The Josh Innes Show - What Is The Best Dive Bar Music?

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Our Friday ended up getting more lit than we had planned. What was supposed to be a chill night culminated in drunken karaoke at a dive bar. Speaking of dive bars, I don't believe new country belongs on the jukebox. Also, this leathery old lady crushed Jimmy Buffett karaoke..here's the audio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, everybody, here we go. There we are. There's some good volume for you. Good levels. Level check. One, two, three. Mike check. One, two, three. Mike check. Testing. One, two, one, two, three. Testing. It's weird that that's the universal mic check thing. I know that this is a random thing that maybe no one cares about unless, you know, you're on the radio or whatever. But it's one of those random things where not everybody actually does it. You know, it's just like, okay, you understand it and you know it because you've seen someone at some point do a mic check. So like mic check, one two, one, two, three, or testing one, two, three. Like, no one just talks when they do a mic check. They don't go like, hey, test the mic. Well, Steve, let me tell you, here's the levels. Or nobody says it at the level they would actually say it. Because when you're on the radio or recording something, generally speaking, you're going to be louder than what you do when you do a mic test.

So when you do a mic test, you're just, you know, mic check one, two, one, two, three, hello. But then the mic comes on and you're ready to talk and you're like, hey, everybody! I don't know why anybody would give a shit about that. I don't. But I'm kind of at that point in the day where my brain is kind of fried. I've been up since four, so I've been up about six hours. The good thing is about getting up at four is I was able to knock out a bunch of podcasts early so you guys get them bright and early. I would imagine you guys like that.

I would assume you would prefer to get a good number of your podcasts before the rooster crows than get it at one or two in the afternoon. good thing about being on the Eastern time. Like, I look at the clock, I'm like, oh, it's 1020, but a lot of my audience is getting this at 920, right? So, hey, if you guys like getting these things early, good for you because I plan on getting up here early and knocking out a bunch of them, mostly because I don't want to stay at the radio station until one or two in the afternoon every day. How about that?

All right, let's play a couple commercials, and let's get into some mischief. All right, so Friday, I was telling you about how we went out and just, we're going to go have a couple of beers. We were going to, you know, watch the Lions preseason game, the Tigers game, and then we were going to go about our business and go home. And that was the plan. By the way, Friday, I was still chug-a-lug and a lot of beers. And, like, you don't realize how many you're chugging. Being at a bar is a bad situation. Because you get, like, see, you get a pint, or in this case, I think I was getting, like, 20-ounce glasses. I'm like two or three gulps and it's down. And before you know what, I've had seven or eight of these, whatever.

But I was fine, and we walked home. And the way it's situated is our house is probably half a mile from this one bar. It's not that far of a walk through a little neighborhood. It's not a great neighborhood, but I don't feel unsafe when we're in this neighborhood. You know, it's just, it's not the nicest, most upscale thing. I was talking to someone today, and they're like, well, I like that you live in this neighborhood instead of out in one of those ritsy neighborhoods out in the further suburbs. And I'm like, listen, if this radio show becomes successful and your boy starts making some chingalang,

your boy is going to get the hell out of this neighborhood real quick, and I'm going to be in those nice neighborhoods again, and I'm going to live that life again. That's the life I lived in St. Louis, and I wasn't living, you know, like on Pill Hill or anything like that. It was just a nice, calm, cool neighborhood with a neat little downtown, and I could live with that. But anyway, so we're walking home, and things are going, you know, like we're going home, going to see Ross. Everything's fine. We ate dinner. We drink some beers. We're going to go home. Maybe have another beer at home. And we walked by another dive bar. The dive bar we went to. first was a place called Cozy Lounge

all right then we ended up at a place called the starting gate that's the place we walked by was starting

gate and this is what I heard emanating from the building the very faint off in the distance sound

because it was through a wall and through the door but I heard this as we were walking by I just bought a water

back hell it's filled up for me and you and you say you are snuffling Oh, I don't think it's true Oh, why don't we get drunk And screw? And this woman, if you haven't seen my

Instagram or anything with the video, this woman looks exactly how she sounds Like a tiny, leathery woman wearing a denim skirt I think it was a denim skirt and a cowboy hat and with the raspy smoker's voice, everybody in there had raspy smoker's voices. So when I heard that coming from outside the building, I said, Jilly, I'm just drunk enough to go in this place.

It's one of those kind of dive bars that you walk by and you're like, I'm probably never going to go in here because as much as I like dive bars, there's like a certain level that you still want to get to when you go to a dive bar. There's not like, you don't want to go to a real, real, real. real shithole. But you also, you know, like there's a level. There's like a line that you'll look at. But I said, Jilly, we've never walked in here. We're just drunk enough to go. So let's go in

and see. So we go in. Lady singing karaoke. She's a fun time. Other dude gets up there and sings, whatever he sings. There's a random black guy in this bar. Now, this neighborhood we live in is a very white neighborhood, but it's like kind of hipsters mixed with really white trashy people. Come to think of it. I haven't seen too many black folks. are some, because there's a couple guys that live down the street that are always on their porch. There's this black guy that's always smoking weed on his porch and his lady, who I'm guessing is his wife or his girlfriend, she's white and she's missing a leg. And they sit on their stoop together and when we walk across, we see them. So there are black folks in our neighborhood,

but it's a white trashy mixed with hipsters. The hipsters are trying to infiltrate the neighborhood, a little gentrification. That's what they're trying to do. But it's mostly white trash people. pleasant little place. It's not terrible by any means, but it's mostly white trash people and some hipsters who've worked their way in and then us. So there's one random black guy in there that's like singing like some R&B song. And I'm like, oh, he's the one guy here. And I start singing along from the bar. And the bartender goes, hey, you should get up there and sing. And I don't want to do that shit. Like I know that people think that I covet so much attention. I really don't. I don't give a shit. I don't need you to pay attention to me.

I don't need you to fawn over me. In fact, I try to stay quiet. I try to just stay out of the way for the most part. And people view that as me being aloof. I really just don't feel like messing with people and being the center of attention. It's honest to God, not my thing. Unless I'm drunk enough, and then I am. And I'm like, no, I don't want to do that.

Then Jilly starts bullying me because, you know, Jilly is bitchy and she starts bullying me. And she says, go do it, sign up. So I go up there. I'm like, Julie, I don't know what to sing. This is a small little bar, too. This is not some fancy karaoke. This is a guy with like the little screen, the computer, and the speaker. That's all this is.

This isn't some fancy like, you know, Asian karaoke or some shit or drink Houston or whatever. This is your basic, like, dude with a computer, one TV screen. It's showing the song, speaker, let's go. I'm like, I don't know what to sing. And she goes, sing Home Sweet Home. I'm like, that could be a song that might get them going. Like, you know, when you go into the karaoke situation, you have to have a song that's going to get people going.

You don't want to sing, you know, black hole sun or something like that. So, and that's a slow song at least, but it's one that, you know, can get people going. It's a power ballad, right? So I go, all right, I want to do, I want to do Home Sweet Home. And then you got some of this goodness, right, right here. Two many romantic dreams up in lights falling off the sand to the screen. The heart's like an open book for the whole world to be. Sometimes nothing keeps me together at the sea.

I'm on my way. I'm on my way. Home sweet home. Tonight, tonight, I'm on my way. And that was me. And when you actually listen to the audio, because when you're up there, you don't know if people are paying attention to you or not. You're just going at it.

I'm talking about it like I'm at live aid or something, but you don't know what people are doing if they're paying attention. When you actually hear the audio from a video and all you hear is people having random conversations while you're doing karaoke, it does confirm that no one actually likes people doing karaoke except the people who are doing karaoke. Because these people are not paying attention to me. Hell, if I was John Mellencamp, I probably would have just started. stopped in the middle of my performance. I would have said, you sons of bitches aren't even paying attention, you damn Trumpers. And I would have just, like, stormed off and said, you get no more show because these people won't stop talking while the performance is happening.

So anyway, I did that. And I mean, I had to have, like, I was in that kind of zone where the gal keeps bringing out. They may have been Miller lights. I'm not sure. But they were like, you know, 20-something ounces. There's big mugs of Miller light. I don't know how many ounce. I'll have to chat GPT a picture and let them, you know, tell me how many ounces I had. But, We drink some, I'm chugging these beers and get to a point that I'm super hammered. I go apparently sign up to sing another song. And for the life of me, I don't know what song I signed up to sing. We ended up leaving before anyway.

I have no recollection. I'm trying to trace my steps. I'm trying to go back. And I'm trying to figure out what song I was going to do. And I cannot, like for a million bucks, I cannot figure out what song it was that I was going to do. I do know that at the previous bar, when we decided to leave, I left about, you know, $20 worth of songs in the jukebox. So some people are going to get some kick-ass Neil Diamond at that bar, so you're welcome. I also learned that Steely Dan is solid dive bar music.

You know, I put in a bunch of money into the jukebox and just, like, I played like seven straight Steely Dan songs. And they were all, like, they all kind of hit pretty good. Like, it's a solid, like, mid-tempo type of tune to play to bar. Because sometimes, like, a lot of the songs that were playing when we were in there were, like, shitty new country songs. Like, hey, here's a, what's his name? One of those doofuses, you know. That's what they go by. One of those doofuses.

I'm like, I don't really want to hear this shitty new country at this dive bar. Dive bars are for, like, outlaw country. Dive bars, like, when you're in a dive bar and the clientele is, it's not old, old clientele, but it's like a mixed bag of some younger people, whatever. to me dive bar music needs to be like outlaw country or Bob Seeger you know that type of stuff that's what we're looking for in our outlaw like I need outlaw kind of I need dinosaur if I'm going to be at a bar I need dinosaur like a dive bar with that clientele you're drinking domestic cold beer you're eating a burger off the grill in there dinosaur do you happen to know any old Hank will you I'm a dinosaur. Like, that's what you need to have at a dive bar. That's dive bar music. Not Morgan Wallen.

Not last night we let the liquor house. That's not what you needed a dive bar. Dive bar music is, you know, highwaymen. That's dive bar music. Lukanbach, Texas. That's dive bar music. Bob Seeger, you know, like Outlaw Country slash Southern Rock. Like, that smell.

Well, that's dive bar music. Dive bar music is not like, you know, sitting here drinking beer talking, God, amen. That's not what that is. We don't do that here. What we do is we get like Loretta Lennon shit on the jukebox. That's how it should be at a dive bar. But anyway, don't remember going home at all. Was not hung over on Saturday.

Had to get up and go sling some meat. I had to do one of these meat truck remotes. where all these people go out to buy, you know, $40, they spend $40 on 20 rib-eyes or whatever, like to buy these big boxes of frozen meat. So I had to do two of those this weekend. But, you know, as I told you, I don't get hung over. I don't know what it is. It's just something about me.

I have a gift. But anyhow, more to come.