I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Closing Time’ on his new live album and it reminds me how much time I’ve spent in bars at closing time, playing the last song or packing up my gear as the lights come up.

There is more drama in the last half-hour before a bar closes than normal, healthy people are accustomed to experiencing, which is why normal, healthy people usually aren’t around. Drunks buy each other vodka shots they definitely don’t need, nightcrawlers eye each other and launch into final hookup negotiations, the flirting of the earlier hours yields to occasional outright groping, some hero/saint might come up to the stage and drop a $20 bill in the tip jar, some musician might want to sit in with the band, some musician wannabe might insist on sitting in with the band, some group of girlfriends might dance with each other, martinis or appletinis or bellinis or whatevertinis in hand.

And then the lights come up and there’s a certain glare to the room, which provides a level of sobriety all its own. You can see the beer stains and the carpet burns and the bags atop the bags on the eyes of the remaining diehards, and you wish the lights would go back down. But people won’t leave until the lights stay up, and the harshness scatters the closing time crowd.

There was a time when this might have been the beginning of the night for me. The gig would be followed by breakfast at a diner or a locked-door after-hours hangout session at the bar with the staff, followed by another hangout session at a band member’s house, followed by the sunrise and a trip home. But I’m too old for that now, mostly, so I wrap up my cables and pack up my harps and think about sleep. And I’ve witnessed another closing time.