Though the red-checked tablecloths and steins of beer might as easily be found in Heidelberg or Hanover, the audiences are more akin to Hackensack. Some, of course, are college kids, but a surprising number are middle-aged couples, flushed of face and strong of voice, swinging down memory lane, with a stop now and then for a swig and some peanuts. The band is properly twangy, the repertory—On, Wisconsin!, "Hold That Tiger," "Roll Out the Barrel"—the sort that only a trombone, a tuba, a washboard and a couple of banjos can get away with.
Beer-and-banjo fun was started six years ago in San Francisco at the Red Garter on North Broadway Street, and from Frisco the fad has rippled across the land. There's the Blue Banjo in Seattle, the Levee in Dallas, the Silk and Satin in Portland, the Red Garter in Chicago.
Typical is Your Father's Mustache in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. There, for $3, the nostalgiophile can sit back with a pitcher of Schlitz and have a look under the mellow light of Tiffany lamps at gilt-framed pictures of Civil War officers. Fellows feeling particularly risqué can peep at pictures of Gay Nineties showgirls; those feeling like a change of face can purchase a mustache for 50¢. Young people feel a sense of release from the rapt silence that is derigueur at cool-jazz joints. Stag girls like the clubs because the wholesome entertainment reassures them that the boy singing Bye Bye Blackbird across the stein is not likely to turn out to be a mugger (and even if he is, at least he's a happy one).
Mustache is owned by Joel Schiavone, 27, a barefoot boy from Harvard who sports a stubble of raggedy beard. A banjo strummer himself, Joel opened a club in Boston two years ago shortly after graduating from business school. Happily riding the banjo tide, he has opened another in Cape Cod and is planning a new one on New Orleans' Bourbon Street. But Joel views the future with the cold eye of a trained economist. "Novelty wears off and the crowds drop off," he says. "The life expectancy of these places is ten to 15 years at most."