IT’S A WRAP for another longtime local venue, as El Rocko Lounge closes for good on Jan. 31 after ten years.
El Rocko is forever linked in the public mind to its owner, Wes Daniel, who had already made a name for himself with his other Whitaker Street bar, Hang Fire, from 2006 to 2015.
While the aesthetics and vibes of the two places couldn’t have been more different, they both shared one important thing in common: Despite neither being originally intended to host bands, both El Rocko and Hang Fire evolved into significant hubs of live music.
“We didn’t think we were going to have live music at either bar. We weren’t planning on that to happen at all,” recalls Wes.
“But we sort of kept expanding our PA, and kept getting more and more bands. It was happenstance. It started slowly, and became a much bigger thing. I’m definitely glad it happened.”
Wes’s list of his personally most memorable shows at both El Rocko and Hang Fire are a who’s who of local and regional indie and heavy music in the 21st century:
CUSSES, Sunglasses, Mitski, Black Tusk, Boy Harsher, Crazy Bag Lady, Creepazoid, King Tuff, Bastardane, Whores, Bloodkin, West End Motel, All Night Drug Prowling Wolves. Various David Barbe projects over the years.
Of them all, Wes says, “I’d have to say my favorite show was Jeff Pinkus. And that’s because the Butthole Surfers are probably my favorite band of all time. Jeff was a really gracious guy.”
(Honorable mention, he says, goes to the band that covered the entire Vince Guaraldi "Charlie Brown Christmas" album.)
Whether it was Hang Fire's oddly located "stage" – actually just a tiny area on the floor immediately next to the main entrance on Whitaker Street – or El Rocko's once-swanky cocktail conversation pit invaded by amps and drum kits, the quirky layouts of Wes's places often seemed to add to, rather than subtract from, the experience.
But the real reason music became such a key factor in the success of both El Rocko and Hang Fire was quite simply because music is such a key factor for Wes himself.
“Music was always a huge part of my life. I got my first guitar at 14. I just wanted to learn how to play ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long,’ stuff like that,” he recalls.
“Not long after that, punk rock happened. And I started getting into the Sex Pistols and Generation X, bands like that. And I realized, well, this makes playing the guitar a lot easier,” laughs Wes.
EL ROCKO and Hang Fire were also well-known for attracting a mix of SCAD students and locals – a task easier said than done in the notoriously fickle local market.
“Coming from Savannah, I knew a lot of the private school guys, even though I went to public school. I always knew what to talk to them about. But my own aesthetic is different,” he says.
“I’m comfortable in both spheres of people, but the SCAD kind of aesthetic is just what I’m more comfortable with.”
Wes is candid that being identified so closely with the SCAD student clientele wasn’t always great for business.
“Their school year just seems to get shorter and shorter,” he laughs.
It’s a common refrain for anyone familiar with SCAD’s academic calendar, which features an extended two-month winter break and a leisurely return to classes in the middle of January and September.
“Our business would sometimes literally cut in half when SCAD was out of class. Basically we would have January through late April, that’s about it. The rest of the time we’d be pinching pennies,” Wes says.
“But I wouldn’t have traded that. It’s not like I was ever going to turn it into a sports bar for the summers. That’s just not my thing.”
In between SCAD class sessions, El Rocko was largely dependent on locals who came specifically for the live music.
No one perhaps more so than the late, lamented Larry Jack Sammons, a longtime friend and patron of Wes’s and the widely acknowledged superfan of local live music.
“Larry would constantly leave his hand-held recorder behind at the bar. I must have found it and given it back to him over 40 times,” says Wes.
“Whenever Larry would see a band he really liked, I’d always say he looked like a guy who’d just discovered puppies,” Wes laughs. “He’d become so happy, his face would just light up.”
As with many venues all around the country, COVID brought its own challenges to El Rocko.
While bars were legally forced to stay closed for awhile during 2020, “The owner of the building started hitting me up for rent,” Wes remembers. “We were like, hang on, guy – are you watching what’s going on in the world right now?”
Wes remembers that “the first day we could legally open, we opened. Because, well, yeah, we had to pay some rent. We were trying to follow all the protocols... I think Savannah was one of the first places in the world to reopen.”
YOU could say that fate brought Wes Daniel to the El Rocko spot on Whitaker Street.
It’s located next door to the former location of the legendary Jim Collins Bar, now the site of Tequila's Town. Wes often frequented Jim Collins's place in his days as a young scofflaw, back when few local bars bothered to check IDs.
“I remember I got kicked out of Jim’s for six months,” Wes laughs. “I had stolen some watermelons and was cutting slices at the bar and handing them out to people. After I got kicked out, every so often I’d stick my head in the door and Joe Holmen, the bartender, would yell ‘Get the fuck out of here, Daniel.’”
Wes got his first tattoo at the old California Tattoo Studio, which was right where El Rocko is now.
“I was 17 or 18. I ran into my stepbrother one night and we decided to both get tattoos. He got some Grateful Dead thing, and I got an airplane. This was back when fucking no one got tattoos.”
Wes's El Rocko was actually named after yet another longtime local dive bar, the former El Rocko Lounge on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which was then known as West Broad Street.
“When I went to Jenkins (High School), me and a buddy both worked at River Street Sweets after school and would drive there together. One day we saw this little bar on the way to work, called El Rocko,” Wes recalls.
“I said, ‘I know they’ll serve us.’ So we stopped in, with our funny little sweet shop uniforms. The bartender stared at us for a minute and then said, ‘You can have two beers each, and then you can get the fuck out,’” Wes laughs.
“But we eventually became friends with him, and we ended up stopping in all the time on the way to work after school. That was the first bar I started going to.”
In an all-too familiar tale to many a son, bar life solidified his relationship with his own father, a Marine.
“I guess you could say bars have always been in my DNA. I remember my dad would take me in bars with him. It was the first time I’d seen him outside the house and his work life. He just became a completely different guy. That really had an impression on me.”
Wes's first actual experience bartending came during a six-year stint in Atlanta, working for Charlie Kerns, owner of the iconic Eats and the burrito joint Tortilla’s.
“Charlie is legendary in Atlanta,” says Wes. “He used to work with Bill Graham back in the day, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Charlie was actually there when they filmed The Last Waltz.”
Wes was originally drawn to Atlanta by its livelier music scene. While there, he became friends with the late Brent Hinds of Mastodon, when that band was in its formative years.
To support himself, Wes worked in various incarnations of Charlie’s businesses in ATL, eventually taking up bartending.
“That first night I made $350 in cash. I was like, I should have been doing this the whole time.”
Charlie and Wes went on to become business partners to open Hang Fire. The two remain friends to this day.
Wes’s main partner in El Rocko has been another friend of even longer vintage, Kieffer Parker.
“Kieffer and I met at a keg party in high school. The cops came, and everyone scattered but us. We just stayed standing calmly around the fire, still drinking beer. The cops left us alone,” Wes laughs, saying the two have been friends ever since.
INDEED, Wes says one of the main pleasures in running El Rocko has been the remarkable variety of people he’s met and worked with.
Rocko became a full-fledged family business of sorts, with several members of Wes’s extended family taking stints behind the bar.
Wes credits his wife Chrissy with being the rock behind Rocko – holding everything together whenever things got difficult.
And one of the most difficult things Wes and his family have had to deal with is that familiar, ever-present danger to anyone involved in the bar business.
Wes is candid about his struggle with, and eventual victory over, alcohol.
He doesn’t like to call it recovery. “I don’t want to sound all pious about it,” he says.
Simply put, a brush with his own mortality set him straight.
Specifically, an attack of diverticulitis, which though not usually associated with alcohol, required an excruciating two-week hospital stay beginning the day after Thanksgiving 2023.
“You can't have any food or anything to drink for two weeks, they just pump you with IVs constantly,” Wes says. “It was just such a miserable experience. And if you get another attack, it’s another two weeks in the hospital.”
Unlike many who struggle with a long divorce from drinking, Wes says his decision was quick.
“It wasn’t like I had to white-knuckle it or anything. It was just… the threat of death. Besides, I had already made my mark in the alcoholism world,” he jokes.
Another strong incentive, he says, is that his son was wanting to come live with him and Chrissy.
Wes has since distanced himself from day-to-day operations at El Rocko, largely depending on trusted colleagues such as Tony Beasley, aka T-Murder, a former Jinx stalwart and well-known local musician who took on manager duties at Rocko.
“It’s been so awesome having Tony come aboard,” Wes says. “It’s so great to have a guy who I’ve been an actual real fan of for so long come and work for me.”
COVID couldn’t take out El Rocko, but its final grim reaper is the same one now cutting a swath all around the country: Rising rents, rising costs, rising fees.
An old story told and retold again these days by countless small businesses, nationwide and local.
Wes confidently says he isn’t planning on getting back into the bar business. He jokingly summarizes his life in the service industry as “so much broken glass! That’s how I would sum up the past 35 years. Broken windows, broken glasses, always sweeping up broken glass and fixing things. And phone calls. So many phone calls, all day and all night. ‘Somebody pulled down the sink... The toilet’s clogged... There was a fight... The cops came.’ It never stops.”
But it’s all been worth it, he says, “because of the amount of great people I’ve met. I liked it. I loved it. I had that experience. I left a mark.”
Wes and El Rocko are going out with a bang. Specifically, some bangers of shows, leading up to the final “last call” Jan. 31.
Here’s the schedule:
Jan. 23
Strong Zero presents: Matt Pless, Dustin Price, Susanna Kennedy
Jan. 24
Cougar Fest presents: All Hell, Mired, Pit Locust
Jan. 29
Chipper Bones, Bero Bero, more bands TBA
Jan. 30
Dustin Price, Tyler Key, Cody Marloww
Jan. 31
El Rocko Last Call