Growing Up in the 1970s French Quarter. Dave Brinks, second generation owner of the Goldmine Saloon. Interview.

Growing Up in the 1970s French Quarter. Dave Brinks, second generation owner of the Goldmine Saloon. Interview.

Interview with Dave Brinks, owner of the Goldmine Saloon, about his youth in the French Quarter. References to “this place” are to the same business. This interview was conducted May 15, 2012. The Goldmine Saloon was opened by his parents around 1970. Brinks is a noted local poet whose last book was launched at Lawrence Feringhetti’s City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and together with his wife Megan Burns--a graduate of the Allen Ginsberg founded Naropa Institute--host the nationally famous 17 Poets! reading series on Thursday nights at the Goldmine.

Mark Folse: What I wanted to do is talk to you about growing up in the French Quarter. Where you in fact born, were your family living here?

Dave Brinks: Well actually my family got their first place in the French Quarter, which is this building, in 1970, 1971. And I was just four years old. And then we had a family home in Algiers. So, and then of course my Dad didn’t go to school past the fourth grade. Actually neither of my parents went to college. They grew up good, hard working people, went from sanding cars for $5 a car [until] my dad started doing ice machines and juke boxes for place andthen he graduated from that to doing pool tables in places. And then he graduated from that instead of just putting the pool tables and the ice machines and the juke boxes ion the places in they would get the place so he could kind of do the whole thing. This was the first place that they really got that was really great. The guy that sold it to them was a jazz philanthropist, his name was Jules Kahn, who owned a lot of buildings actually and they kind of did this building on a handshake. In fact, he wasn’t going to sell it outright to my dad and my mom so he said, but probably, I don’t know, I’m not sure there was some kind of business stuff they wanted to avoid, I’m not sure, but he said but if you get this building down here on Dauphine which was right before Esplanade on the right then I’ll swap you that building for this building ‘cause I want that building. So that’s what they did. And then [my father] got this place. And then had a couple of places on Bourbon Street that he leased. One was an arcade, which was fun and great. And then they had a sandwich shop which also had some machines in it, some arcade machines in it and both on Bourbon Street so that was kind of my playground. Plus they had a little warehouse in old Algiers where they kept a lot of the equipment.

Folse: When they took over this business, you moved from Algiers to here?

Brinks: No, we still kept the family house in Algiers but we were always here so, you know, whatever, for New Years and oh God,, since I was five years old, you know, all of them, Mardi Gras, everything, as soon as I could carry an ice bucket I was working. But it was fun too, because when it got to be later in the evening I could sit out on Bourbon Street or you know during the day times when you have to work run around and hang out with my friends, the tap dancers. Of course you know at that time all we loved to do was, besides watch all the other characters, was play pinball. And just get into whatever kind of foolishness that you want to get into when you’re at that age. I was tap dancing on Bourbon Street. The Canedos who lived over on St. Ann, was a family of firemen and they had a lot of kids and so I would sleep over there from time to time. In fact it was strange. It was at 622 St. Ann I think and I remember Beth McCormick who was friend of mine in later years had that same place and I didn’t realize when I went to her house that I was in the Canedos’ house. One of the Canedos, John, he and I were the only two white tap dancers in the French Quarter.

Folse: By the time you’re parents were running this place you were down here during business hours? Did you spend the night? Because it’s a bar, obviously business ran into [all hours].

Brinks: You see this is the thing is, where I was supposed to go and where I wasn’t supposed to go. Or they would tell you where you could be and where you couldn’t be. In other words, my parents didn’t mind where I was so long as I wasn’t on this side of the quarter ‘cause still at the time in the early ‘70s this side of the Quarter was considered extremely dangerous. I wasn’t not allowed to come over here until I was about, you know, actually come over, until I was 13, 12, maybe 10 or 11. But I would come with my parents. So we were pretty much running…there wasn’t anything over here for kids anyway…so we were pretty much over on St. Ann and the rest of the Quarter and up on Bourbon and Royal and Chartres to the River. Canal Street. But year, from Dauphine to Burgundy to Rampart, I mean, that was not, people don’t understand it. It was really f---king dangerous. It really was. No question about it.

Folse: Was it the people who were down there. The nightclubs, the businesses that were down there?

Brinks: You didn’t’really have too much trouble in the [Goldmine],. you know, it was mostly bikers who were here and in a sense it was the bikers, in a weird way, kept things in check, so there wouldn’t be just pell-mell craziness although that would happen, so they kept things in check. I got to grow up, I got to know a lot of the bikers at that time and they had the funniest names. There was a guy named Fungus and trapped alligators when he wasn’t in the Quarter and fixed people motorcycles and he had a daughter named Mildew. There was a guy named Crazy Dave, he was one of the head, and Blake and they were one of the head of the Galloping Gooses at the time. There were Doc Wells and Little Suzy and Hobbit who got married here in a shotgun wedding. They had the wedding here at the saloon and I was a little older then and they had a pizza joint on St. Peters street where the pool table is now, we had a pizza joint there and I remember he opened the door and he shot the shotgun up over into the sky. So it was literally a shotgun wedding. But these guys were pretty great. It was all of the different ones, there was Long Haired Mike.It’s also artists and stuff.

Folse: So you’re 10 or 11 and you are basically bar back so you’re seeing these people, talking to them, getting to know them:

Brinks: I guess what is the funnest thing when you’re a kid seeing all the bikers. They were very polite. They didn’t get foulmouthed or into any fights around me. And they were actually very respectful. And you’d have magicians and pool hustlers and stuff and they’d show you all the tricks. That’s what I always loved. when they’d teach you different trick,s they’d show you how to make a coin disappear behind your ear. Do you know how to make a blow torch out of Jack Daniels bottle? Fungus showed me that. You lit a cigarette and you put as much of the smoke into the bottle, the empty bottle of Jack and you put your thumb over the top of it and shook it and then if you put a lighter in front of it and then all of a sudden this big flame could come out of it. it wouldn’t explode or anything. Just all kinds of stuff like that, Ruthie, you know

Folse: That’s one of the things I want to ask you about, some of the characters in the Quarter. So you’re 10 or 11 when you’re starting to be let out of the door

Brinks: On this side of the Quarter.

Folse: Earlier your parents had a place closer to the river.

Brinks: On Bourbon.

Folse: When did they start letting you out the door>

Drinks: You know I’d wander around without telling them. But the thing was that all of the night characters that you would see anyway, were always on Bourbon during the day, all of them: Ruthie, Chicken Man. Probably the bikers and stuff, they had jobs during the day so they wouldn’t be over here until later in the evening. So you were constantly seeing Pork Chop. I mean, that was probably the most amazing person I have ever seen in my life. His name was Pork Chop. He a tap dancer, he was the greatest tap dancer ever. I mean this guy would do flips and everything else. He was always dressed up in a suit and a derby hat, he was dressed to the nines, and people would gather around him, he would fill his [hat with tips], his wife was always there and she was dressed to the nines. He came to find out later that song Mr. Bojangles was literally written about him. Jerry Jeff Walker lived, and still has a place here, over on Burgundy Street and he wrote that song. But see they were at this joint on Bourbon Street, on lower Bourbon Street, and Elouard Burke was there so. It was a place where white people and black people could get together without too much hassle. So anyway the police raided the joint one evening, not Burke, he got out of it, but Pork Chop and Jerry Jeff Walker had a joint or something and they took them, arrested them and so that night Pork Chop and Jerry Jeff Walker spent the night in jail. And that’s when Pork Chop told Jerry Jeff Walker his whole life story. And so then [Walker] did write that song and called it Mr. Bojangles but it was really about Pork Chop.

I’ll tell you one of the saddest things I ever saw was after Pork Chop died, now he was a tap dancer that was tap dancing on Bourbon Street from the early 50s and he was very well known. I would see him, probably at the time that I started watching him he was probably 50, and maybe in his late 40s or early 50s and he was still doing flips and stuff and he had so much class. When he died I guess it was something around 1980. And I think he really did well for himself because we always heard he had a house on the lakefront, a really nice house, him and his wife, from the money he that would make tap dancing on the weekend, primarily but all week long. But his wife came in, we had the sandwich shop on Bourbon Street, on 633 Bourbon Street, I think its now a daiquiri joint, I think its Fat Tuesdays daiquiri join, that’s where we spent, we spent a lot of time there as a kid on the balcony and everything in there.. She would come in after he passed away and she would come in She would still be dressed in her white dresses, and the net hat and she would come around with his hat and then she would say you know Pork Chop is still, he’s really sick and we knew that he was already dead. And she wasn’t hustling us. She was sad. She had always had this hat, and I had always thought aboutt hat, that hat represented their livelihood and their whole life together. So it was always sad to see her and then she stopped coming around. Chris Owens, you know I’d see Chris Owens you know because we had an arcade right next to the Chris Owens place.

Folse: Let me go back to the arcades and you are 10 or 11. So had did you make friends when you were down here

Brinks:. You made friends on the street. Everybody knew everybody. You know, not as many white kids on the street. You’d go to the parades together. Our thing was, I guess in early ’74, ’73, we were hanging out playing at the arcades. And there were a lot of kids who would come over from the Iberville Projects right there and also the Lafitte projects over there.

Folse: Where were these arcades?

Brinks: There was a lot. There was one over on Royal Street back here on the other side of A&P and then there was another one, that was a pretty good one, I don’t remember the name of that one, there was [one] game room that was the 600 block on the lakeside, that was 631. And then there was the 504 arcade which was our one. That was back before video games, these were electro mechanical games, there were black lights and mirrors, it was not video games like now. Not like Pac-Man.

Folse: What else did you do when you were younger besides the arcades?

Brinks: Hang out on the Square, go up to the river, I mean, it was just simply an adventure to people watch. That’s what you did. You kind of watched people like Chicken Man, the Lucky Bead lady, you definitely never tired of walking by the naked joints with the pictures outside with their private parts covered up and try and peek in the doors and stuff.

Folse: Where did you go to school? Were you going to school here?

Brinks: I went to Jesuit High School, and then I went to Aurora Gardens which was on, you know, part of the Chalmette Battlefield. We used to pretend we were doing archeological digs. We were going to find the musket ball that saved the city of New Orleans, stuff l like that. Aurora Gardens Academy. What was fun, also, you’d get to see the prize fighters of those day like at the Municipal Auditorium. yYou would go to the Municipal Auditorium a lot, that was the place to be. You’d go over there a lot because that’s where the circus was. They would keep the elephants downstairs and you’d get go hang out with the elephants. And that’s where when they had a big prize fight, like when Muhammad Ali would come they would do a week of training things at the Municipal Auditorium. And all those big prize fighters. I remember back in ’75 I remember John Belushi came into the arcade one time. So you meet those kind of celebrity people all the time. I don’t know. It was just basically people watching, hanging out and tap dancing. All the summers that’s what we did, tap dancing.

Folse: This wasn’t a neighborhood where you’d go out and threw the football.

Brinks: Yeah, no, there was no football throwing. You know get some somebody’s balcony on Bourbon Street and drop things in their beers as they went by and then duck.

Folse: What did you all do to get into trouble by the time you were a teenager?

Brinks: Well, you know, that’s when the idea of altering consciousness entered the picture.

Folse: This doesn’t need to go in here if you don’t want.

Brinks: No, no, you’d see people, that’s whey I remember there were certain people besides the people who did spin art, which was really popular and cotton candy, and then there were people on the streets that had microdots and stuff like that. [Microdot was a form of LSD].

Folse: This was around the mid-70s.

Brinks: And so there was that kind of adventure going on. I had epilepsy, really pretty bad epilepsy, t. my head was always kind of tripping out, so I was not as much an experimenter with those things.

Folse: Did you ever live past adolescence outside of the quarter?

Brinks: You see, after [there was] a dangerous period and I was here a lot more, when I was getting to be in my later teen years. The whole biker thing had kind of fallen apart. The Galloping Gooses, one of the presidents got shot in the back and killed. That was a person who used to hang out here at this place. There was I think there was a lot of bad drugs that had come in in, not just for the biker world. They used to have a great, a sort of a code of honorwith in that world and it seemed to not happen, it seemed to completely fall part. I remember I was bartending. I was 19, downstairs and one of the biker’s brothers pulled a .357 (handgun) on me. I was lucky. I grabbed it from him It was just, it got very, very not good. That was just a horrible time with the bikers. They were always trouble all the time. They would always threaten people and tell people they would burn their building down. It just got bad.

Folse: What was the crowd like in the Quarter, besides the biker’s and the people who lived here and Ruthie and Pork Chop?

Brinks: Well, It was always a hustle down here, even if you were an artist or whatever you were down here. I think it was a hustle for a way of life for people who had a creative vision towards how they wanted to live and really, fully embodied the aliveness of that. To some extent, however they needed to do that. There was the Luck Bead lady that was giving beads out for a buck or two for luck, or Chicken Man who had the voodoo beads. All those people hung out together. There was a lot of prostitutes, there was that. A lot of dancers, you wouldn’t call them prostitues, you would call them dancers or something else.

Folse: When you were down here between 10 or 11 and 18 was a still more of a residential neighborhood before gentrification.

Brinks: No. There was a lot more joints. There’s a lot less joints now. I think the idea of neighborhood that we know of that they seem to like now is much different than the other kind of neighborhood. There were a lot more joints on Burgundy Street, and music joints and stuff like that. And also this was the poorer side of town. In other words, Dauphine Street was the cutoff. This side was all white and this side was primarily, you kno. I mean gradually more white people moved in over here over the course of a couple of decades. But I mean old musicians were living [lists several musicians--names unintelligible--living] on Burgundy Street. There were a lot of hangouts. This was considered the poor side of town and maybe that’s why my family was able to get it. Because my family wasn’t rich.

Folse: Your parents, because that was the safer side of the Quarter, they weren’t too worried about you running around Bourbon and south of there?

Brinks: Well, yeah, I guess they were but they knew I had some sense in my head. And you definitely didn’t walk on this side of town at night time. I mean first of all it was incredibly dark. And you didn’t know what you’d get into.

Folse: I think everybody as an adolescent whose parents would let them down town would try to stand outside the strip joints. Were there music places that [you would stand outside], or weren’t you allowed to run the street during band hours?

Brinks: The one thing that you like to do was watch people paint. There was an artist named Boland, I don’t remember his first name, he had a gallery and you could see him paint from the front door. The music places, it was just: here’s the thing. You always wanted to hear music going on, I think the things for me, that’s still to this day, it was hard for me, if I got to somebody’s house and it was really quiet everybody was quiet and II didn’t hear a beep, it would send my brain into a bad space and would sometimes trigger epilepsy because I liked to hear noise and people going on and music and the life blood of the city was hearing jazz, just the sheer excitement of the whole thoroughfare of sounds was like breathing air.

Folse: There were a lot more jazz club and a lot fewer cover bands and karaoke.

Brinks: There were a lot more jazz joints. There was one on the corner where the cat’s Meow was and they were pretty good. They were always playing seven nights a week. I think they put a sign out that said Dixieland. But you know it was ljazz. It wasn’t like Dixieland. Dixieland was boing music. They had at that time a lot of R&B, which was really great, listening to the real R&B, a lot of real R&B bands playing really, really, really wonderful R&B, a lot of stuff that had come up around here. Smokey Johnson was a drummer . . .Big Joe, what was his name, well I’ll remember it in a minute

Folse: When did you leave the neighborhood? Did you go to school or . . . ?

Brinks: I did for about nine months and I was in a bad car accident. I went to LSU. Then I was in a really bad car accident and that’s when I came back here for good. I was studying science. I was really into science. Still, I’ve always been totally into science. That’s been a big thing for what I do. I keep up with that. I moved back here and that was when business completely went kaput eveywhere.

Folse: When you say back here to you mean in the Quarter?

Brinks: In New Orleans in general. Everywhere. Everything. Everything had been back in the tank =, that was was in ’86. I came back and lived here and we were just trying to make ends meet. I started playing music. I started playing in bands with my friends in bands. That was, that kind of kept my attention pretty good.

Folse: You and [Brink’s wife} Megan Burns first lived here and started a family here?

Brinks: Yeah, we did. T that’s kind of funny. When we had Meena, she must have been maybe three years old, maybe three and a half, we were going to have something to eat on the topside of North Peters and the first time I was going with the baby carriage down Bourbon Street. And then one of the barkers I recognized kind of wearing his pimp coat and all his jewelry, he was standing out in front of, it wasn’t Big Daddy’s it was something else because it was on the lake side, a strip joint. And then he’s like “oh you got you a little one, she’s a baby girl, she’s got red hair, she sure is a fine one” and I’m like “I’m not going to make those worlds connect.”

Folse: How old were the kids. Let me back up. What was it like? Where did you and Megan go when go out with the kids when you went you the stroller out.

Brinks: Oh, you’d go ride the street car, just go roll a ball up and down the levee and watch the ships and ride the streetcar, that was always amazing and great. . The only problem in the Quarter is you can’t go dig up worms anywhere and kids like to dig up worms.

Folse: How about the park back toward Esplanade.

Brinks: It wasn’t much of a kids park. The closest kids park was on the other side, in the Marigny.
We’d go over there. With the kid, it was just exciting to roll around the Quarter and see your friends, go to the leather shop or go to the rock crystal place, they have all the fancy quartz rocks and things, I think its called Lapidarium. Something like that. And just go hang out and see whoever you run into..

Folkse: How old were they when you decided you had run out of space and moved out?

Brinks: Meena, she was born here. Both Meena and Blaze spent their early years here. I was it wasn’t until I guess 2007, no, it was almost 2008.

Folse: Would you have felt different as a parent letting your kids out the door to walk down to the river, to roam up and down Royal Street by that time?

Brinks: [Long pause]

Folse: This is going to sound bad…

Brinks: I don’t know.

Folse: …but because they are girls did it make a difference?

Brinks: I guess anybody, you have a, look, I remember being on Bourbon Street I had to be maybe six years old. There was this guy across the street he used to always try to get my attention with stuffed animals. I remember he came in one day to the arcade and asked me what kind of stuffed animal I liked. and I told him I like elephants. And I remember seeing him again standing on the corner across on our street and he would wave at me to try to get me to come over there and he had a big stuffed elephant and I’m, like, boy this guy’s creepy. So, you know, there’s a built in sense of how to avoid things and I would hope my kids would have that. I would think my daughter Meena would have that. And being around in the Quarte., I think that’s built into her system pretty good. During the day time I don’t think there would be anything to worry about them, you know, I mean, it’s just an everyday kind of thing. And you just finally know as a parent when they’re up for that.

Folse: I want to go back because I want to ask something that popped into my head and but I kind of saved it. You said a lot of your friends initially you found on Bourbon Street, they were tap dancing, people up from Iberville, for the kids did it seem natural to hang out together, or was there any of that parental influence, I mean, segregation ran both ways in New Orleans. Among the kids was any of that true?

Brinks: I went into the projects. I didn’t think anything of it. Some people kept their places immaculate, like you walk in, I mean serious, like you walk in and everything was completely immaculate.

Folse: I mean out on the street, you werejust naturally kids you would either bond or not if you talked to somebody.

Brinks: I never did experience, I can honestly say I never experienced between the kids people, other kids saying something to me because I was white or seeing some kid saying something to somebody else because they were black. I don’t know, it just didn’t . . . Now I remember I was supposed to meet one of my buddy one time to play pinball and he never showed up ‘cause we always met every day at a certain time. I never did see him again. And then somebody told me he got in some kind of a mess of a trouble and something bad happened to him and he got killed.

Folse: I think you or Megan told me you basically ran out of space here. Was that the main reason to move out? Did you want to go dig worms and . . . ?

Brinks: You know I think [long pause] I think with kids I think the biggest problem for us was parking. That really started to become a real chore after two kids. I mean, it sounds funny, but you’ve got groceries, you’ve got kids, and so not being able to park right out in front of your house, I know it sounds crazy, but that really started to be tough.

Folse: If you only had one child would you probably have stayed in the Quarter? Would you have been happy to raise your kids here where you spent so much time?

Brinks: Well, they still come down all the time. I think it’s the most wonderful place I’ve ever known. I know there are other great neighborhoods because I used to go to other friends’ houses in neighborhoods in Carrolton and Mid-City and I love those areas, too. I don’t want to put the Quarter over Mid-City for sure. I love Mid-City for sure so, but for riding bikes? You can’t really do that here.

Folse: Did you have a bike?

Brinks: I never rode it down here. No, there’s no bike riding. And then the other thing, too, like when we were kids skate boarding was the thing and you couldn’t, you just couldn’t just ride skateboards anywhere. The streets were not skate-boardable nice streets. So, you really thought about that. Damn, can’t ride my skateboard. So that was a thing, too. So those kind of things, riding a bike, skakeboards, those kind of things that you want to kind of do.

Folse: You say the kids come down here a lot. Is there anything you think they miss, are missing growing up, experiences, anything that you had that you wish they had if they’d grown up here.

Brinks: No cause you take them to do all the things, you end up gravitating toward that, whether it’s going to feed the pigeons stuff like that, hanging out in Jackson Square, there’s something that automatically tick, those sort of things just kind of click and you want to do those things again with your kids. I mean, looking at the river is pretty amazing. I mean when I grew up and went to other places and saw the rivers I thought, those aren’t really rivers. I thought every rivers looked like this one. You know riding the ferry is really exciting. You know, for a kid, its just amazing to stand out and look at the river while you’re on it. And go walk around old Algiers and look at the city back on the other side. So those sort of simple things, listening to street musicians? I mean gee whiz. You know you have the other guys, you have the glass harp guy who would play all the notes on the glasses filled with water; you had people painting faces. So, I mean, you know that’s the difference. If you’re living down here, if you’re in some some neighborhood you might want to figure out where the nearest playground is or you might go to a movie or something, but down here you just walk out your door and there’s just endless things to do. Somebody is making balloon animals, there’s constantly some kind of, there’s a puppet guy, all that kind of stuff. You definitely want your kids to see all of that and be around that as much as possible.