My undergraduate college experience shaped me into an English/Political Science major who loved dense and difficult books. I’ll defend my love of Faulkner and Constitutional interpretation to the end of my life. I often wonder if any member of the current Supreme Court has read Light in August or Absalom, Absalom! I’m pretty sure that the now senior senator from my home state hasn’t.
But I don’t want to focus here on the important legal decision as to whether an American can also be a white nationalist and a racist, because in my heart outside of Dixie, I know that the answer is a defiant, definite yes, mainly because so many in American history “don’t give a damn about their bad constitution (reputation).”
You know that when someone says they are “110 percent” against racism” that he’s playing with a fiery cross somewhere.
Which brings me to the other part of my undergrad education at a university located in the geographic center of the state of Alabama.
Both the campus of the University of Montevallo and the town from which it sprang were defiantly dry. That, of course, didn’t stop a semi-student, a friend of a college friend, Sam, from carting a whole case of Budweiser through my freshman dorm and, ahem, up to my second floor room one fall night. I remember his unruly beard, and the bandana Sam wore around his head, and that his girlfriend (whose name is lost forever to me) admired my Neil Young poster, a candid shot from On the Beach with Neil facing camera and grinning. And most likely stoned.
A state we’d be getting into soon on that and so many subsequent evenings.
Drinking in a dorm room has its merits, like lounging comfortably on a bed during male/female dorm visiting hours and being able to listen to the music of one’s choice, be it Neil, or ELP, or Bowie. Some, not me, chose SKYNYRD, too.
There were no bars in Montevallo during my freshman year except for a lonely outpost on the Calera highway, just past the official town limits. It once had a name, but like that of the girl above, I won’t recall it, so let’s say it was Red Dog’s. I never attended its services, though, because its patrons, at least so I heard, kept to themselves and might have been just a tad American/racist/white nationalist.
Things happen to a person between their freshman and sophomore years, and sure, we can joke about the term “sophomoric,” but in Alabama, becoming legal drinking age—19 then—meant never having to say you’re sorry ever again for sneaking into clubs or buying underage beer.
Skirting all these questions, though, was Red Dog’s, who got bought up by former/current student Ray McKinney. Clearly, I’m not sure if Ray was still attending UM at the time he bought the bar, or whether it was his money, his dad’s, or someone else’s that financed this endeavor.
Nor do I know how or why, over that summer, once a few renovations were finished, they decided to rename the bar,
The Kollege Klub.
I assume that unless you’re the senior senator from Alabama, I don’t have to spell out the reality that when you substitute more than two Ks for Cs in any prominent sign or brand in old Dixie, you might be speaking in a certain code (unless you’re trying to sell glazed doughnuts).
I truly don’t know what Ray’s thinking on this matter was, but I remember his enthusiasm the day he burst in the student newspaper office (“The Alabamian,” of which I was editor in that sophomore year, and being Alabamian has its vestiges on my heart and soul) wanting to buy a half-page ad to announce the grand opening of the KK.
At this moment, I’m thinking of Ray’s last name, and that other prominent K.
Oh.
I never knew Ray well, even over the course of that year when I frequented the Klub often, enjoying myself after an afternoon’s bout of studying (I did have to chase him down to pay for that first and many subsequent ads, but he finally came though, just before the Klub itself folded). The Klub had no membership requirements that I knew of, and in 1975, didn’t have to worry so much about catering to anyone but the vastly white Montevallo student body.
Even legendary Shelby County sheriff Red Walker kept from issuing Raid orders on the joint.
Does any of this sound quaint, in a sort of old south way?
Well, let’s throw in two other factors now—relatively harmless, unless you were the parent of one of us on the infamous 25 cent beer nights the Klub held on Tuesdays. The first few Tuesdays, a quarter would get you any beer, bottled or tap, that they sold. On those nights, coeds I knew danced on tables. Later, the policy was amended to 25 cent Busch beer, but when you’re 19-21, why do you care which brand you can swill for a quarter?
I do have some discretion, so I won’t go any further down this road, and I have no stories of any major altercation at the Kollege Klub to offer, mainly because, again, if you were of a different background from the southern caucasians who flooded everywhere, why would you chance entry to this place with its two or three prominent Ks?
One Friday night a Black couple did venture in and stayed a good while, bumping to KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight” a favorite song on the bar’s jukebox. Several of us joined them on the dance floor, too. See: things can be harmless and fun if we let them.
The other factor, the one that germinated this memory, is that the KK had an unofficial house band that played a couple of nights a week. Led by a student named Robert Churchill, who played guitar and drums, (but mainly guitar in this memory) this band could have been famous and actually was for us, though yet again, my good memory can’t provide their name. But it can provide two of the cover songs they played on these nights.
If I asked you to guess two songs that a local band might feature in a place called The Kollege Klub, run by a guy named Ray McKinney in a bar just on the outskirts of a dry town/campus in the geographic center of the state of Alabama in the year 1975 (George Wallace still governor) how far down your guess list would you have to go to come up with these?
Ready?
Maybe I had heard the song somewhere, but I don’t think so, because when I finally heard Cream do it, I didn’t realize how short it really is. Robert Churchill’s band extended it to a major jam, maybe singing the last verse two or three times and then wailing on a guitar worthy of greatness (I say after feeling more than a few Busches).
I loved it so, as did the rest of our crowd.
Still one of the great songs of the rock era.
But even if you think, “Oh yeah, I see the jam here,” what about this next one? What on earth would motivate this to be chosen for playing in front of…us?
Yeah, it, too, reels into a major improvisational territory at the close, material worth closing one’s eyes to in the darkness, out on the outskirts of a rural town in Alabama. Or at least some of us could close our eyes.
I still see Robert’s face as he sang:
“Everybody’s knows the secret.
Everybody knows the score.”
Even if we kept what we knew/know to ourselves.
A way to live, a time to remember.
A close, intense study of what it all meant.