The reason that David Page is having a time locating someone to lease
a player piano to a Western Bar is obvious.  A piano in a bar is a
setup for a piano horror story!

Player pianos in bars have a very short life.  When people are drinking
many have no regard for anything or anyone.  Nice old things like a
player piano, or valuable nickelodeon don't have much of a chance.

Drinks get spilled into the mechanism, cigarettes are left burning on
the case and keys.  Chairs get slammed against the case, and in a short
time the piano may be totally ruined.

Quite a few years ago when I was tuning and repairing pianos, I was
called to quite a few bars to tune pianos.  I found many pianos that
were deliberately ruined by inebriated patrons.  One patron decided
that the piano did not sound well to him, and it must need a drink.
He went over to the piano, lifted the lid and tossed in a drink that
contained sugar and cherry juice.  (Imagine that on a piano or player
action!)

Another time a bar owner leased a beautiful Seeburg G.  While I was
there tuning their grand piano for their sing-a-longs, a patron with
a plaster cast on his arm, started to bang his cast on the ivory keys
of the Seeburg G, breaking ivories, and doing much damage.  The grand
piano in the bar had suffered terribly from a large candelabra on the
music desk.  The candles had burned, dripping wax over the tuning pins,
hammers, strings, and piano action.

I have seen rolls put on backwards "for fun" and ripped to shreds;
beer bottles banged on beautiful ivory keys; a pedal lyre ripped from
the piano and tossed out a window; beer deliberately sprayed into a
tracker bar, adjustment knobs pried off a nickelodeon, hammers ripped
from the action, and probably the worst one was at the Army depot bar
where a soldier got sick from drinking and found that lifting the top
of the upright piano was more convenient that heading to the men's
room.

If anyone asks me to lease a piano to a bar, that answer is
"absolutely no!"

Bruce Clark