There seems to have been a lot of reminiscing about The Troubadour in Los Angeles and its place in music history lately. Well then, as long as everyone is throwing their two cents in, I thought that I’d add a few things that may have been missed.

 

     In 1961, The Troubadour was anything but a mecca. …more like a yucca. As a matter of fact, it was on the verge of collapse. True story. The Ash Grove on Melrose Avenue was the ‘Carnegie Hall of Folk’ at the time with a mixture of ultra-ethnic and blues artists. The ‘strip’ (Sunset Blvd from Laurel Canyon to Doheny) was peppered with a few folk coffee houses, a club on La Cienega (The Garrett), and a few others.  The Ice House was heating up in Pasadena and each little berg in the big Los Angeles tapestry had its designated folk hideout. That was it. No one had heard of Bob Dylan. It was the dark ages.

 

     Night people were flocking to ‘The Renaissance’ on Sunset Boulevard to listen to Les McCann play jazz and Lenny Bruce talk dirty. Red Foxx was telling dirty jokes over the tinkle of cocktails in his club on La Cienega Boulevard. Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg were the waning gods of the ‘Beat Generation’ and folk music had the legit clubbing crowd scratching their heads and wondering why they should go to a club that didn’t serve a decent martini.

 

     Folk clubs, if you could call them that, were mostly coffee houses with loud espresso machines, no booze, and a collection of patrons who felt more comfortable with poetry and chess than they did with loud music. The ‘clubs’, if you can call them that were for the most part dingy closets with uneven tables that spilled your coffee if you leaned the wrong way and baristas who always looked at you like they knew something you didn’t. Microphones, if there were any at all, were lousy. A Vespa or Lambretta was usually parked outside and since no alcohol was being served, closing time was optional. The aroma of marijuana was faint in some of the rest rooms.

 

     Yet it was in these odd caves of coffee and aromatic darkness that young men and women, armed with guitars and a passion for the traditions of the American musical heritage nested like dusty acorns, and slowly replaced the angry defeated poets and their proclamations of doom, and eventually emerged onto the great stages and venues that thrilled and moved a nation.   

 

     Paul and I hit town in the early spring of 1961 in a ‘49 Chevy with our pal Bob Hippard and my dog Dink, a sweet diminutive German Shepherd that never harmed a soul.  Word had spread about us from our spawning ground, Greenwich Village, which was still the absolute center of the folk music universe in 1961.

 

      Our Greenwich Village reputation, two albums on Columbia Records, and one national TV spot on Celebrity Talent Scouts had gotten us to Mike’s Pub in Boulder Colorado.  After three sellout engagements in Boulder culminating in a big concert at the University of Colorado, we were ready for Los Angeles.  Two misfit folksingers, a vagabond reformed biker and a German Shepherd in a beat up Chevy coupe that Bob had bought for fifty bucks in Boulder. The three of us rolled into L.A. on Route 66, which had oddly morphed into Santa Monica Blvd., proclaiming that we had reached the promised land and convinced that just by breathing the air we’d become stars.

 

     Our first call when we got to town was to my friend Rivi. Rivi and I had been friends in New York when I was at Columbia and we remained close by phone later on when she moved to California. Her older brother was Gene Barry. Yes, that one…Bat Masterson, Burke’s Law later on. That Gene Barry.. Rivi was hooked into the music scene and she took us in until we settled. She gave us the grand tour. Coffee Houses, Jazz Clubs. Our first nights in town and here we were being shown around in the company of a tall hot looking ‘insider’ who knew everyone in the ‘scene’. Not bad. Rivi was by no means ordinary looking.  Long blond hair, more than ample equipment, and dressed in California beach chic pastels. She drew stares wherever she went and the sight of two skinny folk-urchins who looked like they’d just stepped off the pages of The Grapes Of Wrath traveling in her company let people know that we were not your ordinary riff raff. Rivi owns a restaurant/bar now in New Zealand and we still laugh on Facebook about those days.

 

     It was on Rivi’s advice that we phoned Doug Weston, owner of the floundering Troubadour and Art and Paul, stars in our eyes, met Weston on a street corner next to a chain link fence on Santa Monica Boulevard one June-gloom evening in early 1961. Doug Weston was an imposing figure. He was taller than me or Paul - far skinnier and far weirder looking than we expected. He immediately reminded me of a praying mantis. That image never left me and remains to this day. Just mention Doug’s name and that’s what I see. A sloppy six foot praying mantis with slightly bulging grey eyes, head thrust forward, wispy hair, and who slurped slightly when he spoke and I had a rough time trying not to visualize him spearing an insect with a sudden lunge of his chin.

 

     Doug promptly deflated our dreams of opening at The Troubadour. He told us that he was considering turning it into a jazz club or just plain shutting it down. It was a large place and business had been slowly sinking. He told us that evening that he was on his way to see his sister to see if she had enough cash to lend him to keep the doors open for a while longer.

 

     “Of course, if we stay open, I would use you – slurp – but I don’t think I can pay you much”

 

     “What’s much?” – we smelled a deal…

 

     Now for us this was a logical question to ask, since both of us had read a magazine article about negotiating business deals when we were on the subway in New York once and of course we had seen a few Bogart movies, so we knew how to posture the negotiation. Besides, when we had been in Boulder at Mike’s Pub, Paul had attempted to negotiate a higher fee by demanding that Mike disclose the amount of his rent and how much he paid for his meat. Of course, Mike almost threw us out of the club in a rage for displaying so much chutzpah but nonetheless, it gave us experience in what not to ask.

 

     Doug told us that he would let us know after he talked to his sister and decided the fate of The Troubadour.

 

     “Where are you staying?” he asked.

 

     “With Rivi”

 

     “I’ll call you”.

 

     Two or three weeks later Doug called and announced that indeed Art and Paul could play the Troubadour.

 

     But…

 

     “….I still can’t pay you much”

 

     We were so damned excited, we didn’t even hear the last part of the sentence…

 

     We showed up for work the next Friday night and sang our hearts out for Doug, Bob Borella, his Barista and a handful of the Art and Paul faithful who had heard about the opening through the L.A. grapevine.  It was late June 1961.

 

     Doug had decent microphones and even a lighting board, a real stage and a loud espresso machine. We were home. Dink waited for us while we sang and quickly figured out how to get to Borella for food scraps.

 

By the end of the first week, we had built a little momentum and since Doug still couldn’t pay us more than a few bucks each, we made a deal.  (Did I mention that we had read a magazine about negotiating business deals?).

 

     For the first three weeks of our engagement, Paul, Dink, and I slept in the upstairs dressing rooms of The Troubadour (Dink and I got the room to the left of the corridor that now leads to the lighting booth, and Paul got the one straight ahead), and Bob Borella made sandwiches for us.  Room and board. What could be better? We showered in Rivi’s apartment on Larabee Street.

 

     Waking up in the morning day after day, walking downstairs to get a sandwich and coffee, kind of makes a place feel like home in a way. Besides, we were doing well there and it was a warm feeling to walk through the place in the daylight. Dink came to regard The Troubadour as her permanent home. In the years that followed, when she wandered off from time to time, somehow, she always ended up back at The Troubadour – once after she wandered off from the rear door of The Ice House in Pasadena – that trip took her four days).

 

     And the people started coming. And coming. Doug kept us for another week, another, and another. He obviously hadn’t read the same magazine we had or he would have realized that he had been taken by a couple of shrewd folksingers no less.  He was even shamed into paying us.  Later on, I figured that it was either that or the building inspector found out that we were living there with a dog.

 

     By the end of July, business was so good, we moved into The Tropicana Motel down the block at the corner of La Cienega and took our meals in real coffee shops. Stardom and fame were sweet.

 

     Art and Paul played The Troubadour fourteen consecutive weeks in the summer of 1961, starting in June and ending in September. I dare anyone else to make that claim. By the time we left, the folk music scene in Los Angeles had erupted and a flood of performers from all over the country were filling the clubs seven nights a week.  Joe and Eddie, Bud and Travis, Steve Martin, The Smothers Brothers. Randy Boone was running Monday Night Hoots to sell-out crowds, Dickie Davis ran the light board, and every folk act you could mention eventually showed up at the Troubadour.  The rest is history.

 

     And so children, that is how Art and Paul with their clever business acumen saved the Troubadour and how it became the shining light in the magical city of Los Angeles and paved the way for those who followed – Linda Ronstadt, Roger Miller, Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Carole King. Those guys had it easy.