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PROFILE WEST END REBEL

The many faces of Richard Chase
By Chris Tucker |

RICHARD CHASE, owner of Dick’s Last Resort and The West End Oasis, should have a family reunion. No uncles, no aunts, no cousins needed. Chase could easily fill the guest list with his various personas, the many different selves that make up his multiform personality. No doubt they’d all like to meet each other.

First, Chase the ex-documentary filmmaker could hold forth about 1971, the year he spent dodging bullets and British cops while filming No-Go, a docudrama about the outlawed Irish Republican Army. The film’s “partisan fervor, ” according to the Christian Science Monitor, made it compelling even to those who disagreed with the IRA’s tactics. “Violence and terrorism don’t resonate with me, hut there are two sides to every story, ” says Chase, who was threatened with reprisals from the IRA if he betrayed their confidence. He had to smuggle the film out of Ireland.

That Richard Chase might seem to have little in common with the Chase who came to Dallas in 1983 to make Paradise High a parody of teen sexploitation flicks like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. To give it that soft-R mindle5sness, Chase asked local ladies to bare their bosoms for reasons wholly unrelated to plot-but he was given the cold shoulder instead. After several Dallas fashion models refused to appear in die film, the media portrayed Chase as a porn king slinking into town to corrupt our milk-fed maidens. Chase, who had paid his dues in serious filmmaking (The Upper Crust, Hell’s Angels Forever), remains baffled by the response. “That film was so innocuous, ” he says. “To come here, to Dallas, a great drive-in market and the home of Joe Bob Briggs. and suddenly have all this double-standard hypocrisy… It was absurd. We had models saying, ’I don’t want my tits to be shown on the screen. ’ when the Neiman’s catalog shows more. Fashion was okay, but the cinema is considered déclassé. ” Chase finally sold the rights to the picture and would end up “eating about a hundred thousand dollars on the project, ” he says.

And what would that Richard Chase have to say to yet another Chase avatar, the surly proprietor of Dick’s Last Resort? The bar, billed as “The Shame of the West End. ” gives receipts bearing the message, “I entertained a high-level government official, his stockbroker and his girlfriend. ” Dick’s shaggy image is everywhere-on the match-books, the beer mugs and the souvenir T-shirts. The Last Resort is sawdust floors. Dixieland jazz and buckets of ribs and chicken. Chase calls it “a compendium of every beer joint I ever got drunk and threw up in, ” but it may be the most profitable “beer joint” in town. The bar has netted what Chase discreetly calls “an atrocious amount of money, ” but that’s not the main appeal of the place for him. “Dick’s allows me to be an institutional iconoclast, ” he says. “It’s an absolute reflection of the bad boy side of my sensibility. We don’t try to please anyone but ourselves, and in the process, we please other people. “

Chase also loves the endless variety of a saloonkeeper’s world. “You see all the stuff of life here. ” he says, “and you have an opportunity to intervene at critical moments in people’s lives. ” He grins, tossing back his shoulder-length hair. “I intervened Saturday night in a fight and got my elbow smashed up. Got a guy in the hospital. ” (He admits to a little help from his bouncer, a former defensive lineman with the New England Patriots. )

The reunion list won’t be complete with-out Chase III. who recently opened The West End Oasis a block from Dick’s Last Resort. The two establishments have a common owner and both are on the same planet; the similarities end there. Dick’s is raucous, crowded and earthy. The Oasis, in the reborn turn-of-the-century Texas Moline Building. is the eye of the storm; the sort of tranquil, elegant though not foreboding restaurant that makes the good life seem possible even for the unwealthy-if they save their money for a week or two. Chase wants The Oasis to be “a great refuge from the speed and plasticity of urban life. ” and to that end he commissioned nationally known artists like sculptor Brad Goldberg and painter Eric Orr to visit the site and “respond” to his vision of The Oasis. The results are stunning, a visual feast from Ron Cooper’s “En-trance with Radiant Void” in the entryway to Goldberg’s impressive outdoor dining garden, constructed from 100 tons of pink granite.

“It’s a beautiful place, a great place for psychic healing. ” Chase says of his new restaurant. I’m not trying to make it a cathedral, but I’m trying to find the sacred things in the common. “

The Oasis, Chase says, is not a monument to his ego but to the “unfoldment” of the Tao. “You let the right things and the right people evolve into something beautiful. ” After two decades of careening around the film industry, he’s ready to slow down and build something lasting. “I’ll be 40 this year, ” he says. You do physically re-adapt in middle age. You can’t carouse forever. You begin to have a sense of mortality. “

But Chase’s hunger for “grace” in everyday living does not preclude some strong views and blunt language about the restaurant business. He doesn’t hesitate to brand some of the city’s leading dining reviewers as “incompetent” (even before seeing the reviews of The Oasis) and says that the sainted French Room is “a very sophisticated adult Disneyland. ” A great restaurant. he believes, should be indigenous to its native ground. “The French Room doesn’t exist as part of this world, ” he says. “It’s a fantasy world, a transportation of another sensibility. It could be on the Champs Élvsées or the Right Bank. “



THE PARTY MIGHT get crowded with Chase the tuna boat mechanic, the psychological researcher (and early disciple of Frederick Perls), the journalist and the motorcycle racer, but they’ve got to make room for one more: Chase the reformer, tinged with a bit of self-righteousness.

“I’m a Christian and I try to be fairly aggressive about it. I’m the type who would have been in there kicking ass when Christ drove the money-changers out of the temple. ” Chase doesn’t believe that a restaurateur must turn in his principles when he gets a liquor license or forsake his beliefs to worship the bottom line. He’s known as a soft touch for wandering street people and transients off the railroad tracks, who eat for free at Dick’s. He doesn’t serve veal at The Oasis and won’t, regardless of demand. “I’ve been against serving veal since my friend Amanda Blake [the former Miss Kitty of TV’s “Gunsmoke”] told me how it was raised. It’s a heinous process. “

When Dick’s Last Resort opened, Chase the reformer refused to stock Coors beer, citing the liberal party line: “They’ve got a long-time, clearly demonstrated pattern of abusing labor unions, minorities and people who aren’t white Protestants living in Golden, Colorado. I find that offensive. ” And Chase the realistic businessman knew he had some leverage: Dick’s is the tenth largest seller of beer in Dallas and the largest retailer of those bet-you-can’t-chug-one quart containers, a trademark of the bar. Coors wanted in, and Chase wanted something too. Every year he does a pro bono project for a worthy cause (last year, a film on the Salvadoran sanctuary movement). Would Coors like to make a hefty donation to the Trinity Center in Oak Lawn, a ministry and soup kitchen for the homeless?

Yes, and quick. “They came through with great bucks, ” Chase says, “and they’ll be repeating their donations throughout the year. ” ’Today, Coors has its place among the 74 brands of beer at Dick’s. The Oasis stocks five brands, Coors among them. Everybody’s happy. “The Coors guy came by and said he was glad I’d forgiven them. I still think they’re fascist bastards, but that’s not the point. As long as they show this kind of charitable vision, I’m going to stock their beer. “

Hoping to encourage “charitable vision. ” Chase went to Ben E. Keith, the Budweiser people, and struck up a deal with them. Same with his other suppliers, who know that charity begins with the pocketbook.

Mr. Chase, meet Mr. Chase, meet Mr. Chase… What a party, when these guys gel together.

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