Lee’s Unleaded Blues is a bar located in Chicago’s South Side, along a foreboding stretch of asphalt where about the only signs of life at night are a handful of package stores. When a friend and I visited about a year ago, Lee’s began filling up with nattily-dressed black folks and a blues band began to play. After a couple songs, a new singer got up from the audience and strode to the stage. After a couple more songs, a new drummer got up from the audience and strode to the stage. And so it went: Pretty soon, it became evident that not only were we about the only white people in the bar, we were about the only non-musicians in the bar, too. All told, the Lee’s experience was an all-night, all-star blues jam of the highest caliber. If Seattle has an equivalent to Lee’s, it’s The Barrel in Top Hat, a peculiarly-named neighborhood between White Center and Burien. Unlike Lee’s, The Barrel’s customers are mostly white. On Tuesdays, they host a blues-rock jam with rotating players that starts at happy hour and ends at closing time. The Barrel’s interior is a wide room with picnic tables built for communal drinking. Drive-in-style parking stalls surround the structure, and its name is emblazoned upon, well, a barrel-like feat of masonry that shoots up from the roof. (It must have been an A&W in a previous life.) The crowd is mainly working-class folks who don’t fuck around when it comes to drinking, and the waitresses are a seasoned collection of brassy, don’t-take-shit-from-nobody starlets who won’t hesitate to cut you off if you get out of line. But you have to get way out of line to invite such a heavy hand at a place like The Barrel, where Friday comes three nights earlier than scheduled.