Streetside: Scouring a post-Springsteen downtown for something in the night

American hero Bruce Springsteen was in Kansas City last weekend. I wish I could report a local Bruce spotting — best-case scenario would have involved him eating from a lunch pail outside some factory down on Front Street, though eggs at Succotash would have sufficed — but nobody I have spoken with or creeped on social media seems to have seen the man anywhere besides the Sprint Center stage Saturday night.

I attended that show (you can read my review at The Pitch‘s Wayward Blog at pitch.com), and afterward, my friend and I sought to ride the Springsteen high at some downtown bars, preferably with some fellow Springsteen fans.

There wasn’t much action inside Duke’s on Grand, the new bar now open in the old Willie’s space, at the corner of Grand and Truman Road. Apart from the stupid-looking (though presumably temporary) sign outside, it appears that Duke hasn’t made many changes — same high tables, same setup. (It’s possible that the opening was rushed to court the post-Springsteen crowd, and I wouldn’t fault them for that.) We rolled past and ducked into the Cigar Box, which was muggy and crowded. As I made my way to the bar, I noticed a group of men hoisting a red bar stool in the air, but not in a violent way. It was more like they were trying to pass it around the crowd. Still, they were making a lot of noise and behaving recklessly, even for the Cigar Box, and the doorman rushed over and confiscated the chair. As I got closer, I saw that these culprits were idiot friends of mine.

Having just come from Guns ‘N Hoses, an annual charity event where cops and firefighters box each other inside a convention room in the downtown Marriott, they were running on adrenaline from a different source. (“There’s three rounds, and each round is only a minute, but it seems way longer than that,” I was told. “I mean, it’s pretty fascinating stuff to watch.”) The point in the evening when they could have articulated why they were whipping that chair around had long since passed.

Per usual, Al Latta, the lounge singer at the Cigar Box (“It’s His World,” The Pitch, February 24, 2005), was presiding over the room, crooning classic songs and charming the women in the house. In tribute, he cued “Glory Days.” The friend who had accompanied me to the show, whom I would describe as a pretty big Springsteen fan, was handed the mic but weirdly couldn’t remember any of the lyrics besides glory days and pass you by. There are isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea that can sing along to “Glory Days.” But he just stood there with the microphone to his mouth and nodded his head, his brain searching in vain for the words, the instrumental version hurrying along in the background. Finally Latta grabbed the mic back.

The charm of the Cigar Box, for me at least, is its transparent sexuality. Nobody in there pretends that they aren’t there to flirt and fuck.

“Waiter, I’ll have one of those,” a middle-aged blond woman purred, nodding at a pair of muscle-bound dudes who had costumed up for the show with matching cutoff shirts and bandannas.

One of my friends chatted up this woman’s friend at the bar later, and when I went up to get a drink, he tried to rope me into the conversation. “This is a man of words right here,” he said.

“A man of letters,” I corrected him.

“You don’t say much,” she said.

“He speaks softly but he carries a big stick,” my friend said, hilariously. Oh, she loved that one.

“We gotta get out of here,” I said.

We walked through the Kansas City Star truck tunnel between McGee and Oak and decided that it was finally time to see what goes on inside Madrigall, the club at the corner of 17th Street and Oak. On Saturday, the room was packed and intimate, lighted in dark-red hues, and full of people salsa dancing. Attention, women who just broke up with your boyfriends: You would totally love Madrigall. A woman friend of mine walked up to the bar, and within 30 seconds, a tall, dark, handsome stranger asked her to dance. “I like this place,” she said later, a little dizzy.

“We mix it up,” the owner, a nice man named Sam, told me. “We do more electronic stuff on Fridays, which gets a younger, artier kind of crowd. And on Thursday nights, we do a salsa class for beginners at the beginning of the night. So then you can come back and dance with the girls for real on Saturday.” Who could argue with that? Don’t we all need a little of that human touch?