Nights at the Husky, a Frozen Grin Web Comic Exclusive! (UPDATED 9/27/2002)

 INTRODUCTION

The Brazen Husky is the Anchorage bar I would have sneaked into along with my brother and Dave Landry as high school kids in the mid-to-late 1970s. It was the coolest bar in a town with a surplus of bars. It reeked of cigarette smoke, booze, sweat and the blues, and thanks to the great taste of its owner, Rick, it featured the finest performers then on tour, The Husky was where you could go to hear the likes of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ry Cooder, John Lee Hooker, Koerner, Ray and Glover, Big Bill Broonzy,  Bonnie Raitt and Mose Allison. Add in the occasional Zydeco band and obscure folkies like Richard and Linda Thompson, and you  had a bright spot in the middle of the sub-Arctic dark of Anchorage winter. 

 Those were wild times in Anchorage. People were earning massive wages building the Trans Alaska Pipeline, from the North Slope to Valdez, crossing two massive mountain ranges, the Yukon River and hundreds of miles of frozen tundra. It was a tough, dangerous job, done under forbidding conditions. The pipeliners worked hard and partied harder, coming into town looking to blow off steam. Those in the know blew their steam and the contents of their wallets at The Brazen Husky.

The Husky was located in the center of one of Anchorage's red light districts, Spenard, a raggedy neighborhood that clung to Spenard Road, which wound through the Western part of town. It featured a massage parlor next to a bar next to a liquor store on every block.  Mixed in among the watering holes and whorehouses were pawnshops, gun shops, coffee shops, adult bookstores,  and a sprinkling of quaint log cabins. The Husky was the jewel in the tarnished crown of the neighborhood.

As blues-besotted teenagers, only one thing kept us out of this musical Shangri-La. The Brazen Husky didn't exist, and still doesn't, outside of my imagination. But you can visit it here where over the next hundred days or so, I will publish a page a day from my book-length comic history of this Anchorage landmark, Nights at the Husky.

 

 

Chapter two follows right here