From Beer Authority to the Sunset Strip: Eddie's Dive Bar Nears the End of Its First USA Run
Updated: Sep 30
Eddie's Dive Bar wraps up its first American tour this weekend at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip, where Beer Roadie Lara Mirinjian pours her final shift of Lagunitas' Trooper West Coast IPA. Before the send-off, Fermented Metal traces the pop-up's three-week run through nine US cities and reports firsthand from where it all began three weeks ago: an afternoon at Beer Authority in Times Square, ahead of Iron Maiden's tour-opening shows in Harrison, New Jersey.
This weekend, Eddie's Dive Bar pulls into the venue that may suit it better than anywhere else on the map: the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip, September 25th through 27th, from noon to 2 a.m. each day. Iron Maiden's pop-up fan bar has probably found the most appropriate venue of its US run.
The Rainbow has been the genuine article since 1972: the place where Lemmy Kilmister held court most nights when he wasn't on tour with Motörhead, where Mötley Crüe and Guns N' Roses came up, and where the band Rainbow got its name.
Los Angeles actually gets a second Eddie's Dive Bar stop this weekend at Tom's Watch Bar at L.A. Live, and the contrast with the Rainbow could not be much sharper. The Rainbow is old Sunset Strip mythology made physical — dark, cramped, historic and carrying the ghosts of decades of rock-and-roll excess. Tom's, meanwhile, is a giant modern sports bar wrapped in screens and planted beside Crypto.com Arena. One feels like the kind of place Eddie might have been drinking in since 1982; the other feels like somewhere he'd show up on 150 televisions at once. Somehow, both make sense for Maiden — just for completely different reasons.
It's also Lara Mirinjian's second and final stop as Lagunitas' first-ever "Beer Roadie," closing out a run that started three weeks and nine cities ago on the other coast, at a Hell's Kitchen sports bar most of those same regulars probably never would have picked as an American Maiden dive bar location. More on her later.
That first stop is the one Fermented Metal can now report on properly because, this time, a writer was actually in the room. What follows is the fuller shape of this tour: where it's been over the last three weeks, what still hasn't been independently reported anywhere else and — merged in for the first time — a firsthand account of the day Eddie's Dive Bar opened in America.
Nine cities, and going strong
Eddie's Dive Bar's U.S. debut opened September 5th and 6th at Beer Authority in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen, timed to Iron Maiden's North American tour opener a few miles west at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey.
The band played two sold-out nights with Megadeth and Anthrax in support, delivering a very nostalgic set built around some deep cuts: "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "Wrathchild" early, followed by "Infinite Dreams," missing from Maiden's live sets for nearly four decades.
From there, the pop-up worked its way through Banners Kitchen and Bar in Boston on September 9th; Craftworx Taproom in Gainesville, Virginia, on the 11th; Beer Garden in Charlotte on the 12th; JB Lovecraft's in Harrisburg on the 15th (this brewery sounds awesome); a multi-day residency at the Louder Than Life festival grounds in Louisville from the 17th through the 20th; Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Minneapolis on the 19th; and Reggie's in Chicago on the 21st and 22nd ( another solid venue).
As of this writing, every one of those stops has come and gone with essentially the same result: a burst of nearly identical wire coverage when the tour was announced, followed by little independent reporting from the events themselves.
New York is the exception, and only because Fermented Metal had someone there.
The night before, and the walk in
I'd spent the previous evening at the Old Canal Inn in Nutley, New Jersey — a building built around 1908 and in business as a bar since the 1930's — for a brief chance to meet Derek Riggs, the artist who created Eddie in the first place.
That's another story altogether, but it's the reason I woke up on September 5th already in New Jersey. It also meant the trip into Manhattan that afternoon was a short one: a crowded train from Newark Penn Station to New York Penn Station, followed by a ten-minute walk to Beer Authority to find my friend Paul, get a Trooper West Coast IPA in my hand and see if I could track down Lara Mirinjian, the Lagunitas Beer Roadie contest winner, before the show.
Beer Authority was hard to miss.
Eddie's Dive Bar banners were draped across the front, and Iron Maiden flags hung from the edge of the rooftop deck above. The building runs three floors — a smaller, cash-only bar on the ground level (known as "Tony's Corner"), a larger main bar and dining room above it, and the rooftop on top — and by early afternoon, the mid-level room was already thick with people. Getting to the bar itself would take some patience. I took a quick look around
The room was done up properly: Eddie posters everywhere, a dedicated Eddie's Dive Bar photo booth and, more unexpectedly, a table covered with Trooper/Lagunitas/Fender contest to "design and win your own guitar" sheets and colored pencils for anyone who wanted to sit and draw for a while sipping on a beer.
I skipped the bar line and headed straight up to the roof.
The rooftop opened into a big, sunny space — merch tent on the right, bar on the left — after a climb up an old wooden staircase that made the whole thing feel a little more like an actual dive bar than the modern, polished floor below.
The merch line was short, so I got my New Jersey event shirt first: a design that leans hard into Sopranos iconography, which is exactly the right joke for a Jersey-adjacent Maiden show and one I appreciated (I had visited the shooting location of the last scene of the series in New Jersey the day before).
Then it was time for the Trooper West Coast IPA and a lap around the room.
The Maiden family, one shirt at a time
I had my Eddfest shirt on —one of the ones from the Knebworth show— and spotted a couple of others wearing the Knebworth shirts, along with a Paris event shirt from June.
Tour merchandise is always a reliable conversation starter at these things, which is partly by design. Iron Maiden has gotten very good at giving strangers a reason to talk to one another.
But the best conversation of the day started over something nobody sells: a hand-painted denim jacket.
That's how I met Pete, from Queens, who was wearing a custom-painted jacket commemorating a Radio City Music Hall show from 1985. The artwork had been done by a friend of his named Eric Karalis.
Pete and I traded show histories, and by his account, his first Maiden concert was on the 1983 World Piece Tour — August 25th, twelfth row, at the old Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum on Long Island, the arena the Islanders called home until 2015.
What sport is more metal than hockey?
I mentioned mine — just a few months later that same year, in Kansas City at the Memorial Hall.
Pete had come to Beer Authority with his brother Kevin who had also caught those early-'80s shows, along with their wives. For the two women, the Harrison stop would be their first Iron Maiden concert, full stop — four decades into their husbands' fandom.
Next, I ran into the Road Dog — that's what he goes by, and it fits. He'd driven down from Massachusetts for the show and was planning to drive straight back that same night, then catch the band again a few days later when the tour hit TD Garden in Boston.
The Road Dog (left), making friends
We traded guitar picks, paraphernalia that represented our particular roles in the world of metal fandom.
And then I found Lara.
Meet Lara Mirinjian, Lagunitas’ First-Ever Beer Roadie
I'll admit that the first thing I told her was that I'd thought about entering the Beer Roadie contest myself before deciding nobody needed to see my crusty old mug behind a bar or in an article.
She laughed, which was a good sign, and turned out to be exactly as easy to talk to as that first exchange suggested. But how did she get to this spot on a roof in Hell’s Kitchen?
When Lagunitas Brewing Company went looking for someone to take beer, heavy metal and Iron Maiden fandom on the road, Lara Mirinjian turned out to be exactly what they were looking for.
The Long Beach, California, piano teacher was selected from hundreds of applicants as Lagunitas’ first-ever Beer Roadie, a temporary paid position created around the brewery’s collaboration with Iron Maiden and the release of Trooper West Coast IPA.
Applicants submitted 30-second videos to BeerRoadie.com explaining what would make them the ideal Trooper Beer Roadie ahead of a July 7th deadline. Three finalists were then interviewed by a Lagunitas selection committee.
The job came with $1,000 for her two tour appearances, a trip to Lagunitas' Petaluma headquarters and hands-on training from head brewer, Jeremy Marshall on how the beer is brewed, handled and served.
All of that is true regardless of how it's marketed.
And having now met her, the marketing copy about the role celebrating "the intersection of great beer, great music, and the communities that form around both" reads less like a slogan and more like an accurate — if polished — description of what she was actually doing on that rooftop bar.
We got talking a bit about her history with regarding heavy metal. I had already read how she found metal through her older brother in the wake of their father's death when she was fourteen, riding to school with him while he played it in the car, and how what started as some thing to hold onto during a hard year became a genuine, lasting attachment to Iron Maiden.
It's a story Lagunitas has put in front of a lot of press outlets as part of the Beer Roadie rollout. Reading it in a wire story is one thing; but hearing her talk about her passion for the music in person, unprompted by a publicist, is another. It felt like someone answering a question honestly.
And she was already looking ahead to her last stop on the job: the Rainbow. She knows the venue well and was genuinely excited to get there — which tracks, because if you're going to give someone a farewell shift as an officially licensed metal beer ambassador, the Rainbow Bar & Grill is about as fitting a location as you'll find in America.
So, If you're in West Hollywood this weekend, stop in and say hello to Lara for me.
The Beer Sherpa, and an idea for London
My last conversation before heading to the show itself was with Everest Curley of Lagunitas, who goes by "Beer Sherpa" — a title that makes more sense once you hear his background.
He spent years as Lagunitas' U.K. sales lead, responsible for adapting the brewery's draft IPA to British drinking habits. That gave us an actual shared frame of reference.
I've been trying to get someone at Lagunitas interested in a Trooper West Coast IPA night at the Cart and Horses in London — the East End pub with its own long-standing ties to Iron Maiden's story — and pitched him on it again on the spot.
Nothing's confirmed. I'm still hoping it happens, and if it does, I'll be there.
So understand...
By the time I headed to the show, the day had done what these events are actually built to do, marketing apparatus notwithstanding: put a room full of strangers from a dozen different decades of Maiden fandom in the same place and give them a reason to talk.
It wasn't identical to Paris — different country, different beer, a Jersey “Sopranos” joke on the shirt instead of French Revolution Guillotine — but the ingredients that made that night work were mostly the same ones at play here: shirts serving as conversation openers, a community forming around them without much prompting, and a Trooper — or, this time, a Trooper spin-off — in many of their hands while they told one another how they got there.
What's clear from the one stop this magazine actually walked into is that the marketing math holds up better than a cynic might expect.
Strip away the sponsor names and the paid ambassador title, and what's left is still a room full of people who flew, drove or came in by train from somewhere, wearing shirts from shows decades apart, finding each other over a beer before the lights went down.
Same Maiden family.
Different coast, same set.
Comments