Zack Palmer says it wasn't long after he became the proprietor of Walters Downtown that he understood the place was his. It was just a matter of hours, he recalls.
"I had just got the keys to the bar and turned the lights on," Palmer told us one afternoon last week, standing behind the bar as members of Canadian pop-punk trio Courage My Love set up the stage for that night's show. "I had brought my tape player and was playing tapes over the PA. I was just in awe of it. This bar means the world to me."
The bearded, twentysomething Palmer has alert, dark eyes and an easy laugh. Beside him on the bar was a hefty leather-bound organizer stuffed with bar-related paperwork, which he says he's been referring to often. The previous night was the first time Walters had been open since the club's founder, Palmer's mother Pamela Robinson, was laid to rest at age 55. After some legal maneuvering to get the remaining permits transferred to his name, which took about three weeks, Palmer was handed the keys November 18.
"It's definitely sunk in, the level in which I'm invested in this -- like, I can put a fiscal number on it," Palmer laughs. "Which is a silly way to describe it, but ultimately it means a lot more to me than anything."
It's not hard to guess where Palmer came by such poise. Robinson was the beloved Houston nightclub doyenne who since the early '90s presided over a handful of incarnations of Walters, two on the Washington Avenue corridor and its current location near UH-Downtown, and for a time running the nearby clubs Silky's and Mary Jane's as well. Her passing on October 22, after a long battle with cancer, brought forth an outpouring of not only grief but appreciation for her gracious, no-nonsense manner and open-door policy to fledgling Houston musicians. It sounds like none of that has been lost on her son.
"I hear it every day," he says. "I grew up in bars, and a few times a week -- if not every day -- I'll be at a bar and I'll overhear somebody start a conversation about either Walters or Mary Jane's, new or old, without even being a part of it. This place is in people's hearts."
If Palmer's last name is unfamiliar, it may be because many people came to know him as simply Zack on Washington. His mother started bringing him to Walter's Ice House, her first bar, when he was around 12 or so. He began officially working for her a couple of years later, by which time it had moved a few blocks away to become Walter's on Washington.
The first show he distinctly recalls working was Japanese noise-rockers Mono's first visit to Houston, which the band's Web site lists as taking pace at Fat Cat's (an alias of Mary Jane's) in 2003.
"Ridiculously loud," Palmer recalls. "They were all very humble, too. They barely spoke English at the time and they were trying to talk to me. I don't know (laughs) -- I think they were kind of fascinated that I was so young and still there."
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