No. 624 – You Know You’re Right

Performer: Nirvana

Songwriter: Kurt Cobain

Original Release: Single, Nirvana

Year: 2002

Definitive Version: None

When I joined The Dispatch and for many years after, I was either the youngest member of the copy desk or the only single member—or both. So that made for almost no socializing outside of work. For many years, I had Debbie and my own friends in Columbus, so it didn’t matter. After Debbie and I broke up in 2001, my social calendar opened wide.

Chuck told me that he and a few people from the news copy desk upstairs—most of whom were younger—went to the Thurman Café on the fringes of German Village on Friday nights to hang out, and if I wanted, come on down.

Of course, I had been part of a real tight-knit group—the Sports department—in Flint, and I had missed the camaraderie. At some point, outside friends don’t want to hear about work issues, and they don’t really understand the situation even if they do. But work friends are good for current-events sessions, because they know the situation and dynamics. You don’t have to explain anything.

So I started going, and I liked it. The Thurman is a cool restaurant/bar—very divey but with great late-night food. Chuck always got the potato latkes, and we’d end up splitting a few orders of that and maybe some mozzarella cheese sticks. Later we started getting the pizza, which had a wah-fir-thin crust, as though it were a few tortillas, which I think it was. After a hard night of funneling copy around, that was just the thing to accompany a few beers. (By this time, the JD was long out of my repertoire.)

The Thurman has two rooms. The room that had the front door was mostly empty except for the juke and a dartboard and maybe a standup video game. A couple tables were scattered randomly, but you never sat in that room. Instead, you went into the main room, which had wood booths of various size along the wall by the doorway and the standard bar stools on the opposite wall. The lighting was dark and of the Christmas variety—standard bar fare, just like the décor.

We usually sat at The Dispatch table, so named, because one table had several framed pictures of Dispatch front pages and a few pictures of former workers who were regulars.

Chuck and I, and a few others, took command of the juke on these nights, as I mentioned—shades of my former life at the White Horse. And when this song was added, I played it every time. It was nice to have some new (old) Nirvana, and it made me realize how much I missed the music of the ’90s—the last time I had a late-night newspaper crew.