I went to Chicago for the New Year, and rang it in at the locally famous dive the Lakeview Lounge, home to Nightwatch, the city’s best so-bad-they’re-good classic rock cover band. Sometimes Agitator guestblogger Bryan Westhoff wrote a bit about the Lounge and Nightwatch here. Agitator director of design Brian Kieffer took pictures of the Lounge at a Chicago blogarama a while back and posted them here. And Courtney wrote up our New Year’s experience here.

The bar is cool in a dive-bar kinda’ way (as Westhoff notes, it’s Ryan Adams favorite spot when he’s in town), but it hasn’t yet been taken over by, as one of my Chicago friends put it, “hipster doofuses.” Unless of course you count the five of us who were there.

At any rate, it was a great time, and I got the whole place to fall for the old “fake New Year’s countdown” gag at about 11:50.

The drive from Indy to Chicago was a little hectic. I got the call from Fox to do the TV interview as we were about three hours from the city. They said it’d be no problem doing the interview from the Chicago studios, but I’d need to pick up the pace a little to be sure I got there in time. Enter the Tippecanoe County, Indiana police department. An undercover Camero nabbed me and two other guys in one stop. Mighty efficient for a government employee,no? Of course, they’re always a bit more efficicent when it comes to collecting revenue, aren’t they? Clocked me at 85 in a 65. One hundred-two dollars.

I obviously made it in time, but barely. I also had my dog with me. So the producer told me to tell the security guard she was part of the interview. It’s the only way they’d let her in the building (hey, she is pretty talented). So yes. My dog watched my interview from the Fox studios.

Next week, I’m taking a mini-vacation to San Francisco for a few days. If you have any cool, off-the-beaten-path recommendations, drop me a line.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at 9:55 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.