This is a new weekly feature, designed as yet another indulgence for an insomniac who gets to work four hours before the rest of the office staff and finds himself with at least an hour of free time before the rest of the world is awake.
There are places, some merely of the imagination, that have taken hold in history and fiction as they represent an era, a time, or a shared cultural experience that has since faded, but is certainly mourned. These places are pockets of nostalgia for what once was or could have been. Most of those to be featured, if they existed at all, are no longer with us, replaced by parking lots, or “big box” stores, or ugly houses. However, if you’re with the right people, or in the right place, to evoke them is to evoke an era that may be long gone, but permitted some creativity and joy.
Café Frankenstein
Laguna Beach, California
Laguna Beach, California
This week's "place" is seminal in the unlikely collision of both the liminal and mainstream culture in late 1950's and early '60's Southern California.
I have a weakness for the images of nascent surf culture. The colors, clothing, patterns, patois, and perspectives of that era I recall as a child when I began to form my awareness of the world. Unfortunately, for those who have to indulge my taste in film, a portion of that weakness involves a non-ironic appreciation of the beach movies made by American International Pictures in the early 1960’s. You know, the ones that starred Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon. Yeah, those.
You see, the surfers always had a hangout. In one of the movies, the hangout included a catatonic beatnik [eventually revealed to be Vincent Price] and a goateed host [played by B-list comedian, Morey Amsterdam, already well into his fifties] who introduced the house band of Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. Actually, the band was the most authentic shard of surf culture in the movie, as Dale was the creator of the so-called “surf sound” in music.
However absurd the juxtaposition of the Del-Tones with Price and Amsterdam, there was something familiar about the gang’s hangout that would have been recognized by the actual California surf culture of the era, as it was based on a place that was, by turns, infamous, notorious, and necessary.
In 1958, the beat artist Burt Shonberg and television writer [and marijuana advocate] George Clayton Johnson [profiled in The Coracle] bought an empty storefront on the Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. This was a bold move for a couple of reasons. One, they had almost no money and, two, this was in Orange County, California, which was in those days the most conservative portion of the state. It was doomed to start with, but what better for a place named after a movie about a monster.
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| Shonberg and Johnson |
Their vision was to create a European-style coffee house [it was not European at all, of course; it was based on coffee houses in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco and in Greenwich Village] where the various portions of SoCal’s liminal cultures could mix and mingle. This meant that beats, beatniks, surfers, bikers, folk musicians, jazz musicians, and their various fans and hangers-on would have a club house of sorts in the midst of prototypical suburban America.
It was an idea that would either be a boon or a complete disaster. For the liminal, it was a boon. For the local police, it was a disaster and, eventually, a target for overbearing and often unlawful harassment.
Café Frankenstein would close just four years later, after numerous citations for everything from underage drinking to wanton licentiousness. The local members of the women’s church society also had objections to the stained glass image in the front window which was not a sacred study, but a depiction of the café namesake’s monster. With that, social pressure began to be asserted against the parents of the local kids attracted, as they always are, to the café’s outlaw ambiance, and fewer and fewer customers came by to drink coffee, talk about surfboard fins, Harley-Davidson brake calipers, iambic pentameter, or some young, mumbling folk singer from Minnesota.
However, before it closed, Café Frankenstein hosted a number of musical acts that could find no other venue in Orange County. Jazz, folk music, and even beat comedians could be heard within the bizarre walls of the establishment. While few are household names, their influence is well-known within the confines of the musical community. It was, at least in terms of sentiment, a success that would serve as a forerunner to the larger, more business-savvy clubs, bars, and coffee houses that would open in Los Angeles County during the remainder of the decade.
In 1962, no longer able to afford a police-harassed, oft-cited, shunned place of business frequented by those who were not from the state’s wealthier demographic, Café Frankenstein closed and was purchased by the owner of the business next door. He had it razed and turned into a parking lot.
A few years later, when she first came to SoCal, Joni Mitchell would hear tales of Café Frankenstein from her fellow folkies and the verse, “Pave paradise; put up a parking lot” would be framed in her imagination.
