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Health & Fitness

Early,Little Venues

When I was growing up, so much of our young interests revolved around the up and coming music from the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and so many others. And if you were really into it, there was the hard core Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the others in the folk aspect of this new music. But Ma and Pa and uncles all over the place refused to join the appreciation of this new stuff. They still listened to Tom and Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ella Firzgerald, just part of long list of pre-World War II artists. The war of music was definitely between the generations back then.
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I assumed that the same war was going on today between the generations, after all, I hate rap music. But also, I never had kids so I haven’t been real intimate about what recent kids like and don’t like nowadays. While in the process of re-integrating myself back into my hometown, however, I’ve come to find that lots of my friend’s kids and grand kids are still listening to the same music I listened to when I was their age and it is most surprising to me, a pleasant surprise.
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One thing I have also become aware of, however, is that these young people have no idea just how close and local the core of this music was. Everyone is aware of Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium up in San Francisco, and later, Winterland, but I never hear anything about the local venues that provided fertile environments for so many first generation rockers and folk singers. The Catalyst in Santa Cruz was the first one I became aware of. Its original location was in the ground floor of the old Saint George Hotel. Its front door was on Front Street while the entrance to the hotel was on Pacific Avenue. The Catalyst had three grandly unique rooms, the largest being a big, open room with the wall facing Front Street being a high collection of large panels filled with small window panes going nearly all the way up to the shadowy ceilings. This room had the stage. Near the stage was a doorway into a narrow bar, long with only a few tables. The third room was my favorite. It was an irregular pentagon with a red, Spanish tile floor and all of its five walls were simply smallish panes of mirrors from floor to about eight feet high. What a room to “people watch” in. If you knew how to use these mirrors, you could view six or seven great vantages of a good looking chick with just a few glances, and without moving your head. In the center of the tile floor was a small, raised pool with a famous fountain in its center, a fountain that, it was said, was rushed around the “Horn (Cape Horn in southern Argentina)” in a clipper ship. The mirror room was my favorite.
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Plopped into one of the five, mirrored walls was a door leading into the back end of “Bookshop Santa Cruz.” What more could one ask for; a huge, well provisioned deli counter that served espresso, a rock and roll stage, as much beer as you could drink, a fun house full of mystical mirrors with a magical doorway to take you into . . .

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