O'Connell's Irish Pub & Grille to close first location

   Longtime Norman nightlife staple O'Connell's Irish Pub & Grille will be closing its Lindsey Street location in January next year, leaving the local business' Campus Corner O'Connell's its sole location. 

   According to owner Jeff Stewart, the popular bar and restaurant received notice at the beginning of December from OU, which owns the property known as "the Corner" of Jenkins and Lindsey streets. 

   "[There were] several ideas that they were going to put here, I understand, and dormitories met the best use for the property," said Stewart, who has been renting the property from OU since it acquired the area in 2008 after the state Board of Regents' approval. OU also bought property behind O'Connell's off of Lindsey on Lincoln Avenue in summer 2009. 

   This closing notice, which neighboring businesses like Subway, Pad Thai and Campus Market received as well, came after the Board approved the $75-million project this fall. 

   "It's of my understanding that by mid-February they'll bulldoze all of it," Stewart said.

   OU plans to construct new, mid-rise Sooner Center Student Housing facilities starting sometime next year that will include more than 380 beds, central dining, computer labs, study rooms and a Faculty-in-Residence apartment. Parking will include approximately 65 spots. 

   Minutes detailing the project design, which was to be presented to the board for approval this fall, hadn't been posted at the time this story was written. The project will be completed by fall 2013.

   Norman residents and O'Connell's regulars Gordon Mercer, Greg McDougal, Robert Killian and OU alumna Cassie Carson have been coming together for five years to watch Monday Night Football games while drinking from beer taps at their table.

   Mercer, who has been coming since 1970 to O'Connell's, said its atmosphere is what has kept bringing him back, and isn't happy to see his favorite Monday-night locale shut down. 

   "I think it's wrong," he said. "[O'Connell's] has been here a long time, it's a place where kids can go and release some steam from all the work that's required from education." 

   Mercer and his friends said they don't know where they will go for hang-outs instead. 

   "We'll meet somewhere, we've been doing it for a long time," he said, joking as the others sitting next to him laughed too. "Probably at the top of the parking garage!"

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Video by: Alex Ewald and Chelsey Kraft

OU music professor is all about The Beatles eight days a week

OU bassoon professor Carl Rath listens to an NPR about Rolling Stone 
in his office surrounded by Beatles posters.

Audio: Rath talks about how perfectly timed The Beatles were as he was growing up in the 1960s. 

OU bassoon professor Carl Rath never went to a Beatles concert when the band was together as a teenager in the '60s growing up with their music, but that hasn't stopped him from amassing a collection of more than 300 books and dozens of posters about The Fab Four.

"I don't get into the knick-knacks very much," Rath said. "[Out of the 300], I would honestly say five to eight are really well researched and well-written books. Almost every book that comes out I find a mistake in."

Rath lets his reeds for his bassoon soak in a Beatles mug.

Rath, who turned 57 the day iTunes released The Beatles' music on Nov. 16, teaches a Beatles Seminar class in the spring, in which students learn the history of the band before and after the Fab Four's international success.

Rath said the class spends a lot of time on The Beatles' early years in Great Britain and Europe because the band's members worked together best in the initial years. The Beatles' success was due to their refreshing music, in an industry chalk-full of girl-group and standards music, he said. 

"[The band] was just something very, very different, and at the same time it was something that people have been trying to describe ever since," he said. "Throughout their whole career everything about the Beatles has been such a positive feel."

Since The Beatles appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in February of 1964, Rath has listened to anything the band released, and was in college when the band finally called it quits in 1970. But that hasn't stopped him from continuing to listen to their music. 

Beatles fan Rath has collected many posters 

and other memorabilia of the band.

"When they broke up, it really affected me for several years, to tell you the truth, but I still listened to their music," he said. "We will always have their music. Just like Mozart and Beethoven, it's there, and that's a good thing."

In 1989, Rath and other School of Music professors formed general cover band Mid Lyfe Crisis that they call "The world's most educated rock band," which opens every February for Beatles cover band 1964. Rath plays the drums in his band.

"I think we've only played enough gigs to maybe match a month of Beatles gigs in 1963," he said about the band's success. 

Each member brings his own personal style of music to song selections. Rath himself said The Beatles' pop style has greatly influenced him, going so far as to compose woodwind quartet music of their songs such as "Yellow Submarine" featured with pieces like "La Mer." Rath is also writing an essay about protest music against the Vietnam War in the '60s for the Norman Public Library, in which The Beatles are included. 

"I didn't really get into all this long, improvisatory type of music ... it just didn't appeal to me, it wasn't what I was first approached with from The Beatles," Rath said. "So I gravitated toward anything that was melodic, had interesting harmonies, rock rhythms ... that was just what I liked."

Audio: Bassoon professor Carl Rath, who also plays the drums, explains how he would 'play with' the greats in his basement.