Moss, Local Man of Mystery

Getting to know the elusive master of the Double Down is no easy feat

Julie Seabaugh

The soon-to-be-55-year-old tends not to mince his words. Six-foot-4, clad in black Converse All Stars, black pants, a long-sleeved navy shit and thick black glasses, Moss resembles a shaggier, hipper Kevin Nealon. He curses freely and refers to his friends as knuckleheads, and if he doesn't like something, he's not afraid to let you know it. "Bars here are all the same," he says, sipping a Heineken in his cramped office. "You've got your 15 video poker machines, you're watching ESPN and you're throwing chicken wings at people, and it's the same shit down the street. It's pretty boring to me. I mean, these bars all work, so I guess everyone doesn't feel that way, but I do.

"I hate hippies," he continues. "There was this big thing in the Thomas and Mack, I don't know if it was Phish or whatever—one of those big hippie bands—so I found a soap on a rope, nailed it up over the door and figured half the hippies would be scared of the soap and run away, and the other half wouldn't know what it was, so they'd get scared and run away. That was pretty good.

"So yeah, I hate hippies, I hate hypocrites, and I hate people who make promises and then don't keep them. Your word is important. And I don't give people the benefit of the doubt. I don't like getting close to people as a friend or a trusted associate or anything. I won't trust anybody until you give me a reason to. Give me a reason to like you, and I'm there. You've got me for life."

Conversely, Moss is effusive about the things he does like. "Oh God, I looove midgets," he laughs. "I mean, who doesn't? When we showed porn here, we used to show a lot of midget porn. We've got a soft spot in our hearts for them."

Some of his additional favorites include learning about the history of Las Vegas, his brand new Bad Boys of Las Vegas calendar (he's Mr. January), the time-capsule rocket he recently purchased from the Stardust auction and the Double Down Saloon, the landmark bar he founded with his late partner, Scot Siegel.

"I think the American Dream is being able to not have to dread going to work," he muses. "That's not living. You need to feel good about being in your place. ... It's a concept everybody understands, and nobody's going to hand it to you. You have to make it happen. You have to know just what it is that's going to make you happy, and once you figure that out, make it happen. And if you can do that, I think you've beaten life. And that's a pretty proud achievement, I'd say."

In fact, it's difficult to neatly separate the man from his Ass Juice and bacon martinis (Double Down specialty drinks). Moss makes for a study in dichotomy: On one hand, he's the public face of a bar that upon first opening had to drag bums in off the street just to have bodies in the place. Now having just celebrated its 14th anniversary, the Double Down will likely go down as Vegas' answer to CBGB, Hogs and Heifers, Whisky a Go Go and The Roxy. Folks stop in on the way from or to the airport, buy a round of Ass Juice and some T-shirts, and hop back in their waiting cabs. Comedy Central's Insomniac highlighted the bar in its Vegas episode. Moss even has a story about four guys from England who spent their entire four-day vacation on the premises. They never made it to their hotel, and they proclaimed it the best vacation they ever had.

On the other hand, Moss is an intensely private individual who will talk about the Double Down's jukebox for half an hour but clams up when it comes to revealing personal details. "It's not on purpose; that's just who I am," he shrugs.

Not that it's a bad thing; Retaining a little mystique goes a long way in the nightlife business.

On most other counts, however, he's got a liberal open-door policy. Literally. "The front door doesn't even lock," says Scott Cameron, a 13-year Double Down barkeep. "About five months ago when the city turned off the water in this neighborhood, we had to back a car against the door and keep it parked there to keep people out."

In contrast to proprietors of exclusive "scene" bars, Moss makes sure that at his place, everyone—from tattooed girls with shaved heads to blue-collar afternoon regulars to businessmen in suits and industry folks just getting off work at midnight—is welcome.

"Nobody gets looked down upon like you do pretty much everywhere else you go," he explains. "You've got a rock star at the bar, some regular guy, and you've got a movie star next to him, and the two famous guys are really happy to be here because nobody's making a big deal out of them. And the guy in the middle is thrilled to be here because he's getting treated the same as these guys."

When Moss stands underneath the "Happiest Place on Earth" sign outside and sees a Clear Channel billboard across the intersection, not to mention the construction under way clear up to the Hard Rock, he'll describe envisioning all this growth coming a long time ago. He knew it was inevitable, he got in early and he's turned the Double Down into a capital-D Destination.


"Moss helps out a lot of bands from all over the world, not just around the country. Bands from Japan, Finland, Mexico, France, who people normally wouldn't get a chance to see," echoes Vermin bassist Rob Ruckus. "And does right by them to make sure that they always come back. He's given any local band that's worth their shit a chance, too. He gives younger bands a place to hone their chops and old folks like me a place to call home."

It's no wonder that in certain circles Moss is known as the P.T. Barnum of Paradise Road.



*****


"Hit him! Kill him! Knock him out!" Moss shouts, slapping the tiled bar top.

He's perched aside the Orleans Casino's Alligator Bar, sipping a Skyy and tonic, blowing Partagas cigar smoke and rooting for Central Michigan University vs. Ohio in the game in progress overhead. An avid sports bettor, he's got "a goodly amount" riding on the game, but the main reason he comes here most Thursday afternoons is for verbal sparring sessions with his friend Louie Thomas, bartender and vocalist/bassist of The Sparker Dims, a local indie-psych band that regularly plays the Double Down.

"We met back in '83, when I was a freshman in high school," Thomas makes up on the spot. "He worked at Winchell's, and I used to ditch first period and go get donuts for all my friends, 'cause we smoked pot and I'd get the munchies before school started. He was there at 5 a.m. making donuts, and that's how we met."

Moss shakes his head and makes a few cracks about his buddy's grandmother and his malodorous feet. "It's kinda dull today, but you can see that it can be really amusing," he says. "You're having a bad day, you can just kinda come in here and listen to these knuckleheads, and it can really change your mood. My guy scored, look at that!"

Moss knows all the drink-slingers here by name and bullshit-ability, and Louie, Miguel, Enrique and Richard all coo at the image of the Stardust rocket he passes around like a family photo. "We're gonna fly it to China!" he riffs. "It can comfortably fit 48 dead babies or a nice party of three plus a really hot stewardess."

At the Alligator Bar, hyperbole, half-truths and downright lies are encouraged. Facts are as unwelcome as hippies in the Double Down.

"I grew up in the Midwest, and I've lived in New York, and I've lived in LA, and I lived here a long time ago, briefly," is how Moss summarizes his biography. "My history is varied, but I've never really had jobs, and I've never really wanted to."

Instead, he prefers to discuss his cooking prowess, debunk Las Vegas mythology ("Bugsy Siegel had a vision? That's not true! [LA nightclub owner and Hollywood Reporter publisher] Billy Wilkerson had a vision!") and glower at the throngs of rodeo cowboys ("The fuckers are everywhere! They're like cockroaches!").

It takes a few drinks and fourth downs until he admits to being born in Chicago, moving around a lot as a kid, then attending high school in Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota, "with a little bit of journalism stuff at Northwestern thrown in. That's it."

Somewhere further down the line, he dabbled in concert promotion and made the late-'70s scene at New York City fixtures Max's Kansas City, CBGB and the Mudd Club. At another point, he had some bad experiences working as a screenwriter for a major Hollywood player. As far as details go, Moss is unapologetically evasive.

But back before the screenwriting and the East Coast and the who-knows-what-all-else, Moss was just a kid with a vision. "I was about 10, and I was watching some movie or TV show in black in white," he recalls. "There's this guy wearing a tuxedo in this bar, this nightclub. All the girls are coming up to him; all the guys are like ‘Heeey!' Then he goes into his office, which is more opulent than the whole fucking place, and I'm thinking, ‘This is pretty fucking cool. I want to do this someday!' They had the floor show and the band and the other stuff, and I said, ‘I want to be that guy.' And on a really low-rent scale, I am that guy. Did I mention I have a rocket?"

He fiddles with the ornate silver ring on his left hand, a flying skull that was a gift from legendary Hells Angel Sonny Barger.

"Let's just say that I was never a player or anything, but I've been around. And given the way history played out from all of that, it was pretty cool to have been around. That's all. And that's enough.

"Like any of these knuckleheads will tell you, I've got stories, but no more so than anybody else. Everybody's got their stories and they're all pretty much true. That's just how it is. ... Meanwhile, there's children in China that can't get a drink. Richard!"



*****


Moss has been married for 11 years to a woman he met by losing a bet, the circumstances of which he's keeping mum on. Suffice to say, somehow the two coolest kids in town ended up together.

Julie Brewer, who helped launch First Friday alongside Cindy Funkhouser and Naomi Arin, was the founder of ill-fated Downtown arts destination Enigma Café. "At that time, it was pretty much the coolest place in town," Moss boasts. "It's a real shame it isn't there anymore. If it was there, it'd be making a fortune, but it was way before its time, and it's something that an awful lot of people will always remember and speak well of."

The pair have a 15-year-old daughter, whom Moss describes as "nuts."

"The phone, the text messaging, all the instant messages, the MySpace," he marvels. "She's really into the Ramones and really early punk, but she falls to a lot of peer pressure from her friends and likes a lot of stuff that she probably wouldn't like if she was left to her own devices. But she likes a lot of punk, and she's pretty cool. She's a very, very liberal, open-minded kid."

Do his daughter and her friends know who Moss is? His role in the local music scene? "Yeah, some of them understand," he says. "But they'll be listening to some band, and I'll go, ‘I know those guys; those guys were in the bar.' Some will go, ‘Oh yeah?' and be real interested, and then in the same vein be like, ‘Oh shit, maybe we'd better rethink this if this old guy likes it.' A lot of them understand what I do here and are fascinated by who I know, but they pretty much want to keep that to themselves and not let me know that they're interested. 'Cause they're kids. You can't possibly like what your parents like, though in this case I'm not exactly your average parent."

He makes a good point; how many other parents take pride in painting a large skull—"Its eyes follow you everywhere!"—on a tree in the front yard in a nice neighborhood?

Moss is parked in a black leather chair in the sunken living room of his family's home off West Sahara Avenue. Though two weathered rocking chairs are stationed on either side of the appropriately moss-green house's front door, the interior décor seems more apt: a vintage green sofa, a record player resting in front of the fireplace, albums taking over floor space, a lampshade fashioned from lingerie, a pair of skeleton candles, a funhouse mirror, a school desk from the Nevada Test Site, an Etch-A-Sketch on the coffee table, incense burning in the background.

"I hate my neighbors, but I love the neighborhood," he says. "It's quiet, the houses have character, it's got trees, it's got grass, and I'm five minutes from everything."

Over the grill out back, he's got a wooden "Bacon" sign that flashes when plugged in, a birthday gift from his wife a few years back. "What can I say? I love bacon!" he laughs. "Bacon and midgets."

He's mounted the original Double Down pay phone on the wall of his "barn," an uncluttered office into which he retreats to watch as many as six black-and-white crime dramas a day. Moss claims to own around 1,500 of these noirish films and TV shows, each cross-categorized by title, director, where they're stored and his own personal ratings system.

On the other side of the rectangular pool sits his two-car garage. It's here that he's stashed his new treasure: the shiny, blue 15-foot Stardust rocket.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he gushes. "Look at the fins on that fucker!"

Though Moss won't say how much it set him back, the 45th-anniversary time capsule reportedly went for $13,500. (That doesn't include the six miscellaneous flashing, spinning Stardust neon signs he also scored on the auction block.)

He only came up with a plan for this booty two weeks ago, the details of which, naturally, he won't divulge, other than to say it involves "taking Ass Juice to the universe—and beyond!"

Also on the horizon is the one-year anniversary of New York City's Double Down East, which opened last March and has already been feted by The Village Voice, New York Post and the BBC.

"And there are other projects in the works that I don't want to talk about," he says. "I've got something reeeeally cool going on. It's going to be a little while, but ... within a year, people will know about it."


In the meantime, Moss continues to publish "off-center Vegas fiction in various rotten magazines," and plug away at a novel in the same vein. He describes his stories as profiles of characters that don't seem to exist anymore. "There used to be lots of storefronts all up and down Las Vegas Boulevard. They were all really small, took action on races and sports, and there were all these characters hanging there all day," he elaborates. "That's the shame about the way the town has changed. A place like Las Vegas is on the fast track, where shit just goes away. People die; they aren't replaced by anyone interesting. That's progress, and progress sucks."

Does he glimpse a little of himself in the characters of his fiction? In his hundreds of black-and-white films?

He pauses. "I dunno. Some people would think I'm a character in maybe other ways. My attitudes are pretty unique, the way I talk to people and handle things. Most people are afforded the luxury because of their job or because they're just idiots or whatever. But I'm fortunate. I have a job that lets me be me and do pretty much whatever I want. You can say ‘Fuck you!' to somebody and have them say ‘Thank you.' I like that. If I couldn't do that, then what's the point?"

It's not to get rich by selling $2 beer and neglecting to charge a cover to catch four or five bands a night. It's certainly not to spill his guts about who he is, where he's been and where he's going. Perhaps the entire point is remaining, as he prefers, a mystery.

"It's all just an awful lot of work," he sighs. "I'm overworked. I work seven days a week; nobody sees that. I sit in a bar, just hang out, and then go and collect the money. People say that to me all the time. They have no idea what I do to make that work, to stay at the level it's at. I need to end this some time, but when I go out, I'll go out with a bang. I'll go out with something good. Count on that."

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