Almost Live From The Liberty Bar (1991)
Promo Spots (2), Bongo Joe music video intro, Outside Commentary and end credits sequence (9:20)
Michael Mehl, Producer/Director
Copyright Michael Mehl 1991 

 

Michael Mehl, Producer/Director/Director Of Photography
Steve Henry, Associate Producer
Howie Nestel, Almost The Host
Ann Kinser, Production Coordinator/Makeup/Wardrobe
Diane Henry, Logo and Print Promotion Design/Production Assistant
Kathy Reding, Post Production Manager and Special Effects
John Grossenbacher, Post Production Assistant
Randy Allee, Audio
Voice Over, Howie Nestel
Bongo Joe, House Band/Musical Sound Track
Bongo Joe Musical Themes “Cool It” and Listen At That Bull”
Courtesy of Arhoolie Records, San Anselmo, California
Co-produced by The Highlight Zone and KLRN TV
Charles Vaughn, KLRN TV Executive Producer
Lewis Miller and Frank Brooks, KLRN Engineers
Dagoberto Patlan, 2021 Digital Transfer/Color-Audio Corrections
Special Thanks to Liberty Bar, The San Antonio Current,
Don Friedkin, Greg Moring, John Hogan,
Tad Wachter, C.C. Smith, Helen Glau, Mike Hood,
Balloon Creations, Laurie Segovia, Teresa Clark,
Sean Sexton, Phillip J. Sheridan and The Brakenridge Park Railroad.

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Offbeat Show Makes It Into The Mainstream
San Antonio video producer Michael Mehl’s Almost Live From The Liberty Bar to debut on KLRN with theme penned by Bongo Joe
Ed Conroy for the San Antonio Current, July 25, 1991

•••

When you do it right,
You do it accordin’ to right.
There’s only one right
And that is right!

Well, it depends on which side of the question
You look at it from;
Some say there’s only two sides to a question
But that’s the biggest lie ever told. 

I’m here to tell you that there’s six sides to any question.
First you get the north side and south side,
East side and west side,
You got the fron side, and the rest I don’t have to
Tell you.

Better cool it
You gotta cool it
And do it right!

– “Cool It” by George Coleman, a.k.a. “Bongo Joe”
From a 1968 vinyl platter released by Arhoolie Records

According to San Antonio producer Michael Mehl, those words by Bongo Joe “reflect the spirit” to be found in the latest locally-produced television show to hit the airwaves, known simply as “Almost Live From The Liberty Bar”.

I guess you could say that “Cool It” is the show’s theme song.

Regular readers of this column may remember that the larval stage of “Almost Live” got some local press a few months ago, when Mehl was planning to shoot a pilot utilizing inimitable San Antonio attorney Jerry Goldstein as its principal guest. The idea, as Mehl explained it to me back then, was to create a talk show that delved into San Antonio and its people in a way never before attempted by local mainstream media.

Well, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. The show’s concept hasn’t changed that much, but everything else has. Most importantly, after some initial discussions about trying to interest commercial stations in it or showing it on public-access cable television, this hour-long show has finally found a home at KLRN TV (much to the credit of that station’s management). Even more remarkably, it’s gotten a great time for its debut: 9 pm on Saturday, July 27.

So, if you’re someone out there in “television land” desperately wanting to tune in to something truly different, “Almost Live From The Liberty Bar” is your big break. Mehl showed me a VHS copy of the master tape the other day, and all I can say without comparing it to the “David Letterman Show” or “Alive From Off Center” is that San Antonio has never had a local show like this –and it’s about time.

Actually, to contradict myself (which is also in the spirit of the show, where there are indeed six sides to every question), there’s a lot more I can and ought to say about “Almost Live From The Liberty Bar”.

For instance, I should be sure to mention some more of the people involved in making it, such as Steve Henry (also editor of the Current) who serves as the show’s associate producer and technical coordinator, in addition to local promoter/advertising man Howie Nestel, who plays the role of “almost the host” with plenty of panache.
Diane Henry designed the distinctive gunshot-flecked target that makes up the show’s logo, and Ann Kinser, besides working alongside Steve on all the production grunt work, does a great job on the makeup.

I should know. She put the pancake powder on my face just a couple of weeks ago when –as fate would have it– yours truly turned up at the Liberty Bar to be taped as a guest for the first show. They asked me to give my feelings and thoughts about the Unidentified Flying Object phenomenon, almost two years since the release of my book “Report on Communion”, which examined Whitley Strieber’s controversial account of apparent encounters with non-human beings.

Dave Risher, owner of Hogwild records, who was crowned King Anchovy during this year’s Fiesta Cornyation celebrations in honor of having successfully resisted an attempt to force him to cease selling a recording by 2 Live Crew, rounds out the first show as its other guest.

And, to complete the brazenly self-serving image that writing this column is giving me, I should point out that this very different television program is being supported and promoted by San Antonio’s only truly alternative newspaper, the Current, as you’ll see from the presence of its logo in the show’s introductory moments. That support is appropriate, since along with the “Almost Live” logo in the show’s opening moments appears another colorful logo announcing the show as one of KLRN’s “New Alternatives” – perhaps a sign of more creative programming to come.

When I asked KLRN program director Charles Vaughn if he had agreed to the idea of “Almost Live From The Liberty Bar” in the interest of attracting more younger viewers to KLRN he quickly replied “That’s right!” He also went on to say that “Michael Mehl has an unconventional way of expressing himself, and we could use some of that around here”.

Mehl’s unconventionality is visible from the very first moments of the show, which displays time-lapse images showing people scurrying by the bar’s large, well-lit windows, in a sequence taped at night from the opposite side of Josephine Street. The camera takes you to a street corner outside the bar where Bongo Joe percusses his 55-gallon oil drum in time with the ditty quoted above. “Fog” from a smoke machine gives the scene an effectively surreal feeling. Mehl talked about his style and his motivations recently in an interview at my home.

“I wanted to talk to people that were, if you will, countercultural, but not in the normal sense that makes you think of, say, Berkeley, California”, he said. “Rather, I wanted to tap an undercurrent of the apparent mainstream culture of San Antonio. For me, the embodiment of that was Bongo Joe. I perceived him as a very unique individual in San Antonio, and now that I have gotten to know him, that uniqueness has acquired depth. He’s highly individualistic. The public perception of him is very different from his true nature. That’s real important because this city is really high-strung on perception, appearances”.

Just about everybody in San Antonio knows Bongo Joe and his catchy songs, raps and rhythms, but in case you don’t, Mehl is referring to George Coleman, who performs under the moniker of Bongo Joe. Since the late 1960’s. he and his unique musical style have been a consistently regular feature of local downtown life to the point where the man has become an institution.

And why did Mehl choose the Liberty Bar as the place to tape the show?

“One reason is the name, and what it represents”, Mehl said. “Also, a whole lot of people congregate there, and a whole lot of important issues are discussed there. The age of the building lends it a certain credibility, too, a certain timelessness.

Mehl noted that the original concept for the show, which had been worked out among himself, Steve Henry and local alternative media veterans Don Friedkin and Pleas McNeel, began to suffer from “too many compromises”. The result was a new host, and an opportunity for Howie Nestel.

“The main thing you have to keep when you’re doing something like this is enthusiasm”, he said. “If you lose it the project is dead. When we talked to Howie he was amazingly enthusiastic. We met when he was an account executive at the ad agency Montemayor and Associates. He’s young and street smart, and not overbearingly intellectual”.

Steve Henry also makes an appearance on the show, in a little tag segment at the end in which he and Nestel exchange banter about the evening’s entertainment. Henry, who appears in a half-lotus yoga posture, seems to be staking out turf for himself as the show’s resident philosopher. We guests like myself and Dave Risher, the show could probably use one.

One of the intriguing aspects of Mehl’s way of packaging the interviews in the show is his editing technique, which takes comments out of sequence.

“I wanted to do a subjective, non-linear conversation type of program”, Mehl said. “My approach has more to do with the subjective feel of it than the objective perception have of it. That’s one thing I’m very aware of when I’m editing. I’m looking at it as if I were composing music. I try to feel what comes next”.

Okey, okay, so it’s finally getting on the air –but will this be just another flash in the local media pan, vaporized by lack of funding? When I asked Mehl about his “funding strategies” he doesn’t even blink.

“The idea is, once I have a show in the can, I can go out and solicit sponsors”, he said. “My idea is to find funds on my own. If KLRN decides they want to provide funds for me, that’s great too, but I won’t stop soliciting funds myself. But I don’t care if I get funds or not. As long as I can afford to do it, I’ll keep doing it. I set a goal of producing a show a month until the end of the year, except for August, when KLRN has its big pledge drive. By the end of the year, I’ll have the program finessed enough that I’ll know exactly what I can do”.

And so will we. Mehl refuses to talk about future guests, but if he and his friends succeed with this show, younger-minded KLRN viewers may finally find more local programming that’s truly, as the PBS spots like to sing, “TV worth watching”.