Chukker Meet-UP 2025
painted with “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.”
Chukker Meetup 2025
John Earl and ChatGPT
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Preface
In the Republic of Memory, every dive bar is a nation, and every regular a founding
father.
Twenty-two years after the death of the Chukker—a Tuscaloosa watering hole that hosted
the lost, the loud, and the lovely—a few hundred of its exiles gathered again, outdoors,
under a harmless Southern sky. They came to drink to the ghost of a place that had once
been their home, their church, their asylum from America’s better manners.
What follows is not a history, nor a eulogy. It is a report from the frontier of
nostalgia—where the past is too alive to bury, and too unruly to forgive.
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I. The Ghost Bar in Broad Daylight
The air had that lazy Alabama thickness to it—too soft, too bright, like a preacher’s smile
concealing a con.
Facebook said the Chukker Meetup 2025 would be outdoors. That made the decision
easier. I’ve avoided crowds since Covid came down like a biblical curse. But the word
Chukker has a magnetic pull; it conjures the smell of beer, the echo of laughter pitched
just shy of violence, the sound of someone confessing their sins in public and meaning it.
And so I went. Not to drink—I’ve never been much for the bottle—but to see the last
survivors of that strange tribe who once ruled the night at 2121 Sixth Street.
The Chukker was gone, buried beneath what the city fathers call Government Plaza,
which sounds like something built to keep memory out. But the crowd that gathered that
day—gray hair, denim jackets, voices made of gravel—proved that the Chukker, in spirit,
still had squatters’ rights in the heart of Tuscaloosa.
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II. The Descent of the Proper Bar
In the beginning, the Chukker had manners. White tablecloths, clean restrooms, jazz you
could take your mother to. It was a proper place for men who worked, ate steaks, and
didn’t yet know the world was about to fall apart.
By the late ’60s, the Chukker had gone to hell—plumbing shot, food service dead, the
clientele shifting from businessmen to bikers, drunks, artists, gays, and the city’s other
holy undesirables. A microcosm of the republic itself: every class, color, and creed,
colliding under one roof, sustained by beer and a fragile code of tolerance.
It was not utopia, but it was honest. And honesty, by the Seventies, had become the last
refuge of the damned.
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III. The Brothers, the Camera, and the Knife
I came to the Chukker with a camera. That was my religion—capturing the cracked faces
of America’s underbelly before the daylight washed them out. The bar was owned then
by Bob Callahan and Lewis Fitts, men who understood that rebellion was not a posture
but a necessity.
One afternoon I photographed Callahan and the Brothers Motorcycle Club. They stood in
front of the bar like a mural come to life—leather vests, cigarettes, a faint suggestion of
anarchy. Rick, one of them, kept a hand buried in his vest. “Why?” I asked. “Because
that’s where I keep my knife,” he said, with the calm certainty of a man who’s thought
through every contingency.
Later, I brought several of the Brothers—and one of their hogs—into my father’s
photography studio. I shot portraits of Rick, Teddy, Goat, Indian, Rocky, and Big D, each
in their club colors. Two of them began French kissing mid-shoot, spilling beer, while oil
from the Harley soaked into the carpet. I spent hours cleaning the mess. But I’ve never
taken more honest photographs. They were beautiful, dangerous, and free—America’s
fallen angels posing for posterity.
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IV. The Nation That Drank Together
The Chukker wasn’t just a bar; it was an ecosystem, a petri dish of madness and art.
People talked about Chukker Nation—not as a joke, but as a kind of sovereignty. The
Alta Apartments next door were its housing projects. Patrons could slide down a fire
escape and enter the back door like refugees of a better world.
By the time Ludo—Ludovic Goubet—arrived in 1991, the Chukker had entered its
mythic phase. A Frenchman running a dive bar in Alabama was absurd enough to work.
He painted Liberté, égalité, fraternité on the outside wall in florid script and flanked it
with satyrs. Across the street stood Municipal Traffic Court—bureaucracy facing
Bacchus, God and Goat locked in eternal duel.
Inside, Ludo brought jazz, blues, and madness. Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Larry
Coryell—the names came like incantations. I photographed them all, black-and-white
film under the faint hum of neon. Ludo was a true believer. He thought art could save us.
Maybe it did, for a little while.
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V. McCoy Tyner and the Last Ride of Sun Ra
December 1992: McCoy Tyner dropped by the Chukker after a university gig. He needed
a ride to his hotel, and somehow I became the designated driver. It was a quiet night, the
kind of December evening when the air carries more memory than oxygen.
As we drove, he talked about wanting to get back to New York for Christmas shopping.
That was the moment that killed me—the great McCoy Tyner, once Coltrane’s pianist,
worried about gifts like any other mortal. The myth peeled away, and I saw the man
beneath it—and he was magnificent in his simplicity.
That same year, Sun Ra returned to Earth, at least for one night, playing under the
Chukker’s cracked ceiling. I had seen him last in 1977 at the Five Spot in New York.
Now he was back in Alabama, leading his Arkestra through chaos and cosmos. If God
ever came to Tuscaloosa, it was that night—and He was wearing a sequined cape.
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VI. Death of a Bar, Birth of a Legend
The Chukker closed on Halloween, 2003. A fitting date for a resurrection that never
came. The building smelled of its own obituary—beer, smoke, old leather, and the sweat
of the living. The city would eventually tear it down, pour concrete, and plant grass. The
bureaucrats call it progress.
But every so often, the ghosts gather. Like now. The Chukker Meetup 2025. The gray-
haired faithful, the poets, the wreckage of the sixties still humming in their veins. They
speak of the old nights as if describing a religion that the young will never understand.
They’re right. The Chukker was a cathedral of the outlaw spirit. And in a nation that
worships conformity, that makes it sacred.
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VII. Epilogue: The Church of the Lost Cause
Now a green lawn sits where the Chukker once stood, manicured and bland. Government
Plaza, they call it. You could lay a saint’s bones under that grass and the city would still
issue parking tickets across the street.
But here’s the truth: the Chukker never died. It just moved inward—into the bloodstream
of everyone who ever drank there, played there, loved there, or tried to photograph the
soul of it before it disappeared.
America keeps trying to bury its rebels. It forgets that they make the best fertilizer.
And somewhere beneath that grass, the Chukker still breathes—laughing, cursing,
bleeding, and alive.
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