COMEDY : Just Warming Up : For 30 years, the Ice House in Pasadena has launched the careers of young comedians who now form a comedy Who’s Who

No sooner had owner Bob Fisher announced Oct. 29 as the day he’d throw a party to celebrate the Pasadena Ice House’s 30th anniversary when he discovered that he had the wrong date. And if that weren’t bad enough, the anniversary had already passed.

His mortification was short-lived, however. Like radon, a certain small trace of odd luck always seemed to be seeping up through the landmark comedy club’s venerable floorboards, some of it natural, some of it man-made, as when one of his headliners, Denny Johnston, called up shortly before show time one night to say that he was stranded in Big Bear and wouldn’t be able to appear. Since it’s club policy to refund all monies if a headliner doesn’t show, Fisher saw his life flash before him in a flutter of airborne dollar bills. Not to worry, however. Johnston had slipped in unnoticed and was calling from Fisher’s own office in the club.

Besides, if the club’s beginnings aren’t quite dubious, they certainly are vague. Sept. 21, 1961 is the date when Fisher’s predecessor, Bob Stane, came up from San Diego to open the room as a kind of folk-singer, comedy-act coffeehouse strongly reminiscent of the subterranean Beatnik era hangout, but that was nearly a year after Stane’s silent partner, Willard Chilcott, had worked at length on refurbishing the place.

Too, “I don’t think it was ever really just an ice house,” says Fisher. “There was an Army barracks nearby during the war, and my feeling is that this was really a meat locker for the troops. I think it was called an ice house to satisfy the genteel tastes of the people who lived in the Pasadena mansions.”

The Ice House is more than a club that owes its existence to a benevolently obscure, low-rent location pitched near the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. It’s an unlikely institution that has survived radical changes in atmosphere and taste while remaining a clearinghouse for young talent on the rise.

Some of the comedy and music acts that have played there include Jay Leno, Lily Tomlin, Steve Martin, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Linda Ronstadt, Diane Keaton, the Smothers Brothers, Pat Paulsen, Mason Williams, Cheech & Chong, George Carlin, Seals & Crofts, Hoyt Axton, Kenny Rogers, Don Ellis, the Association, the Aman Folk Ensemble, Randy Sparks, Captain Beefheart, Glen Campbell, Rod McKuen, Toshiko Akiyoki & Lew Tabakin, the Firesign Theater and Hiroshima. (Forty albums have been recorded there.)

“It’s a fabulous club,” says comedian Emily Levine. “Sometimes it’s a danger to think you’ve got good material because the audience responds so well.”

“The one nice thing about it is that it’s a comedy club in the classic tradition of working the room,” says Leno, who played there a great deal in the mid-’70s (there’s a photo of a younger Leno on the entrance wall in which, characteristic of what was au courant in the ‘70s, he looks as though his hair doesn’t belong to him). “You never follow anyone who’s been doing incredibly filthy work. It’s a family club with a ‘60s sense of what’s risque. I think of David Steinberg doing his God routine, which everyone at the time thought daring, with the double-entendre that parents could appreciate and kids didn’t get. It’s the last vestige of clubs like the Bitter End, or the Hungry i, which don’t exist anymore.”

A framed copy of the club’s 1978 contract with David Letterman also hangs on the entrance wall; he’s signatory to a salary of $250 for 11 shows for the week. Another framed contract tells us that Paul Rodriguez has two years of college and wanted to play the club to help advance his career.

When George Winston was starting out, he didn’t even play the main room. Bob Stane recalls him playing Footsie’s (an adjacent room) and sleeping on stage beforehand in bare feet. Russ Guitere started out at the club as a janitor, then worked the lights, and then formed the Association, which went on to record a No. 3 hit, “One Too Many Mornings.”

By any commercial standard, 30 years is a long time. If 1960 was indeed the Ice House’s inception date, Dwight D. Eisenhower was still President of the United States, the heart pacemaker had just been introduced, the national per capita income was $1,891 and the minimum wage $1, and the new two-door Corvair retailed for $1,870. If September of 1961 marked the club’s opening, President John F. Kennedy was smarting from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, multiplex stereo was the newest thing to hit the hi-fi market, the M-4 robot-manned space capsule made its first orbit of the Earth, and the American Cancer Society announced its finding of a link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

Stane, who is a career professional photographer, ran a coffee house in San Diego called the Upper Cellar that attracted a lot of off-duty and/or unemployed entertainers, whose restless indolence Stane found irksome. “I was showing movies, playing chess and I’d have all these people standing around,” he recalled. “Finally I shortened the legs of a coffee table for a stage, put a bulb in a can, and let them work. When I came up to Pasadena, they followed.”

Stane’s objective eye led him to insist on ambience before anyone set foot in the room. “Every nook and cranny was designed with a film set in mind, so that a lot of TV and movie people could work here,” he said. “ ‘The Harrod Experiment’ was filmed here. I wanted a heavy coffeehouse look without the feel of heavy, an excitement quotient. We’d throw pine in the fireplace for a smoky effect. When people came through here, they’d feel as though they were running a mysterious gauntlet.”

The combination of dark wood and brick created an intimate, nocturnal setting that invoked philosophic reflection and a shadowy anteroom for emanations of the id. (“You could hear comedy and then go pick up girls,” says Paul Rodriguez. “It’s great.”)

Then there was the main-room format: Three acts, music or comedy or both, with an emphasis on the performer as entertainer (“I kept telling Diane Keaton to loosen up,” Stane recalls). He also insisted on professionalism and a modicum of taste. “I would not let anyone work blue. We had 16-year-olds and their parents coming in. Besides, I wanted them to have no excuse if a TV producer came out here to hire them. That’s why so many Ice House performers have gone on to bigger things. If you played here, they’d audition you.”

The emphasis on professionalism is underscored in a recollection by Fred Willard, who came to California in the mid-’70s with the New York-based comedy sketch group the Ace Trucking Company, which made liberal use of the Ice House to polish material for the “Tonight” show (where they made 40 appearances).

“One night we were sitting in the dressing room working on some new sketches,” Willard said. “That was during the period when streaking was in vogue. I don’t know if management put her up to it or not, but this girl ran in one door and out the other. She was completely naked. I remember somebody in the group making a brief reference to her endowments. Otherwise, we hardly skipped a beat and kept on working.”

John Gribble is a music teacher and poet who lives in Long Beach. He ran the club’s lights off and on for eight years beginning in 1964. “There was always a lot of variety, and nobody was just a player,” he said. “Everyone had to have an act. The music business in lots of ways is a dirty business, and a large part of it is made up of the clubs, which are often no more than upholstered sewers. But that wasn’t true of the Ice House. The performers were treated well, and there was always a sense of family about the place. It was a relaxed place to work in or just listen. As long as you took care of your responsibilities, there were no hassles. No one assaulted your sensibilities, and you weren’t gouged.”

Gribble saw a lot of performers come through and remembers the early Steve Martin vividly. “Lily Tomlin was lovely to work with. Mason Williams (the guitarist who wrote and recorded ‘Classical Gas’) could be cold, but he was also giving--he gave me an on-the-spot guitar lesson once. Steve Martin had a banjo-magic act. He’d play the hell out of the banjo, then he’d go on to do these magic tricks that didn’t work. He’d make balloon cartoon shapes that didn’t look like anything. He’d say, ‘As soon as the next audience comes in, I’ll tell a joke that isn’t funny. But you laugh as though it was hilarious.’ Sure enough, people’d come in, he’d tell the joke, the first audience would laugh like hell, and you’d see the strangest confused reactions with couples and people who didn’t know what was going on.

“Martin was the first comedian to break down the audience hostility towards comics who opened for rock acts. That was because he learned how to play big, how to magnify every aspect of himself, from the white suit that caught your eye to his exaggerated ‘Well excu-u-use me !’ He certainly knew how to work an audience.”

Tom Smothers also remembers Martin from those days as someone who “had this weird thing. He didn’t know what to play. He’d stand on a chair or on a table as Supersomething, wearing a cape. He’d have this little electric rabbit buzzing around on the floor, then he’d jump off and squash it.”

Smothers’ mystification didn’t prevent him from eventually hiring Martin as a writer for the Smothers Brothers’ TV show or from shining on the club as a good venue for an album.

“The Ice House is known as a comic’s fail-safe room,” Smothers said. “In 1965 we were looking for a place to do an album for Mercury. I’d been out there to see Pat Paulsen, and when Bob Stane said he’d give us Honda 50s if we’d work there, we jumped at the deal. The record, which was called ‘Something I Said,’ went gold. Later we went out to record ‘Pat Paulsen for President’ on our own Rubicon label, and of course that was where we met Mason Williams. It’s a classic room. The recording process could be quite tense for us, but the audience always made us feel relaxed. We were the first big act on TV that had worked out of the Ice House.”

Despite the steady stream of new talent that has used the Ice House as a springboard, the club has hardly enjoyed a perpetual revel or the nonstop music of ringing cash registers (or in the new age, the minimalist clatter of computerized receipts). If Stane thought the place would be, as he puts it, “more romantic if you had to look for it,” there is something strange about a venue that (a) can’t be seen from the street, (b) is difficult to find, and (c) means that a wrong turn in any of several directions in trying to find it can easily put you head-on into oncoming traffic.

And the popularity of any entertainment form is cyclic. “For two years after the Watts riot it was a disaster here,” Stane says. “It took the edge out of going out for a long time. Plus, that period seemed to coincide with a general dearth of talent. There were times when you could shoot a gun down Colorado Boulevard and not hit anyone.”

There is an even more esoteric quirkiness of fate that has visited strange things on the place. “There was a science of the mind shop next door that had a display of pyramids with razor blades hanging in them,” Stane recalls. “The idea was that the pyramids had mystical qualities, one of them being the natural sharpening of the razor blades. We decided to bring the pyramids into the club, maybe 10 of them, 8 feet high, made of metal tubing. They turned on us. We had an incredible run of bad luck, plumbing breaking, performers not showing up, customers not showing up--whole strings of things.

“Once we decided to do an Egyptian passion play and got all these people up in Egyptian costumes to play it. We managed to get Channel 11 news out to cover it, which they did without ever mentioning where the thing was being done. Once we hosted a major comedy contest. Channel 2 came out and covered it but never showed the club. They showed the Handlebar Saloon down the street, but not the club.”

Sometimes the fate was less malign than prophetic.

When George Carlin decided to shed his suit and tie and Hippy-Dippy Weather Man image in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and go back to the counterculture origins of his Greenwich Village coffeehouse days, he used the stage of the Ice House to help with the transition. “I needed to reassure myself that I was right, that I had these other chops,” he said. “The Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas fired me, which meant I lost an income of up to $12,000 a week. I kept doing TV shows like Virginia Graham and Della Reese and Merv Griffin to keep myself going, but I also worked the Attica in Santa Monica and The Other Side in Venice. And the Ice House. It had this sense of permanency, of family.

“I had just bought this brand new Pontiac Firebird, which had just come out, and parked it in the street outside the club one night when I was working. It was a beautiful car, white with blue trim. When I came out, someone had sideswiped it, smashed it in completely on one side from front to rear. I remember saying that this is the small test and confirmation that I’m doing the right thing. This was tangible proof of my willingness to sacrifice.”

As for the club itself, Carlin says, “I always had the feeling of being in capable, professional hands. So much goes unnoticed there. I always felt comfortable, at home, protected.”

For as long as he stayed indoors, anyway.

Sometimes its spell followed people wherever they went. Pat Paulsen’s tenure represents a certain historic moment when something happens that transcends locale. In this case it was his bid for the presidency of the United States (“We must remember that as the centuries go by time will pass” and “This is the only country in the United States” are only two of Paulsen’s homages to the rhetorical fatuity of politicians on the make). Paulsen was one of the Ice House’s early regulars, stopping by en route to Orange County clubs such as the Mecca, Mon Ami and the Golden Bear to perform his comedy takeoffs on the folk genre. They didn’t, at first, go over with management, and the pickings were so lean that Paulsen wound up painting whatever needed to be painted in and outside of the club when he wasn’t performing.

“Bob (Stane) is not known as one of the people who . . . or does, or will, or how can I say this? He’s cheap,” Paulsen said. “It was only after the Smothers Brothers heard one of my songs that I started to get paid regularly.

“I miss those days, and the club. It had a good, hip audience, a lot of variety, and quality.” Paulsen is still campaigning under the slogan “Pat Who In ’92.” For as long as he represents, as he puts it, “the more than 50% of the people who don’t vote,” he figures he can’t lose.

By the late ‘70s, the pressures of running the Ice House had put Stane in a chronic pre-ulcerous condition, and he sold it to Fisher and three partners for $75,000 (its estimated value is now $1 million). Fisher, who is 46, gained a full liquor license for the place, put in a comedy format and eventually bought out his partners (one of whom, Jan Smith, went on to create another excellent comedy club on the Westside, Igby’s). His first roster consisted of Rick & Ruby, magician Peter DeParla and comedian Gallagher. It wasn’t always smooth sailing. At one point early on, in fact, he had to sell his Porsche to make the payroll.

Now the refurbished club, which seats 200, is busy all week and seems to be rolling along on its own momentum. “When we first took it over it was run-down and a little over the hill,” Fisher says. “All you could get to eat was a giant soft pretzel with cheese” (now it has a restaurant, especially good for a night club, called Comics). “My attitude about the people who come here is that you have to make them feel like you care about them. You don’t hassle them, or push them around or make them worry about where they’ll sit. The room itself is magic. I’ve thought about expanding the space, but I know if I did that I’d spoil what it has, this rectangular, tiered, acoustically sharp space where everyone is close to the stage and the overall atmosphere is friendly and warm.” (Fisher did in fact buy up an adjacent site but has donated it to the Inland Valley Child Abuse Prevention Center.)

“This has been the best year in our history. We figure that over 2 million people have come through these doors since it opened, and 9,000 now come through each month.”

Fisher admits that the comedy boom has bottomed out into a terminal phase. “People don’t like to be intellectually challenged anymore. They like the safe stuff, the 7-Eleven jokes. I think the lowering standard is not only the fault of club owners, but also of our educational system, TV values and a breakdown in parenting. Comedians don’t look at the form as an end, but as a means to a sitcom. And it’s overexposed. I see people getting tired of straight stand-up comedy. You’re going to see a lot of clubs go under, and a lot try other things.”

Fisher doesn’t see an immediate threat to his club, however. “The adage is, if you can’t get a laugh at the Ice House, you can’t get laughs anywhere.”