learning more everyday how much freedom we have to go wherever we want. Being a three piece allows us to focus on the rhythmic structure of the songs and our sound and to play around with dynamics on an extreme scale.”

And if what’s being cooked up in the studio reflects what’s been happening onstage lately, “The audience can expect things to get much darker as we’ve strayed away from the now saturated honky-tonk based Country and have been really digging in and developed a sound based much heavier on the music in my heart, which is Appalachian Blues, Bluegrass, and traditional mountain string music. There’s a certain dread and forlornness in the music that I feel translates to modern times and the general state of uncertainty in the world. I think the record will serve as a raw introduction and claiming stamp on the Sunday Valley sound.”

Much like the altered barrels that turn an unrefined liquid into something worth sharing, the more you listen, the more you find that you are able to hold, though your most vital organs be scorched to char, your blood thinning to resin. On Saturday, July 3rd, Sunday Valley will be scorching organs next at Buster’s, the first in a lineup of upcoming gigs this month, including the particularly promising July 24th show at Cosmic Charlie’s with the “Dancing Outlaw,” himself, Jesco White. Simpson wishes clarity for the people planning to come through, “If they take away anything, it will be something to hopefully believe in, being that so much music today, especially country and its retro novelty acts, are based on a postured persona with no real emotional content in the songs….”

And ultimately, he wishes what any musician worth his instrument could wish most for a crowd, “Ideally, someday we’d love to look out at a room full of people rocking their asses off and crying at the same time.”

So come this weekend, try not to flinch when Sunday Valley leaves anyone in hearing range breathless, pulses popping through temples, palms, soles, and throats plain wore out. ‘Cause you won’t be put out until you’re fully cured.

Next show:
July 3 Buster’s Billiards and Backroom w/The Sundresses
Doors at 8, Show at 10, $7,18+

For upcoming dates log on to: http://www.myspace.com/sundayvalley.
Also, stay posted on Facebook through the Sunday Valley Official Fan Page.
(Photo by Richie Wireman)

Dancin’ at church, Long Island jazzie parties
Waiter, bring us some more Bacardi
We’ll order now what they ordered then
‘Cause everything old is new again.
                            -Peter Allen
Columbia Steakhouse has been in operation at its downtown historic location since 1948. Not alot has changed over the years.  Although the famed Nighthawk Special is always on the menu, a few times a year it is specially priced and heavily advertised. It is usually during those times that we venture down to savor it.  Lately, we have been dining there more frequently. Columbia’s is always good, the staff is super friendly, and the atmosphere is so old school steakhouse.
When I first moved to Lexington from NYC in the mid-eighties, Columbia’s was where everyone went after Johnny Angel’s Disco Bar closed in preparation for the after hours scene.  Either you went into the back parking lot to continue the party, or you went to Columbia Steakhouse for munchies and rejuvenation.  The smoky restaurant would be filled with happily intoxicated dance revelers and tired drag queens eating Diego salads, fried banana peppers, and loaded baked potatoes. At the appropriate hour, everyone would stumble back to the bar for the after hours party. That was my introduction to Columbia Steakhouse.
We have been going back there ever since those halcyon disco days to drink great Old Fashioneds and enjoy the steaks, appetizers, salads, and other offerings.
They have added a few new items over years.  Fresh grilled salmon is popular today, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t grace the steakhouse menu during the rowdy olden days. Steakhouses were steakhouses.  Salmon would have been sacrilege. Today’s modern menu features a Grilled Salmon Entree Salad along with Grilled Salmon Fillet, either blackened, pan-seared, or broiled wth homemade dill sauce.  They also offer Fried Walleye Pike, Fried or Broiled Tilapia, Chicken Monterey, and delicious Southern Fried Catfish Fillets.
It’s the stalwart standards that keep people coming back.  Their Famous Signature Lamb Fries, breaded and fried, are a rarity in town.  Talk about old school.  Their Fried Banana Peppers are what banana peppers should be, crisp fried and hot with cocktail sauce as a dipper.  Very simple and straightforward.
The Nighthawk Special is definitely the signature item at Columbia’s. Named for the famous deejay Tom Kindall, the king of midnight radio in the 1960s, the garlic butter-laden steak is a craving on a plate.  I always get mine with grilled onions, Diego Salad, and a baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream. Occasionally, I’ll add on the fabulously fantastic corn pudding.  The portions are huge and I usually lose the clean plate battle. I actually enjoy losing that battle because carryout boxes exist for a reason.  Leftovers!
  Last night, Flo, the 23 year veteran and long time General Manager, greeted us at the door with her usual big smile. I’ve known Flo for years and she always makes us feel at home in her second home. The restaurant is simple and dark with a lot of booths. Cozy. 
We were tempted to start off with the lamb fries, but knew we would kick ourselves had we passed up the banana peppers, so we chowed on those until the Diego Salads arrived.  I love that salad.  Sliced lettuce tossed in their special seasoned vinaigrette with radishes and cucumbers. The dressing almost wilts the salad in a very pleasant southern way. With a side of our favorite blue cheese in town, it was wonderful.  We toyed with ordering the Nighthawk, but after recently devouring it during one of the promotions, we went with prime rib and fried catfish.
The prime rib was cooked perfectly medium rare with a robust and deep au jus to the side. The catfish was sweet, crisp, and butter-soft. It was so good, I could not be bothered with using a fork.  I ate it with my fingers, pulling it apart and dipping it into tart sweet tarter sauce. Uh huh. No apologies. We both had corn pudding and Flo’s Signature Sweet Potato Casserole. The casserole was outrageous with a brown sugar nut crust topping covering whipped sweet potatoes mixed with coconut and raisins. Crazy good.
What a great old school and well meaning steakhouse.  No pretense. No glitz. Just good food with good people taking care of the customers.  That’s why they’ve been around for 62 years.
On the way out, we passed a patio table of new generation Columbia Steakhouse patrons.
The beat goes on. ■