Well, I saw the news in The Birmingham Weekly this week. The Burly Earl (
http://www.myspace.com/theburlyearl) has closed for good. Last week, they announced that they'd stopped opening for lunch and now the bar is gone. The Burly Earl was a great rock, blues, and Southern rock kind of dive with really shitty beer on tap and incredible samplings of good music and better pub food. The Burly Burger, Friar, fried mushrooms and horseradish and all the other assorted goodies made in a great place to eat plus they had a couple of ratty pool tables and coin-op arcade games for your amusement as well.
Back in the day, there were two similar bars: The Burly Earl and Smacky's a little further down 7th Avenue South. Both bars had similar food, similar atmosphere, and similar music performances, but around 1993 Smacky's became a parking lot and The Burly Earl continued on. When I worked in downtown Birmingham for the government, The Burly Earl was an after hours watering hole and supper all centered around a pool table and either The Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox. The same friends and I met there about a year or so back and it was as good as it ever was.
But, like all things Birmingham, either the urban yuppy hipsters or the homeless overwhelm it and I'd guess this was instrumental in The Burly Earl's end. Drive a few blocks east on 7th Avenue South and you'll smell the tapas and mojitoes as you enter Lakeview and the smug urbanity that's infested the area. I swear; the last goddamned thing Birmingham Alabama needs is another trend-setting bar in Lakeview. Yes, I appreciate the fact that there's fine dining, but for fuck's sake, can we not have at least one blue-collar dive with decent food and rowdy music?
Well, I guess now there's Marty's, but his grill doesn't open until 11PM.