Spotlight on Spotlight
“Spotlight Tavern is an entertaining and hip (though not overly, annoyingly hip) bar and live music venue located on Rantoul Street in Beverly. While I personally thought the place always had potential to be a fantastic stomping ground, I always arrived too early to really mingle with any sort of crowd. I finally had a night to share a beer or two or three or four or five or six with the local patrons and I am happy to report this is one of the coolest establishments on the North Shore.”
These were the opening words to something I had planned to write about Spotlight just a few days before it was gone for good. I had only been there about a half dozen times before its abrupt closure in the summer of 2017, and it was during an interesting time for me. I was looking to meet new people, and I was really sick of meeting others off the internet or planning things with people my age who have no time to do anything or being around the people I’ve been around for over a decade. I was almost unreasonably upset when I heard the place closed, because it felt like I had finally found a place where I could actually go and make friends and not feel unwelcome. Almost every bar I go to makes me feel entirely out of place. I’m too old, or too young, too fat, too dumb, too woke, too not-enough-of-a-biker. Spotlight never felt that way for me. Maybe it’s just because Beverly is a place where a lot of “me’s” hang out now, but I feel like it’s more than that, because it wasn’t just the fellow overweight dudes with beards and glasses (hi!) I was getting along with. I was getting along with the band, the bartenders, the older folks, and the way-cooler-than-me younger folks. They could all have just been humoring me as I was making an ass of myself, but even if that was the case, imagine how friendly they would be to people they actually like!
It was easy to underestimate the size of Spotlight. A modest bar (with some good beers on tap, including Left of the Dial by Notch and Goose Island IPA) greets you at the main entrance, and from there it’s a straight shot to the deck. The first time I was in there I actually completely missed the second bar and the stage, which is a shame because it’s easily the coolest looking part of the building. There’s very nice psychedelic colored lighting, and some trippy blacklight and day glo paintings hanging on the walls.
Because of my limited experience with Spotlight, I feel like I’m not the most qualified person to write this. I don’t have years of history with the place, nor do I know the regulars or staff by name. I do know that every single time I went there, I felt like I was attending the coolest party ever. You’d arrive and have a few drinks at the bar with your friends and catch a band play on that cool, trippy stage. You could go outside and dance on the deck with some strangers and probably end up doing some other weird shit on the deck too, but there was a sign that said “what happens on the deck stays on the deck” so I’m going to keep it that way.
There is one night in particular that I think encapsulates the place for me, though. It was around 8pm on a Friday, and this was the first time I had gone in alone while waiting for some friends to arrive. There were still only a few people at the bar, the whole place seemed livelier than usual. A man who was not happy with the baseball game (as in he wasn’t a fan of baseball, which is a hard thing to not like with around here), asked for music to be played; Queens of The Stone Age, specifically. Nova (off their self-titled) blasted over the speakers and I sat there sipping my beer, smiling, wondering when my friends are going to show up and if they’re not maybe I can actually pull a big boy move and meet some people on my own. It is a pleasant yet strange feeling when a bar starts playing a song you want to hear without you actually doing the playing of it. It’s sort of like that feeling you get when someone says something you were thinking and then you wonder if you said it or just thought it. Anyway, my friends arrive and that brings the total tally of patrons to maybe seven or so, because apparently showing up anywhere in Beverly before 9 means you’re going to be sitting alone for a bit. So all six or seven of us get to talking, and topics range from local bands to the sad state of Hampton Beach (will they ever fix that Q*Bert machine?). There was some small talk among my group with a man who apparently worked for the Salem News. For the life of me, I cannot remember how our conversation went, but he mentioned the paper needed something “young and hip,” to highlight places “off the beaten path.”
And I remember thinking to myself, hey, this could be it! Maybe this could be good for me. Maybe I could just write about what happened to me that night and send it in to both him and whoever is above him. I thought that even though I’m not all that young and not hip in the slightest, it’s always fun to pretend. I typically have a strange point of view, I’m not good at describing things, and I’m probably the very definition of an unreliable narrator, but I definitely like to go to enough places to write about them. If there was ever a place that deserved to be written about, it was definitely Spotlight.
So I started writing. I started writing right there, on my phone, in Spotlight’s bathroom. I was taking a historically long bathroom break, as I was holding it for a long time due to not knowing there was more than one bathroom. I was taking note of everything in there and jotting it down in my phone, trying real hard to not drop it in the urinal. I have a soft spot for restrooms with crewd band stickers and graffiti tags all over the walls. I remember looking in the mirror, which was broken, and thinking it was too perfectly broken to not have been done on purpose, making it a nice piece of decorative art. Breaking just about anything can make it art, and that’s why I wrote something down about wanting to smash a bottle of mustard and sell it on Etsy. I never actually went through with that. These are all the things I made note of in that piss-poor article before I sent it off to the Salem News in hope of making it big.
They never responded.
It’s not a very interesting story, really. Not compared to other tales I’ve heard come out of Spotlight. I did wake up with a new stranger on my Snapchat, though. There were numerous videos of us hanging out on the deck and, well, it at least looked like we were having a blast! There were girls and drinks and music and everything! The crowd sure grew to an impressive size before midnight. I wish I still had those videos, because I really liked people-watching at Spotlight, and not for some weird, ironic, schadenfreude-ish reason either. It was a crowd composed of a fine mixture of the counterculture and middle class. So many post-”somethings.” People that were probably really into a scene before and now just maybe don’t have the time or energy. Mohawks, biker helmets, rastafarian hats. But then there’s the two college girls eating Domino’s on their one night out, and a cute middle-aged couple wearing their nice summer clothes. What a weird, comforting place.
But the more important thing to me was that, in a weird way, Spotlight got me writing again. I had stopped for a very long time and was starting to lose interest in it. I think maybe I was just looking for something special enough to be written about. There were only so many movie reviews and video game reviews and “hey here’s my hot old man take on some bullshit” articles I have left in me. I wanted to write about things I like, and as it turns out, I like whatever Spotlight represented. Again, because of my limited exposure, someone else will have to tell me what it is that place represented; what it really means, man. Maybe someone can write that down and send it to the Salem News for me.
