Bar Memoriam, Volume 6: Cedar Lounge

Many of the taverns in my dive bar book have closed. Here is another of them.

Cedar Lounge

7237 Airline Dr

Texas State Historical Association

It’s a little too far north of the hipster-ridden Heights to have been rediscovered, but the Cedar Lounge has all the criteria you would look for in a joint ripe for youthful reclamation project. It’s 48 years old, dark, cheap, and the walls are all done up in decadent red dimpled leatherette. The Cedar’s main room is dominated by a huge dancefloor in front of the stage and a big old horseshoe-shaped bar at the back. Several pool tables squat in a side room off the bar.

The Cedar is muy historic: back in the glory days of Airline Drive, when the road was lined with honky-tonks and throngs of shitkickers turned out to hear George Jones and Willie Nelson across the street at the defunct Dance Town USA, Cajun/Mexican-American bluesman Joey Long was stomping the boards at the Cedar, lit cigarette in his tuning peg at all times, schooling the likes of the very young Johnny Winter in the wicked ways of primordial rock and roll. (To complete the sordid spectacle, Long’s drummer never took the stage with filling his clear bass drum with water and goldfish, few if any of whom lived to see a second gig.)

Long passed away in the 1990s, and while the Cedar still bills itself as “Houston’s oldest honky-tonk,” the claim is belied by the facts that there may be older honky-tonks in town (Harbor Lights comes to mind), and also, on the night of our visit, the marquee announced that Tejano Night was now running four of every seven evenings, as befits the heavily Hispanic area around the bar. You’ll still hear live country and/or blues on a couple of those other nights, or you can just dial it up on the jukebox.

2021 Epilogue: Demolished to make way for used car lot. Way to go, Houston!