Karaoke draws a crowd

CHENEY – It’s Wednesday night at Willow Springs Restaurant & Lounge in Cheney, and some of the regulars are arriving for the 9 p.m. start of karaoke.

Richard “Curley” Turbin, 65, is seated at a table with his traditional cup of coffee. Robin Branch, 49, is visiting with some of the patrons, and groups of college students are coming in. Other Cheney-area residents are arriving for what promises to be another evening of good times and good music – and some not-so-good music. Not that anybody cares about that.

But that’s what karaoke is, said Ryan Jensen, the karaoke jockey (or KJ) at Willow: “It’s made for people who can’t sing, but what’s great is to see the hidden talent that emerges. And there’s quite a bit of that.”

Karaoke at Willow isn’t like karaoke at a lot of other places that cater to a particular musical genre or age group or other demographic, Jensen said. Turbin’s overalls, ball cap and senior citizen status, not to mention his love for the oldies of country music, seem to mix nicely with the trendy outfits and casual T-shirt-and-jeans style of the college students and after-work attire of people from the area – not to mention the rap songs, jazz, rock and standards that would be heard that evening.

It’s described as a family experience by the regulars, with something for the 21-year-olds and something for the baby boomers and beyond.

“Maybe not everybody knows your name, like on the ‘Cheers’ bar on TV, but Ryan certainly does,” Branch said.

Indeed, during the evening, Jensen, who has been the karaoke master at Willow for the past 10 years, seems to know most of them and encourages the singers, sings harmony or plays air guitar for them while they perform. He knows Branch’s style so well that she doesn’t even sign up with a song list. “Ryan knows what I can do and selects songs for me,” she said.

And like most of the regulars at Willow, Jensen has a day job, too – president of Innotek in Spokane Valley, an innovative technologies company that manufactures consumer safety products such as gas, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors.

The Willow karaoke patrons are firefighters, teachers, social workers and what-have-you by day, but by night, they are all performers. They talk easily about the place and why they come.

“It’s fun to perform, to pretend you’re a good singer,” said Brynn Potts-Thorne, 26, a clerk at Michael’s in Spokane, where she lives with her husband, Mark Thorne, 25, an Eastern Washington University student, who was there singing, too.

“We all range from horrible to amazingly good,” she said after performing a charged rendition of the Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy.”

Although Willow has karaoke on Friday and Saturday nights as well, Wednesday is the big night, when the lounge, which has an 86-person capacity, is often elbow-to-elbow room-only. Mike Hartman, owner of Willow Springs Restaurant & Lounge, built the stage in 1998, and karaoke at Willow on Wednesdays has been a Cheney tradition ever since.

As the evening begins, “Curley” Turbin gets up to sing Josh Turner’s “Your Man” in his Burl Ives style. Everyone applauds. Turbin, a retired EWU maintenance and janitorial worker who is disabled, said it took him two years of sitting and watching before he got up to sing. That was in 2000, and he’s been a fixture there ever since.

“This is one minute away from where I live, and it gets me out of the house to a place where I can put my heart into a song,” he said.

Justin “Stone” Michaels, 24, who lives in Cheney and works at Safeway, has a quasi-Blues Brothers look going for him, with a black shirt, loose white tie, black fedora – with the image deviating wildly when set off by his camouflage shorts.

“It makes me feel a little like a rock star here,” he said after finishing “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, “and what’s especially nice is that the crowd actually listens to you, sometimes sings along and always applauds.”

He hangs out for a while with Potts-Thorne, a friend of his since they were seventh-graders in Lind, Wash. “We like to come here for Ryan and because this is our place, where our friends go and because it’s like home,” said Potts-Thorne.

Linda Currie from North Idaho has been attending heavy equipment school in Spangle and comes to Willow “to relax. I used to sing at church a lot, doing background vocals. I’m learning how to do lead now.” She put a lot of emotion into Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.”

Drew Salter, a 22-year-old Eastern student, a senior biology/pre-dentistry major from Hermiston, Ore., simply finds karaoke a light-hearted release. “It’s really fun to be ridiculous with a microphone,” he said.

Dan Bowlin, 30, a cook at EWU, did a fierce Axl Rose imitation in Guns ‘n Roses’ “Patience.” The crowd whooped and cheered. “I love it,” Bowlin said.

Branch, the mother of six children, four of whom are in college, is also a cook at EWU. “You know, it’s like home, like family here,” she said. “If it’s late and you sometimes go home without paying your tab, Mike (Hartman, the owner) is a nice guy. He knows you’ll come in the next day to pay up. This is a user-friendly place.”

Maybe it really is a bar where everybody knows your name, after all. A true neighborhood gathering place – but with singing.