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Take me home Country Road
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Country Road is an American-style bar located at one end of Soi Cowboy. It’s one of my favorite hangouts, and I’ve probably spent more hours there than any other single drinking establishment in South East Asia. It always puts me in mind of the type of bar you’d see featured in the movie, Roadhouse.
Country Road has 5 pool tables, two service bars, wooden stools with cushions around tall wooden tables, an outdoor veranda, lots of friendly girls, probably the smallest and most frequently used dance floor in town, and a live band seven nights per week.
Every night from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. an Elvis impersonator takes the stage. He’s a Thai guy straining at the waistline, with his sideburns and his hair in a bit of a pompadour/mullet style. What he has in common with Elvis is exactly one thing… he has sideburns. He doesn’t look like Elvis, sound like Elvis or move like Elvis. In short, he’s probably the worst Elvis impersonator of all time, but somehow he continues to be popular night in and night out at Country Road.
There are about three different bands that rotate through Country Road, and the quality of the music is very uneven. I often get the feeling that they’ve been playing the same playlist for so many years that they’ve just grown weary of it… they often sound like they’re playing in slow motion. There’s nothing crisp or fancy about what they play.
But the main reason people go to Country Road — amazingly — is for the music. I’m a good example of the typical customer. I like to shoot pool and listen to music. The pool tables have seen better days, as have the bands for the most part, but Country Road draws you in with what one friend referred to on Monday night as “atmosphere”.
The key is that the bands (and Elvis) have a short playlist of songs that are popular with a certain age of Western guys; that is, if your 50-ish you’re likely to enjoy the songs and if you’re in Country Road and you look around, you’ll see many of the customers singing along happily to the tunes.
The playlist includes rock & roll, country and ’southern’ rock. The John Denver tune, Country Road, is on the play list of course. Usually a couple times a night. Johnny B. Good usually gets a couple of runs. I’m always surprised how popular the song “In them old cotton fields back home” is here in Bangkok. It gets played once or twice a night in this bar, but I also hear it in beer bars all around town. Other playlist tunes include Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones, Wonderful Tonight, some Eric Clapton and a couple of Dire Straits tunes.
Probably one of the reasons that the band is so tired is that they don’t get a break… from 9:30 p.m. until closing time the band plays straight through, so the music is a constant.
Country Road has bar girls and they are distinguishable from customers mainly by the plastic nametag hanging around their neck. They are a friendly lot. I’ve never seen one of them beg a drink, yet most tables will have one or two girls drinking steadily with the customers.
One comment I’ve heard from many people is that, in spite of being on Soi Cowboy, Country Road is one bar where you wouldn’t mind bringing your girlfriend or wife. Indeed, Country Road generally has a large number of western women among the customers. The working girls in Country Road don’t look like working girls. They tend to be in jeans and ‘normal’ shirt, but they are easily barfinable if you choose. But your girlfriend is unlikely to be aware of this, and if she is, she is unlikely to feel uncomfortable or threatened by it, since the focus at Country Road is on drinking and music, not on sex.
Invariably a certain number of tables are filled with men who bring their barfined companions from other places along to Country Road for some drinks and down-home music as part of an all-night party. I’ve done this myself. In fact I was introduced to Country Road (three years ago this week) by a girl who took me there.
Country Road opens early, and it can be a good spot for killing some time in the afternoons. Five days a week from Sunday to Thursday they have free pool from (I think) 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. I’ve been known to go in, buy a 60-baht bottle of water and shoot pool for two or three hours.
The live music starts at 7 p.m. and happy hour runs until around 8 p.m. nightly. Even the normal drink prices are agreeable, but happy hour is a real bargain. I tend to be at Country Road with friends, so I usually order pitchers of Heineken, which cost 190 baht normally, and are a bargain at 150 baht during happy hour.
With its early opening time, I often meet friends here for a couple of happy hour drinks before heading out to the wilder stops on Soi Cowboy, but equally often I spend my entire night out in this bar, and if I have a late work meeting or I just feel like getting out by myself, I often go into Country Road around 11 pm or midnight and listen to a couple hours worth of music before wandering back home.
I did exactly that on Sunday night, arriving at 11 pm, a friend of mine joined me at Country Road a little past midnight, and we stayed there until the lights were turned on and the band stopped playing at 2 a.m. Instead of going home, we had a couple more beers at one of the outdoor bars that pop up on the corner of Asok Road and Sukhumvit Road after midnight.
Just as often, if I am in Country Road at closing time, or coming out of a go go bar alone at closing time, I decide to sit and eat a late night-early morning meal at the little restaurant that pops up in front of Country Road after the lights come up and the doors are closed. They quickly put up three or four aluminum tables to supplement the tables already on the veranda, and two or three of the girls who have been serving drinks all night grab pads of paper and start taking food orders. The food comes from Sams 2000 and is high-quality fare at good prices.
One of the most productive alcohol selling spots in Thailand can be found just next to the front door of Country Road. It’s so much a part of the front of the building that it’s easy to walk past without noticing it. It’s a whiskey cart.
The whiskey cart has two jars of sweet, cheap Thai whiskey. The vendor doles out the whiskey with a ladle. There are two sizes. A normal shot is 10 baht and a double, served in a tumbler, is 20 baht. All night long, dancers and bar girls from every bar in Soi Cowboy come up to buy cheap shots of whiskey. They arrive wearing the costumes of their trade, including bikinis, skimpy dresses and school girl outfits. If you’re a punter on the prowl, you could do worse than to hang out near the whiskey cart and let all the beauty of Soi Cowboy come to you. When you spot the girl of your dreams, you can simply follow her back to her place of employment and introduce yourself.
On Monday night I met up with Rik, who is in Thailand from Australia. He was with his girlfriend, who lives in Bangkok, and I had a Thai girl along with me. We had dinner and several drinks at Gullivers on Soi 5, then craving a change of pace, I recommended Tokyo Joes. We piled into a cab, but upon arrival we found that we were the only customers on a slow Monday night. We u-turned, piled into another cab and went to Country Road.
The band was in full swing, the bar was full and the beer was flowing. Rik smiled. At one point he leaned over to his girlfriend and said, “You know the difference between this place and your favorite bar? One word: atmosphere!”
Her favorite place is listening to music at a bar in the Landmark Hotel where, no doubt, the quality of the music is superior. But it has to be said that somehow, the down-home Southern-U.S. feel, the service girls, the pool tables and the music all come together to make Country Road much more than the sum of it’s parts.
Oh! I almost forgot to mention that part of the appeal of Country Road for some is that anyone is welcome to climb up on the stage, grab a mike and sing with the band. I love to sing. Unfortunately, my singing is ATROCIOUS so I generally fight any urge to sing in public. On Monday night, though, Rik was urging me to have a go, and for some stupid reason I did. From memory I stayed on stage and croaked out three songs. Amazingly, the bar didn’t empty out, and I even got a couple of congratulatory (or consoling) handshakes or pats on the back from other customers in the bar.
Whether your looking for a spot to shoot free pool in the afternoon, a spot to meet friends for happy hour drinks, somewhere to enjoy non-stop music, or a late night venue for drinks and food, Country Road is a place that you may enjoy visiting. It’s a fun bar with plenty of ‘atmosphere’.
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