Elliott McPherson remembers the colors of the “Garden of Eden” mural plastered on the walls of The Chukker, his first memory of a bar that closed 20 years ago to the day this Halloween.

“Those seem like colorful times, you know?” said the co-founder of The Dexateens, who will perform together in their original form for the first time in 23 years. “Just thinking back, that place was so colorful. I don’t know, man, it was neat. The very first night I went there, The Penetrators were playing. They were wearing gold lamé suits, similar to the one Elvis wore. I recognized the sound of the music they were playing because my dad had a bunch of Ventures records. And I got to see the artwork on the walls, how colorful it was. That’s my first memory of it.”

McPherson was an art student at UA when he first entered the bar and noticed colorful murals painted by local artist Bob Weston on its walls. He remembered the happy hour crowd, people like “Mr. Bill and his dog.”

“If you went in early, you’d see him in there. You’d see him asleep in there a lot of times He had a shoe-shine chair in the middle of his store,” McPherson said. “He’d take naps in there with his dog at his feet, and you’d see him later in the Chukker. There’s just a thousand characters like that who’ve been in and out of the Chukker that you would see over time. It’s hard to even think about all the crazy people I’ve seen in there.”

Their band formed in 1998, when they would practice in a building now occupied by The Alamite hotel in downtown Tuscaloosa. After one of their many practices early in the band’s run (three times a week sometimes, opposed to the zero practice reps they’ll have before this weekend’s reunion), they’d walk over to The Chukker. “We spent a lot of time talking about the band in there,” he said. “We played our first shows in there.”

The bar helped McPherson and his friends figure out their futures as musicians, not just with their first gigs but with a space to talk and get excited about art, something he said they couldn’t find elsewhere in Tuscaloosa at the time.

For Bo Hicks, it was “a bit counter-culture, essentially.” While he wasn’t old enough to get in during “the heyday in the ‘90s,” he felt cool when his bands finally got the chance to play there. “I felt like a little bit that, ‘OK I’ve made it.’ What I was trying to be part of and put out was sort of validated because I had so much respect for so many people that influenced me a lot, that I knew it was their place.

“Going in there to see The Penetrators and Guided by Voices. Who would have thought you could see indie rock legends like that in Tuscaloosa? For me, it just meant something rad, a mythical ethos or a state of mind. These are my people, a rag-tag bunch, as it were.”

Chukker Weekender

Hicks owns Druid City Brewing Company, which will host The Chukker Weekender, a 20-year reunion organized by the nonprofit Chukker Nation, on Friday and Saturday (Oct. 27-28). The event will open with a welcoming happy hour performance by Tommy Sorrells and Greg Staggs.

Formerly located at 2121 6th Street in downtown Tuscaloosa, The Chukker opened in 1956 by “Chukker Bill” Thompson. The original concept: A sit-down restaurant where couples and families could enjoy meals together. But the venue evolved in many different ways during its five-decade existence. By the mid-to-late 1970s, it settled into a bar popular with local hippies and bikers before the ‘80s saw a transformation into a live music club hosting local bands as well as performances by a wide range of legendary entertainers including R.E.M., Sun Ra, Richard Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Fetchin’ Bones and The Replacements.

This weekend, the Chukker Weekender will host more than a dozen bands and performers (full schedule below) who played the bar before it closed for good on Halloween night in 2003. Groups like Club Wig and Sweat Bee will perform for literally the first time in 20 years. Surviving members of surf band The Penetrators will perform in honor of the band’s founders, brothers Scott and Brian Rogers, who passed in 2003 and 2009, respectively.

Che Arthur, who booked shows and ran sound at The Chukker, will return for a rare performance in the South since moving to Chicago in the late 1990s. Southern punk rockers The Dexateens will reunite for a one-off performance with all five founding members. The original lineup has not performed together since 2000.

You can catch a chair yoga session with former Chukker owner Frannie James Saturday at 10 a.m., followed by an open-air market outside the brewery from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. Goods for sale will include arts and crafts, vintage clothing, memorabilia, and other items.

During market hours, Tuscaloosa Irish band Henri’s Notions will perform along with some electric blues from The DT’s. There will also be a poetry reading organized by original Chukker Poetry Night host Abraham Smith, a set of standup comedy from Chukker regular Carin Chapman, and guest DJ sets from various members of the Tuscaloosa arts and music community.

The event is free to the public and for all ages. Chukker Nation also set up a fundraiser at GoFundMe, which along with the nonprofit will remain active beyond the Weekender to fund future activities and causes dear to the Chukker Nation, as well as emergency funds for members of Chukker Nation should they be needed. They hope to create a marker at the old site of the bar and also create scholarships for the arts, among other things.

‘An oasis of art and culture’

“Heyday” is right. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, look at who played The Chukker: Sublime, Sun Ra, Morphine, Dick Dale, Descendents, R.L. Burnside, Guided By Voices, Richard Thompson, Drive-By Truckers, just to name a few.

As AL.com’s Matt Wake wrote in 2016, “By the 1980s, The Chukker had already lived many lives. It had been a workingman’s bar. A restaurant serving steaks. A biker bar. Gay bar. Hippie bar.”

After Ronnie Myers, one of the many people to own or co-own the bar throughout the years, sold to partner Bruce Hooper, the bar saw a return to more local-centric bookings while remaining n the crosshairs of Southeastern touring routes to book rising regional acts. While UA fraternity houses and other Tuscaloosa bars like Lee’s Tomb booked cover bands, The Chukker quickly became the local place in Tuscaloosa to see original music.

Bands like Club Wig, Storm Orphans, Even Greenland, Jous, The Hitchcocks, The Newsboys, Instant Karma, Eric Landis & The Squires, Ghost Ranch and, eventually, The Dexateens. Bands you’d hear on the UA college radio station WVUA 90.7 FM (V-91, as many will remember it). Wake wrote, “Between The Chukker, Vinyl Solution and WVUA, local bands now had key ingredients to help them flourish: a place to perform, a place to sell their music and a place to get their songs on the radio.”

Brett Tannehill, who played drums in some Tuscaloosa bands including jangle-pop combo Kilgore Trout and punk-tinged Sweat Bee (performing this weekend), told Wake the Chukker “really was an oasis of art and culture in the middle of a football-crazed town. The bands I was in, it was a place we could actually make money to go into the studio and put out tapes and CDs and things like that.”

‘It’s a place that changed my life’

Putting on what amounts to a two-day Chukker festival with bands, poetry readings, standup comedy, a costume contest and a cornbread cookoff (The bar had a motto: “Eat cornbread, raise hell.”) sounds daunting. But Matt Patton said it was easier than expected. It helps to have help from folks like Lori Watts (Vintage Market), Franny James (the nonprofit’s treasurer), Craig Gates (graphic design), Nick Rymer (live-stream/video) and Eric Danger. In fact, scaling it down was the hardest part.

“The only difficult thing was once slots were filled, having to turn away people. That’s the most painful part about this. We needed less bands, less entertainment. There were still things I wanted to book. Just a hard thing,” said the Drive-By Truckers bass player, and original member of The Dexateens and Model Citizen. “Once people got wind of what was happening, instead of me finding them, they were finding me. I tried to keep my personal preferences at bay. I tried to get as many folks from different eras, different styles, tried to mix it up.”

Some of these bands haven’t played since the Chukker closed, Patton said. Most people coming this weekend haven’t even seen each other in more than two decades. The 20-year mark just felt like the right time to reunite and honor a place that means so much to so many.

“It’s a place that changed my life,” Patton said. “It was sort of a refuge I was drawn to.”

And he said “refuge” fits for a kid who grew up in Jasper, attended a Christian school and went to church three times a week. He found The Chukker when he was 19 while attending the University of Alabama. “It seemed to be much more welcoming and accepting,” he said. “There were all kinds of people and walks of life socializing. I didn’t even drink or party or do anything back then. I was interested mainly in seeing shows, seeing musicians.”

He said you might encounter just about anybody inside the bar. College students, professors. Bikers. Others say drag queens, as well as general working class folks. Patton’s favorite time of the night came around midnight or later when other local bars like Black Orchid or Michael’s would close, and those customers would spill into the downtown streets and scurry over to The Chukker to end their night. “That was the liveliest,” he said. “I just loved seeing everybody all under one roof having a good time together.”

Exposure to national artists passing through town and hitting the venue’s stage did Patton some good, even as an aspiring musician not old enough to have a drink who had to beat it once his set finished. “How they conducted themselves, having access to something like that was good for me,” he said. “I didn’t have that in Jasper. Having a wide music community to put bands together…that was huge.”

Still, even as a youngin’, Patton found friends and mentors like future Dexateens bandmate Craig “Sweetdog” Pickering, and Vinyl Solution (local independent record store) manager Chuck Thompson. And Chukker bartender Sandra Sahm made him feel at home.

“As soon as I turned 21, I began to frequent shows there. That was my place. I felt like people were protective of me. I was young and naive, not caught up in the party scene,” Patton said. “People looked out for me and had my back. Let’s not pretend there weren’t drugs and things in the Chukker, things I could have gotten into as a young person, because there were. I didn’t feel like anybody was ever pushing me.”

When The Chukker closed, its clientele certainly felt a hole in their hearts before splintering off to other bars with a similar spirit, chiefly Egan’s on the Strip before it closed in 2021.

Filling the void now is Druid City Brewing Company, which will host the Chukker Weekender. Patton said the brewery’s mission to spotlight local music echoes what The Chukker did decades ago, partly thanks to owner Bo Hicks’ own role in Tuscaloosa bands like Chinese Dentist and Baak Gwai. “His business is carrying forth the legacy of old school weird Tuscaloosa live music — live original music,” Patton said. “It’s appropriate, and most everyone would agree. To go there to experience shows, it seems to be the proper space.”

Hicks considers that “a huge compliment, especially from somebody like Matt who I respect.”

He also found acceptance at The Chukker, which is what he hopes Druid City gives back to the community amid what he called “the fractured nature that — socially, economically, politically — we find ourselves in.”

“It sort of warms my heart that people would think of us that way,” Hicks said. “That’s something, frankly, that we’ve tried to model — because you can’t replace something like that. That’s something that we’re really proud of and want to continue to do at Druid City. Let’s support art, let’s support a little outside the normal box, let’s be welcoming to anybody no matter who or what they are. That’s an important thing we carry on.

“The scene’s gonna evolve. Things change. But also, you can learn from such amazing people and say ‘Hey let’s be cool, support each other, do some art and music.’ Something I think Tuscaloosa needs. We’ve always looked at music as break even at best, and frankly that’s OK with me as long as we can bring people together and support art and culture.”

Friday, Oct. 27:

5 p.m.: Happy Hour with Tommy & Greg

6 p.m.: Speakers

6:30 p.m.: Tommy & Greg

7 p.m.: Poetry with Abraham Smith

8 p.m.: Crying Jags

8:45 p.m.: Instant Karma

9:30 p.m.: Irascibles

10:15 p.m.: The Cunning Runts

11 p.m.: Model Citizen

Saturday, Oct. 28:

10 a.m.: Chair Yoga with Frannie James

11 a.m.: Market begins

12 p.m.: Henri’s Notions

2 p.m.: The DTs

3 p.m.: Poetry with Abraham Smith

3:40 p.m.: Carine Chapman Comedy

4 p.m.: Market ends

6 p.m.: Blip

6:45 p.m.: Club Wig

7:30 p.m.: Che Arthur & Adam Reach

8:15 p.m.: Haunted Housecat

9 p.m.: Sweat Bee

9:45 p.m.: The Penetrators Ft Big Ray

10:30 p.m.: Hooper

*Costume contest – $100 cash prize!!

11:30 p.m.: The Dexateens