Is there any profession as mythic and, perversely, as ubiquitous as the musician-bartender? They are omnipresent enough that I'm sure nailed to the wall at CREEM HQ they have an AI-rendered photo of an übermusican-bartender circled in red ink with the note: “our target audience.” Order a Buttery Nipple, as you do, and nine times out of 10 the hand that served you has also twiddled a guitar pedal. Yet they’re mythic because of the lifestyle they engender—hedonistic, providing liquid happiness and oblivion, low-paying yet enabling freedom, facilitating dreams three steps from the gutter. Jobs this romantically hardscrabble are hard to come by nowadays. Everybody is looking for a “Rock Star in Marketing,” but who’s hiring the real deal? I’ll take a buzzed grump bartender in a band over your shitty Warrior Poets any day of the week.