The Never Ending Pool

POP MUSIC REVIEW

Live: Ash Grove's 50th Anniversary
The long-lost club is remembered with an all-star show.
By Steve Appleford
Special to The Times

April 21, 2008

The seats at Royce Hall were still empty when Ramblin' Jack Elliott stepped onstage for his Friday afternoon sound-check and rehearsal, a black cowboy hat pulled low over his tangle of white, bushy hair. He sat on a stool and strummed his acoustic guitar, singing of coming west from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, a musical cautionary tale written by his friend and mentor, the late Woody Guthrie.

"California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see," Elliott sang in a voice rich and fittingly rough. "But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot, if you ain't got the do re mi."

He was joined by Dave Alvin and his band, all "Ash Grove babies," musicians just old enough to have been teenage regulars at the old club on Melrose. "I can still smell it," Alvin said. "Old wood and cinnamon, with tobacco smoke." That 150-seat venue finally burned down in 1974, but only after a dozen years as a crucial West Coast room for folk, blues, bluegrass and other organic sounds of Americana.

Elliott and Alvin were among a powerful lineup at a weekend-long musical celebration of the club's 50th anniversary, hosted by UCLA Live. On Friday, they shared the stage with Ry Cooder, Ben Harper and Holly Near, along with vivid eruptions of West African and Mediterranean folk music. (Saturday's show would include Taj Mahal, Michelle Shocked and Watts Prophets.)

At 76, Elliott was ready for another gig among old friends. And watching from behind a video camera was [Elliott's] daughter, Aiyana, leading a documentary crew for a film on the Ash Grove's legacy.

Out back having a smoke was Arlo Guthrie, the night's surprise guest, set to open the show with his father's "This Land Is Your Land." His hair and mustache were long and silver now, and he remembered that he got his first West Coast gig at the Ash Grove when he was just 18.

"After 43 years of playing, there's a lot of clubs and venues under the bridge, but I remember that one," said Guthrie, who credited club owner Ed Pearl for emphasizing social consciousness over business.

As the night's concert began, Alvin plugged in for the rumbling, bluesy "Ashgrove," a song from 2004 that's less a tribute to the club than a lament on years lost and a changed world, sung in Alvin's fluid baritone: "All the old bluesmen have all passed on, and I'm out on this highway travelin' town to town . . . I'm just tryin' to raise the ghosts up out of their graves."

Back in the 1960s, Cooder was a teen prodigy studying the blues and folk masters up-close at the club. And on Friday, he sat in for a short set of old-timey tunes with the folk and bluegrass masters Mike Seeger and Roland White. They picked through "She's More to Be Pitied" (as recorded by the Stanley Brothers) with warmth and precision, but when Cooder slipped into a bit of modern technique, he shook his head and said, "I ought to be thrown out for doing that!"

During an intermission, Pearl watched musicians roll in and out backstage. "We're an hour behind," Pearl said, but he didn't look unhappy. "It's a wonderful show." He was soon at the microphone himself, praising the music while comparing today's grim political climate with that of the Ash Grove's founding in 1958: "Art is always the escape valve."

That political mission was fully represented by a moving and hilarious appearance by Culture Clash, as the comedy/theater troupe performed parts of its tragicomedy "Chavez Ravine." Near spoke of ending the war in Iraq, and Laura Love sang the civil-rights anthem "We Shall Not Be Moved" to cheers as she added the lyric, "Like that man in the White House, they must be removed . . . ."

It was midnight when Taj Mahal introduced Harper, who brought a band that included his mother, singer Ellen Chase, once an Ash Grove regular. Together they performed Harper originals, from the dramatic folk of "Gather 'Round the Stone" to the Dixieland of "Suzie Blue," plus a new duet, "Spanish Red Wine."

Before stepping onstage, Harper said he considered it "a very prestigious honor" to be considered part of the Ash Grove lineage. The music there represented "some of the best manipulations of silence that human beings have to offer. It's some of the best music that has come out of this country."

http://www.calendarlive.com/music/pop/cl-et-ashgrove21apr21,0,729168,print.story

Up From the Ashes: The Ash Grove Is Reborn on a UCLA Stage

Posted Apr 22nd 2008 11:00AM by Steve Hochman
Filed under: Around the World

A celebration marking a half century since the opening of the seminal Los Angeles folk/blues/world club the Ash Grove brought something home: The roots of American roots music is in rootlessness.

All night long, in the first of two evening concerts marking this milestone, artists who in more recent years shaped modern American roots music -- Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Dave Alvin -- reminisced warmly on the stage at UCLA's Royce Hall about teenage journeys to the Melrose Ave. music spot to worship and learn at the feet of the masters: bluesmen including Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Rev. Gary Davis, such mountain music mainstays as the Stanley Brothers, plains balladeers such as Ramblin' Jack Elliott, even Eastern European folk music revived under the direction of musicologist Mike Janusz.

"The Ash Grove," noted Alvin this night in a scorching electric blues song he wrote in tribute to the old club he and his brother Phil made regular pilgrimages to from nearby Downey, "that's where I come from."

If not for Ash Grove founder Ed Pearl, Alvin stressed, most of those blues greats would never have even come out to play in California. Folkie Arlo Guthrie, who as an unannounced guest opened the evening with a fine rendition of his dad Woody's anthem 'This Land Is Your Land,' said that his first West Coast trip was a 1965 gig at the club, when he was just a teen himself. Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and fellow Rolling Stones mate Bill Wyman were among those who would stop by when they were in town, not as performers but as fans.

The music the youngsters heard in the late '50s and through the '60s, though, was the music of the displaced, the refugees, the kidnapped, those forced to leave their homes: Africans stolen into slavery, Jews fleeing poverty and pogroms, Irish escaping famine and oppression, English and Scottish crushed under the Industrial Revolution. The people playing the original Ash Grove were direct descendants of these immigrants, just a generation or two removed, if not immigrants themselves, caught between two worlds, not exactly as welcomed here as some myths would have it, but with no "home" to which they could even think of returning.

But for the wide-eyed kids, coming of age in a postwar, consumer-driven suburbia, arguably the most stable and comfortable situation in the history of the non-upper-classes, the yearning of the rootless somehow resonated. And it wove a thematic thread through this show, with Ramblin' Jack doing Woody Guthrie's satirical Dust Bowl migrant ballad 'Do Re Me' and Cooder singing Agnes Cunningham's comparable 'How Can You Keep On Moving (Unless You Migrate Too),' a song he learned at the Ash Grove.

Sure, it's pretty much a social anthropological cliche by now: the combo of Eisenhower-years blandness, the true establishment of a middle class and the mass-media explosion that opens up windows to other cultures and ideas sparks a new consciousness, music helps fuel awareness of civil-rights issues, a generation comes of age questioning the values of the power structure and, well, the '60s happened. Don't sell it short. The Ash Grove alone was perceived as enough of a threat to someone that it suffered three arson fires, the last closing it for good in 1973.

In the highlights of this concert, though, the tone turned personal more than political. Alvin's short set held a particularly deep note for the death a few days before of long-time musical saddle pal Chris Gaffney, with a line tossed into 'Ash Grove' and a dedication of a moving 'Shenandoah' to "my best friend." But then he couldn't wipe a big grin off his face as he and band accompanied elder statesman Ramblin' Jack through his digression-filled tales of the drifting life. Cooder, teaming with veterans Mike Seeger and Roland White for a tribute to "old timey" music, remembered nights during high school accosting Elliott and Carter Stanley as they came off stage to show him licks they'd played, and also imitating Pearl decrying any sense of commercialism even in performers mentioning albums they were promoting. Emcee Dr. Demento told of when he was simply young Barry Hansen working as a ticket taker, stage manager and everything else at the club. Unannounced surprised guest Ben Harper brought a real sense of currency and continuity by being joined by his mother, Southern California folk maven Ellen Chase, for an entrancing unplugged set with his band, including a sweet mother-son duet on Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.' (Word is Ben and Mom are going to make an album together, which, based on this little taste, will be a treasure.)

The inspiration took many forms: Holly Near, another graduate of the Ash Grove school, showed in her segment with East Coast duo Emma's Revolution how she channeled the lessons learned into a career of women's rights, civil rights and environmental activism. Culture Clash offered up political theater in the Ash Grove spirit with an excerpt from their 'Chavez Ravine,' another work about cultural and physical displacement in its pointed satire of the destruction of a multicultural community for the building of Dodger Stadium around the time the Ash Grove was founded. And younger musical artists Laura Love and Ashley Maher brought the Ash Grove aesthetic into newer contexts with, respectively, a distinctive brand of funk folk rooted in old spirituals and civil-rights anthems and a hybrid world music/dance bridging modern America and traditional Africa. And closing this first night, a motley Eastern European jam session blasted spiritedly into the wee hours.

The musical pinnacle came in the Cooder/Seeger/White set on a number in which Seeger played harmonica and fiddle simultaneously (a neat trick) on a mournful, haunting lick, singing lyrics about slaves being transported, with Cooder coming in for an electric slide solo that echoed Blind Willie Johnson's ghostly, despairing 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.' This performance at once captured that intersection of generations at the founding of the Ash Grove, that passing of rootless displacement into the realm of folklore roots, though the song itself shows that's nothing new. It was 'Stolen Souls From Africa,' a piece associated with white abolitionists more than a century before the Ash Grove even existed.

Pearl himself, in a brief address to the crowd, made a call for a new Ash Grove, something he said is needed in a time of complacency he likened to that of when he started the original club. The case can be made. Punk is by and large toothless, rap is becoming a caricature. There would seem not just a need but untapped demand for something really of substance, a unifying, galvanizing musical force that would bring in stray youth in search of, well, something. But is that even possible in the blogosphere era, when every music, every opinion, every thought is instantly accessible? No kid has to go to a club to learn about folk music or blues or anything today. Never mind creating something so threatening to the power structure that someone would burn it down once, let alone three times.

http://www.spinner.com/2008/04/22/up-from-the-ashes-the-ash-grove-is-reborn-on-a-ucla-stage/

not Coffee House related, but follow-up to earlier John Jacob Niles posts:

1926 recording:


John Jacob Niles & Marion Kerby - Just Like a Tree



John Jacob Niles & Marion Kerby - He's Got the Whole World

Thanks for those, 4th. Some interesting images, there.

Here's a re-up of the link for "The Hangman," a performance that you described as "truly extraordinary." That's an apt description, imo:


"The Hangman," by John Jacob Niles, live, from 1959
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1hrmr4

"I Can't Sign My Name," by Big Joe Williams, Gerdes Folk City, NYC, FE 26 62
http://www.sendspace.com/file/mqrrbb

"With Bobby and Joanie singing so bright, who needs a compass with all of that light?"

So sings Peter LaFarge in this little ditty. Not live, but from '65.



LaFarge made a brief appearance in "No Direction Home." He lived on the third floor of the Earle Hotel, in NYC, for about a year ('61). Two other rooms on that floor were occupied by Bob Dylan and Jack Elliott:

"Move Over, Grab a Holt"
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0ojwn3

This one's for that cantankerous, but generous gentleman (this may be an oxymoron), Bill Laing:

"Mr Blue," by Joni Mitchell, from NO, '66 at the Second Fret, in Philly.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/mae2nk

This song is not "Blue," which came later. Joni was just 23 (or very soon to be), and begins the song by talking about Bob Dylan.

Many of these clubs would only have a seating capacity of, say, 150 to 200 people, which is why the applause can sound rather sparse. It would be sparsest, early in the week, generally speaking. I once saw Steve Martin with Mimi Farina as the opening act, in such a club. He drew seven people to an opening set on a Tuesday night.

Here's another one from The Second Fret that I just posted at The Watchtower, as my way of thanking Billy for posting some Carnegie Chapter Hall mp3s.

It's OC, 1967, and Mitchell is not yet 24. She's been living in NYC since early '67. Just after the applause at about the 4:00 minute mark, she begins to talk (for a full minute) about Bob Dylan (and Eric Andersen and David Blue). She talks about going "to a Bob Dylan movie" and refers to BD as "Mr. Dylan."

"King In A Tenement Castle," plus JoniTalk, by Joni Mitchell

http://www.sendspace.com/file/91eona

Son of Utah, singer to the world

Utah Phillips returns 'home' for benefit concerts filled with songs and stories from a well-traveled life

By Dan Nailen
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:05/24/2008 09:57:45 PM MDT

Editors Note: Original publication date: February 11, 2005

During the 22 years Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips lived in Utah, between the ages of 12 and 34, he learned the art of storytelling from a Mormon elder, learned American Indian songs from a Catholic priest, ran away from home to ride the rails with hobos and tramps, worked as a state historical archivist and ran for the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom ticket.

Then Phillips' life got really interesting.

The man best known as Utah Phillips went on to become a legend in folk-music circles, a performer who combines long narratives about labor heroes and tramps with singalongs and odes to the country he's traveled from coast to coast by driving, hitchhiking or riding the rails. The entire time, his music career has been strongly linked to his life as a progressive activist, whether working with pro-peace groups or his beloved International Workers of the World. You know, the "Wobblies."

Phillips' son Duncan works with Utah Jobs with Justice, and Utah Phillips is coming home for a pair of concerts next week to help raise money for the organization and touch base with his roots. Phillips currently calls Nevada City, Calif., home, a place he calls "a blue town in a red county in a blue state in a red country in a blue world." The Salt Lake Tribune's interview with Phillips was delayed a couple of times due to his meeting with the Nevada City Peace Center, a group of about 2,000 in his hometown trying to address issues like helping war veterans in the area and bringing a peace-related film series to Nevada City. Phillips truly thinks globally and acts locally, and for him, "locally" means every town he's visited.

Tribune: So what do you do to get ready for visiting a town for a show?

Phillips: When I go play a town I haven't been to in a while, I want them to send me the newspaper so I can get caught up on the local issues. Then I go to the library and read up on the history and economic base and economic distribution so I know the right questions to ask. Then I get taken to see wonders and marvels of the place when I get there.

In Utah, I think I know where the wonderful marvels are, or were, in the case of Salt Lake. That town has been pretty well torn down and I can't say I care for it much. You should have seen it in 1947 when we moved there. It was a big cow town. My first memories of first moving to Salt Lake - and this is moving from the old Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, where everyone spoke Polish and Yiddish - moving from that neighborhood to Salt Lake on the anniversary of the pioneer trek, it was all Mormon pioneer stuff. It was like moving to another planet. We went over there to 21st South and 13th East and parked the car because 21st South was blocked all the way to the west side from Parleys Canyon. We had a picnic and sat on top of the car and watched rivers of sheep being driven down from Heber, flowing down 21st South by the Basque sheepherders with their red berets and dogs barking to get them down to the railhead on the west side. For a kid coming from Cleveland, that was incredible.

Tribune: What else do you remember?

Phillips: It was a pretty exciting town. West Temple with the Del Rio Club and the Havana Club, all these clubs I used to get thrown out of because I was underage. Then [I remember] all the secondhand stores where I could buy old 78s. My first run-in with folk music of any quantity was old-time country music. That's when Cousin Ray's Record Barn down on 3rd South, when the LP came into play, he threw all his old 78s out on tables on the sidewalks and sold them for a nickel apiece. I found old hillbilly records, songs that I still sing and love.

Tribune: It's been a few years since you played in Utah, right?

Phillips: I used to play there at least once a year, but it's been quite a while since I've been back. The last time I was there I played the Egyptian Theatre with Rosalie Sorrels, and of course it was Rosalie and I and a bunch of other folks who started the Utah Folk Music Society - the great folk music scare of the 1960s! There was a lot of singing going on around town, and we brought a lot of people in from out of town. Rosalie left in '65 and I left in late '69. I left in an old VW bus with $75 and no prospects. I didn't know I was a folk singer, for one thing. I left really as an unemployed organizer.

Tribune: What was your first stop?

Phillips: Well, we stopped all the way across the country because the damn bus blew out trans-axles one after another! In Atlantic, Iowa, we were stranded for quite a while. We had a burned-out Vietnam vet in that bus. And a real good poet named Larry. And a real good Utah poet named Hal. And the other fellow with us was a French Communist who ran the Utah Free Press, the socialist magazine. We were delivering him to the port of deportation in New York. It was a woolly crew. Nobody had any money except my 75 bucks. We were hitting up the Episcopalian churches across the country for their emergency funds.

Tribune: What did you do in New York?

Phillips: I made my way up to Saratoga Springs where Rosalie was, and there was a club called Café Lena. That was ground zero for folk music in the East. It was a tiny club upstairs that couldn't hold more than 50 or 60 people, but Bob Dylan did his first East Coast engagement there. Ramblin' Jack Elliott played there. Everybody played there because they loved Lena. She cared for us, and it was she who taught me that I was in a new trade. She taught me how to do booking, she gave me a place to play, gave me a place to sleep while I got my feet under me.

That's when I discovered there was this enormous folk music family all over the country, a subculture that happened below the level of media notice but is all-pervasive. Every community had a folk music society, a folk music club, a singer's circle. Everybody knew everybody because of the traveling folk music singers sleeping on couches, working for $25 a night in these small coffeehouses and working back and forth across the country in these old cars, or hitchhiking. I fell in with them. I had an old '57 Chevrolet, and back and forth across the country we went, learning songs and learning towns. Each town is its own teacher.

Tribune: Any plans on retiring now that you're almost 70 [Phillips' birthday is May 15]?

Phillips: There's no retirement in my trade; it's a trade you die at. Ten years ago I got diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and a good part of my heart doesn't work. . . . I did stop performing for a little while, but that was to get myself together medically, to get the medications right, to start the cardiac rehab exercises at the hospital and get a really clean, organic diet going. But I feel fine, and as long as I can control it, I can go out once or twice a month.

That's why I'm coming to Salt Lake and Logan. I love the Cache Valley. I've spent a lot of time there. I'm going to go get a good dinner at the Bluebird Café as soon as I get there. . . . And of course the Wobblies are prominent in Utah, mainly for the execution of Joe Hill. . . . I look forward to spending time with them and having a potluck. Utah-style folk.

http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_2564211

Note: There's a photo in the link.

Excerpt from "Blugrass Annie's Scrapbook:"


"I was once assigned to pick Ramblin' Jack Elliott up at the Burbank airport for a show he was doing that night at the Ash Grove. He must have called the Carradine Brothers as well because they were also there to meet him. Jack chose to catch a ride with them and who was I to argue with three, rather large, grown men?"

"I returned to the Ash Grove where Ed [Pearl, the owner]asked me, "Where's Jack?". That question wouldn't be answered until much later that same day when we received a call from the local police department where Jack and the two brothers were safely locked up. It had to have been a pretty small amount of pot that got them into trouble because he did manage to eventually make it to the Ash Grove and put on a marvelous show."

"Ramblin' Jack Elliott appeared at the Indian Summer Hoot in August of 1998 and is the only performer who hasn't agreed to be included on the "best of" Hoot recordings.

http://www.cambriahoot.com/gallery.html

With Betsy Siggins, of Club 47 (now, Club Passim)


Club Passim: 50 Years Of Folk Legends, by Abigail Beshkin

Listen Now [7:24]

Song excerpts from the club include Joan Baez, Tom Rush, and Doc Watson.


Courtesy of NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93310839&ft=1&f=100

Aiyana Elliott (The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack) is producing a documentary film about the legendary Los Angeles coffee house, The Ash Grove.

Within the link, below, is an easily accessable (Quik Time) link to a trailer for the film. There is some great archival footage (from Doc Watson to Lightnin' Hopkins, and from the Stanley Brothers to Big Mama Thorton) as well as present day commentary from the likes of Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal, Dave Alvin, and Ed Pearl, the club owner. A Dylan quote, about The Ash Grove, starts things off.

The club was a lot more than a room where musicians performed. Check it out.

http://www.ashgrovefilm.com/

posted on another site by "alias"

Blowin’ in the Forgotten Wind

Quote:
So you don't have to log into the NYTimes web site:

THE windows of Le Figaro Cafe at Bleecker and Macdougal Streets were whited over last week. Except for the workers stepping past boxes of new floor tiles and appliances, the inside was as quiet as it has been since June, when the old place closed its doors. Plans to install signs for the new tenant, a branch of the Qdoba burrito chain, were still awaiting city approval.
More Dispatches

One recent afternoon on Bleecker, returning college students lugged bags from the Container Store into a stairway, and a display of obscene T-shirts met shoppers at a store called Modern Village. The Figaro, two doors down, might have been called Ancient Village by comparison. This holdover from the neighborhood’s beatnik and folkie days outlived the scenes that passed through it, disappeared for a while, returned for a 33-year encore and finally expired, mostly unlamented.

Alexandra McGrath, a 21-year-old student and restaurant hostess, stopped to look at a building permit posted in the window. Ms. McGrath grew up on Long Island, but from the time she was 11 or 12, her father used to take her to the Figaro on visits to the city. He had lived in Greenwich Village when he was younger, she said, and always recalled the cafe as a hip place to go.

•

Ms. McGrath lives in Queens and works on the Upper East Side, and until walking past, she had not realized that the place was closed.

Still, a few minutes earlier, she had consulted a tourist map of the neighborhood in her search for a friend’s apartment, and saw that the Figaro was literally on the map, marked prominently.

“So,” she said, “that means it was a big deal.”

Suze Rotolo started hanging around Washington Square Park as a Queens teenager in the late 1950s, around the time the Figaro opened and moved to the Village a few years later. She remembers the old French newspapers plastered on the walls and the management’s willingness to let patrons linger without buying much.

“Writers, poets, visual artists, actors, anybody could go and nurse a cup of coffee and not have to worry about spending too much money,” she recalled a few days ago.

Ms. Rotolo — an artist who hung around with Macdougal Street luminaries like Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan, dated Mr. Dylan and recently wrote a memoir, “A Freewheelin’ Time,” about the era — remembered the Figaro as a place to go before or after a performance at a nearby club.

It seemed to be aiming for the mood of a Paris cafe in the 1930s, she said, and for some customers, emulating that earlier, more romantic time was part of the appeal.

The Figaro went out of business for the first time in 1969, a victim of rising rents, to be replaced by a Blimpie sandwich shop and, later, an ice cream parlor. The cafe reopened in 1975 with a new owner, Ben Fishbein, who ran it until 2004, when he sold it to the corporation that owns the space today.

•

Ms. Rotolo still lives in the Village, but she had not been by the cafe in a long time. “The Figaro really became, for want of a term, plastic,” she said. “You know what I mean? Some things go from wood to plastic.”

The writer André Aciman, who used to spend time at the Figaro in the 1970s, said he was not surprised by its quiet passing. “Nothing is mourned in New York,” he said. “We miss it as an idea, but in point of fact, if it’s gone it’s because nobody was going there.”

Over the years the Figaro had its moments. Despite what Mr. Aciman recalled as nondescript sandwiches and limited pastries, it was a good place for an afternoon glass of wine, a late-night cup of coffee and maybe an impromptu conversation with a stranger at the next table. Mr. Aciman remembered seeing Fellini’s 1963 film “8 1/2” for the first time at the now-defunct Bleecker Street Cinema, down the street, then heading to the Figaro to talk it over with friends.

“You can’t do that in a burrito place,” Mr. Aciman said. “But on the other hand, if you don’t have a movie house that will show Fellini, then the Cafe Figaro becomes sort of unnecessary, too.”
******************************************************************

my comment (under another name)

yeah, we just passed by last week and saw this. There's a post on that NY Times blog that mistakenly cites Caffe Reggio as being closed, which it isn't, nor is it on that corner. All four corners at the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal have been decimated. It was Caffe Borgia on the northeast corner.