Is there any profession as mythic and, perversely, as ubiquitous as the musician-bartender? They are omnipresent enough that I'm sure nailed to the wall at CREEM HQ they have an AI-rendered photo of an übermusican-bartender circled in red ink with the note: “our target audience.” Order a Buttery Nipple, as you do, and nine times out of 10 the hand that served you has also twiddled a guitar pedal. Yet they’re mythic because of the lifestyle they engender—hedonistic, providing liquid happiness and oblivion, low-paying yet enabling freedom, facilitating dreams three steps from the gutter. Jobs this romantically hardscrabble are hard to come by nowadays. Everybody is looking for a “Rock Star in Marketing,” but who’s hiring the real deal? I’ll take a buzzed grump bartender in a band over your shitty Warrior Poets any day of the week.

So in celebration of the profession, I decided to see what made these essential workers tick by bothering them with an inane questionnaire. “You can really get to the soul of a person by making them fill out banal paperwork,” said some historical figure convicted of war crimes, probably. I guess I wanted to contrast hard data with the stereotypical images I had floating around in my mind like bubbles in beer. Were there new trends in the job? Who is the ideal patron, and can I emulate that for better service in the future? My guess was, universally, the customer who buys a beer and a shot, tips well, and then proceeds to shut the fuck up will forever reign supreme. The typical Detroit bar is not that different from any watering hole in a similar Rust Belt city, so feel free to apply my findings next time you find yourself, through no fault of your own, trapped in Cleveland.