Booze in Pringles cans: Explore Vegas’ newest dive-bar-to-be

The room was beautiful. Naturally, it needed to be smashed.

P Moss knew just who to call.

A few months back, the owner of iconic Vegas bars the Double Down Saloon and Frankie’s Tiki Room — as well as a pair of spots in New York City — was putting the finishing touches on his newest place, the Triple Down at the Punk Rock Museum.

There was just one thing: It was a little too nice.

This was meant to be a dive bar someday, after all.

So, Moss reached out to Fletcher Dragge, guitarist for long-running SoCal punks Pennywise.

A rowdy, boulder-sized dude who possesses all the subtlety of a prison riot, Dragge has earned a rep as a human wrecking ball known for laying waste to many a dressing room.

“He’s a lunatic,” Moss grins approvingly, clad in a blue Hawaiian shirt, his words often of the same color. “He and I get along great.”

Dragge’s marching orders: “I go, ‘OK, Fletcher, I need you to come and kick the s--- out of this room’ — which he did,” Moss recalls. “He came one night. He’s kicking the s--- out of the room.

“I go, ‘Great,’ ” he continues, smile broadening in direct correlation to the mayhem he speaks of. “I told him, ‘We’re looking really good. I need you to come back, and kick the s--- out of it a little more.’ Things like that’ll help, you know.”

With the Triple Down now open to the public after 7 p.m., that personality is on display for all to see and drink in alongside stiff cocktails served in snack food containers.

One of the things that has made the Double Down a Vegas institution is the come-one, come-all atmosphere deliberately cultivated in the dingy dive, where at any given time at the bar, a Hollywood actor might be sitting next to a dude in a business suit next to a lady with a face tattoo.

It qualifies the place as a punk rock bar as much as the Ramones tunes in the jukebox, that sense of egalitarianism that defines the music, in which audience and artist are intended to be on equal footing with little barrier between the two.

With the Triple Down posited on the same principles, it’s a natural fit for the Punk Rock Museum — and vice versa.

“The people who come to the museum, they’re going to find something — or a lot of things — in here that they’re going to identify with,” Moss contends. “That’s why it’s different from most museums. You go to a museum and look at dinosaurs — ‘Hey, cool’ — but they can personally identify with something in here.

“And I’m hoping for the same thing in the bar,” he continues. “We’re hoping to get that in here, but it’s not the thing you’re going to get overnight. You have to earn that.”

Building that which can’t be built

If there’s one thing that Moss knows about creating a dive bar, it’s that you can’t create a dive bar.

“A dive bar is something that, over decades, gets the s--- kicked out of it, and develops personality,” Moss explains, reclined on a couch in the Punk Rock Museum den, adjacent to the Triple Down. “Anybody that says they can create that, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Still, the Triple Down is off to a sufficiently gritty good start, despite its un-divey newness.

The black walls look like a teenage punk’s bedroom, layered in weathered show fliers and myriad band stickers, plenty of them placed by the clientele here, who are encouraged to do so.

“No hippies,” reads a hand-written sign alongside graffiti-style, spray-paint renderings of the Bad Religion logo and the Misfits’ signature skeleton above the bar.

Old-school Double Down veterans will probably thrill at the return of Alonzo, the battered hobby horse that was once a fixture at the New York City location and now sits in the middle of the room.

Beneath the staircase to the museum’s second floor sits a turntable with stacks of vinyl, “Play it fast” scrawled on the wall nearby.

Framed pictures of various venues from around the country lend the room some national flavor as opposed to a wholly Vegas vibe.

Thanks to all the punk rock history here — and Dragge’s fists — the room is starting to have a lived-in feel to it, though as Moss notes, it’s not a dive bar.

Not yet.

“It’s shiny, for God’s sake,” he says, his voice a cocktail of pride and contempt.

Introducing The Fletcher

Moss has been buying in bulk lately — a lot — raising the eyebrows of some fellow shoppers upon occasion.

“I gotta go to Costco once a week and buy another 16 cases of Pringles,” he sighs. “You get the old lady, ‘Oh, you must really like them.’ I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s all I eat.’ ”

Of course, he’s being facetious about the consumption of said snack chips — instead, it’s their distinctive, cylindrical packaging he’s after, which houses by far the Triple Down’s most popular cocktail, The Fletcher, a rum and coke served inside a Pringles can. It’s named after the aforementioned Pennywise six-stringer, who created the drink back in the day. (And yes, you get to eat the chips after they’re poured from the can.)

“People love it,” Moss notes. “It’s the stupidest thing, but everybody likes it, and the salt in the Pringles makes the drink taste better. People love to drink it — and they love to get their picture taken with it.”

The Double Down is known for one-of-a-kind drinks such as the Bacon Martini and its signature, tropical-flavored, who-knows-what’s-in-it? Ass Juice.

The Triple Down offers the similarly sweet Gut Punch shot, which Moss describes as Ass Juice’s “bastard cousin.”

In another nod to the Double Down, there will be weekly events here, all of which will be free — at Moss’ insistence.

On Saturday nights beginning in August, Moss hopes to have some of the museum’s rotating tour guides — who have included such notables as Agnostic Front’s Roger Miret, L7’s Jennifer Finch, and Greg Hetson of Bad Religion and the Circle Jerks — come to the Triple Down for a DJ set. Double Down vets Atomic Mayhem will host their Atomic Video Jukebox on Wednesdays. Expect a food truck on Thursdays and more nightly events to come.

There will also be a happy hour from 7 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Fridays when everything is $5.

The big idea: Show up, maybe slap a sticker on the wall, make the place your own.

That’s as punk rock as the museum next door.

“What we’re trying to do is give the room a personality,” Moss explains. “I know this is what it’s going to become. And now that we’re open to the public, that’ll happen a lot faster.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.