Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He is a determinedly private man. “It's easy to be famous, but it's not a particularly
smart thing to do.” Under pressure he admits he grew up in Phoenix. When pushed, he ac-
knowledges he went to college but refuses to remember his major. “It wasn't music. Come
on, nobody ever uses their major out here in real life.”
He has vivid memories of when he began playing music, which story in the telling
makes me wonder why it never showed up as a skit in the Follies. “My dad was a doctor,
and he had a patient who—” He pauses, searching for the politically correct terminology,
and gives up. “The only way to describe her is as a Las Vegas broad. She played the B-3,
the ultimate jazz and rock and roll organ, in every Las Vegas lounge for years.” Then she
married a guy from Phoenix who owned a mortuary. The broad played all the funerals at
the mortuary, and she'd show up at Keys' house in floods of tears “with all this Las Vegas
mascara running down her face, sobbing 'It was the most beautiful service I ever saw.'
She'd have to sit down with my mother and drink coffee for hours before she could get it
together enough to teach me my thirty-minute lesson.”
Why did he start playing? “My mother gave me a choice, I could either wash dishes or
practice playing the organ.”
Why did he come north? For a while he had a job working at a medical supply ware-
house (“Ever try to lift an iron lung?”) and he kept running into people from Alaska. He
figured if one percent of all the stories he heard were true, it might be a fun place to live.
In 1970 he decided to find out.
His first job in Alaska was putting in a garage door on Post Road, beginning with jack-
hammering a hole in a concrete wall. The door is still there. He visits it often. “The whole
beauty of Alaska is that you don't need to know anything or have any experience to do a
job and get paid for it.”
He worked construction until he saw an ad in the paper for a piano player at Chilkoot
Charlie's, where he played for five years. In 1980 real estate developer Charlie Walsh
bought the Flying Machine and said “Hey, kid, want the keys to a bar?”
And thus the Fly By Night Club was born, Keys says, “just about the time the entire in-
dustry was going to hell in a hand basket.” In the space of a year, the drinking age went
up, eliminating two years' worth of customers. Anchorage closing time changed from five
a.m. to two a.m. “I kinda liked that.” There was a big
DWI
push and “Liability went from
