Club Nana Revisited-With The 1960s Folk Minute In Mind 

CD Review

By Zack James

Troubadours: the 1969s Folk Scene, various artists, Arise Records, 1987

“I started out hating the very fact that folk music was taking over the coffeehouses and jazz clubs that I hung around in a few years ago in North Beach, hated the idea that be-bop poetry and cool Dizzie jazz was being replaced by people singing twenty-seven verse songs from the 16^th century and expecting everybody to get worked up about it,” whispered Monica Simmons to her latest flame, Doug Phelps, as they sat in the newly opened Club Nana in Harvard Square just off Brattle Street while Tim House was winding up his cover of Fair and Tender Ladies to end his first set of the night. No, she had hated the very fact of folk music if it came right down to the core of the matter, saw the cretins who were going crazy over music to snooze by while perfectly good poets were rusty away just when they were beginning to get a hearing, beginning to get out from the depth of poverty, unpaid bills and back rent. Monica had moved to Boston, actually Cambridge, to finish up her education, at least she thought that she would be finishing up her education, at Harvard where she expected to receive a Master’s Degree in Sociology for her efforts.    

Monica continued, a little louder now that Tim had finished up his set and she had to fight the noise of people getting up from their tables, the clang of coffee cups and pastry plates as the waitress tried to clear the tables before the next set (and truth be told since Hank Jackson, the owner of the club, had miscalculated on how many people would show up that night for the relatively then unknown House unlike later when he couldn’t afford to play such a small intimate club, at least that is what his manager who had bent over backwards to get this early gig told him was the case  had not ordered enough plate-ware and silverware so the dishwasher would have to do a snappy job to get enough dishes and utensils for the next set), and the sounds from the speaker system playing the latest Joan Baez album (Joan a personal friend of Hank’s from the time he managed the Club Blue down the street and she had come in with Bob Dylan, sung a couple of songs at a customer’s request, and had put that place on the map), “Digger, [her pet name for Doug] you know in high school, my senior year at Berkeley High I had a date with a guy, a freshman at Berkeley who was into the “beat” scene in North Beach and had taken me over there once he knew that I had read Allan Ginsberg’s Howl which he was crazy about, would recite that stuff about the crazy negro streets and all the rest and was seriously interested in Jack Madden, the great jazz tenor sax who had played with Chu Berry back when he was a kid but who had moved on to play this cool, cool jazz that I heard one day in music class because the music teacher was some kind of friend of his, they had gone to school together or something like that. So after that one date night I seriously got into the beat scene, dug all the stuff going on, saw the whole thing as a breath of fresh air, my fresh air, loved the poetry readings in the clubs mixed up with this jazz that seemed so symbiotic. I even wore all black for a while, black blouse, skirt, beret the whole scene thing. Of course I had to carry the stuff in a bag and change in the Ladies’ Room at whatever club I was at since my mother would have never let me out of the house in that outfit. [Monica’s outfit at the Club Nana by the way was long ironed black hair as was the style once Joan Baez and few other folk women made that the style, a peasant blouse, a long flowing skirt which would later by called a grannie, and sandals, in short the female folkie garb of the day, so you know a sea change had occurred, occurred at least for Monica.]                     

 “I remember one night at the Hungry Bear, over on Fillmore, a funny thing happened that I didn’t make much of then but might have been when the big change over was in progress. Gregory Corso, the crazy wise ass street gangster desperado poet who really could with all of that write circle around most of the San Francisco poets, one of the inner circle of the beat poetry scene especially in New York, was reading. There had been a huge line outside waiting to get in so the manager, I forget his name, after Gregory had finished his first set brought a guy, a guy with a beard and kind of weird looking with a guitar in one of his hands up to the stage. The guy started singing some drone song about some medieval married lady who had an affair with somebody not her husband and since she was nobility and he a commoner the guy had to go to the axe, to the execution block, and the thing ran on and on before he got to the bitter ending.

I, with my date, that Cal freshman who sported a beret and beard at the time, stayed but I noticed several couples, maybe more, get up and leave and their places were taken by some of the people waiting in line. The guy started to sing another drone song but the people who had stayed for Gregory’s first set stayed put this time once they saw what was happening. Nobody was moving so the manager, I wish I remembered his name, went up to the stage and stopped the folksinger right in mid-song. I heard that started a trend when Gregory who always got a cut of the house when he read went back to New York and told the coffeehouse owners there that story about a good way to clear the house and make twice as much revenue. Here is the real funny part thought, maybe a year later that same weird guy was back at the Hungry Bear, still droning but doing a three-song set at an “open mic” once the Bear started featuring folksingers three times a week.”         

Digger reminded Monica that he found that former hatred of hers for folk music strange since the night he met her in the Club 47 also down the street a couple of doors from the Café Blue seemed both by the way she dressed and her vast knowledge of the folk scene around Harvard Square to be the queen bee of the folkie scene asking, “What turned you around on this stuff. I know I got into it one night when I was riding in Jack’s car and he had on WMAD, a station I never listened to because I thought it was an all-news all the time station and there was a six-song stretch with no commercials unlike WMEZ, the rock station, which had one after every song and some interesting songs like Cocaine Blues done by Dave Van Ronk who I didn’t know at all at the time and then a guy by the name of Tom Paxton doing The Last Thing On My Mind. Then I started listening on my own after that night when I was at home. One thing about the guy who ran the Sunday night show, Curtis Sloan was that he would announce who was playing where in the area and what places, coffeehouses or clubs, you could go and have a cheap date, like this one, a couple of coffees, maybe we will share a brownie or have one each, a couple of bucks to get in and maybe a buck for the “basket” when the performer finishes up. I had overheard a girl in my Western Civilization class talking about Rene Dubois, before he became a big name, and I started talking to her. One thing led to another and she was my first cheap coffeehouse date. That was a while back before I met you. So what gives, why if you hated folk music so much did you flip over on the thing?”          

Monica laughed her small-voiced laugh and told Digger, “Well, you know it kind of just happened. Remember that guy who I said was doing three-song “open mic” sets at the Hungry Bear when it turned to folk a little. Well, I went to the Fish and Grog one night and there he was playing hi silly ass three-song set and expecting some money when the basket came out. He was still stuck somewhere in the 17^th century singing for thirty-two verses about some professional highwayman who finally got caught, who was going to be hanged, hanged high for his transgressions, until his daughter, his beautiful daughter, who was begging for mercy from the judge got propositioned by him after he said ‘no go’ unless she went to bed with him. The father said don’t do it, don’t trust the bloody bastard, but she did. Guess what the bastard judge hung dear old dad high. I forget the finish but I think the daughter killed the judge and had her revenge. Boring.

“But right after him came Teddy Madden, who sang some funny songs, and some modern stuff he wrote. That night I kept thinking about those melodies of his. I showed up for a mini-concert he was giving at B.U. and I liked it even more because he did some Woody Guthrie covers.” We went out for a while, you know, and he got me off my all black kick which seemed out of place in the emerging folk scene. Look around here and you can see where a girl looking like a pale black mascaraed dressed in black beatnik and not all angelic and pure faux peasant girls would be out of place. Then I came East and kept up my interest, met you and here we are nothing but folk aficionados. I wonder what happened to Gregory, Jack and all those beat brothers who filled up the Bay Area-fogged night. Probably faded like my black blouse.”                    

And you will hear what Monica with, and later without, Doug heard in the local Cambridge and Boston coffeehouses and concert halls in this compilation. Okay.