“I got 13 years in this business. That’s enough,” Dean Karabatsos explains over a beer in the front room of Gaspars, a lovely old nightclub at Southport and Belmont that pioneered the local new-wave music scene. The Karabatsos family has sold Gaspars (the asking price was a half million dollars), and Dean isn’t sorry. “It’s a rough business,” he says. “The hours are real weird. People come by and say, ‘Dean, you got it made.’ But you’re here at noon replacing a sink or fishing a Kotex out of the lady’s-room john, or mopping up vomit off the floor, and you stay up till all hours. I never had stitches in my life until I worked in this business. A guy busted one of our picture windows on me, another guy pulled a gun on me–it turned out to be a toy, but still. People who are in the business–the first words out of their mouths are ‘Dean, congratulations.’ It’s the others who say, ‘What, are you crazy?’ I’m lucky that after 13 years, I still have my health. I have seen guys get so wrapped up in the bar scene–the drugs, the women, whatever–that they’ve blown marriages, their stores, their whole life. You look at them, they look like balloons. Will I miss it? Sure–it’s 13 years of my life. But there are other things that I’d like to do.”
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Dean Karabatsos’s father bought the building many years ago, when Dean was a kid. “I’ll never forget my first look at the place,” Karabatsos says. “There were motorcycles lined up from Southport halfway down the block on Belmont. We were saying, ‘Jeez, what are we getting into, a Hell’s Angels bar?’ But it was a national motorcycle club that had its local monthly meeting at the place, which was called the Old Bavarian Inn.
Gaspars–Karabatsos got the name from a composer whose guitar piece he was learning at the time–moved over to new wave with the help of talent booker Jim MacNamara, who had worked at the Quiet Knight concert club, and musician Jim Desmond, who had the handle on who was hot and who was not.
There seems to be no word on the street about the bar’s next incarnation. “The new owners haven’t been very specific about what they want to do with Gaspars,” Karabatsos says, though he doubts that the current venue will continue. “I’m not worried about it. After all, we sold to them, it’s theirs now, not ours.”
