The opening act asked, “Are we in New York City anymore?” Yes, yes we are, at Ridgewood’s Gottscheer Hall (6-57 Fairview Ave.), despite the abundant country western wear. Tyler James Kelly, said opener, is from Rhode Island, though I would’ve believed Texarkana. He played crisp, trebly guitar work before the headlining Cowpokes, who were so vintage as to have a fiddle.
Before either, hosts Charles Watlington and Jonny Nichols1 played from their also-vintage country record collection. On stage, they go by DJ Moonshine (Watlington) and DJ Prison Rodeo (Nichols), the latter of which hints at the Angola Prison Rodeo, where convicts play poker on a showground as an incensed bull is unleashed upon them for a chance to win $500 for their commissary books. I thought COVID had killed the Angola’s rodeo (it briefly did), though it resumed thereafter, and will happen again later this week. America holds onto old ideas.
I was recently told, at least twice, that I appear unable to enjoy anything, but maybe I’ve just got a different idea of fun. Honky Tonkin’ in Queens, in its third year, has been left untold, despite abundantly reporting. Beyond an early PR release, there is real coverage, like Laur Weeks’ quaint article in No Alibi, which promises that, “Honky[ ]Tonkin’ in Queens is a place to remember who you were before the rent got this high.” In an article of low-hanging fruit ( “the scent of halal truck smoke”), Weeks leaves this nostalgic urge uninvestigated, while Rolling Stone’s Josh Crutchmer does little more than list names. Curbed’s Emma Alpern affirms Weeks’ nostalgia, dwelling on a Britney Spears’s cover spun into a Girls reference (sung by Jemima Kirke’s sister). It’s a national trend now, though Kate Mooney at New York Groove describes a lineage of honky tonk in NYC, confirming that this isn’t an isolated phenomenon here, one that’s deserving of an investigation into why this is happening again and now. This culture, one culture of so many NYC cultures that is so often broadcast to the rest of America, the rest of the world, by media channels and NYC Twitter accounts that don’t appear to leave their apartments. The observable world needs to be pounded with meaning.
Corsets and cowboy boots beneath bell bottoms and bootcuts. I didn’t see many nudie suits, but pearl buttons abound. Mustaches and mustaches, too. They weren’t dressing like Jelly Roll Americans; instead, everyone, regardless of looks, appeared beautiful. Sneakers and clunky Chelseas had a place here. The best dress is what you came here in.
With Lissette, a fashion photographer, I discussed courting rituals, how one stands by the dance floor and waits for eye contact, for any indication to join another. Neither of us were approached. We danced together from an appropriate social distance.
Brian and Kristina2, of Chicago and Long Island/Tampa Bay, came because they began to enjoy country music as they got older, which wasn’t so old (I’d guess mid-30s). There was only one big hat between the two, and I never saw them dance. I imagined them looking out at the bedazzled young. The Honky Tonk in Ridgewood is the cultural ephemera of young people getting caught up in ageing, now performing their older selves on the dance floor. When I first began to hear “That’s How I Got to Memphis” and “Dust on the Bottle,” I started estimating my days spent sleeping alone, and thought that number must be something like 10,000 if childhood counts.
Others remember childhood more fondly. While early hipsters laundered suburban nostalgia and lived within eyeshot of The City, the people here live farther out and look farther back, past suburbia’s false nature and toward rurality. In the hunt for authenticity, they’ve made Ridgewood into Brooklyn’s newest frontier, every new remodel a Homestead Act parcel for Brooklynites too tired of being priced out of Fort Greene open houses.
The honky tonk is a ritual performance of that migration. It depicts yesterday’s rurality—something chivalrous and harmlessly sexy—because small town America nowadays isn’t much to idealize outside of copper theft jobs that compensate for an embarrassing state of taxable work. Gottscheer itself is a pocket dimension, pursued and attended in the way one heads upstate for a long weekend.
The century-old beer hall is still run by the Gottscheer, a demonym for people from a Bavarian-speaking region of present-day Slovenia. When the Kingdom of Yugoslavia formed after WWI, the Gottscheer absconded to Germany before once again heading out to Slovenia during WWII (guarded by the Reich), before once again absconding back to Germany during the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans across Europe. They constantly sought their duchy, only to end up back in Germany anyway. Unlike the Gottscheer, the honkeys did end up reclaiming Ridgewood.
Garb is essential. Honky Tonkin’ once hosted Charley Crockett, who I met briefly years ago, through a mutual friend, at Off Broadway in St. Louis. There, Crockett asserted his dominance by folding his raw denim jeans into tall, formidable cuffs—halfway up his calves—that dominated his backing bands’ stouter, chode-like cuffs. A cowboy pecking order.
Outside, across Bushwidgewood, people take on the look of urban pioneers: instead of prairie colonizer chic, it’s cargo pants, Merrell boots, and workwear. This is the frontier, after all: clothes reflect hiking, labor, hunting. Never put on heritage New Yorker dress (North Face puffers) that implies this place was previously known.
During this February’s winter storm, the LL Bean boots—indicative of white, rural Americana—came out in force. Clothing reflects not just terrain, but a perception of the terrain and one’s relation to it. An adventurer wants to remain obvious. You don’t want to blend in, so you wear camo. You assert your claim over the prairie, over the dance floor, with a cowboy hat.
Attendees had found their Gottschee at Gottscheer. Couple Crü and Cammi, living in Brooklyn and Queens for over two decades, said they’d seen honky tonks in Cleveland and Vegas. Some were free, others not. They’ve come and gone and come back, just like the Gottscheers.
Shar, a longtime Bushwick resident, architect and honky tonk regular described a sentiment, common in Bushwick, to still look west toward The City for experience and entertainment, an embodiment of bridge and tunnel cultural cringe. In Ridgewood, he’s convinced to see Queens and Brooklyn as the world in which to seek whatever one wants, the playground nearest to us all along.
The honky tonk, to him, isn’t a pocket dimension, but a grounding place, dance sans the adulteration of drugs or the expectation of sex in a culture that represses movement so much that any physical touch might appear as an invitation. The hedonism—movement and drink—was restrained. Alcoholism seems more out of style by the day. Here is a moment to let loose in regalia.
Shar’s sentiment was affirmed by Julia, a freelance journalist, Greenpoint resident, and Arkansas native, who made comparisons to Latin American dance culture, where dance is more a community than the bacchanals that Shar describes. Having a dance isn’t necessarily an invitation for anything more. I danced briefly with Julia and her friend Seana, from Chinatown (by way of Miami) and did a few hand rolls beyond moseying away.
A loose line dancing set formed near the end. No one seemed obsessed with timing. They seemed happy to be here, where so much culture is felt automatically. Old women danced with young men practicing to become suitors. DJ Prison Rodeo beguiled me twice with his earnestness. He seemed to just want to make fun for others, which is what this was: dress-up, maybe more.
P.S. The night before, I saw Mclusky at Warsaw so I could wonder, yet again, why white boys are so angry. Boston’s Pile, the opener, offered a non-explicative: the usual anti-Trump platitudes to an audience they knew would agree with them, everyone exiting said moment having learned nothing.
Mclusky, though, had insight. Back in high school, the insight I cared about was how a guitar could whine like Andrew Falkous’—riffs reminiscent of childhood whistling made indignant, atonal. That night, their lyrics finally struck me. In their closer, Falkous sings, “My band is better than your band / We’ve got more songs than a song convention,” delivering a sense of relentless competition against imaginary enemies to push yourself harder, which people have been doing for the two decades since the release of the Albini-produced Mclusky Do Dallas. So nakedly out of place, Falkous cracks Morrissey jokes in 2026. A postpolitics so indicative of the era it was produced (the months leading up to 9/11) now another idea out of place.
That’s not the era we’re in now. We live in mass action with no impact, where every public activity we attend and consent to is only collective in its capacity to palliate everyone individually, including the guys at Warsaw who smelled like middle school pencils, the uncouth who shoved past me without a shoulder tap: desocialized but incapable of cowering at home 24/7, the worst among them a lone woman who snapped at my friend for speaking too loudly at a noise concert. So I called her a freak, because that’s what she was: in a venue with capacity for 1,000, everyone either had no idea that she was there or knew exactly where she stood and hated her for it. Abjected momentarily, but unalone in a way that must make one ache for an empty bed. “And we’re all going straight to hell,” Falkous has been saying for 25 years now. But hell never came: we’re no less in competition, but we still have no set of demands.
In the place of demands, we try practicing joy, so we’re there no longer: no longer in Mclusky’s politics, no longer with the rabble at Warsaw. John Brown was the only true American. He was a real killer, but you won’t die for anything here at the honky tonk. Give it all up to be on the dance floor. Think of leaving the south, even after having already left. This is where you kill the fear of having to live and die in Indiana, in Arizona. $33.85/ticket.
Honky Tonkin’ in Queens happens once a month at Gottscheer Hall in Ridgewood, Queens.
Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
- Disclosure: Nichols sold me an expensive pair of pants (worn to the honky tonk) and gave me free tickets to ease the sting, though I received these prior to disclosing any intent to write this piece. ↩︎
- While Kristina said she came from Ditmas Park, I didn’t confirm where Brian lived, and I just kind of assumed they were a couple. Where else can you find such rigorous, can’t-miss reporting but Grime Square? ↩︎
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