Joe's Star Lounge
Joe's Star Lounge
By Arwulf Arwulf
12--Agenda--December 1993
December, 1984. Just a night or two before Christmas. We sat at a table near the back of Joe's Star Lounge, right next to the jukebox. Joe stood behind the bar, quietly giftwrapping bottles of liquor. Very pastoral.
One person had the entire dance floor to himself, and used every inch of it. He was a diminutive fellow, wearing owlish, thick-lensed black-rimmed eyeglasses. Periodically he'd end up standing at the jukebox, shaking the perspiration from his mostly bald head, and selecting his favorite Buddy Holly singles. We watched him as he twirled back out onto the dance floor, rocking about with wild abandon as Buddy sang his silly little refrain of "hi-hi, huh-huh-huh hi-hi..."
The dancer was none otherthan David Kozubei, of David's Books, whose likeness still peers from the doorway of that wonderful used bookshop at 622 E. Liberty. They tell me he's doing something media related in California nowadays. I recall his face being ubiquitous on the streets and at cultural events in Ann Arbor during the late '60s and throughout the 70s. On this night he was in his own universe, where Buddy Holly spun him like a top across the dead sea bottoms of Plutonia, or wherever it was that the music took him. The scene l've described here is one which I am not likely to forget.
Indeed the memorable nights spent under the "Saturn" light fixtures of Joe's Star Lounge are among the most cherished that I have in my panavision head. Talking to Joe just recently, l've been handed a small ocean of historical information, concerning the building itsetf and its neighborhood, and about Mr. Tiboni.
Firstly, let's consider the bricks which are no longer there. In 1824, at the corner of Main & Huron, there was Allen's Trading Post. Just next door, the structure which we're concerned with was included n the original plot of the city, and Joe gives the date of its construction as 1848. (By contrast, the blocks which house the Old Town and the Del Rio date from the1870s.)
Somewhere around 1900, a tavern opened up at this location on Main Street. Up until the 1940s it was called the Orient. Then Dot's Bar. By the 1960s it was the Star Bar. By the early 1980s, our historical neighborhood had seriously deteriorated and the place was up for grabs.
Enter Joe Tiboni. I first remember him coming to help us organize Anti-War activities in 1970 at Forsythe Junior High School. An enraged parent thwacked him on the chest with a notebook, calling him a communist! Branded an outside agitator, our hero was physically thrown out of Huron High School in a similar attempt to bring the issues to the attention of young people. Joe and I really got to know each other working at the Free Concerts on Otis Spann Memorial Field off of Fuller Road in the early 1970s.
Cut to the early '80s, when Mr. Flood's Party, next door to the Old Town, began to flounder. Joe was mighty interested in this space, and had plans for a Joe's Bar & Grill, with an actual grill from the front of a truck mounted on the back wall. But it was not to be.
Instead he chose the Star on Main Street, and on January 20th, 1982, Joe's Star Lounge opened. The renovations were impressive! A very nice working class bar had become a unique and very cool place to hang out and hear live music. No other lounge in this town has ever come close to what Joe's was, before or since.
We saw Big Joe Turner and J.C.Heard, who let a young Mr B siting at the piano. We sat out back of the place with Clifton Chenier as he rested between sets. We sang along with the Persuasions, heeding Jerry Lawson's urgings when not enough voices joined him in a spiritual: "Don't never, never, never be afraid to say 'Amen'!". We caught Martha Reeves, Sippie Wallace, Griot Galaxy, Country Joe Mac Donald, Catfish Hodge, Ellen Mcllwaine, Commander Cody, Mose Allison, Los Lobos, DreamSyndicate, Sonic Youth, The Violent Femmes, The Feelies and R.E.M.
Tiboni rightly points out that the heart and soul of Joe's Star Lounge were the local bands who cooked there on a regular basis: The Blue Front Persuaders, Steve Nardella, George Bedard & the Bonnevilles, Kevin Lynch & the Cadillac Cowboys, Melodioso, Domino, SLK, the Falcons and the Sun Messengers. That's not everybody, either.
Joe had all-ages shows on Saturday afternoons catering to the very young punk thrash crowd, and there was an "Open Mouth Poetics" series, piloted by Pat Hinchey, and often featuring Torn Lynch, poet & undertaker from Milford. Also present at these readings was Mike Myers, the world's most philosophical shoe salesman, who went on to initiate the Sottini's Sub Shop readings a few years later. You see, Joe's was a happening place.
So why isn't it still there? Joe explained at length the gradual demise of that particular block. A theater at Main & Ann was condemned and demolished in the early '50s. In 1971, a hotel at Main & Huron burnt down, leaving a vacant lot which some of us hoped would become a park. But this block was doomed to development. Even the County Jail moved away to Hogback Road. All that remained was Joe's and a slender 'Lawyer's Building' alongside it.
Investors began to circle like buzzards, and in September of 1984, the future of Joe's Star Lounge suddenly looked grim. And Joe was prepared to, well, relocate.
The plot sickens: There was something called the Ann Arbor Music Project, and a mini-festival of local music called "Cruisin' Ann Arbor." This went well, and a second one was proposed, but then, says Joe, a bidding war erupted and they ended up holding the event at the U Club, which at the time was being investigated by the State for operating as a public lounge even though it didn't have that kind of a liquor license.
Lots of people claimed Joe sicced the feds on them out of spite, but this simply isn't true. They were operating illegally, and the chickens carne home to roost just as the second "Cruisin' Ann Arbor" tried to open at the U Club. So they had to rigidly enforce the 'members only' policy, and, well, that sorta kept Ann Arbor from cruisin' in. Kinda ironic, no?
Joe is quite bitter about the whole thing, and understandably so. In June of 1984 the landlords told him they wanted to buy the lease. At that time, he was planning on hosting the second "Cruisin Ann Arbor," and asked that he be permitted to remain open until September for that event. A strange contractual flim-flam occured when the landlords put the money for his lease in an escrow account, stipulating that they didn't have to give him the bread until they officially gave him notice to close. (Joe's lawyer goofed and overlooked this clause.)
So they strung Joe along for nine months, until a fellow from city council by the name of Jernigan said, in effect: You guys can build here, but don't be fuckin with our merchants in this way. By that time, Joe's capital had been eaten up, and this may have something to do with why today there is no Joe's to go to. I do recall a standing joke about when the next "final night" would be. But those nine months must've been horrible for Joe to endure.
April 13th, 1985 is when they finally gave him notice. Soon afterward, it went down. I still have some bricks from the remains of the building. Today there is a monstrous Wart on the site, and through some interesting socio-political architectural logic, the Liberty Title building was spared. Joe points out how the building block, stair-step effect of these buildings was designed to comply with zoning laws which demand that the taller the building is, the further it should be from the street. So the upper stories recede. Neat, huh?
Today Joe Tiboni is active in this community as an organizer of Poetry and Music events, most recently at Cava Java on South University at East U. He throws a birthday party at the Performance Network every January, and dubs it "Joe's Star Lounge In Exile". Will there ever be another club like the one he so diligently ran for all too short of a time? Now that's a great reason to stick around Ann Arbor.