Magic Man now hangs out in a wheelchair at Meadowbrook Shopping Center.

Christopher showed him his videos that were done about 1991 and Magic loved them!

Christopher and Magic2

MAGIC MAN WITH KOKOMO   Kokomo and Magic

 from the October 23, 2003 issue of THE STRIPTHE HAUNT FOR DEAD OCTOBER 

by Courtney Haden

...Another haunted house will be closing Halloween night, and that is The Chukker. It is somehow appropriate that a place that served spirits be possessed by spirits. The Chukker was a favorite haunt for "beatniks, bikers, boozers, losers, rockers, rollers, doctors, lawyers, hippies, poets, musicians, educated derelicts, drag queens and just plain regular folks," as Dan "Electro" Hall of the Woggles recently put it. The artist Eugene Chadbourne was more succinct, call The Chukker "the pow wow grounds of the Alabama psychedelic generation."

The bar predated psychedelia by a decade or so, but it became renowned for the bands that filled its tiny rooms with golden noise, as far back as Duane and Gregg Allman, as far out as Sun Ra and his Arkestra. REM, the Replacements, Morphine, Dick Dale, Jay Bennett- when musicians looked for kindred souls in Tuscaloosa, they would find them at The Chukker.

So many generations stopped off on Sixth Street they called themselves Chukker Nation, but a seven-nation army could not thwart the moralism of the Tuscaloosa City Council which cut off alcohol sales at 1:45 a.m., the beginning of happy hour most nights at The Chukker. Too, with Richard Shelby intent on gentrifying the neighborhood, there really is no more room for public idiosyncracy.

Better to raze it than to raise in again elsewhere. There is no real estate outside of Valhalla where Bradford's ceiling paintings could hang, where that particular pinball machine should rattle, where those madcap patrons might throng once more. If Halloween is a night when the dead live again, what better place to spend it than among the souls of the departing at The Chukker?