Teenagers flocked to places like Speakeasy, I Gotcha and Electric Circus in the ’70s in Fort Worth.
The Speakeasy, publicized in this 1972 ad, was among a number of nightclubs in Fort Worth that catered to the younger crowd.A new group of nightclubs got around issues with the legal drinking age in a couple of ways. One was by separating the room into legal drinking customers and underage customers. Another way was to not enforce the law too strictly.
Constantly chasing after the elusive full house, in the late ‘70s the Speakeasy began catering to the Country-Western crowd by booking Larry Mahan and Mickey Gilley. On the east side of town, catering to a different clientele, were Savvy’s and Electric Circus . Savvy opened in 1977, offering live music nightly performed by the house band, Savvy. They also had dance contests with prizes, 25-cent beer, and admitted “unescorted women” free.
It was Spencer Taylor who put his mark on the nightclub scene in the 1970s by opening three clubs on University Drive that catered to the TCU and Paschal High School crowd . Taylor had attended Arlington State College and briefly worked as a golf pro and a car dealer before spreading his wings. He invested everything he had or could borrow to open a string of nightclubs.
The complaints went public when Municipal Court Judge Maryellen Hicks recused herself because she was Black and hearing the case might look like a conflict of interest. That did not keep her from blasting the clubs and their ownership. Taylor vehemently denied the discrimination. The furor died down, and he went on to bigger and better things, opening Billy Bob’s Texas in 1981.
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