Who have you seen in coffee houses, small clubs etc.

[fitness1]

First time I met David Wilcox right after "How Did You Find Me Here" came out - he was playing at The Ark in Ann Arbor (old building that held less than 200) that night, but I walked into Schoolkids Records and he was scheduled for a 1 PM in-store performance. I was the only one who "attended" and he leaned up against the record bins next to me and played 5-6 tunes for me and we chatted in between. That's the one that sticks in my mind the most.

Later that night, after his Ark Show, he and I were talking about instruments and I asked him if he'd ever been to Elderly in Lansing. He got kind of excited when he found out it was relatively close by - this was at a time when T.J. Thompson was still at the repair shop. We'd become very friendly and I'd passed him a cassette of some of David's music. I called T.J. - it was late, but I knew he was up in his shop at home, and put him and David in touch.

They ended up spending a good part of the next day together.

Another one that comes to mind was seeing Alison Krauss open for Tony Rice at The Ark when she was about 16 or so. She only sang about 3-4 songs that night - the rest instrumental.

Saw Nanci Griffith with about 100 people in about '85 or so. I have photo evidence of that show, and a friend made a very high quality recording of the PBS broadcast that was created live in the "studio" of that show - still have it to this day.

[FingahPickah]

Originally Posted by rwmct

who later became too big for that sort of thing?

The Richard Shindell thread reminded me of this. Coffee house in a church basement. Some artists start in that kind of environment and never go back. Some get big for a while, then come back down again. Any memorable "very small" venue concerts with artists on the way "up" (or "down")?

About 20 years ago I saw Janis Ian perform solo at a Coffee House called "The Old Vienna" in Westborough, MA. She was way past starting-out, but she was touring up the east coast and this was a one night CD sale opportunity. There was fewer than 50 people in the room. She was awesome. A very worth-her-salt guitar player too. I remember she had two custom O or OO sized Santa Cruz guitars. She was very cool... hung around signing autographs.

[Don W]

Grateful dead, Quicksilver, Johnny Winter, Jethro Tull...all at a small venue here in Boston.

[MCDEMO1]

Saw Tom Rush, Richard Thompson (well after Fairport Convention), Fairport (well after Richard Thompson), John Martyn, June Tabor, Clive Gregson & Christine Collister, Steeleye Span, and Iris DeMent (around the time of her first album release) among others - all at a now closed small bar & grill in Easton, MA called the Blackthorne Tavern. Some performers, like Thompson and Fairport, were there multiple times. Country singer/songwrier Lori McKenna performed at open mikes there starting out.

Before one of the Fairport shows a local luthier presented Simon Nicol with a Kellogg's Corn Flake box shaped guitar which I still saw him playing years later at a Thompson show up in Salem, MA.

The Blackthorne had low ceilings and was very small to the point that they probably really did not need a sound system. Not a bad seat in the place. The owner at the time, Barnes Newberry(?), I believe knew a lot of these performers from early travels to the Cropredy festival in England. He still does a radio show at MVYRADIO.org called My Back Pages on Saturday mornings.

The Old Vienna was another great place now long gone. Saw Shawn Colvin twice at the OV before she achieved great recognition and almost bought a banjo from John Hartford after one of his shows there.

Shows by Pierre Bensusan, Bruce Cockburn, and Stan Rogers at Club Passim early in their careers.

[mtdmind]

I seen John Lee Hooker open for Muddy Waters. Also seen Stanley Jordan.

[Medina Sod]

Peter Frampton at a small college in upstate N.Y Loverboy in a bar outside of Montreal

[islandguitar]

Earliest: Jamie Brockett in a little church coffee house maybe '68. For some reason I had my guitar '64 D-18 and he played it that night and wanted to buy it on the spot! Jamie became famous for his "Titanic" song which lasted about 13 minutes and he stole the show at the Newport Folk Festival in the late 60's. it created quite a stir as it threatened to over shadow some of the evening headliners after performing in the afternoon session. Wonderful guitarist and songwriter.
Over the years:
Richie Havens
Tom Rush
Tommy Emmanuel
Judy Collins
Pierre Bensusan (small house concert of maybe 30 people)

[Dronfield]

Hi

Here in Sheffield, UK in small venues i have seen the following;

Walter Trout
Albert Lee
James Burton
Francis Rossi
Dan Patlansky
John Coughlan - Quo
Judi Tzuke

Two i unfortunately missed out on;

Robert Plant / Jimmy Page did a warm up gig under a fictitious band name at city centre club.

One of the city schools in around 2003 needed to raise some funds, and so an event was organised where a limited number of parents could buy tickets for an evening to listen to the father of one of their students talk about his career and play a few of his songs acoustically.
I worked with someone who attended the event and confirmed it was excellent - the parent in question; Eric Clapton.

Rich

[rmp]

The Cars about a month or two before their first album hit the stores, small pub in Lunenburg Mass called The Buttercup

Rush just after Neil Pert joined, at the Fitchburg (Mass) Theater.

[Birdbrain]

Bruce Hornsby playing an E-Town radio gig at the Boulder High School auditorium.

Junior Brown at a tiny bar in Santa Fe, without his black hat, playing a reunion gig with his early band buddies.

Muddy Waters at the small, historic stone chapel at Vanderbilt University.

Lou Reed, Bruce Cockburn, Bob Weir and Paul Simon at the Tennessee Ball for Bill Clinton's first inaugural. It was in a small hotel conference room, where I stood right in front of the stage.

[kentwinterton]

So this is cheating a little bit because although he does play the banjo he's not really considered a musician as much as a comedian. The guy I'm talking about is Steve Martin. I saw him at the old Smith Fieldhouse on the campus of BYU back in 1977. He was the warm up act for The Carpenters. No one had heard of him but he was hilarious and, as ya'll know, went on to fame and fortune.

[dougdnh]

Small venues -
John Gorka
Gregg Brown
Bo Diddley
Christine Lavin
The Jive Five
Patty Larkin
Mose Allison
Dan Hicks
Duke Robillard
Roomful OF Blues
Rusted Root
Marsha Ball
Anson Funderburgh

[Brucebubs]

Nothing like you guys - Men At Work at a Melbourne pub just before they made it big in the USA and I recognized Tommy Emmanuel standing in line at the Melbourne airport just before he also made it in the USA.

[rule18]

Cheryl Wheeler
Cliff Eberhardt
John Gorka
Patty Larkin
Christine Lavin
Sloane Wainwright
Nancy Griffith
Emmy Lou Harris (thanks @srick for jarring my memory!)

Full disclosure - Gorka, Eberhardt and Wheeler were touring together. I was on a different tour with Eberhardt's GF at the time so we went to see them all in Atlanta. Geez, sooo many years ago.

[srick]

Many years ago, Southern New England was home to multiple small venues. I suspect that these made a great “off-night” stops between New York and Boston. The venues were a little bigger than coffeehouses, generally seating 200 or so. The ones that spring to mind were: Shaboo (Willimantic, Ct); Toad’s Place (New Haven, CT); Music Inn (Western Mass), Agora Ballroom (West Hartford, CT) and the Oakdale (Wallingford, Ct).

Shaboo, in particular, had an incredible number of acts, so many that I’m sure that I saw, but the intoxicants erased from my mind! When I look at the Shaboo tribute page, there are faint glimmers of recognition (“hmmm... I think I saw David Crosby, I think I saw Taj Mahal, I think I saw BB King...”)

Some of the acts I do remember were Bonnie Raitt, Roger McGuinn, Jonathan Edwards, Dickie Betts, Alabama, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Billy Crystal, Pam Tillis, J. Geils, Emmy Lou Harris, Dick Dale, Duke Robillard, and many other first tier and second tier performers. And for the bigger shows, it was a quick road trip to New York or Boston. At all of these venues, you were generally no more than thirty to fifty feet away from the stage. I’m sure I would be amazed if I looked back at their showbills, but very few of us had the money to see all of the acts that were touring at any given time.

There were a slew of other acts who were both local and national who would play these venues, but they were not exactly what I was listening to at the time - the Aerosmiths and Bostons of the world.

The seventies and early eighties were an incredible time to experience music in Southern New England. Get a bunch of old guys together and they’ll talk your ears off about all of the acts that they have seen.


Rick