Dean Barrett Guide to Soi Cowboy

Writer Dean Barrett walks thru Soi Cowboy, describing the scene.

  " I was innocently walking down Soi Cowboy and Jimmy Corr 
saw me while he was photographing them and had me pose with them. 
Nothing happened. I swear!"
- Dean Barrett

New Years Celebration at Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, Thailand

Khun Nana states that these are the good old times in the nightlife of Bangkok. And from looking at Dean Barrett's New Years Eve photos of Soi Cowboy, maybe he's right.
Check out Dean and Khun's website for more insight.

Shark Bar at Soi Cowboy

Got to Shark bar around 9 this time. Got a seat and admired the lineup.
So many good looking girls, great happy hour prices and awesome music.

Someone makes a point of getting fresh UK/US top pop songs which are fun to listen to but more importantly - the girls are into it as well. This makes all the difference with the girls enjoying the songs and actually dancing a bit on the stage.
I easily saw 10 girls I would barfine at first glance. Shark is great but go early.
I noticed dancers from playskool, r2 and voodoo on the stage. The exodus from Nana continues.
Farang Speaks 2 Much

Soi Cowboy was Soi Gold Label (A Little History)

Started in early 1975, the Gold Label was the “seminal bar” in every sense; aside from being the first bar on the Soi; it was the first bar aimed at expatriate custom; it was also the first double-shophouse wide bar, and it was also the first multi-story bar, and it was the first A-Go-Go and “Show” bar (later, upstairs), while downstairs, it remained a lounge.

But mainly, it was the bar that realized -and made others realize- that the Soi was an ideal location for a night entertainment area. The Gold Label enjoyed an approximate three-year run of popularity. At first, only the first and second floors were used, but for a brief period the third floor was opened to accommodate the custom. The regular expatriate clientele treated it as if it were a best-kept secret - and for the most part, it was. It has since been replaced by several other bars, the latest being the Baccara Bluebird A-Go-Go . During those early years the Gold Label was not only the first, but for a long time the only bar, so naturally enough, the soi was referred to as Soi Gold Label .

But times were changing; within the next three years, the Gold Label would fade from the scene and a number of smaller, single-shophouse bars would open. By 1978-1979 the Soi reached a nominal ‘critical mass”, and as time passed, it was becoming clear that the leader of this new pack was the Cowboy Bar.
The Cowboy Bar was opened by another then-recently retired US military veteran. Everyone knew him, unsurprisingly, as “Cowboy”. This upsurge in numbers of entertainment venues on the Soi and the resultant increase in popularity were not lost on Bernard Trink , then with the Bangkok World. The Soi was often mentioned in his weekly entertainment page. He dubbed the soi, “Soi Cowboy” and the name immediately ‘stuck’ - today you won’t find a taxi driver who doesn’t know where Soi “C’boi” is.

Only a few die-hards remember it as Soi Gold Label.

Richard D. Hartman from
Bangkok Eyes

Soi Cowboy on YouTube

Some of the videos feature Dean Barrett, the Soi Cowboy Poet

Soi Cowboy's Neon Thru Bangkok Eyes

The neon lights of Soi Cowboy, it's looking more like Vegas all the time. Check out the rest of the photo essay of the Soi at night thru
Bangkok Eyes.

Suzie Wong - Speaking of Tongues

I took a bi gf to see the Suzie Wong show a couple of months ago. Arranged to take out the best looking girl we saw, who we had just seen with her tongue in two other girls. When we got back to my room, she tells us she is 'not really into girls' and that it is all an act. Major disappointment….

With another friend there recently, and I told him the show must be well rehearsed 'cos the girls are constantly moving in sync into new positions without communicating, to which he replied that they must be 'speaking in tongues'….

Mochalover in Bangkok Bad Boy

What I Love About Bangkok

Soi Cowboy was hopping with the Suzie Wong show as good as always but the most fun was had in Dollhouse.
No tops and no undie girls cavorting on our laps. Awesome.
Rawhide had a dancer contest with most of the A team and B team competing in mostly naked shows. All good. However it does get old buying the A team girls a drink and they disappear a few sips in.
Doubt I will do that anymore.

After closing down Cowboy we hit Spicy on Rong Muang. It was rammed. We could barely get a table but managed to share a table with 3 cuties. Within moments of joining them some Japanese guy came over and handed one of them some cash. She handed it to her friend who counted it and then 2 of the girls left. The last girl stayed, who my friend took home, but later the other 2 reappeared after taking care of business. Spicy can be all business at times but yet on some nights you might meet nice office or uni girls. Love it. Spicy appears to still be the king of after hours.

Farang Speaks 2 Much

Watching Soi Cowboy Wake Up

Watching the soi wake up is an enlightening experience. Many of the girls live above the bars in which they work - so we see them emerging, sober and docile, into the soi to buy lunch from one of the countless food carts. Office workers pop into the soi to buy food, looking warily at the girls and hastily beating a retreat once they’re loaded up with som tam.

Later in the afternoon, some of the girls who’ve managed to acquire their own apartments (or spent the night in someone else’s) begin to arrive - some by foot, some in taxis or on mopeds or motorbikes. Some even arrive on the back of their Thai boyfriends’ motorbikes (which the girls probably paid for).
Bangkok Bad Boy

Dean Barrett Walking Down Soi Cowboy

This YouTube link features Dean Barrett walking down Soi Cowboy, talking about the nightlife. It's great.

New Year's Eve at Soi Cowboy

However, without question, the winner of the most-fun-bar on New Year's Eve is Dollhouse also on Soi Cowboy. In his wisdom, Darryl every year brings in an enormous amount of tiny Styrofoam balls so that one must wade and swim across the floor, one hand on a glass and one hand on a lovely, skimpily clad lady.

Dean Barrett

Christmas in Bangkok

Christmas at Soi Cowboy
I found this image in Dean Barrett's archives from last year. Hopefully, there will be some photos from this year's holiday season.
Happy Holidays to everyone.

Christmas at Nana Disco

This shot is from a couple years ago, showing the dance girls at the Angels Disco (or Nana Disco), dressed for the holidays. (Its the dance club that's found inside the Nana Hotel.)

Dreams Can Come True.....

photo by Randy Magnus

The best night in Bangkok this time was going to the Long Gun GoGo Bar at Soi Cowboy and paying the bar fine for this great outgoing-personality, affectionate girl from the stable for short-time. I noticed her dancing among the other girls on stage. She came down and said hi, but I didn't recognize her with her clothes on.
She moved on to this other guy, and I could see how friendly and passionate she was as she flurted with the other client. But he didn't take her out.
When she passed by I tapped her and bought the girl a drink. She quickly fell into my lap and asked if I was going to pay the bar fine for her. I told her I wanted to see her dance again. After her stint on stage, she came back and I gladly accepted. On the way back to my place we stopped by Nana Entertainment Plaza and went inside a place I knew I could photograph in.

The bar was pretty dead, the girls only sitting around. I put the Long Gun girl up on stage, and the place came alive. The other girls were enjoying her energy, everyone was dancing. She would fall into my outreached hands in front of the stage, and dance in my arms. After a little bit, she wanted back on stage so I lifted her back onto the stage. I had a hard time having her keep her bra and panties on as she performed her pole moves, saying she was hot. Five or six guys wondered in and stayed to watch her. She was a ringer, for sure.

On the way down the stairs at Nana she held tightly onto my body saying she was sorry she was so drunk. She had a great time.
We both did.
We got to my place, undressed, showered and began cuddling on the bed, rolled over to another position and she passed out, face down, right in the center of the bed. I squeezed over to one side, placed the covers over us and went to sleep myself.
As she was waking up the next morning, the girl was very affectionate and loving, the way one hopes to wake-up with being with such a beautiful creature, and continued the affair.

Later on while I was videotaping the Thai Cowboys performing their bluegrass music at the Weekend Market, I called her up and had the Blue Mountain Boys seranade her with a country version of "Happy Birthay". It was her birthday on that day.

Stickman Estimates The Number In Thailand

Outside of the most well-known spots - Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket, there are the "secondary areas" like Ko Samui, Hua Hin and Chiang Mai. Naughty bars with girls can be found in other touristy areas like Ko Samet and Ko Chang. And then you get into the places where relatively small numbers of Western holidaymakers venture, but where there are enough Western guys living locally to sustain a few naughty bars. This would include Songkhla, Udon Thani and Khon Kaen.

Nana Plaza has 32 bars, but only 28 of them have women available. Remember, Nana Plaza is katoey central and there are four bars where all you'll find are transsexuals. My best guess is that there is an average of perhaps 45 girls per bar in Nana. That is 1,260 girls. In the past the number would have been a fair bit higher. A lot of the bars seem to have fewer girls now than they did say 5 years ago. This is probably best explained by the fact that there are many more bars in Bangkok these days meaning more options in terms of places to work.

Soi Cowboy has a similar number of bars, but there would have to be fewer girls there than Nana. There are not so many big bars, and a couple of hole in the wall types. With the number of bars on Soi Cowboy totaling 30, I estimate an average of about 35 girls per bar, although that is perhaps a little on the high side when you factor in the likes of the tiny Pam's Bar. Assuming 35 girls per bar, that would make a total of about 1,050 girls. That's got to be in the ball park.

Patpong is perhaps the easiest bar area in Bangkok to estimate numbers. Most of the gogo bars are medium in size and have a similar number of girls employed. You do not have a lot of really big bars but there are a few of the smaller bars on the second Patpong Soi, which have only a small number of girls. There are about 50 bars spread over the two Patpong sois and the average number of available girls would again be around 35 in each bar, meaning a total of perhaps 1,750 girls, making it the most populous of Bangkok's major bar areas.

So Stickman estimates the number is as follows:
Nana Plaza 1,260
Soi Cowboy 900
Patpong 1,750
Sukhumvit Soi33 675
Bangkok beer bars combined 1,200
Bangkok freelancers 1,500
Phuket 2,500
Pattaya 17,000
Ko Samui 500
Hua Hin 300
Others (Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Udon + everywhere else) 1,500
TOTAL 29,265

(Estimates 7,285 in Bangkok alone)