Probably the most frequent knock on the Upper Valley heard these days is about the shortage of nightlife activities for young adults. Nothing much exists in the way of live music for dancing amid convivial beverage consumption and casual connections.

It’s a major contrast with how it was around here in the 1970s and early 1980s when there were restaurants featuring bars with bands, service and fraternal organizations with regular dance parties for their members and “bona fide guests” and a throbbing club scene in White River Junction and the Ascutney and Killington ski hubs.

The post-World War II era of diverse dance venues offering music ranging from big band to country and western had faded, to be replaced by the age of rock ‘n’ roll with its freewheeling, improvised dancing styles. Nightlife in this region was juiced by the lowering of the legal drinking age to 18 in Vermont in 1971 and 1973 in New Hampshire, a situation that would last until a federal mandate moved it back to 21 in the mid-1980s.

People now in advanced middle age often fondly recall good times they had back then: rollicking nights out at HoJo’s Old King’s Highway Lounge, Eleazar’s or AJ’s Jacks or Better in White River Junction, Mogul’s in Ascutneyville, the Sheraton in West Lebanon or on runs over to the Wobbly Barn at Killington; or dancing in a jam-packed barroom at Lebanon’s Landers restaurant. The Junction even briefly had a discotheque at the height of the John Travolta-Saturday Night Fever craze.

So what happened four-plus decades ago that changed it all?

Pooh Sprague and his wife, Anne, in the mid-1970s were just out of UNH and starting a farm enterprise in Plainfield that eventually would become one of the Upper Valley’s largest producers of vegetable and horticultural crops. Sprague had a couple of side hustles as a ski patrolman and musician playing with bands at clubs and events up and down the Valley.

Looking back, he now sees the beginning of the death of the freewheeling nightlife as coming to him in Lebanon one January morning in 1979.

“A group of us had been playing at Landers and we went in to see Mickey Alafat (one of the brother-owners) about plans for the coming months.

“Mickey said ‘Okay, guys, we’ve got to downsize our entertainment. Our insurance has just gone from $11,000 to $88,000 because we have entertainment.’ That was the first of the downturn.

“Getting rid of entertainment boosted the bottom line. It led to a different time,” Sprague says.

David Briggs, owner of the Coolidge Hotel and a lifelong scholar of all things Hartford, agrees with Sprague’s economic analysis, but says societal change in attitudes toward alcohol consumption may have been a larger factor in the cultural shift that came in the 1980s.

“You saw the decline of clubs come with the rise of enlightenment about alcohol. The 1970s were an age of indulgence — it was the time of big buffets, a time when people would have a drink before the meal, wine with the meal, then maybe a couple of drinks after.

“Then came a sea change. People became less elastic about alcohol, they figured out the health aspects,” Briggs says.

And American culture shifted with respect to the right of 18-year-olds to consume alcohol. Passage of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1971 reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, and paved the way for lowering the drinking age, which came on a state-by-state basis.

Vermont lowered the drinking age soon after adoption of the 26th Amendment in 1971, while New Hampshire followed in 1973. That two-year differential would crop up again a decade and a half later when then-Vermont Gov. Richard Snelling, a Republican, refused to heed a federal mandate to raise the age, saying someone who could be called into the military deserved the right to buy a drink. But later Gov. Madeleine Kunin, a Democrat, followed pleadings of other Northeastern governors to make the cutoff uniform all over the region. Along the way, New Hampshire had raised its drinking age to 20 in 1979, then made it 21 in 1985.

There would be other oddities in the Northeast region over the years. Maine in 1985 made the cutoff 21, but allowed minors to drink alcohol as long as a parent supervised. New York had had an 18-year drinking age long before the 26th Amendment came along, and young people from the Upper Valley region occasionally drove across Vermont to Whitehall, N.Y., to drink and dance at a club called the Hampton Manor, which sometimes featured the likes of Bo Diddley and Fats Domino. Today any New York minor may consume at home with parental consent.

At its peak the Hartford Elks Club had a membership of close to 1,400, and its frequent dinners and dances were often the largest social gatherings In the region. Various Upper Valley communities supported American Legion, VFW, Elks, Moose and other service and fraternal organizations that held liquor licenses; some faltered and disappeared and others are still on the scene in 2025. Not all were affiliated with national organizations — there were hyperlocal groups, like the Mascoma Club in Lebanon, the Marconi in White River Junction and one that survives today, the Polish American Citizens Club in Claremont.

A person doesn’t have to be Polish to join the Polish American Citizens Club. Founded in 1938 in the middle of a neighborhood that was predominantly of Polish extraction, music and dancing have always been key parts of the club’s life, a tradition that continues now.

A keen observer of the dramatic changes that have swept through the Upper Valley’s nightlife is Al Alessi of Woodstock. For 14 years he performed full-time as a musician and comedian, a grueling pace that included as many as 300 gigs a year. Then for 30 years he worked what he says was half time, bringing a mix of humor and music to crowds at clubs, theaters and private affairs.

Fresh out of UMass Amherst, he landed in Grafton in 1975 and began playing with an informal collective of local musicians. He started performing at the old Peter Christian’s Tavern in Hanover, joined the Wooden Shoe commune in Canaan for a time, then came to Lebanon in 1981 and formed a group called the Hazbin Brothers. This would lead to many combined music-comedy gigs at venues around the Upper Valley, generating an enthusiastic following. He could nail the voice and style of Roy Orbison and easily handled many of the rock classics of the time.

Later he would take his show to Maine, New York, the Atlanta Olympics and the Sugar Bowl. Eventually he decided to “get a real job” and settled into tech work. He continued to do a few shows, often solo, until Tropical Storm Irene’s flooding destroyed all his stage equipment in 2011.

He agrees that economics and changing attitudes about alcohol are prime factors in the upheaval in the Upper Valley nightlife world, but he also points to a simple cultural change:

“People got up and danced in those days,” he says. “They don’t today.”

Steve Taylor, a retired farmer, newspaperman and public official, lives in Meriden and contributes occasionally to the Valley News.