The drive out to the Dolphin Lounge can be lonely, at least at night anyway.
A relatively uneventful drive southeast from campus down Interstate 71, merging onto Interstate 670 toward the airport – one quick left and another quick right off of state Route 62 east and pull off at 345 Agler Road – the lounge is situated where many blues lounges have been built historically: close to travel, accessible from many ways, implying a sense of transience and passing and loss.
So the attitude of the Dolphin Lounge then is somewhat surprising: reeking of character and personality grounded in a collection of local history, legend and myth that has combined the traditional decor of the blues lounge with a homemade collection of kitschy memorabilia, like TGIFriday’s but without all the effort and the irony.
Which is not to say that the Dolphin Lounge is corny or out-dated, only that it has kept- desperately at times- many things which so many others have lost. A place like the Dolphin is a kind of relic, a cultural museum, a time capsule of memorabilia.
“We don’t change much,” jokes owner Nancy Ebright from behind one of Columbus’ last old-style sunken bars.
“We get people in here who come in after so many years and smile and say, ‘Oh, you haven’t changed a bit,'” she says, pouring a “Famous Dolphin Drink,” which she says with another laugh is some pineapple juice and a lot of liquor.
Ebright, “Dolphin” to her friends, is the lounge’s matriarch, a warm, quick-witted businesswoman who thirty years ago transformed the bankrupt Dante’s into a bastion for local music in central Ohio. For the nubile, aspiring musician this offers a crucial stepping stone on the tough and rigorous road that even the smallest success involves.
“What’s cool about this place is that there are always open stages,” says Peter Conrad, a longtime Dolphin patron. Conrad, a six year host of the Saturday night rock ‘n’ roll jam session, wears a jacket full of patches and bears a striking, slightly comical resemblance to John Denver.
The calendar is filled with these open stage opportunities. In fact, the business cards advertise “Open Stages 5 Nights a Week w/Hosts & Rhythm Sections.”
There are rock ‘n’ roll Saturday nights. Open stage Wednesdays. Acoustic open stage Thursday nights. The oldest blues jam in central Ohio with Richard P. Boals and Soals on Monday.
“The Dolphin rocks,” claims Amy Comer, a bartender punctuating her claims with two devil-horned fists. “There is a lot of great music that comes through here, and I like being a part of that.”
“For the most part, it’s a musician’s bar,” insists Conrad. “I’ve seen bands form here that are playing all over Columbus.”
Indeed, members of Watershed have tried out new material to the eager Dolphin crowd before taking the songs elsewhere under their real name. Members of the Decals, an eight piece band who played Friday night, came together over a series of Saturday night jam sessions hosted by Conrad.
“It gives the bands somewhere to get their music out of their garages and into somewhere they can play to a crowd,” Ebright says, recalling bands such as Fade to Blue and the Decals, Wonderlight and Double Ought that have been part of her lounge on their attempted paths to stardom.
“It’s all local,” she said, noting how difficult and tiresome it can be to deal with outside groups and managers who know nothing of her bar or her patrons. “It’s especially nice to have new local bands because the crowd is always fun and dedicated. They’re very appreciative. It works out nice for everybody.”
To a generation of students surrounded by fast-paced culture, the traditional blues lounge may be somewhat of an oddity – a strange relic from a period punctuated by an aesthetic of dim lighting and velour curtains, gold-plated lava lamps and bars trimmed with over-stuffed brown leather. Even the carpet seems oddly out of place.
It is a bar that begs questions about the precarious state of blues music itself, as blues bands of all types begin to play to smaller and smaller audiences, parts of a blues scene that has largely been eradicated from campus and replaced in many other previous strongholds held in the past. It begs questions about the place of blues lounges and where the lounge scene went.
“Commercials are fast-paced. TV is fast-paced. Man, everything now is fast-paced; maybe kids are looking for that,” pondered Conrad. “It doesn’t seem they want something this laid-back.”
Which the Dolphin Lounge definitely is, above all.
The bar, said to be really just Ebright’s family room, is one laden with casual, jovial conversation: Ebright telling her staff to get dolphin tattoos on each arm, musicians promising to sing to the waitresses at the next open stage, discussions on the ethics of using dolphins to find mines in the Persian Gulf.
And, as always, there is the nostalgic recollection of the genealogy and the mythology of the local music scene, a recap of those that have passed through onto something else, those that have tried their luck and are remembered even in failure, and those that have impacted the bar in some way that cannot be forgotten.
These legends will most likely never pass into the minds of the public. But those that do, add to the Dolphin’s patchwork fabric character, one which those who go there regularly or not know they will not have to put on any false front.
“We don’t really cater to anyone,” Ebright said with a calm sigh. “We get people of all ages in here, people 21 years old on up. All kinds, really.”
Indeed, it is this fabric that has- partly by chance and partly by Ebright’s hard work, dedication and love of music – helped the Dolphin become the monument it is, staying in business through times that have proved harsh for other places with names no one remembers.
