Major Music Figures Gear Up to Resurrect Ash Grove : 2 Fund-Raisers to Recall Past, Celebrate Future

Some of the top figures of L.A.’s ‘60s musical heritage plan to gather this weekend to celebrate the history--and the future--of the Ash Grove.

That’s right, the future of the club that served not only as a center for musical developments from 1958 through 1973, but of profound social changes as well.

Two Wiltern Theatre concerts, one tonight highlighting folk-rock roots and a blues/gospel show Sunday will serve both as 30th anniversary celebrations of the original club and as fund-raisers for an ambitious ‘80s version of the Ash Grove currently under construction in Hollywood.

“My gut feeling is people are desperate for something to go to (like this),” said Ash Grove founder Ed Pearl during a recent interview at the site of the new club. “If it’s genuine and honest, people will go to it.”

Genuine and honest hardly capture the vibrancy and significance of the original Ash Grove, which Pearl founded as a 21-year-old UCLA drop out at the beginning of the folk music boom in 1958.

Throughout the ‘60s, the club was a veritable symbol of L.A.’s place in those turbulent times, serving as the launching pad for such seminal L. A. rockers as the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt as well as a meeting hall for socio-political activists.

But to hear Pearl, now 51, tell it, the Ash Grove came about by accident.

“I simply wanted to introduce my flamenco friends to my American folk music friends,” Pearl said of the club he founded in 1958 at the Melrose Avenue site of what is now the Improvisation comedy club. “I wanted to show my folk music friends that you could do more with a guitar than Woody Guthrie songs.”

If that seems a modest goal for what eventually played such a significant role in shaping the musical heritage of the city, it reflects just the sort of informal, yet adventurous spirit that gave the Ash Grove its special character: a place for people from different cultures and backgrounds to gather and share ideas and music.

In the 200-seat room, local youngsters like Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Roger McGuinn and Jackson Browne could two decades ago interact with and learn from the likes of blues and folk masters such as Howlin’ Wolf, Brownie McGhee and Pete Seeger.

By the early ‘70s, however, the folk scene in Los Angeles had declined and the counter-culture movement that found a home at the Ash Grove splintered into various directions. Following a series of fires, the club closed in 1973.

“Basically the culture dissipated and the sense of vision and power and righteousness lessened,” Pearl recalled wistfully. “It’s possible the Ash Grove would have folded even without the fires. . . .”

But Pearl feels the time is right again for the Ash Grove.

The new club, featuring a 400-seat threater/restaurant, is under construction at 6820 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, and could be open by August. A 110-seat theater/art gallery is already open.

The concerts this weekend were designed not only to honor what was, but to also point to what can be.

Byrds founders McGuinn, David Crosby and Chris Hillman will headline a show at 8 p.m. Friday honoring the folk and country emphasis of the old club. Brownie McGhee, who was the first headliner ever to play the old club, will join Willie Dixon, the Chambers Brothers and others for a blues/gospel program, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

Perhaps most telling, though, is a bonus set that has been added to the Sunday show featuring a selection of younger artists that Pearl feels represent the values of the new Ash Grove, gathered under the banner of “Future Roots”: Dave Alvin, Peter Case, the Beef Sisters, Antja Mimes and Tony Rugolo.

Can the Ash Grove be to the ‘80s and ‘90s what it was to the ‘60s?

Pearl is optimistic: “I’ve always operated on the theory that if I felt something deep in my gut, other people would respond that way too. That’s my deep faith.”

Pearl is as proud of the activist side of the Ash Grove’s history as the musical.

“It was from the Ash Grove that (some Los Angeles) Freedom Riders took off in buses to the civil rights demonstrations in the South,” Pearl said during a recent interview at the new club.

A man who speaks with an almost evangelical zest, Pearl traces his passion for music and culture to a Los Angeles childhood steeped in labor activism and Jewish heritage.

“My dad was a strong union person,” he recalled. “I was not a developed leftist, mind you, but someone who had a strong relationship to other workers. And I had a strong Jewish--actually Zionist--background, where the music and culture and going back to one’s roots was important.

“There was always the combination of the religious side--my mother’s side--and the worker’s side--my father’s side. And early on I found that the marriage made sense.”

When the activist movement seemed to lose its sense of unity and direction, Pearl found himself somewhat at loose ends. After closing the Ash Grove, Pearl retreated to a series of unglamorous jobs, occasional production of concerts for various causes, hosting a music show on radio station KPFK-FM and dealing with what he describes as “personal problems.”

“Everybody disagreed about everything,” said Pearl, recalling the social climate of the early ‘70s. “Some people wanted to go back to the land, others wanted to stay in the city and try to change the system from within--and they all failed. The mass base for the Ash Grove, the sense of hope and unity, slowly disappeared.”

By the mid-’80s, however, Pearl began to feel that the kind of cultural environment that supported the Ash Grove was returning.

“I began having a sense again that people’s vision of a human America had to be better than what we were living,” he said. In 1984, he volunteered to run KPFK’s annual Winter Fair fund-raiser--a food, music and crafts fair.

Recalled Pearl, “At the Winter Fair dozens of people came up to me and said, ‘This is just like the Ash Grove. Why don’t you do that again?’ ”

Pearl also became encouraged by the social concerns and roots awareness displayed by a number of contemporary L.A. rock artists.

“There’s a large number of groups who have social vision in their music,” he observed. “People like the Blasters and X have even said they trace their music to the old Ash Grove. The Alvin brothers (Blasters founders Phil and Dave) were the youngest generation of Ash Grove goers.”

But though Pearl’s using the same club name and much the same philosophy that once served him so well, he recognizes that the times have changed.

With that in mind, he has assembled a team of local music insiders--including public radio disc jockeys Rene Engle, Jimmiy Hori and John Brekow, plus Pearl’s blues musician brother, Bernie--to help organize the shows. He sees booking acts as varied as folk guitarist Doc Watson, New York avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn and rock ‘n’ rollers the Georgia Satellites.

“If the music I’m hearing didn’t energize me, I wouldn’t be doing it,” Pearl said, his voice reflecting his enthusiasm for being back in the club business. “The fact that no one picked up the gauntlet is sad, but it leaves an opening for me. . . .”