Back in 2017, which now seems like a very long time ago, we did a show in Detroit, staying at a lovely hotel in nearby Rochester, Michigan.
We had a genuine day off, and I figured I would take a walk in charming downtown Rochester. Onthe way out, I ran into our guitar genius Richard Bennett, and then our well-known vocalist, who was also feeling like taking a downtown stroll.
We wandered around the streets and quickly found some lovely shops. Naturally, the one that caught Neil’s eye was called Rochester Sports Cards and Memorabilia, and we spent quite a bit of time perusing the goods there. Neil found quite a number of items that he couldn’t resist. some for gifts, others for personal treasures. One such keepsake was a baseball autographed by Detroit’s slugger, Al Kaline, who passed away just the other day.
By the time Neil’s bag was filled with souvenirs, he had run up quite a purchase, and I suspected that the young fellow behind the counter was keen on making such a jumbo-sized sale.
Afterward settling up, we continued touring Main Street in downtown Rochester, which provides everything needed to support human life. There was an Irish pub, a bakery disguised as a shoe store, a book store, a jewelry store—all that stuff and dim sum. But the establishment that drew our trio through its doors on that Wednesday afternoon was a joint called Red Knapp’s Dairy Bar.
During the 1930's Red Knapp (starting, I assume, with little more than a red Knapp sack, opened a restaurant in Rochester, with a goal of “serving simple food to local patrons.” It was successful, and the restaurant was sold in the late 1940’s. In 1950 Red returned with Red Knapp's Dairy Bar which, on this particular Wednesday afternoon, was serving local food to simple visitors. To the Rochesterians inside, we might have looked like we could conceivably have been coming in from football practice. We were lined up on stools, lost in their malteds: the fullback, the quarterback and the halfback. We chatted about the music playing on the juke box in Red Knapp’s Dairy Bar, strictly oldies, most of them well-known to the visitors.
Some of the tunes prompted we out-of-towners to recall stories from bygone days in the music business, along with strange-sounding names like Bert Berns and Morris Levy, who were likely unfamiliar in Rochester, echoing along the counter.
A mother with her two small children sat across from us and paid us no mind. When she collected her kids and walked over to the cash register to pay her bill. I asked if she would mind taking our picture. “Over there?” she asked, pointing to an open area, and I said “No, right here, from behind us is fine.” So we got a great shot of our backs as we downed Red’s specialties, and I posted a good review on Yelp that night.
There was a sign on the wall that said “Have your wedding party at Red’s,” so I asked, “How much does it cost to have a wedding here?” A young employee in a soda jerk cap replied, “I don’t know, nobody ever asked before.”
When we returned to our hotel, we had apparently remained seated at that counter so long that our waiting security personnel were becoming concerned that we might have been kidnapped or, in this case, Redknapped.