Sand Runs Out on the Ash Grove

Robert Hilburn
Los Angeles Times - Dec 15, 1973

    Since the Ash Grove had twice before been closed by fire, I 'must admit I didn't view the news of the West 'club's latest fire with. much alarm last month. I figured the folk music stronghold would simply be closed a few days, like before, and then would reopen.
    The Ash Grove seemed like a regular, inseparable part of the Los Angeles 'music community. It was easy to think that it would always be here. But I was wrong. After 15 years and hundreds of acts, Ed Pearl has called it quits. The Ash Grove won't reopen.
    It was in the summer of 1958 that Pearl, a 22-year-old with no experience in running a club but a strong believer in the im-portance of folk music as means of relating social conditions and serving as a catalyst for social action, opened the Ash Grove.
    "We had been pounding nails for a month and a half and suddenly we were opening," he once recalled. "People were there and I didn't know what to do. 1 didn't have the slightest idea of how to seat people, what to do with the lights, how to keep records or any of the simple things that keep a place running."

An Outlet for Meaningful Music
    Despite his naivete, Pearl knew what he wanted to present In his club. He wanted it to he an outlet for "meaningful. music"-both the great traditional folk ar-tists, black and white, whose songs told about conditions in their time and place, and the younger interpretative folk artists who learned from the masters and applied those styles to commenting about their own times.
Thus, hundreds of notable artists, reflecting such va-ried folk styles a, blues, bluegrass, gospel and tradition-al work songs, appeared on the Ash Grove stage: Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, the Byrds, Taj Mahal, the Chambers Brothers, Rambling .lack. Elliott, Sleepy John Estes, Pete Seeger.
    One of Pearl's proudest moments was in 1968 when lie took the idea of "meaningful music" a step farther by holding a multimedia workshop (filing, slides, photo-graphs, paintings) to better show the social. cultural and historical conditions that fostered the music. The work-shop subject was the student strike at San Francisco State. Encouraged, he began planning more workshops. He was particularly interested in liberal and radical so-ciopolitical causes and often allowed the club to be used for meetings.
    But An April, 1969 fire left the ash Grove in ruins. Pearl, who believes it was an act of political arson, spent the next four months rebuilding the club. Lots of people came to his aid. The Byrds, Canned Heat, Jim Kweskin, Albert Collins and the Firesign Theater were among those who appeared at various benefit concerts. The Ash Grove reopened in August, 1969.
The second fire was in June, 1970, but it was much smaller and the club reopened after three days. The last blaze, however, tore at the heart of the club, causing massive damage. "When I saw how bad things were, I knew the Ash Grove was finished,", Pearl said. Arson, again, was suspected.
    Even though the fire marked the official end of the Ash Grove, its future as a folk music showcase was al-ready limited. Pearl, discouraged by what he feels is a lack of socially or politically meaningful music, had been planning to change the Ash Grove from the strict musical diet that had long been its lifeblood to a. mul-timedia center-films one night, symposiums an current events another, experimental art projects another, and so forth. Folk music • would be limited to weekends. Pearl was going to change the club's format in January.

Small Labels Swallowed Up
    He puts much of the blame for the drop in "mean-ingful" artists on the swallowing up of small, folk-or-iented record labels by major conglomerates who, Pearl argues, wanted the smaller companies' catalogs but no longer offered recording opportunities to young, socially conscious singer-songwriters.
    Besides a decline in appropriate new artists, many of the older, traditional folk artists who once appeared at the Ash Grove are no longer performing and other folk artists, including many who got their start at the club, have stepped up to larger clubs for bigger paydates. So Pearl had to turn to other fields, i.e. comedy and jazz, in recent months.
"I like to think of the Ash Grove as an hourglass in which the culture of hundreds of years and many places came together and reached others who then broadened it out again," Pearl said, reminiscing about the club's golden clays. Many of his fondest memories are of the hundreds of young, hopeful musicians who hung around the club, learning from the classic bluesmen who performed there.
    On his way out of the Ash. Grove one night, Mick, Jagger, a frequent visitor to the club, shook Pearl's hand in gratitude. He simply wanted to thank Pearl for all the entertainment-and no doubt musical education-the club had given him. It's a gesture a lot of us should make. The Ash Grove's contribution to this city's musical heritage was invaluable.
    Pearl's now exploring the possibility of establishing a multimedia center in an unused portion of the KPFK studios on Cahuenga. He believes several meaningful things are being done in film, videotape and other areas and that a center could bring about a valuable interaction. Even if it materializes, however, the center won't be called the Ash Grove. That chapter in this city's history is over. Sadly