A Blog from Jeff Liles... part 1 of 2

Wednesday, July 30, 2008


Who Stole the Soul?
Category: Life

The Slip Inn is a blink-and-you-miss-it dive bar located at the corner of Henderson and McMillan in East Dallas.

For years it was a favorite of neighborhood locals and the service industry crowd. It opened at seven in the morning and was a great place to catch a soap opera with your afternoon cocktail. It was the only place to be first thing in the morning on New Year's Day. Christmas Night was always the bomb. Regulars ordered pizza from Louie's and gathered around the TV at the end of the bar to watch NBA playoff games and Ultimate Fighting matches.

Best of all, it was a place where people of all ethnicities could all come together to enjoy hip-hop music almost every night.

Well, so much for all that.

With t-shirts that read "Defend Dallas", '"Uptown Sucks" and the sublimely sarcastic "Keep Dallas Pretentious – Support Your Own Materialism", the Slip Inn became the favorite nightspot of people who hated everything that Dallas was fast becoming – a thriving haven for $30K millionaire douche bags.

We laughed and talked shit about the Cocaine Republicans who populated all of the snooty velvet-rope clubs down the street, and cranked up Tool on the jukebox whenever any of these freaks curiously wandered into the club. One look around, a quick beer or shot of whisky, and they were usually out the door in less than five minutes. Tool, indeed.

Of course, they were never there long enough to make the connection.

Now, quite sadly, The Slip Inn is sucking up to the tools and the douche bags.

I DJ'd at Slip Inn on and off for six years. Always loved the place. It has no windows or dance floor, old black patent leather booths, a great jukebox and sound system, a pool table and video games, wireless and a TV, and killer graffiti art on the patio.

Everything ya need.

Best of all, it was staffed with genuinely cool and unpretentious people. The tenured employees remain like a family to this day. I've always wanted to help out any way that I could.

For three years I hosted a Slip Inn group page on MySpace, and showed my documentary film "The Last Record Store" there for free. Besides the weekly DJ gig, I often worked the front door or worked security on weekend nights.

Even though I don't drink alcohol, it was easily my favorite place in town to hang out. The Best Kept Secret in Dallas – a killer bar that never had a cover charge or dress code and welcomed everyone. Blue collar workin' folk rubbed shoulders at the bar with SMU sorority chicks and the underground hip-hop crowd from the 'hood. Everyone was equal.

It was such a great vibe, unlike any other place in Dallas. The only way not to fit in was to refuse to drop your pretenses. It was dark as fuck. Nobody could see that you weren't wearing any make-up. People had sex in the rest room and smoked weed on the back porch. Shit was fun.

When Miles Zuniga and his partners bought the place about a year ago it wasn't hard to see their motivation. The place made money. Thursday nights with DJs Squirt, A One and Phooka were off the chain. These three DJs nurtured a scene that brought in a diverse crowd of people and generated bar sales that were regularly in the neighborhood of $5, 000- 7, 000 a night. Weekend nights were pretty much the same.

It was a purely organic endeavor – a profitable nightclub that never spent a penny on advertising or marketing. Everything was strictly word-of-mouth. The club was on autopilot, raking in the dough for seven years straight.

So when it surprisingly went up for sale last year, somebody buying the Slip Inn was easily a no-brainer.

Perfect for Miles Zuniga, for he has no brain.

The first thing Zuniga did was to fucking spruce the place up. That meant fresh paint on the walls. To me, that was a red flag. You just don't paint over that kind of character. The place used to look like something straight out of a Bukowski novel.

Now it looks like an Uptown pizza joint.

Then Miles started firing tenured bartenders and replaced them with employees from his other club. People who had worked at Slip Inn for years were let go for no good reason at all. Inexplicably, he fired one female bartender and took the only remaining female bartender off the weekend shifts.

Instead of taking the blame for these decisions, Zuniga stayed in the background and left Shane (the longtime bar manager) to fade the heat for any contentious public relations blowback. That wasn't very considerate now, was it?

When I returned from Los Angeles over Christmas, Shane called me up and asked if I could fill in for one of the door guys on really short notice. That night one of our customers drank way too much and was carried out the front door by one of our security guys.

This kind of thing happens at every bar. It's just part of the dynamic.

At the time, I had yet to be formally introduced to Miles Zuniga. I actually ID'd him as he came in earlier in the evening. Apparently he was a little disturbed that I didn't know who he was.

As the intoxicated man was being carried out the door, Miles came running up behind them, pointing inside the club and yelling, "Go in there and find him a ride home!" I wasn't sure what he meant by that, and I promptly replied that I couldn't leave the front door unattended.

He started screaming at the top of his lungs, "IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB! GO DO IT!"

I couldn't believe this customer was yelling at me because of something that was as inconsequential as this. It made no sense. My first thought was to have him thrown out as well.

I replied that it wasn't my job, and that I had no idea who this patron had come to the club with – I didn't even know where to begin to look. What was I supposed to do? Leave the front door and start randomly asking people if they could give this guy a ride home? This guy was crazy. We had some very antagonistic eye contact for the rest of the evening.

If Zuniga had just said, "Hey, I'm Miles the new owner. Can you call this guy a cab?" then we would have had a very simple solution to a very common problem. This dude was twitching like Danny Bonaduce on a hot batch of steroids.

Later that night I found out that Miles was the new owner of Slip Inn, and it became pretty obvious that he had been using this particular incident to flex his authority to everyone within earshot. Later that evening, he also yelled at Shane and told him that I was never to work the front door of the Slip Inn again.

I could live with that. I really only wanted to DJ there anyway. No problem.

A few months later, I had a face-to-face discussion out in the parking lot with Zuniga where I apologized for my part of the misunderstanding. We shook hands and discussed my returning to DJ at the club on a regular basis. He made what turned out to be a false promise about bringing me back and then began laying out his "vision" for what he wanted the Slip Inn to be.

It was at that point that Zuniga began to make veiled implicitly racist remarks that revealed his absolute oblivious insensitivity to just exactly what had made this club successful and popular in the first place. His perspective was misguided to say the least.

During this exact same time period, four different DJs all left their weekly gigs at the club – and all for pretty much the same reason: Miles Zuniga, self-proclaimed music and security expert, didn't want them to play hip-hop music.

While discussing my possible regular Saturday night gig (which never materialized, he never emailed or called back) Zuniga referenced an incident where an African-American male had apparently groped a white woman at the club.

This situation apparently infuriated him to no end.