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Five Years of Rockin' Little Rock

by Karen Edwards
July/August 2018 Issue

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© Photos by Larry Hamill

Quinn Fallon

It was 2013 and the luck of the Irish had finally run out – or at least it had for one descendant of the Auld Sod. Quinn Fallon was told his mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Then his wife informed him she wanted a divorce. Finally, their house was about to go on the market, which meant he needed to find someplace to live. And on top of that, he had just bought a property in Italian Village that looked as though a demolition crew had come in, changed their minds that the place had any rehab potential, and left midway through the job.

Now, flash forward five years. This month, Fallon will celebrate his fifth year as the owner of the successful neighborhood watering hole, Little Rock Bar, 944 N. Fourth Street, where each day he meets up with a community of some of his favorite people. Occasionally, he’ll take the opportunity to indulge his passion for music by playing with a small group of like-minded musicians known as Los Gravediggers. If you haven’t yet heard their rockin’ sound, just know that the band plays most genres, including outlaw country.

“I don’t know what draws me to country,” Fallon says. “Our family didn’t listen to country or much music at all, though I remember my parents would have the car radio dial set to a top 40 AM station.”

Growing up with four other siblings, it’s not surprising to learn Fallon would occasionally escape into fantasy worlds. “I was a comic books kid – Batman and all the DC titles,” he says. By the time Fallon was 11 years old, however, he had to face facts. “I was never going to be Batman,” he mused.

That’s when he discovered Gene Simmons and Kiss. If Fallon couldn’t be Batman, at least he could be Simmons.

Guitar connection
So.... his parents bought him a guitar and arranged for lessons. “The minute I had a guitar in my hands, I connected to it,” he recalls. At the time, however, he was also playing team sports. He was a member of both the football and baseball teams, and while he enjoyed the social camaraderie, Fallon just didn’t feel the same, keen connection to sports that he had with music. When Fallon’s guitar teacher remarked, “Are you going to play football or guitar – because you can’t do both,” Fallon had no problem dropping sports and throwing more energy into his music.

That’s about the time he stopped listening to Kiss. “I enjoyed them for about three years, then realized how lame they were.” Obviously, he had outgrown his need to be Gene Simmons. But if you’ve outgrown Batman and Gene Simmons, where do you go next? For Fallon, it was straight to a different kind of music entirely. He started to listen to the music of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Waylon Jennings – music he had been unfamiliar with but liked immediately. “My mom started to listen to them too and became a fan of Willie Nelson. Yeah, I’ll take credit for that,” he says with a laugh.

After high school, Fallon went to Ohio University for a while. “I never declared a major,” he says. “I couldn’t decide what I wanted to study, so I decided the whole thing was a waste of my time and money.” After two and a half years there, he dropped out and began what might best be described as a journey of self discovery.

The search for self
That meant a mind-dizzying round of jobs, from Cooker on Bethel to 700 High, from Lucky’s Bar to the Bogey Inn. Most of the time, Fallon was the in-house bartender. How he came into that profession is another story. “I left Cooker, and applied for a job at Newport Music Hall after a new owner came in and cleaned house. He told me he had already filled all of the spots, except for bartender. I told him I could do that, so he hired me.” Fallon went to work the next night, mixing up drinks like a pro. What the new owner didn’t know was that Fallon had never bartended a day in his life. “I used to be friends with the bartenders at Cooker, and I’d watch what they did. I had 20 basic recipes memorized, so I figured I could do it,” he says. Besides, he points out, at that time – and that place – “It was largely a matter of how fast you could pass bottles of beer over the bar.”

Fallon stayed at the Newport Music Hall for four years, then moved around, always bartending, once serving as bar manager.

One night, on a whim, Fallon stopped by a little neighborhood bar called Hidden Cove. “My friends told me to never set foot in the place. But I kept passing it every day, and I wondered why I wasn’t supposed to go in,” he says. He soon found out. “It was a real dive bar,” he recalls. But he and a friend, DJ Andrew Davis, aka “Andyman,” went in one night and had drinks with the owner. “He told us, I gotta get out of this place. If you will take it over, it’s yours.” Fallon said he and Andy discussed it for “like 20 minutes. We said yes.”

Treehouse is born

Andyman and Quinn celebrate their birthdays (2 days apart)
at their new bar, Andyman’s Treehouse,
in April 2000 .

And so the legendary Andyman’s Treehouse was born. That was in 1999. Fallon admits it wasn’t an ideal time of life to be embarking on a risky venture. At the time Fallon and Davis signed on, neither had any commitments in their lives. But shortly after opening, Davis was married and he and his wife started their family. Then Davis was promoted at his day job – all of which left him little time to spend at the bar. Fallon says it strained the friendship. He understood wife and kids and job come first, but that left him running the bar without a lot of help. Fallon still feels guilty about the way the relationship soured, although no one was really at fault. “I’m still close to Andy’s kids,” says Fallon. The other night, he took them out for a meal and the new Star Wars flick. “Andy and I used to do that, eat at El Vaquero and go to the new Star Wars flick. It feels like I’ve come full circle,” he says.

It was about this time, 2002, that Fallon met Joe Peppercorn who plays with the group The Whiles. “We played the Treehouse a number of times,” Peppercorn says. Eventually, Fallon hired Peppercorn to work the door there. “It was my first bar gig,” he says. Later, Fallon taught him to bartend as well.

At last, Fallon was getting a handle on running Treehouse. He kept the bar operating but it was a stress on him. “One time, we had a band break up in our parking lot before they were scheduled to go on. Then, the next week, they were back together and playing at a different venue,” Fallon recalls.

It all became too much. Fallon sold the Treehouse in 2008 and looked around for something else to do. “I didn’t want to stay in the service industry after Treehouse,” he says. There were other things that interested him. One of his dreams was to start a business that provides rides for children. He would model it after other successful “kid cabs” in places like Chicago, and other big cities. “The drivers would be carefully vetted, and the parents would be reassured that only these two drivers will ever pick up their kids – from school or practice or from their friend’s house.” Considering the widespread need for such a service, it was a sound idea, but Fallon once again ran smack into bad timing. It was right after the recession, and banks just weren’t taking chances on new ventures.

“I looked at other things, too, then realized I wasn’t qualified for anything outside of the service industry,” Fallon says. So he went back to work at various locations, including Basi Italia, Outland and Mickey’s. Once, while working at Outland, Fallon’s old partner Andyman came in, and when Fallon said he had plans to start his own bar again, his partner said he wanted in. “I said, ‘dude, we have covered this ground before.’ Davis laughed and said ‘I’ll wear you down,’ as he walked away. That was the last time we ever spoke,” Fallon recalls. Davis died suddenly a short time later. “Who knows? Maybe he would have worn me down,” says Fallon.

Future prospect
Fallon pushed on. During that time, he had had his eye on a property in Italian Village, on N. Fourth St. “I’d been interested in the location since 2006, but there was a zoning problem then,” Fallon recalled. That problem was fixed, but then the leasing terms weren’t great. Still, Fallon knew he could make something of the place. “I loved it,” he says.

“I used to go looking at places with him,” says Peppercorn. Fallon showed him the Italian Village property and Peppercorn was sold immediately. “I looked around and I could see what he saw in the place. And I knew he could make something of it.”

Fallon continued to contact the property’s owner, and finally, the owner relented. With his share of the sale of Andyman’s Treehouse, and a loan from Heartland Bank, Fallon was now the owner of, well, what exactly?

To say that the building was not ready for prime time would be an understatement. Fallon walked into a space that had been partially demolished. “I had to rehab everything,” he says. He lived in the building while he worked on it. Not an ideal situation, but on the other hand, there is no greater incentive for plugging on.

Fallon’s glad he made the move when he did. Italian Village has grown up around him. Development has turned Italian Village into one of the city’s hottest, trendy spots. “Prices have really gone up,” says Fallon. If you didn’t come in five years ago as an entrepreneur or even a homeowner you may well be shut out now. “Houses down here have really gone up in price. I feel sorry for anyone who didn’t get here when I did,” he says.

Little Rock opens

Front row from left (crew): Natalie Kopan, Mike Harvey, Joe Peppercorn, Quinn’s dog Harvey, Quinn Fallon, Cecil Moore. Back row: Phil Cogley, Kelly Ware, Tim Fulton, Laurie Barron, Patrick Koch, Lauren Piper

Finally, in 2013, Fallon opened Little Rock Bar. Okay. Maybe it wasn’t the smoothest opening. “The day we opened, we had 24 kegs for 30 tap handles, so six of them were empty,” he says. When someone requested an order from one of the empty taps, Fallon had a quick explanation. “I told everyone a truck didn’t show up, but in truth, I was down to my last $200.” Those six kegs weren’t coming – at least not for a while.

Now, however, if you drop by Little Rock, all the taps are operating – and the place looks like it’s always been there. There’s plenty of red brick and worn wood, and if the entire bar area seems like it’s wrapped in windows, there’s a reason for that. “There were no windows at Treehouse,” says Fallon. It’s tough to work in a windowless environment.

Outside the bar, there’s a respectably-sized patio and, recently, Fallon opened a new rooftop patio. “One day the patio got really crowded so I put a ladder against the building and went up,” says Fallon. He saw, with a little bit of rehab, he’d have more space to put the growing number of people who frequent Little Rock.

“We’ve always had a core base,” says Fallon. Generally, the crowd is older, maybe more settled than the typical Short North bar crowd. The roof, when it’s open, draws a younger, sometimes more boisterous population, but everyone is welcome, Fallon stresses. “We even get people coming over from the Gallery Hop” – most of them looking for an off-ramp from the crowded bars along High Street.

If Little Rock has been successful for five years, Peppercorn points to Fallon as the reason why. “It’s successful because Quinn runs it,” he says. “He has all this experience, an eye for detail, and he’s a blast to hang out with.” But it’s even more than that, Peppercorn continues. “Quinn always makes you feel like you’re his guest at the bar and he is going to go out of his way to take care of you – whether that’s intervening if someone is harassing you or connecting you to a drink you didn’t even know you were going to love. He cares about the people around him,” Peppercorn continues. Neighbors, employees, customers – they are all taken care of by Fallon. “He has this funny, outgoing side, but he’s deceptively chivalrous and caring,” he explains.

Amy Adams, a bar regular since Little Rock’s opening, illustrates Fallon’s caring nature with a story. “One year, Comfest was washed out. It rained every day. The bands that were scheduled to play there had to be disappointed. Quinn opened the doors of Little Rock to them. He reached out and told them to come play at his bar,” Adams says. And they came. “It was crowded for awhile as the bands and their followers came into the bar, but it was fun. That’s the kind of guy Quinn is. He thinks about other people all the time. He’s just a great guy.”

Harvey and Quinn

Occasionally, like the fifth anniversary party for Little Rock, you may be lucky enough to catch Los Gravediggers performing. “I don’t do much live music here anymore,” says Fallon. There was a time, after the bar first opened, that live music was standard. “But the groupies who follow bands weren’t always a comfortable fit with our regular clientele,” Fallon explains. So now, live music is an occasional thing at Little Rock.

Of course, Fallon still plays music. Peppercorn describes Fallon’s music as “righteous, rebellious, melodic Americana.” Adam calls it “good, straight rock and roll.” Fallon, however, says his performing days are dwindling. He prefers writing now, but has no illusion that he will be one of those singer-songwriters that burst onto the music scene with a killer song and a huge following. “It’s a difficult, very narrow niche, singer-songwriter,” he explains. And at 50-something, Fallon says, he’s past the age where he can develop a strong fan base. “It’s frustrating, in some ways,” he adds. But he still has the bar and the community that waits inside.

When he’s not at work, or writing songs, Fallon admits to being a running junkie. Following a surgery, his doctors told him to limit his runs. He regularly ignores their advice. “I’m a bad patient,” Fallon says with a laugh. He doesn’t train for races. He doesn’t run them. The runs are simply for him.

“I also spend time with my dog,” says Fallon. The dog is a feisty Jack Russell terrier named Harvey.

Yet Fallon may be at his most relaxed, his happiest, when he’s at the bar with friends. “I don’t have any plans for the next five years, other than to keep doing what I’m doing,” he says. Of course, one day, he would like to retire – and if he does, he’d love to find a nice little place in Central America to call home. For now, though, he’s happy where he is. Still, it’s been quite a journey.

A changed life
When Fallon first opened Little Rock, he admits he was drained by all the life changes that had happened and by all the work he had put into the bar.
“I remember, the first day we opened, I was coming up to the door and I saw a small group of customers had gathered on the patio already. This woman left the group and approached me. She asked me if I was the owner of the bar. I think she knew who I was just looking at me. I hadn’t slept, I looked like a mess, but I told her yes. She gave me a big hug, and she said, ‘Thank you for opening this place.’’

The woman was Amy Adams.

“The bar really helped me get through some tough times,” Fallon says. “It opened up to me what has become a long standing group of friends. They really brought me into their families. I feel blessed to know them and to be part of the Italian Village Community.”

It looks like the luck of the Irish has finally returned.

© 2018 Short North Gazette, Columbus, Ohio. All rights reserved.

Little Rock Bar is located at 944 N. 4th Street and online at www.littlerockbar.net

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