A former student of mine moved to New York City about fifteen years ago, determined to be a professional singer. She was not a rocker nor a rapper, her appearance was zaftig with big hair, like someone who would have appeared on a Bob Hope special in the mid-sixties, and she had a preference for torch songs.
Naturally, the few places that liked that type of entertainment were booked with the high-end performers, and the smaller clubs preferred a contemporary sound. So, after she realized that traipsing all over Manhattan and Brooklyn looking for a venue was futile, on one of her stops she noticed that the club was advertising for a bartender and she applied and was hired.
For a year, she tended bar and did whatever else was necessary to keep the business solvent and operational. After hours, during the clean-up, she would take a seat at the piano and entertain the other workers, including the club's owner/manager. Inevitably, one night a performer didn't arrive and he asked her to fill in. She was a hit and, to this day, still regularly performs there and elsewhere, and has recorded three albums. [Are they still called albums? I don't know.]
She may not have realized it, but she had just engaged in a very traditional manner of finding an entrance to the oft-closed world of entertainment. It brought to mind another singer I was listening to the other day.
When she was sixteen, Linda Ronstadt, a machine parts dealer's daughter from Tuscon,
She wasn't the only one, however, although she may have been the most famous to have come out of The Insomniac Cafe, a place that was popular with the counter-culture performers of the era, if a bit notorious to the local police and politicians. Well, what else is new?
In 1958, an entrepreneur named Bob Hare saw an empty storefront, something that is anathema to any entrepreneur, and decided to imitate the coffeehouses that were becoming common in San Francisco and were beginning to enter Southern California culture. [Please read of Cafe Frankenstein, a surfer/beatnik place that was a contemporary of The Insomniac's, elsewhere in The Coracle.]
So, Hare borrowed $2000 [around $18,000 in 2019] and turned what had been a shoe store into a modest place to have a cup of coffee late into the night. As he didn't serve liquor, he could stay open until 3am, a full hour after the Lighthouse jazz club, which was across the street, closed. That meant the adrenalized musicians and their fans still had somewhere to go after every other venue had shuttered.
Naturally, once musicians are invited into any place with a roof, be it a nightclub, coffeehouse, church, or barn, they have to play. Thus, music began to be offered at The Insomniac and, in keeping with SoCal culture, it was eclectic and fun. Not just jazz or the teenage Ronstadt singing her off-key songs of daunted love, but folk trios, blues warblers, and even Gospel music. At the end of his first year in business, The Insomniac was earning $100,000 annually [about $850,000 today].
Hare's vision was to recreate a Greenwich Village vibe in suburban L.A., an area primarily known for beach volleyball. In order to encourage that vision, he bought the store next door and turned it into The Insomniac Book and Art Fair, where the beat writers and poets who were so popular up north could sell their works and read from them to adoring beach kids, and artists such as Earl Newman, who is mostly famous for his Newport Jazz Festival poster designs, and Frank Holmes would get their start. Allan Ginsburg even showed up one evening and read from "Howl", still one of the best-selling books of poetry in the 20th century.
[See above for Newman's vision of The Insomniac, and below for Holmes work as a record album artist.]
In addition to music, books, and art, The Insomniac also became a place for outer orbital comedians to perform, including the scandalous Lenny Bruce and the truly original, if remarkably wacky, beatnik Lord Buckley.
Sounds ideal, doesn't it? Well, yes, if you're a musician, artist, writer, poet, comedian, coffee addict, or fan of any of the above. Apparently, the city fathers of Hermosa Beach were none of those things and, in a story that's eerily similar to the fate of Cafe Frankenstein down in Laguna Beach, saw The Insomniac not as the sentinel of Greenwich Village culture, but as an impediment to a planned walkway that would connect the beach to the more savory shops in the main part of town. So, the Hermosa Beach police would visit The Insomniac with brutal regularity until [surprise!] they found some drugs. Hare and some others would be arrested, the charges eventually dismissed.
With the subsequent loss of its entertainment license, The Insomniac could no longer be what it had been and the city, through the process of eminent domain, seized the property and turned it into a charmless walkway and parking area in 1965. [I've been there in this century and noted it as an area mostly for the homeless, along with some used syringes and human waste; good thing they got rid of a coffeehouse, eh?]
Hare would later become a counselor and member of the Lutheran Church, serving troubled youth with wisdom and sacrament, if not caffeine and tunes.
Recently, as the city of Hermosa Beach is now desirous of marketing their facile history, a series of murals have been commissioned, including one entitled "Beatnik Alley", that captures some of the performers and the cultural vibe of those seven brief years. Depictions of Ronstadt, folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who came over for coffee after The Lighthouse would close for the evening, may be found along the wall of a Brazilian BBQ restaurant.
We guess The Insomniac, now that it has been closed for over fifty years and its owner dead for eight, has achieved the status of elderly politicians, ugly buildings, and over-the-hill prostitutes and has become respectable.
For the counter-culture, this is the circle of life.
For fun, here's Lord Buckley's take on Jesus of Nazareth. No, really.