Remembering the ’90s stirs up longings for bygone bars and the friends who inhabited them.
by Amy Silverman | illustration by Laura Spalding Best
I’ve got one for you:
A pissed-off twentysomething walks into a smoky old cocktail lounge on the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Indian School and orders a…
Wait a minute. I’m not sure I can recall what my signature beverage was in 1993. Can you? This column – an homage to my ’90s experience in Phoenix – will be full of details that are accurate to the best of my knowledge. But know there might be a few gaps. It’s been a while.
Back to the joke, which is no joke at all. I did walk into Chez Nous on (many) more than one occasion in the ’90s, and if you lived here then, you might have, too.
The place wasn’t a secret – this was long before someone thought to call a bar a speakeasy and charge double. You didn’t need a membership. But I never would have known about Chez Nous, let alone have felt brave enough to open the door, if it wasn’t for a guy named Dewey.
This should be a lesson for all, and one I still remind myself of just about every day. It’s not about the place or the things, it’s the people who make the difference. (Corny/true.) Without my new friend, that bar would have been stinky and full of yucky old people. With him, it was a portal into Dewey’s version of our hometown.
It was so much better than my version. I spent my high school years traveling to speech and debate tournaments. My idea of a fun Friday night out was dinner at Teriyaki Express and a shopping trip to Pic ’N Save. One year, with no better offers, my best friend and I went to see the symphony on New Year’s Eve. Really.
No wonder I hated Phoenix growing up, no wonder I left town for college-first-job-grad-school, no wonder I was miserable when I moved home for two weeks that ballooned into two years. I was on my way out of town when I tried one last time to get my dream job, staff writer at Phoenix New Times.
Things worked out. At that job, I met the man who would become my husband and father of our daughters; I wrote obnoxiously long stories on just about anything I could think of, alongside personal heroes like longtime staff writers Terry Greene and Paul Rubin.
And I met Dewey Webb. Now, Terry and Paul were out of my league (still are), but we all wrote about the same things – government, courts, politics, crime. Dewey was a whole other story. He was the paper’s pop culture writer. And probably the best investigative reporter that paper ever saw. Also the best headline writer anywhere, ever.
I could never figure out where Dewey got his story tips. Looking back, it’s even more impressive because this was pre-Internet. I know he scoured the supermarket tabloids each week for any reference to Phoenix or Arizona; he practically lived at the library; and he knew pretty much everyone in town.
But still, how did he meet female impersonator Felicia Fahr? Or document the travails of Danny Bonaduce? And where did he find those VHS tapes of outrageous behavior he loved to show at parties? (In contrast to the symphony, there was that New Year’s Eve when I learned the meaning of the term “scatological.”)
Dewey wanted to be my friend – or, at least, my tour guide. I won’t say much about what little I know of his life. He was a very private person. He wore Converse, Hawaiian shirts and faded jeans and packed his tiny office with more pop memorabilia than I’d ever seen in one place. I’d perch for hours on a Pepto-Bismol pink hairdresser chair he’d crammed in the corner, staring at Pez dispensers and listening to his stories.
Then we’d go out in the blue Mustang Dewey had won years earlier on Wheel of Fortune. If you’ve complained in the last 20 years about there not being much to do in Phoenix, I would like to direct you to the ’90s. If there wasn’t a good movie playing or a sale at the mall, I was out.
My new friend knew a different Phoenix. He took me to Durant’s, where I learned that I do not like martinis. I have only a vague memory of the infamous drag bar, the 307 Lounge. Countless hotel bars. Later, the gay bar Amsterdam. Merc Bar. The lobby bar at the Arizona Biltmore. It was kind of like that montage scene in Valley Girl, my favorite movie when I was in high school, where punk-y Nicolas Cage drives a naïve suburban girl down Hollywood Boulevard, showing her the nighttime sights.
(Dewey did actually take me to Hollywood once, but this is a story about Phoenix, and anyhow, I don’t really want my parents to know about that weekend.)
My recollection is that we spent most of our time at Chez Nous, which had been around since 1964. People called it a dive bar, but it was much nicer, with black tufted banquettes and some kind of waterfall feature. I don’t recall anything sticky, ever. Even the neon beer ad signs above the bar seem classy in my mind’s eye. But, like any good dive bar, it was windowless, filled with cigarette smoke and (most important) it was always icy cold in there.
All of this makes me sound like a lush. And true, there was, in fact, a Wednesday where I realized I was at Seamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub drinking at 10:30 a.m. with a group of co-workers, and if I didn’t knock it off there was going to be a problem.
But really, it was my Phoenix 101.
As all good things, it ended. Dewey left the paper – and our friendship – shortly after 9/11.
But not before he’d reported on the demise of Chez Nous, which closed in 2001, razed in favor of a British convenience store chain that lasted for such a short time I can’t recall the name. Someone tried to recycle the name Chez Nous on a bar on Grand Avenue, but it didn’t stick.
Dewey passed away in 2017. He was around to see what had been promised for so long – the emergence of a real downtown in Phoenix.
But I’m glad he’s not here now to see computers writing headlines, even stories. And getting so many things wrong.
The other day, I Googled Chez Nous, curious to see what’s out there. Not much, according to the annoying “AI Overview”:
There appears to be a misunderstanding. The search results indicate that “Chez Nous” is not a widely known or documented historical entity in Phoenix, Arizona, or elsewhere.
Dewey would have begged to differ.
