The Basement : Light of ‘Cultural Exiles’ Shines in Coffeehouse

Mark Phillips is singing.

Acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, his scruffy cowboy boots tapping the beat, the janitor at the Echo Park United Methodist Church is playing songs of railroad tracks and the West to a tiny audience in the church basement.

It is Saturday night at the unassuming church on Alvarado Street north of Sunset Boulevard. And on Saturday nights, the basement becomes a makeshift coffeehouse--a dimly lit sanctuary for artists of all kinds.

Since a former choir director at the church started the free Basement Coffeehouse eight years ago, the small room with a shabby stage, creaky card tables and religious books stacked in a corner has been the scene once a week of folk music and poetry readings, New-Age paeans and subdued talk among friends.

“Los Angeles is sort of a city of exiles and refugees in many ways, whether it’s from Central America or Iowa,” said the Rev. David Farley, pastor of the church. “They either come to escape something or they come to pursue some dream. The coffeehouse is sort of for the cultural exiles, for people who feel they have some art to share and need to do it.”

Phillips first performed at the coffeehouse six years ago--an urban troubadour who landed in California after crisscrossing the country several times by thumb and train. Now he works at the church, and he puts together the coffeehouse every Saturday night, calling on friends and friends of friends to play their music and eat cake.

“Saturday is a long night for me, but I still think it’s worth doing,” said Phillips, a lanky man of 40 with long sideburns and a quiet, watchful manner. “I done a lot of hitchhiking in my bohemian days, but I’m settled down now; I’m rooted like a tree. I’ve settled into middle age.”

The entertainment at the coffeehouse, Phillips acknowledged, ranges from professional to embarrassing. But he said the place isn’t there to provide star performances. It is there, he said, to give people like him a chance to play.

“He’s been through some rough times in his life and his therapy is his guitar,” Farley said of Phillips. “He’s enabled this place to survive. The coffeehouse and him are sort of mutually dependent on each other at times.”

Farley said the coffeehouse also serves as a way for a mainline Protestant church to survive the exodus of its original members--mostly white and middle class--from Echo Park.

“As those populations moved to the suburbs, their churches did as well,” Farley said. “Our commitment here is not to be captive to that kind of mold, to be a church for the people of the neighborhood. We have to work hard to be a part of L.A.”

Among a small but varied group of singers and poets, the Basement Coffeehouse has indeed become an important part of their cityscape. And on any given Saturday, the crowd of 15 to 25 usually includes people from the neighborhood.

‘A Lot of Characters’

“It has a lot of character--a lot of character because it has a lot of characters,” Farley said. “We’ll have a lot of people from the Westside all chiced up; we’ll have old bag ladies sort of huddled by the piano escaping the cold with some popcorn.”

Last Saturday night, Bruce Morasch, a UCLA graduate student who calls himself “bowerbird intelligentleman,” recited his rhymes, his voice booming as he padded from one side of the stage to the other:

I’m just a restless, reckless poet from Los Angeles:

orange juice for breakfast on the Los Angeles Crest;

movie stars and boulevards,

and cars and cars and cars;

a restless, reckless poet from Los Angeles.

bdbb, bdbb, bdbd, bdbb;

bdbb, bdbb, bdbdbd.

“One day, I don’t know, poetry just started popping out of me,” he said. “And so you look around for a place to share it. Places like these.”

As Morasch gestured broadly on stage, unkempt blond hair flying and black-clad limbs flailing, a woman who calls herself “Lalaland” stretched, catlike, on a Ping-Pong table in one corner.

“See, there is a message in my rhymes if you want to hear it, but if not, it’s kind of surface,” she whispered, punctuating her phrases with soft taps on a drum she bought at Toys R Us. “It seems to some as nonsense, but to others as a code.”

Word of Mouth

The coffeehouse survives on donations, but the food, coffee and entertainment are free. Phillips advertises the Saturday night performances in culturally oriented newspapers and finds performers largely through word of mouth.

Earl Anderson, a sweet-voiced tenor with an acoustic guitar, performed at the Basement Coffeehouse on a recent Saturday night. A nurse at a drug abuse clinic by day and a folk singer by night, he says there are few places in Los Angeles with the intimate and casual atmosphere that his music requires. The coffeehouse, he said, has that atmosphere--and it gives him a place to play.

“The thing I like about it is it’s sort of the proverbial folk music coffeehouse, sort of a throwback to the ‘60s,” Anderson said. “People are singing songs that they believe in and that they like.”