Moondog’s in Blawnox is still howling after 35 years

One day, in the late 1980s, Ron Esser woke up and said, “I’m working for everybody else. I should be working for myself.”

He’d spent five years working as the manager at Graffiti Showcase, the music venue in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. In 1989, a friend told Esser about a bar by the mill in Blawnox that was going up for sale. Esser decided to turn it into his own venue: Moondog’s.

He’s been running the place for 35 years now, hosting live musicians playing blues, rock, and other genres at the little spot on Freeport Road. That it would outlast some of the biggest venues in Pittsburgh at the time didn’t cross Esser’s mind.

Purchasing the building was a task in and of itself. Esser had to sell his car to get the down payment. “I had 300 bucks, no car, 10 cases of beer, and I was in the ARC House [a rehab center] for 30 days for a DUI,” he says.

“When I bought this place, it was a dump,” Esser said during an interview in the bar’s back room. He claims the smell of cigarette smoke and urine would stick to people after they left. (These days, the bar is non-smoking.) The locals didn’t seem to mind. Many of Moondog’s early patrons came straight from the third shift at the Blaw-Knox manufacturing plant down the street.

“We opened at 9 a.m., man,” Esser said. “Them people, they’d be waiting outside the door to get a drink. It was like a mill-hunky bar.”

Mick Stinelli

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Esser named the joint after his stage name, which he came up with some years prior when he was buying guitar picks at Pianos n’ Stuff (now N Stuff Music, also on Freeport Road). The worker at the counter told him he could print something on them, so Esser asked to put his name on the picks. There was still space for seven more characters so Esser, who had been watching professional wrestling on TV earlier in the day, remembered the Moondogs — the bearded, shaggy-haired performers who smacked their opponents with animal bones and, according to the World Wrestling Federation, came from Parts Unknown.

“How about Moondog?” he told the clerk. And there it was on his picks. Now, it’s scrawled on the big, bone-shaped sign that hangs on the front of the building facing Freeport Road.

Today, the main room at Moondog’s splits down the middle. One side houses a U-shaped bar and a wall with guitars mounted on it. The other side is filled with low-top tables and seats, in front of a short, snug stage. Bands with more than four players might have to fight for elbow room. On the wall along the seating area, a large mural depicts dozens of musicians — including national acts like Keb Mo and Susan Tedeschi as well as locals Joe Grushecky, and Billy Price — as anthropomorphic dogs.

At first, Esser’s ambition was no bigger than putting on some local bands and open-mic nights: a mill joint with music, as he called it. But when the Decade, the nightclub and venue in Oakland that hosted local and touring acts, closed in 1995, Esser stepped into the vacuum and seized the opportunity to absorb some of the bands into the Moondog’s stable.

Norman Nardini, the Pittsburgh-based musician and bandleader, was one of those guys. He said he first played at Moondog’s circa 1990.

“I can’t tell you everything that happened, because it was a little too crazy for consumption,” he said of that first gig. “That’s when I met Moondog. He had been working at Graffiti, but I was a Decade guy. When he put the club together, he called me. And when I went out and played for him, he was like, ‘Dude, you and me need to work together.’ He’s a little like me in that he’s a one-of-a-kind kind of weirdo.”

Esser, now 66 years old, has a thin mustache, long silver-blond hair, and comes from Aspinwall. His father, Arthur “Art” Esser, was the mayor there from 1982 to 1997 and also spent 30 years as the borough’s fire chief. After finishing high school at Fox Chapel, the younger Esser went to Point Park University to study journalism and hoped to become a radio disc jockey.

Mick Stinelli

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But he was eventually dismayed by the restrictions of commercial radio formats.

“You wouldn’t have to play a specific song, but it would have to be in a specific genre,” he said. “In other words, you couldn’t use your imagination.”

After managing Graffiti and putting acts on stage, Esser realized he liked showcasing talented artists more than he cared for performing himself.

Lots of talented acts of various styles have come through the venue, but Moondog’s has become known foremost for their blues bookings. Among the most memorable, Esser said, was Luther Allison, the Chicago bluesman who played in the early 1990s. He went on at 10:20 p.m. and played for three hours and 20 minutes.

“It was incredible,” Esser said. “Out of all the years, all the people, everybody I ever worked with, he was by far the most genuine and talented. It was unbelievable.”

Another standout was Levon Helm, who’s perhaps best known as having been the drummer and sometime singer for The Band. He arrived two hours late, Esser said, riding in a convertible with the top down.

“Everybody’s waiting, and he comes in [the green room] and fires up a joint,” Esser said. “I’m thinking, now, should I bitch at Levon Helm and say, ‘First of all, you can’t smoke dope in the back room, and second of all, you’re two hours late?’”

Esser decided to take the diplomatic route. “I was just like, ‘Hey, Levon, when you’re done, do you think you might want to go up and play?’” When he finally did, Esser said, it was like a religious experience for the Band fans in the audience that night.

Billy Maxim-Brenner, who managed the bar at Moondog’s, was Esser’s right hand for some 18 years. She left the bar on good terms in early 2020. For her, the best part about Moondog’s is the intimacy between the performers and the crowd. Artists lose their pretenses and become more real, she says. “It’s not glamorous. Not everything is a stadium show. It’s a real, down-to-earth thing.”

Before she was behind the bar and booking bands, Maxim-Brenner came to Moondog’s for a few shows. Once, she went with a “blues junkie” friend to see Tinsley Ellis. It was a tough time for her and Maxim-Brenner and she scraped together about $20 so she could go to the show and have a drink.

“I sat down, and Tinsley played — I don’t even remember the song - and I cried and I cried,” Maxim-Brenner said. “And I thought, that was my first blues experience. Blues isn’t sad music, it’s happy music. It’s about release, it’s about continuing. It’s about getting back up and doing more.”

Gilbert and Sue Correy, two longtime regulars, also mentioned intimacy as one of the reasons they’ve been going to Moondog’s for over 20 years. They remember drinking shots with band members after shows, and they stood in awe as musicians improvised with each other at afterparties for the Pittsburgh Blues Festival, which Esser founded alongside John Vento.

“My favorite band to see there is The Nighthawks,” Sue Correy said. “You go there, you make friends with the band people, and they acknowledge you every time they see you and give you hugs.”

“The venue is our favorite on Earth,” Gilbert Correy said. “When we used to travel to see bands, our standard was, ‘Is it as good as Moondog’s?’ More often than not, it wasn’t.”

Nardini uses another word to describe the Moondog’s: enduring.

“This is a place where these miracles have been happening for over 30 years,” he said. “If you’re the right kind of person, there ain’t no place in town gonna give you that warmth and that feeling. There’s nobody even trying to do that.”

In addition to the Pittsburgh Blues Festival, which ended in 2016 and raised over $2 million for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank over its 20-year existence, Esser and Vento also founded the (similarly named) Pittsburgh Blues and Roots Festival. Proceeds from that fest benefit Autism Pittsburgh and Band Together Pittsburgh. The latter organization, another Esser venture, books and promotes musicians with autism.

All this comes from the guy who just wanted to work for himself. “I don’t take credit for it,” Esser said. “It isn’t me. It’s the people that come here, and the people that make the music. I could be Moondog all I want. If nobody comes in to see the shows, who am I? I’m Moondog by myself.”