Anthropologist Studies Bar Scene : The Slower the Music, the Faster the Drinking

PHOENIX —  Anthropologist Jim Schaefer’s scariest moment was not among Jivaro headhunters or Yanomamo warriors in South America but in a rural bar outside Missoula, Mont.

Schaefer had just observed a late-night fistfight and some of the participants wanted him to leave with them, presumably to keep him quiet. Schaefer was not about to report the fight to the police because the first rule of an anthropologist is “never intervene,” and he certainly did not want to break his cover.

“There was no way I was going to tell them . . . I was there observing their drinking habits,” he said.

He went with the brawlers, but all turned out well. They all got drunk and parted the best of friends at 4 the next morning.

Such is the life of an anthropologist whose specialty is the denizens of the American bar.

Schaefer, who is director of the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention at the University of Minnesota, told scientists here for a meeting of the American Anthropological Assn. earlier this month that more than half of the patrons of bars come in alone, that at least half get drunk and that as many as one in every eight patrons is too drunk to drive safely--much higher percentages than anyone had previously expected.

“The bad news is that so many people are intoxicated and the bar staff continues to pour” drinks for them, he said. “No wonder we have problems.”

Among his other conclusions from a lifetime of observing bars: The heaviest drinking occurs in country and western bars, and the heaviest drinking in those bars occurs during slow songs.

Schaefer’s research “is about our own personal risks,” he said.

“We need to teach drinkers how to drink smarter. We need to understand their internal controls on drinking: What are the influences on that control? When does it break down? How does an individual know his or her own limits? Is there any way we can accentuate the personal control so that, at particular times when he or she is at risk of violating those own personal guidelines, we can get some red flags that flash in front of them?”

These are long-term questions, he said, that he and other researchers are only now beginning to grasp.

Schaefer backed into the study of bars, although he had a long knowledge about them.

‘College Days’

“Back in my college days (at the University of Montana), I was a pretty regular drinker,” he said. “So I knew a lot about drinking. When my graduate work (at the State University of New York at Buffalo) was nearing completion, my adviser sat me down and said. . . . ‘You know that your dissertation is probably going to be about something you’ll be dealing with for the rest of your life, so you ought to do it on something that you really like. What do you know a lot about?’ ”

As a result of that conversation, Schaefer wrote a thesis on problems caused by alcohol abuse. After graduation, he got a teaching position back at the University of Montana and began looking for new research topics. The search, perhaps unintentionally, took him back to bars.

“I started going back to some of the same old haunts, with these new eyes that I had gotten, and started looking around and thinking about things that I might be able to do in terms of field studies,” he said.

“I was sitting there one afternoon, with all the same crowd as usual, just six years older, and there was a hubbub of activity. Suddenly, the jukebox stopped; the plays ran out.

“That bar absolutely came to a standstill. And everybody got antsy, they said, ‘Well, let’s get that jukebox going,’ ” he said.

The bartender came out with the bean game, a jar of beans containing one red bean. Whoever drew the red bean got to put the next 75 cents in the jukebox and pick the songs.

“I started observing this whole ritual that went on. Here’s the lifeblood of the place, I thought. It was the atmosphere that was being created by the music.

“At the time, I was sort of in shock. I said, ‘Boy, there’s something going on here that I need to learn more about.’ Well, on top of that, the 75 cents came out, and as the person (who did not normally play the jukebox) walked over, everyone started shouting out their favorite numbers, G-12, N-6 and so on. . . .

“And when I went over to the jukebox a little later, I noticed the ‘G’ was almost completely rubbed off; the ‘N’ was almost completely rubbed off, and I knew I was on to something. That’s how I got started.”

Schaefer’s technique is similar to that of any other anthropologist, picking a defined population and studying it thoroughly.

“It depends on sufficient insight into patterns of behavior, studying them thoroughly so that I can reflect on them and report them as accurate. . . . We believe what the anthropologist tells us about the Solomon Islands because he has studied them intensively. Likewise, I have to be believable about the bar scene by virtue of having been there many times, knowing all the people, knowing all the patterns and reporting on them at meetings like this.”

Over a period of more than 10 years during the 1970s, Schaefer and his students studied the patrons of bars around Missoula and found a close correlation between what patrons listened to and how much they drank. The heaviest drinking, they found, occurred in country and western bars, while only moderate drinking occurred in bars playing rock or pop music.

“There was a slightly different agenda in the bars where rock and popular music was played,” Schaefer said. “They tended to be a little more upscale places, where people dress up a bit and drink more expensive drinks, in general.

“There is just a little bit more group behavioral control as a result. There is not this general attitude of ‘Let’s get drunk and be somebody,’ that is predominant in the country-type atmosphere.”

The least amount of drinking occurred in bars where a wide variety of music was played and where there were many distractions, such as games, video machines, shows or a buffet--where there are lots of things going on that move people around.

“When people are moving and standing, they are a lot more aware of their level of intoxication than when they are just sitting in one place,” he said.

Schaefer and one of his students, Paul Bach, also surveyed the drinkers to see how music tempo affected drinking rate. They placed a miniature tape recorder on their table to record the music, then tapped the table with a coin or a pencil every time they saw someone in a given section of the room sip a drink.

“We expected a direct correlation, the faster the music, the faster the drinking,” he said. “We ran the numbers (through a computer) and it was just the opposite. We were floored.”

In fact, the heaviest drinking occurred during slow, mournful songs.

“The all-time favorite drinking song was ‘Lucille’ by Kenny Rogers,” in which a farm wife left her husband “with four hungry children and a crop in the field.”

“Any Merle Haggard song was also a favorite,” he said.

“Now that was very typical anthropological field work: Mixing with people, following them home, going out to breakfast with them, getting informants, getting people to respond to questions, finding out what the rules were, looking at the back-bar paraphernalia, talking to the bartender, all that stuff,” Schaefer said.

While his findings up to this point were interesting and most were published in alcohol journals, he acknowledges that his research had been somewhat undisciplined.

“When I moved to Minnesota, my colleague Richard Sykes got very interested (in the work), but he was upset about the subjectivity of it,” Schaefer said. “He said what we really need to do is start getting some very tightly designed, very nicely coordinated observational base-line data. And then we can start pulling into it some of those other influences.”

To obtain the data, the researchers have observed more than 2,000 drinking “groups” containing one to nine people in 65 Minneapolis-area bars, collecting information on group size, drinking rates, the cost of drinks, music, lighting and a host of other environmental factors. Most of the data has not been processed yet, but Schaefer has been able to reach some preliminary conclusions, which were reported for the first time here in Phoenix.

About 54% of the bar’s patrons came in alone. They stayed an average of 56 minutes and consumed an average of 4.1 drinks an hour. All three numbers are higher than Schaefer expected.

Couples accounted for 35% of the patrons, stayed an average of 67 minutes and consumed 2.8 drinks a person an hour. Larger groups tended to stay longer and drink less.

Schaefer concluded that more than half of the bar patrons were drunk (consumed at least three drinks at a rate of three drinks an hour) and 12% had consumed so many drinks that they were unable to drive or function normally.

Surprisingly, the bar staff was well aware of the degree of intoxication of the patrons. Schaefer and his colleagues interviewed 89 staff members and found that their estimates of the percentage of customers falling into broad groupings, such as seriously intoxicated, intoxicated and slightly intoxicated, agreed with the researchers’ own independent observations within one or two percentage points.

“The only thing they were really off on was how many people were not drinking,” Schaefer said. “The perception was 11% were not drinking. In fact, 6% were not drinking.”

Even though the staff tended to keep serving drinks to patrons they knew were drunk, Schaefer was encouraged by his observations.

‘Drunk Driving’

“The bar staff pretty much knows what is going on in their place. In other words, here is a very educable group of people who, if they were made aware of the risks faced by seriously intoxicated patrons--the immediate risks, of course, being drunk driving and injury on the premises--could be trained to intervene.”

That intervention could be as simple as serving a glass of water with a patron’s third drink, he said.

“By the time a person is drinking a third drink, it really doesn’t matter whether there is alcohol in it or not. What they want is the physical act of lifting the glass; they want to be sipping something liquid. . . . If enough people did this, and we tipped our server well, they would see the value of encouraging this behavior. There are all kinds of strategies like this that we may be able to implement.”

Decreasing the amount that individual customers drink might seem to be counterproductive for bar owners, who are trying to maximize profits. But Schaefer argues that improving the bar atmosphere by having fewer outright drunks could entice more people into bars.

“If bars could do a larger volume of business in the moderate drinking range, they would lose no money,” he said.

“It’s the . . . heavy drinker that gets the owner in trouble, that gives their bar a bad reputation. They ought to just not serve those individuals.”