VARIOUS ARTISTS
Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013
Tompkins Square
caffelenahistory.org
Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013
Tompkins Square
caffelenahistory.org
I got involved in the Montreal folk scene as a teenager just
as the 1960s were about to fade into the ‘70s. I was just a little too young to
have hung out at the New Penelope, but I was there at the Back Door, the Yellow
Door and the Montreal Folk Workshop. By around 1971, I was helping Chuck Baker
run the Yellow Door – which I continued to do until I took over the Golem,
another legendary Montreal folk club, in ’74.
In 1972, I also began producing concerts at Dawson College
and McGill University and one of the first artists I booked was Bruce “Utah”
Phillips (a good friend who I would work with often over the years). Bruce
insisted that I had to come down to Saratoga Springs, New York and meet his
friend Lena Spencer. Her Caffé Lena, then about a dozen years old, was already one
of the most legendary folk clubs in North America.
So, the next time Bruce was playing there – it must have
been sometime in 1973 – I made the three-hour trip down to Saratoga and spent the
weekend hanging out at the Caffé Lena, chatting with her and Bruce for hours on
end, and sleeping in a spare room at Lena’s apartment. I remember thinking that
I may well have been sleeping in the same bed that Bob Dylan had slept in 10 or
11 years earlier. That weekend was a big part of my folk music education.
Saratoga became part of my stomping grounds for the next
dozen or so years. I’d visit two, three, four times per year, either trips specifically
to hang out there or when I’d pass through on my way to or from New York City
and I spent may evenings listening to music at the Caffé and many more hours
deep in conversation with Lena.
Saratoga is about halfway between Montreal and New York
City, so Lena and I sometimes co-ordinated our booking efforts to help route
performers, and then in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s when I was running a small
booking agency for folk music artists, the Caffé was a place I often booked
them at.
Lena passed away in 1989, but her intimate little folk club,
the Caffé Lena, has carried on as a non-profit venue. With a history stretching
back 53 continuous years, the Caffé is the most historic of current folk music
venues, and still one of the most pre-eminent.
By 1967, some folk music aficionados had begun recording some
of the concerts at the Caffé and Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s
Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013 is a heart-warming collection of 47 songs on
three CDs culled from about 700 of those concerts (or from the regular benefit
concerts in larger Saratoga halls held to raise funds to keep the wolves from
the Caffé Lena’s door).
While it’s too bad there was nothing from the Caffé’s
earliest years – so no Dylan track – but some of the artists from back then who
continued to play there in later years like Dave Van Ronk, the Greenbriar Boys, Jean Ritchie and Hedy West are well represented along with a who’s who of folk
music greats from 1967 to now.
There are lots of wonderful moments, much too many to list
them all, but certainly some of my personal favorites were four songs by
friends of mine recorded when I was there in the audience: David Amram’s
hipster-jazz-bluegrass tune, “Little Mama”; Rosalie Sorrels’ “Travelin’ Lady”; Utah
Phillips’ “The Green Rolling Hills of Western Virginia”; and Dave Van Ronk’s “Gaslight
Rag,” a tongue-in-cheek recollection of another legendary folk music
coffeehouse.
There are many other old friends represented in the
collection. Among them Kate McGarrigle & Roma Baran, recorded in 1972, who do
an obscure song of Kate’s called “Caffé Lena,” written in tribute to Lena and
her club. Kate would later use the melody as the basis for her song “NaCL” and,
in 1974, Kate and Roma formed a trio with Kate’s sister, Anna McGarrigle, that played at a
small, very select number of venues that included the Caffé Lena, the Golem, my
folk club in Montreal, the Ark in Ann Arbor, and the Mariposa Folk Festival in
Toronto.
Other highlights – many of them by other old friends –
include songs by Christine Lavin, who Lena pointed out to me as an artist to
watch out for when she was a Caffé Lena waitress, Tom Paxton, Patrick Sky, David Bromberg, Ramblin’ Jack
Elliott, Mike Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Happy & Artie Traum, Paul Geremia, Bill Staines,
Bill Morrissey, John Gorka, Pete Seeger, Rory Block, Roy Book Binder, Chris
Smither, Mary Gauthier, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, and Lena Spencer
herself, backed up by members of Bottle Hill in a 1972 recording, who quite appropriately
ends the third CD with “Dear Little Café.”
If I have a quibble, it would be that there are several
artists, stalwarts of the Caffé at one time or another, who really should have
been included in the collection. Certainly among them are Tom Mitchell, a
great, under-appreciated singer-songwriter who grew up in the Saratoga area; the
late Logan English, an influential folksinger and playwright from Kentucky who
lived in Saratoga for quite a few years before his death in a 1983 traffic
accident; and Michael Jerling, a fine singer-songwriter who has been based in
Saratoga for many years.
--Mike Regenstreif
