How the little coffeehouse that’s served up folk for 40 years is wagering millions that it can grow into its downtown digs and still keep its heart and soul.
The impish sense of humor endemic in folkie circles made April Fools’ Day an auspicious moment to break ground at Freight & Salvage’s ambitious new building in the heart of Berkeley’s evolving downtown arts district. These are heady times for the venerable nonprofit organization, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary as an invaluable outpost for musicians dedicated to decidedly non-commercial musical styles. As the oldest full-time folk and traditional music venue west of the Mississippi River, the Freight is on the cusp of launching a grand experiment. In a musical world usually governed by shoestring budgets, the Freight is building a folkie field of dreams, and the question is whether enough people will come when the doors open early next year.
Over years of careful planning the organization has raised more than $8 million, and the final $3 million needed to cover the entire cost of the 18,000-square-foot facility is in its grasp. An anonymous supporter is on the hook for the final million if the Freight can raise $2 million, which would enable the venue to finish construction and open its doors debt-free. The eight-figure budget includes a 440-seat club (twice the capacity of its present venue in West Berkeley), a secondary performance space seating 50 people, a state-of-the-art speaker system by Meyer Sound, a cafe and six classrooms. It’s an unprecedented undertaking unlikely anywhere but Berkeley, the progressive bastion where folk and old-time music is woven into the community’s sense of identity.
“Berkeley has been a West Coast center for traditional music for a very long time,” says Mike Seeger, old-time music legend, musicologist and half-brother of Pete Seeger. “You can take it back as far as you want. From the early days of the Berkeley Folk Festival in the 1950s, run by Barry Olivier, and before that to Harry Smith, who eventually put together the Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways. It seems like there’s always been a variety of players and academic folks involved with this kind of music in Berkeley, and that continues today with a resurgence of interest, with people in their teens and 20s playing old-time music.”
On the first day of April, as several hundred Freight supporters, politicians, musicians and journalists gathered in a recently cleared dirt lot lined by bulldozers and heavy construction equipment at 2020 Addison St., rain threatened throughout a rousing set of Cajun fiddle tunes and old-time blues by Suzy and Eric Thompson. As Steve Baker, the Freight’s longtime executive director took the stage, the sun briefly broke through the gray clouds, an atmospheric shift that everyone seemed to recognize as an auspicious metaphor for the club’s ambitious plans.
Over four decades, the Freight has built and sustained a dedicated following with a universal booking policy encompassing a dazzling array of talent, including blues legends Mance Lipscomb and Bukka White, folk icons Ronnie Gilbert and Elizabeth Cotten, Cajun greats Dewey Balfa and the Savoy-Doucet Band, singer/songwriters Greg Brown and Shawn Colvin, old-time heroes Ralph Stanley and Jody Stecher, bluegrass masters Dave Grisman and Alison Krauss, and newgrass explorers Darol Anger and Mike Marshall, to name just a few. With a teetotaling beverage policy, the venue has always been open to all ages, allowing young fans and musicians to soak up the sounds of veteran masters. The new venue joins a lively block just west of Shattuck Avenue that already includes the Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage and Roda Theatre, the Jazzschool and the Aurora Theatre. With the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Judah L. Magnes Museum slated for construction nearby (and Cal Performances concerts within a five-minute walk), the Freight cements the area’s status as one of the West Coast’s premiere arts districts.
In spite of downtown Berkeley’s retail woes (with empty storefronts dotting Shattuck), Mayor Tom Bates sees the silver lining in the arts district. “With the Freight’s arrival, we’ve reached a very important milestone in our community’s vision to revitalize downtown Berkeley,” says Bates.
Rather than a radical shift, Baker sees the new facility as an extension of the Freight’s mission, albeit a mission that’s evolved with the rapidly shrinking world. “I think we have a great opportunity to provide better coverage of what we’re doing,” Baker said in a conversation several weeks after the groundbreaking. “I don’t see much of a change in terms of what we do. There’s always been the same focus. We’ve always had a pretty broad scope when it comes to musical styles. But I think the world’s changed a lot in terms of travel and that enhances the scope of what we’re doing. The range of performers we have an opportunity to book has just grown immensely. The opportunities are just so great right now as international travel has become easier and faster.”
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The Freight was born in a spark of quintessential Berkeley inspiration when Nancy Owens decided to open a coffeehouse in 1968. A young preschool teacher who decided she wanted to try something new, Owens found a cozy space at 1827 San Pablo Ave., one block north of University on a strip dominated by furniture stores and auto body shops. After months of preparation, the coffeehouse opened for business in July, and within months it was clear the intimate space was filling an aching vacuum, as musicians from around the country started calling, looking for gigs. At the time, the rock explosion spearheaded by the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, a revolution led in many cases by folk musicians who decided to plug in (and turn on), had eclipsed the Bay Area’s once bustling folk scene. While Berkeley folk venues like Cabale Creamery and Jabberwock had closed in the wake of the psychedelic movement, there was still a dedicated audience for roots music styles like Delta blues, bluegrass, jug and string bands, traditional Celtic and old-time Appalachian combos. After a decade of running the space as a labor of love, Owens sold the Freight and for several years its existence was precarious. A turning point arrived in 1983, when a group of devoted supporters and musicians led by Mayne Smith created the Society for the Preservation of Traditional Music and turned the venue into a nonprofit organization. The move to the present Addison Street location in 1988, which tripled the club’s capacity, was a brave move that succeeded brilliantly, and not everyone is sanguine that the club can pull off a similar feat again.
Not surprisingly in a scene dedicated to preserving traditional musical styles, many are greeting the change with considerable apprehension. It’s not unusual to hear musicians refer to the decidedly unglamorous space at 1111 Addison St. as “the new Freight,” though it’s occupied that location for some 20 years.
Multi-instrumental bluegrass star Laurie Lewis, one of those musicians for whom the present venue still counts as the new Freight, started playing at the club in the mid-1970s when it was an intimate coffeehouse on San Pablo Avenue that could barely fit 80 people. The longtime Berkeley resident first performed as part of the Freight’s regular Tuesday Hoot Nights, open mic sessions that provided early stage experience and exposure to dozens of players who went on to dedicate their lives to music. She describes herself as “cautiously optimistic about the move,” feeling that if the new facility can open without a significant mortgage hanging over it, there’s a good chance of maintaining the booking policy for which the Freight recently earned the Folk Alliance Award for “Best Small Venue” in North America. “It may be that just moving the place downtown and having that accessibility to walk-in traffic will make it a more popular place,” she continued, weighing the relative costs and benefits of the expansion. “Serving beer and wine won’t hurt either in attracting a younger audience.”
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But Lewis speaks for many musicians when she starts describing her fears about the new new Freight, even as she acknowledges that she worried about the club’s future when it moved from its original home in a converted San Pablo Avenue furniture store to its present space in a former auto body shop. “Why mess with something working really well?” she says. “But I feel that way with everything. I like things small and never want them to grow, which isn’t the way of economics in this country and maybe the world. One hundred people at the Freight now is not a bad crowd, but 100 at the new Freight will seem paltry. The energy that is created by the audience and the performer is a palpable thing that fills up a space, and if a space is too big, you can’t fill it up. So I’m a little anxious about what happens when it expands. It could be a boon to the community to have a place with classrooms and a couple different performance areas, but I’m also worried that the pressure to fill up the big room will make the Freight make choices more on economics than on intrinsic musical quality. The Freight has always been able to take chances with people who aren’t so well-known, musicians who are either starting their careers, or just incredibly important people in traditional music who don’t have a big following. My greatest fear is there won’t be a place for people like that, and that the Freight will have to start booking rock stars on their way down playing acoustic unplugged stuff, which to me would be a shame.”
Not that the Freight has ever been immune to market forces. The club has thrived for so many years by maintaining a good sense of which artists and what musical genres can attract an audience. In the eyes of Chris Strachwitz, the legendary roots music producer and founder of Arhoolie Records in El Cerrito, the club is presenting a vivid but relatively small slice of an infinite musical spectrum. “It’s a tough row to hoe because this is such a multicultural area, and to do justice to all these cultures is virtually impossible,” he said. “So they’re pretty much always limited to what I call Berkeley music, whatever is accepted. It’s a challenge, because how do you keep up with the myriad of traditions and styles of music that exist today? It’s never been this varied. I hope their desire to get more input from Berkeley students will materialize. My hope is that it [the Freight] would even be more inclusive, that it would cover everything from poetry and rap to the most archaic ballads, African-American, Mexican, Afghan and Pakistani music and everything in between. Whatever exists in this area should be here. If one can get those audiences to come, why not?”
While the Freight’s stylistic bailiwick might seem unduly constricted to Strachwitz, the organization has long encouraged a gloriously progressive impulse on the Bay Area scene. While other historic folk venues, like Boston’s Club Passim, tend to focus on a rather narrow range of styles, the Freight maintains an open-door policy that welcomes artists looking to expand musical possibilities as well as preserve tradition. There’s certainly nothing comparable across the Bay. San Francisco may host the annual bacchanal of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which features a wide array of artists who also appear at the Freight, but the rest of the year it’s slim pickings for folk music fans, besides the occasional traditional Irish band at the Starry Plough or brief bluegrass concert series at Noe Valley Music and Cafe du Nord. Maybe the city’s surreal real estate situation has simply locked out low-margin folk establishments, but it’s been decades since San Francisco hosted a club with the Freight’s kind of artist-friendly vision.
That’s why Berkeley tenor saxophone master George Brooks introduced Global Conversation, a new Indo-jazz project with violinist Kala Ramnath, at the Freight last October. The un-categorizable avant-chamber ensemble Tin Hat (formerly Tin Hat Trio) has performed regularly at the club for a decade, and ROVA saxophonist Larry Ochs, a brilliant musical explorer, has been welcome to engage in a series of charged collaborations with an international cast of improvisers.
While the marketplace often requires artists to fit into neat stylistic niches, the curiosity and inspiration that animates many musicians ignores pat genre definitions. The Freight doesn’t present every traditional music style, but the venue has never shied away from booking artists looking to collaborate outside their musical home. The results are often fascinating, as artists build music based on friendship, shared sensibilities and a desire to explore the way various traditions interact with each other.
Berkeley guitarist John Schott, a founding member of the Grammy-nominated acid jazz combo T.J. Kirk with a long avant-garde jazz track record, started attending concerts at the Freight soon after moving to town in 1988. Lately he’s channeled his passion for early 20th-century blues, rags and jazz tunes into his trio Dream Kitchen with drummer John Hanes and Marc Bolin on tuba, bass trombone and jug, and the band recently celebrated the release of his new album Drunken Songs for Sober Times at the Freight. He notes that the lack of money in avant-garde jazz, roots music and other marginalized styles encourages musicians to pursue potentially uncommercial, genre-bending projects.
“The Freight has been an ark in a sense, in recognizing that there are a lot of disenfranchised musical communities that need homes,” Schott says. “And they’ve opened their doors to all sorts of ethnic music, Balkan groups, Indian music, even classical music, poetry and avant-garde jazz. There are people interested in playing with me and I’m interested in playing with them, and the Freight provides a first-class outlet. Let’s face it, the stakes are so low here we can do that. There is room to experiment and grow. Maybe a lot of us are more interested in doing 11 things rather than being known as just the best bluegrass fiddler.”
Schott could be talking about Suzy Thompson, the singer, fiddler, guitarist and accordion player whose career spans a myriad of styles, from old-time blues and bluegrass to Cajun and klezmer (she contributes vocals and fiddle work on two tracks of Drunken Songs for Sober Times). Looking at her career, it quickly becomes clear that it’s impossible to overstate the central role the Freight has played on the West Coast’s acoustic music scene. She arrived in Berkeley in 1973, and within days had made her way to the Freight, catching a jug-band performance by Jim Kweskin that left her enthralled. She soon started performing at the Tuesday Hoots, and before long had plugged into the region’s thriving acoustic music scene. “Everybody that’s in my life, I met at the Freight or through somebody at the Freight,” says Thompson. “I started meeting people and it’s been part of my life ever since. You can hear music there you can’t hear anywhere else, and I hope that continues.”
No one has provided better cause for optimism about the Freight’s future than Warren Hellman, the savvy San Francisco investor who launched the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco in 2001. A banjo enthusiast and old-time music lover, he’s co-chaired the Freight’s fund-raising campaign with Danny Carnahan, the veteran Celtic string player who founded the popular band Wake the Dead. While his well-heeled peers pour their time and money into upscale cultural institutions such as the opera, ballet and fine arts museum, Hellman is devoted to American roots music and its far-flung progeny. “To me the Freight is at least as important to our culture as all the upscale black-tie and white-tie venues,” Hellman said during an interview at the groundbreaking. “It’s easy to try to raise money for the Freight because I believe in it implicitly. I’d rather raise money for Freight & Salvage than the opera or the symphony. Their idea of making it a major center and moving up here appealed to me the first time I heard about it. I’ve seen so many fantastic shows at the club.”
If the Freight can maintain its adventurous booking policy, there are worries that the welcoming vibe that emanates from a core of dedicated volunteers and longtime employees will fade in the new space. Everyone, including Berkeley’s growing arts district’s residents and patrons, seems to be rooting for the venue, which has provided so much pleasure and spiritual sustenance for Bay Area music fans and so much work for musicians largely overlooked by American popular culture. Ultimately, the Freight is attempting the difficult feat that drives many of the artists it showcases, preserving the tried-and-true essentials while evolving to meet new needs.
“A lot of venues have tried to do this and failed,” Suzy Thompson says. “The Freight did this once before and was successful. It provides a high-quality place with a good sound system. They treat musicians really well, whether that person is Iris DeMent or some old hillbilly fiddle player you never heard of. I hope that doesn’t change.”
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Andrew Gilbert is The Monthly’s music critic.
