You can tell a lot about a town by its dive bar and the people in it. The perfect bar is unique to its location. Not some generic, dirty place with cheap drinks, but rather one that is full of local character.

The 2AM Club is Mill Valley. There’s the typical taxidermy and kitschy signs like “Hang Overs Installed and Serviced” that could be anywhere. You have a Steph Curry head watching over you, which could be anywhere in the Bay Area. But one item stands out that you won’t see anywhere else and embodies Mill Valley.

Charlie Deal’s toilet seat guitar.

When you walk in the front door, if you head straight to the nearest part of the bar, you’ll see it. In fact, it was even on the cover of the Huey Lewis album Sports:

Charlie Deal was the kind of person everyone knew in Mill Valley. The eccentric artist type who played music. He liked to say he’d been “sitting on a good idea” when the concept came to him in 1965.

His idea was simple and ridiculous and brilliant: bolt a standard guitar neck onto a real wooden toilet seat and treat it like any other electric guitar. He even secured a U.S. design patent for the concept!

Meanwhile, there was an old roadhouse just outside the Mill Valley city limits, which meant it could stay open all the way to 2am. (That’s how the bar earned its name, although by the 1950s the city limits had changed.)

The bar bought a toilet seat guitar and it has been up there since at least the early 1980s, when Huey Lewis and the News did their photo shoot. Charlie Deal also reportedly sold his guitars to bands including Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. So while it wasn’t a commercial success, it was certainly a cultural success!

More: I attempted to find out how many toilet seat guitars were made, and didn’t have much luck. Likely well fewer than 100. One was auctioned off in 2014 for $550.

Even more: check out this 12 minute video The Legend of Toilet Seat Charlie. It talks about Charlie playing in bands, where they wouldn’t even plug in his guitar, but he’d bring down the house with his enthusiastic dance moves.

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102 F Street, San Rafael

Walking distance to the great restaurants and bars on 4th Street, but the West End is nice and quiet as well. This property is on F Street, just between The Mayflower and Johnny Doughnuts.

I like featuring properties that allow you to dream a little bit, whether that is a mansion or beach house. But this is something different: dreaming financially. Particularly if you rent a 1 bedroom and don’t see yourself owning a home soon.

This property has 3 units. There is a larger 3-bed, 2-bath residence that might be ideal for a small family. Then there is a 1-bed studio and a 1-bed, 1-bath unit as well.

What would each of those units rent for? Maybe $4,500, $2,200, $2,200? What would the mortgage payment be? Maybe $9,000? Pick which one you want to live in and your effective rent (mortgage minus rent on the other units) would be about the same.

So you wouldn’t exactly cover all of the mortgage, but it would be close. It needs to make sense in the short-term and repairs. However, if you look 10 years forward, with rents/inflation naturally increasing and the mortgage balance paying down, it starts to look pretty interesting!

I don’t know if this one in particular is a good deal. I’m just making you aware that there might be opportunities, especially since this one started at $2.1M over a year ago, dropped to $1.8M in September, and still hasn’t sold. Would they take less?

Check it out:

Zillow link

Thanks for reading. We will be back with the regular events and activities email Wednesday morning!

— Allison + Brian