A search for the best music video bartender

Thanks to an obscure bylaw drafted by Congress in 1885, music video directors work under a strict mandate: just about every music video ever made must feature a bartender. Their appearances are often very brief, but so commonplace that the Music Video Bartender ought to be regarding as an institution.

Jon Bois, Spencer Hall, and Ryan Nanni each have a favorite music video bartender. One is very bad at his job, one is implausibly good and one is a nexus of shirtless sexual energy.

Think we forgot one? Write it down on a napkin and throw it away or something, because we frankly do not really care.

In 2011, on the day Penn would have turned 46, someone posted in the talk page of his Wikipedia entry, not to point out style inconsistencies or request a citation, but simply to wish him a happy birthday. We loved Chris Penn, a character actor who often played the loud, craven, dim-witted criminal. In Beethoven’s 2nd he was outsmarted by a family of St. Bernards. In Reservoir Dogs he precipitated the least ceremonious end to a Mexican standoff I’ve ever seen: he squealed, “LARRY STOP POINT’N ‘AT FUCKIN GUN AT MY DEEYYAAAAD,” everybody shot and everybody died.

Penn appears in Jay-Z’s “Can I Get A...” music video as a bartender who mixes drinks and dances.He was afforded roughly 12 seconds of screen time in this video, which everyone my age has seen dozens of times. Either he was told to make “mix drinks and dance,” or he told himself. In any case, he whips himself into grand flourishes and makes the God-fearing shit out of a drink.

He’s holding on to that cocktail shaker for dear life, desperate for a rodeo clown to come save him. When you ask a man to “mix drinks and dance,” director, you must understand who you are asking. Chris Penn does not know how to mail it in or phone it in. He does not trust remote correspondence. He has tiptoed the drink to your doorstep, and bless his goofus-maloofus heart, he has spilled nearly all of it.

Penn, pouring well vodka into the shaker from great height and for absolutely no reason. He is either a rotted-through log in the wake of a motorboat, or dancing. He sneaks a grin at the edges of his mouth, agape in wonder. His eyes are dinner plates, and you have seen this look before. You saw it last time you were at the McDonald’s and the three-year-old at the counter was given a nickel to drop into the water and try to catch. That nickel went to the United Way, and Chris Penn is making a god-dang mess of everything.

A bar run by this Chris Penn, after a week’s time, would be most efficiently cleaned with a blow torch. Bartenders, even those at the seediest dive bars, wipe their work spaces obsessively, which is no accident. Things like vermouth and Fernet-Branca and Angostura bitters, if spilled, will cling to a surface and reek for a month. Spill them on the floor one time too many and you’ll be standing on a Pop-Tart with its top picked off.

This is the sort of bartending that is only permitted in a fictional bar, and even then, only for 12 seconds. In my sophomore year of high school, I would habitually flip on MTV after staggering out of bed. It was too early in the morning to find happiness in anything, but Chris Penn’s unjustified, unexplained goofing would make me chuckle, and the cuts were so brief that I felt like I might have been the only one noticing, and the only one laughing.

I wasn’t, because I tell friends about it now, and they almost always know exactly who and what I am talking about. He paid us all that visit. He will be happy to make you a drink. His recipe for everything is one part shit all over the floor, because he is terrible at bartending.

I really didn’t expect this to become a voyage of discovery, but it did. This is Wham!‘s “Club Tropicana,” a light bit of satire about British vacation packages for young people seeking fun, sun and alcohol poisoning abroad. It only went to No. 4 in the UK, and appeared nowhere on the U.S. charts after its release in 1983.

That’s a speedo George Michael is wearing, and what appears to be a half-consumed Cosmo he’s pouring directly into the pool. If you were to draw up what George Michael was doing at any given moment in 1983, you could not do better than this as a guess.

The bartender appears first at :40 or so. He is a lean, wiry man with a mustache, no shirt, a come-and-get-me-cancer tan, a straw cowboy hat on his head and a bandanna tied around his neck.

His real name is Anthony Pike, and he has done or said all of the following things:

Tony Pike is clearly the best music video bartender because he is the only music video bartender who was, in real life, actually the bartender for the video. (And still is.)

Having never been to bartending school, I cannot say if it prepares you to BASE jump with your bar setup and several unpacked bottles of alcohol. My suspicion is that it doesn’t. Ttherwise, a lot of people would have a story about that time a bartender-in-training floated by their office window, and we’d probably have far fewer ground floor bars.

So, consider how difficult it must have been for Pastor Troy to find the right bartender for this job. Most candidates probably balked at the idea of having to transport all their supplies up to the roof of a skyscraper. Others may have had justifiable safety concerns about serving people who were about to jump off of said skyscraper. Even if all the attendees had signed a waiver, think of the PR nightmare that results from a “BARTENDER SERVES LEMON DROPS TO YOUR DEATH” headline.

And the candidates who were okay with those requests still should have drawn the line at jumping off themselves, especially without a free hand to deploy the chute or a static line to do the job. It’s a lot to ask of someone in the service industry, especially when you could just pay one person to serve drinks on the roof and another to do so at the landing site. Saying no to this job opportunity, despite the handsome sum Pastor Troy was likely promising, would be completely reasonable.

Jim -- I’ve decided this man’s name is Jim -- said yes. Why? I don’t believe it was confidence, though Jim would have needed at least 100 regular skydiving jumps before anyone would even offer to train him in BASE jumping. Nor do I believe it was the money. You don’t get the look of unbridled joy on Jim’s face when you’re just trying to get paid.

I think Jim did this because he decided this death would be a fine way to go out. That’s not to say he planned or hoped for this to be his final day on this Earth, but he accepted that possibility. Jim looked at this setup, considered the chances of catastrophe, and said yes. Yes, that’s a fitting final page to the story of my life.

It’s hard not to envy that ability to approach life not as a balancing of risks and rewards but as a series of narrative opportunities. In Jim’s mind, the outcome of the jump was almost irrelevant. He taught me that surviving and living aren’t the same thing.