La Mesa Crafts Shop-Cafe Aims to Fill Folk-Music Gap

The closing of Drowsy Maggie’s on April 15 left a gaping wound in the local acoustic-music scene. The North Park restaurant, coffee house, and alcohol-free nightclub offered cozy confines to folk, jazz, blues, and ethnic-music performers, and provided patrons a friendly alternative to the various bar scenes. Especially since the 1988 demise of the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia, Drowsy Maggie’s had been the county’s main bastion of acoustic informality, a seven-nights-a-week haven for lovers of the subtler musical arts.

An imminent rent increase, dissatisfaction with crime and drug activity near the University Avenue address, as well as sheer fatigue forced proprietor Marcus Robbins to close the doors after 10 years at the location. The husband-wife team of Bjorn Rafto and Mary Ellen Harshberger are buying the business from Robbins, and they intend to relocate Drowsy Maggie’s in the Gaslamp Quarter. But, by exemplifying urban centralization, that move only underscores the difficulties facing small, acoustic venues in outlying communities.

However, those familiar with the law of physics governing displacement should suspect that the news isn’t all bad. Although La Mesa’s Village Emporium Espresso Cafe is more modest in scope than Drowsy Maggie’s, that venue is expanding to fill at least some of the void left in North Park.

Owner Jane Rogers opened the Village Emporium a year and a half ago to display and sell the creations of area craftsmen and artisans. In January, she began serving coffee in the establishment, and on Feb. 1 the Village Emporium presented live music for the first time. In less than three months, the store-club has developed a loyal clientele, and Rogers, 38, has responded with some ambitious plans.

“We started with 300 square feet of space,” the affable entrepreneur said Monday, “and we’ve already expanded to 1,600 square feet. Right now, we seat about 75 people indoors and outdoors, but we’re still rearranging and renovating, and we hope to have a capacity of 100 to 125 by summer.”

Rogers claims that about half the venue’s space still is given over to locally produced arts and crafts, which she sells on consignment. But six nights of every week, the Village Emporium becomes a showcase for local classical, contemporary, jazz, folk, and country musicians. Wednesday is open-mike, or amateur night.

“The La Mesa community has been very supportive,” said Rogers. “We’re in the heart of the (La Mesa) village, so a lot of people walk here from their homes. The atmosphere is charming, and we’ve already become something of a gathering place for our neighbors.”

Rogers is working out the logistics for a series of children’s concerts at the coffee house, but she also has ideas that push beyond the Village Emporium’s walls.

“I’m talking to the mayor of La Mesa about doing open-air folk concerts in the area,” she said. “Larry Sinclair of the San Diego Folk Heritage has been helping me to book acts into the Village Emporium, and I’ve contacted them about the concert idea, too. If we can find a suitable location, I’m hoping to begin the outdoor series this summer.”

Whether or not her business benefits from the Drowsy Maggie’s closing, Rogers was saddened by the news. “I just loved that place, and I was really sorry to see it go,” she said. “But maybe we can help fill the gap a little for people who don’t want to drive great distances to hear good folk and other kinds of music.”

Jim Hayes is cautiously optimistic about the Village Emporium’s chances. Hayes books both touring and local acoustic acts into Choice’s Restaurant on North Torrey Pines Road, and he probably has as good a sense of the local folk scene as anyone.

“There wasn’t a venue anywhere in San Diego like Drowsy Maggie’s,” Hayes said Monday. “They gave new folk musicians a place to start out. I don’t think their closing says as much about the folk community in this city as it does about the difficulty of running a place like that several nights a week. I’m glad to see what the Village Emporium is doing. They’re small, but they have real potential.”

Hayes’s hammer-dulcimer trio, Three for All, plays the La Mesa Boulevard venue Saturday night.

GRACE NOTES: The April 29 concert featuring Roger McGuinn and Dave Alvin, originally booked into the Spreckels Theatre, has been moved to the Bacchanal--same night, same time.

Tickets are now on sale at all TicketMaster outlets for Blue Oyster Cult’s gig at Park Place May 2, with Copperhead opening.

Tickets go on sale Friday for “Reggae Sunsplash: World Peace Tour ‘91,” which brings Maxi Priest, Shinehead, Dennis Brown, Andrew Tosh, Carlene Davis, Little Lenny, the A-Team Band, and Tommy Cowan to SDSU’s Open Air Theatre on May 31.

Tickets go on sale Saturday for a June 14 concert at SDSU’s Aztec Bowl featuring Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, with Fingers Taylor and the Ladyfingers Revue. It was decided that a single 6:30 p.m. show in the larger venue was preferable to two shows at the Open Air Theatre.

0CRITIC’S CHOICE: STYLISH POP BY TOY MATINEE AT THE BACCHANAL

Unabashed gushing can be a reflexive response to the discovery of imaginative music in the era of MTV and formatted radio. The desperate search for substantive pop craftsmanship goes on, but by rights it should stop and take a long, languorous look at Toy Matinee, who will appear at the Bacchanal Monday night.

The band’s Kevin Gilbert and Patrick Leonard claim that they wrote and arranged the material on last year’s self-titled debut album without concern for its commerciality (mon dieu!), and the material bears them out. There isn’t a market-tested move on “Toy Matinee,” and yet the immediate appeal of its nine tracks demonstrates that ingenious pop alchemy needn’t be esoteric.

Toy Matinee makes “studio pop,” in the sense that production savvy plays an important part in realizing the composers’ ideas. The band is well-served in that capacity by Leonard, who has applied his writing-producing talents to recordings by Madonna and Bryan Ferry. (Leonard, who is now in England working on an album with Roger Waters, is absent from the current touring lineup, which features Gilbert and four backup musicians.)

But Toy Matinee’s music is more than slick sounds and clever instrumentation. The songs boast nooks of melody you can nestle in, chord changes you can chew on, and a spirit of cheeky, good- humored invention that buoys the tricky passages and mitigates any high-brow tendencies.

“Turn It On Salvador,” for example, is a tribute to Salvador Dali that borrows ideas from the Bunuel film, “Un Chien Andalou.” But its confectioner’s refrain and whimsical lyrics--to a groove reminiscent of Stealers Wheel-period Gerry Rafferty--keep the song earthbound and grinning. Similarly, although “Remember My Name” is dedicated to Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, its Steely Dan-meets-Tears for Fears tunefulness precludes brow-furrowing seriousness.

Throughout this marvelous recording are wry wrinkles of other apparent or admitted influences: Gentle Giant, Little Feat, Level 42, Squeeze, 10cc, early Genesis, middle-period Pink Floyd. It will be interesting to see if the touring Toy Matinee can reproduce the album’s dimensions in its Bacchanal show.