Ernie Piper celebrated his 21st birthday in 2008 with a ride on the Gaslight’s mechanical bull. He says he was “flung off pretty much immediately, but there was no line because the bar was empty because it was like 5 p.m., so I just did it again. I probably rode the bull a dozen times that night.” (Courtesy Fiona Worcester)
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The story pitch came in as a text message: What became of the mechanical bull at the Gaslight, the longtime Anchorage nightclub and bar that last month remodeled and reopened under a new name, Club Seven 21.
For the uninitiated: The bull was a staple at the Gaslight Lounge, which itself was a staple, albeit a seedy one, of downtown nightlife for decades. Suffice to say the Gaslight was not a place for the faint of heart — one concise TripAdvisor review notes “strong drinks” and a “rowdy crowd” — and a high-profile fatal shooting outside the bar last year prompted a military commander to ban personnel from the premises.
Nonetheless, the place had its charms, not least of which was its famous, headless mechanical bovine perched on a kind of hydraulic pedestal in the middle of the club. I only visited a few times, but I have an indelible memory of the unambiguously sexual sway of one rider’s hips as she tried to stay on — which I suspect was the point.
An Anchorage Daily News story on the rebrand offered only a hint as to the fate of the contraption: “The mechanical bull has also been removed, leaving more room for dancing.”
It was time to investigate.
So I called John Pattee, the club’s longtime operator, and told him inquiring minds wanted to know what had happened to it.
“The bull was part of the Gaslight, and that’s not who we are,” he said. “It’s a new club, and it’s a new atmosphere, and poor old Oscar didn’t fit in.”
Oscar, huh.
Disappointingly quickly, Pattee solved the mystery: “I still have it. It’s in the back. Maybe you get a thousand readers to say, ‘Hey, we want the bull back,’ I could bring it back if I wanted to. But they need to come in person, buy a drink or two, fill out a form — that the Press provides.”
I could tell Pattee wanted to end the conversation there.
I wanted more detail.
So I said that some people (me) were wondering if the bull was for sale, and maybe the Press could put it in our new office.
“It’s not a toy! It’s a real mechanical bull — it’s got a double horsepower engine. It’s supposed to be a five-horsepower; I added it up to 10,” Pattee said. “It’s out to pasture. But if someone wants to make me an offer, I would look at it.”
Other things I learned from Pattee: He bought his bull in 2008 from a “serious cowboy,” whom he called up after reading about the devices in a news story. Oscar’s creamy white and brown hide is real leather. It was always free to ride, with controls operated by one of his staff.
The settings could go up to 10. “Most people can’t take a two,” Pattee said, but “some of these cowboys, you couldn’t buck ‘em…they could have gone to a 15.”
“And then, of course, there’s all the debauchery over the years that’s happened on the thing,” Pattee added. “Nothing X-rated, but probably — certainly — R stuff on there.”
Liability insurance for Oscar cost $10,000 a year, Pattee said. (He chuckled only a little bit when I said he could have called that part of his policy a “rider.”) There was only ever one lawsuit, according to Pattee — the result of a 2017 spinal injury to an Alaska Airlines flight attendant in training whose depressing prognosis I ultimately absorbed from a thick case file in the Anchorage courthouse next door.
The dispute was settled out of court, though not before citations of mechanicalbull case law and the pre-ride waiver the woman signed — which said the risk of physical and emotional injury “simply cannot be eliminated without jeopardizing the essential qualities to the activity.”
With that, I left the courthouse. Later, I called Cal Perkins — the “serious cowboy” who made Oscar two decades ago, and whose number was miraculously still in Pattee’s phone.
Perkins, who lives in Idaho and is a former professional bull rider, has been making the devices for 35 years, but his enthusiasm for the gig does not seem to have diminished over the decades. More details I learned from him: He sells his top-end mechanical bull for some $33,500. They’ve gone to Italy, Australia and New Zealand, Hawaii. And: “I sent a bull on a barge to Turkmenistan. The foreign oil guys were in there, building up their oil fields or something.”
The Gaslight bull, Perkins continued, had earned some real renown over the years — including with one of his neighbors in Idaho, a journeyman carpenter who’d seen it on a trip to Anchorage. “The city’s well-known, and it’s a great tourism city,” Perkins said. “I would hope that someone would revive it and keep it there.”
Perkins’ neighbor isn’t the only one with fond memories of Oscar. We canvassed Press readers on social media, and several wrote in, including lifelong Anchorage resident Natasha Price.
“In my 20s, I was often witness to the Gaslight’s mechanical bull rides; I didn’t have the fortitude to try it until one night when I had just the right amount of liquid courage,” Price said. “I climbed astride the beast and held on tight. The operator did his best to toss me off, and I probably only lasted less than half a minute. But I dismounted the bull by rolling off it backwards so perfectly that I landed on my feet.
“It was a perfect dismount,” Price added. “Even in my inebriated state, I knew this would be the one and only time I would ever ride a mechanical bull. I could never improve upon that landing!”
Oscar is now in “deep storage,” Pattee said; he sent me a photo of it crammed into a corner, tucked under a pile of mats, to prove it. If you want to bring it back, make him an offer. The Press can’t afford the insurance policy.