George Watson bought a dive bar he would later call The Dock from Bob Fitzgerald in 1973 after a handshake deal over 9 a.m. shots of blackberry brandy.
“It was a cinderblock building. It was kind of raw looking,” he recalled during an oral history interview late last year. “And one of the first things I did was the double doors out front. I cut the doors out and put two big windows in the two front doors. So you had a beautiful view, you could look out and you’d see the Coast Guard station.”
He and his new wife, Terry, moved to Montauk from Staten Island and ran the bar together, with George forfeiting an enviable job with the New York City Fire Department and both of them braving hard-boiled drinkers freshly disembarked from the commercial fishing boats. Many a barroom brawl was broken up in those days.
One day in 1975, George was tending bar when, through the new picture windows, he saw a Bentley roll up and six people emerge.“The first thing that struck me was the outfits,” he said — snakeskin boots, the whole nine yards. Then, “Holy s***! It’s the Rolling Stones!” he realized.
The band spent about five weeks that year at Eothen, also known as Church’s or the Warhol Estate, on the ocean shore, rehearsing and venturing out to party around Montauk. The East Hampton Star reported that May, in fact, that their bodyguard had smashed up an East Hampton jail cell, “terrifying” a neighboring occupant, after a DWI arrest, and that Mick Jagger needed stitches at Southampton Hospital after putting his arm through a windowpane at Gosman’s.
Meanwhile, next door at the Dock, the Stones became “semi-regulars,” George said in a later conversation. “Everybody was cool about it, nobody bothered them.They were just hanging out, they had their own groove.”
“They were fine; they were just kind of down to earth,” he said. “I liked Charlie Watts the drummer; he had the driest sense of humor … Ian Stewart, the piano player, he just raved about the hamburgers.”He added, however, that “generally when they came into the bar they were into drinking, mostly it was booze.” He remembers Bill Wyman, the bass guitarist, sitting unrecognized in a corner of the bar, and visits from Billy Preston and Ollie Brown, both of whom toured with the Stones in 1975.At their request George would drive out to deliver Heinekens and Jack Daniel’s to the Warhol Estate, where he failed to recognize some of the many distinguished visitors like the luxury designer Halston. “I just dropped this stuff off, sat down, and listened to the music for about an hour,” he said.
Also at their request, George and Terry drove the Bentley into the city one time when they were performing at Madison Square Garden – where they proceeded to find the car mobbed by fans. They were invited to several concerts but often had to work.
George remembered having some concern when the Hells Angels, who were angry at the band, reportedly threatened to plant a bomb “under the benches in a bar in Montauk.”
“There’s only one bar in Montauk that has benches,” he said. “It’s our place.”
“That’s about all my rock and roll experience,” he said last week. “It was fun.”
To learn about some of his other experiences, check out the library’s oral history interview with George Watson in November:
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