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Tourists love the place, and trendy young hipsters pack the joint on weekend nights. The musicians are talented enough, but the house musicians are has-beens and the featured musicians are mostly wannabes. That doesn't mean there isn't talent to be found, but that the music is overshadowed by other factors.
There are some pretty sleazy hangers-on drifting around the place. Picture the whole "skinny young italian with greasy black hair, tight polyester pants, open short and porn-stache" thing. These guys are there all the time, so they're either hopeless losers or they're associated with management. The manager is a jerk from the get-go.
You'd probably have a better time at the larger, less-crowded clubs on the street nearby. The other clubs on Lower Broadway rock steadily full-time, unburdened by the baggage of trying to artifiically maintain past glory. The other clubs pack in the guests too, but they just seem more sincere.
If you ever get the chance to see pictures of Tootsie's from the 70s, compare them to the place today. Even though the bar looks old, it's not the original. Ok, maybe that's not fair, since renovations are inevitable in any place that's more than 40 years old.
Of course that's part of the story too. Tootsie's has only been around since the 1960s, although to see the place you'd think that it had been around since the 40s, the true heyday of the country honkytonk. You can imagine that Hank Williams might have played here, but he didn't. The place is indeed a dive, but thankfully not the kind of dive that it was in its early years, when Lower Broadway was a seedy part of town with pawnshops, hookers and general mayhem.
Definitely visit Tootsie's during your visit, but understand that Tootsie' exist pretty much on its past, not on anything special that it's doing today.
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Jeff Dunham
Bars
