The Suburbs is the only Arcade Fire album I’ve ever wanted to like, because I am fascinated by the way suburbs help shape people as they grow up and grow old. When you’re a kid, you think they’re boring. But later, after you’ve gone to college in a larger, busier, worldlier municipality, you might be able to appreciate the ’burbs’ comparative comfort, security, and better-maintained roads. I’m not sure, though, that Arcade Fire really got it right. Certainly, the band hits upon the boredom, the sameness, the crushing sense of meaninglessness that stains your psyche the longer you spend in a strip mall with a JoAnn Fabrics in it, but unless you’ve heard the album’s title track while digging a splinter out of your finger in a suburban strip mall sports bar, I just don’t really think you can appreciate that pervasive sense of malaise.
Now, admittedly, pulling a splinter out of your finger while seated at a table in a suburban strip mall sports bar is an incredibly specific situation, and I’m not sure it’s an experience that can even be conveyed in a four-and-half-minute pop song, so I’ll let Arcade Fire off the hook. At least their song sounds mopey. That’s kind of the base emotion for suburban drinking, and it’s how I felt once I’d passed through the tinted glass doors of Sparks Bar and Grill, a sports bar in North Richland Hills that shares a building with a Dickie’s Barbecue in a shopping center off Rufe Snow.
Besides an opacity darker than the windows on Martin Shkreli’s limo, the doors also bore a dress code notice that, in addition to barring baggy jeans and crooked ball caps or whatever “thugs” wear these days, prohibited kuttes of any sort. Nobody who dresses like a rapper, an outlaw biker, or even a Valient Thorr fan can enter unless he or she changes clothes.
Beyond the entryway, Sparks opens up into what is a long, L-shaped room. The bar is on the left, and at its end, the room jogs to the right at a pair of Golden Tees and a Big Buck Hunter. A pair of cornhole boards branded with the Texas Rangers’ emblem leaned against the wall. I assumed they were normally set up outside, because they were almost in the way of anyone wanting to throw darts into a row of three ancient boards, old enough to bear Miller Lite’s “Tastes Great, Less Filling” slogan. Past some cocktail seating is a pair of pool tables.
[box_info]Sparks Bar and Grill
5209 Rufe Snow Dr.
North Richland Hills, TX 76180
817-656-7722[/box_info]
I sat down at the last long table in the room, where the Golden Tees end and the dart zone begins. I was waiting there to interview local death metal band Turbid North. As I doodled idly in my notebook, “The Suburbs” shuffled out of the PA. If Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler’s desultory whine could put on clothes, it would only wear bathrobes and sweatpants. I laughed out loud at that zinger, and flipped my notebook open to copy it down. In doing so, I caught my left index finger in a gouge on the table’s top. As I carefully pulled slivers of wood out from under my fingernail, I noticed just how wobbly the table and the barstools were. That’s also when I saw that Sparks’ vintage is most notable, not in the gray-headed regulars scattered about the bar, but in the orange, Burger King-ish tile floor, each square pitted and faded with wear.
If that all sounds depressing, I don’t know what to tell you. Those are the kind of details that make me feel at home. Sometimes they sound sucky, but like I said, I just don’t think you can really appreciate that type of suburban malaise. At least unless you drink in it. –– Steve Steward
Follow Steve @bryanburgertime.
