Saying goodbye to math and philosophy and hello to unofficial concert booking, Pearl became the exclusive promoter of Seeger in the Southern California region. Like Seeger’s musicologist father Charles and the folklorist Alan Lomax, Pearl’s taste for tradition ran deep. Budding as a Flamenco guitarist, he was hooked into a scene that embraced dance, art, and spoken word of the fringe and multi-cultural variety. But once he heard Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (thanks to another right-on girlfriend), his vision began to expand from one-off bookings to presenting traditional music on a regular basis, mostly so he and a small group of folklore followers could personally enjoy it. Pooling their resources and with an initial investment of $10,000, Pearl opened the Ash Grove in ’58 with the aforementioned Brownie McGhee show.

By this time, he’d married. Pearl describes Kate Hughes, his first wife, as wildly artistic and instrumental in the Ash Grove’s beginnings. “Kate was going to study with Martha Graham in New York in the summer of 1959, so I went back East around the time of the first Newport Festival,” says Pearl. It was his entry into the East Coast’s folk establishment. “I met Alan Lomax, the New Lost City Ramblers… people had started hearing good things about the Ash Grove, and so I had all these good people doing the booking.”

“I still hadn’t yet had the great traditional singers, but then Bess [Lomax] Hawes brought in Lightnin’ Hopkins. Slow but sure, word got around and I started to hire Big Joe Williams. I introduced Lightnin’ to Brownie and Sonny… we made a record called First Meetin’: Lightnin’ Hopkins With Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, & Big Joe Williams” (the album is available as Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Blues Summit).

“I’d learned how to do concerts, producing Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, and my apex of that was putting on Joan Baez introducing Bob Dylan [at the Hollywood Bowl in 1963]. I’d met Bob in 1961 or ’62, and he auditioned for me in New York and was supposed to come to the Ash Grove. About four weeks before he was supposed to play, he called and said, “Ed, listen, I have a problem… this guy is going to make a record for Columbia and I won’t do it if you don’t want me to because I’d have to delay coming to the Ash Grove.” I told him, “Bob, do it!” It probably wouldn’t have stopped him if I said no, but it didn’t occur to me to say no. So a year or two later, he did the Bowl concert—it was his make-up concert for not appearing at the Ash Grove.” In the meantime, Dylan recorded and released his self-titled debut album, as well as The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

“When Dylan auditioned for me, he couldn’t find his harmonica holder so he spent an hour bending a wire hanger into a harmonica holder and it never worked. The second time, at the Hollywood Bowl, he forgot the harmonica thing again and my brother Bernie brought over a harmonica thing from the Ash Grove. Bob never returned it—just remember that—because Bernie never lets me forget it.”

Blending Politics and Music

It wasn’t until the mid-’60s that Pearl became directly involved with political action outside presenting his multi-cultural events and artists who stood for change. “I’d been doing semi-political shows—Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Steve Allen and Lenny Bruce, an anti-nuclear thing, the Freedom Singers—but then Kate and I had gone up to Berkeley for the first march against the war. I went to the Peace and Freedom meeting and nobody knew what they were doing, and so, by the third day, they asked me to be the head of the LA registration drive for the Peace and Freedom Party. So I devoted a lot of time to that.”

This was the point at which Pearl officially opened the Ash Grove to politicos of all stripes, giving them a space to gather for meetings and presentations. For example, the club sponsored a workshop devoted to the San Francisco State student strike, an unprecedented college closure in 1968-69 that called for an end to the Vietnam War, as well as for the formation of an Ethnic Studies program (the latter was achieved); he even put someone in charge of political affairs at the club, though some of the more controversial political events were met with mixed feelings by musicians and regulars. It was also around this time that Pearl and the Ash Grove became the focus of attention from local and federal law enforcement and officially entered into an era of more trying times.

In 1969, following the screening of films which took a positive view of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, Pearl received a threat from an anti-Castro group. Not long after, the club suffered a debilitating fire. Though the arson was never solved, Pearl maintains it was politically motivated. About a year later, the club was besieged again, this time by an armed band of men who threatened employees and left a trail of kerosene on the floor, setting it alight before getting away. They were eventually apprehended and were revealed to be members of the anti-Castro group.

The shattered political and cultural climate of the early ’70s was not quite so conducive to Pearl’s vision, though had he stayed the course he might’ve been talked into providing sanctuary for women, gay, and minority rights groups, as well as stages for those emerging cultures. As time went on, he found fewer of his type of artist available for bookings, and a final fire in ’73 was the end of the Ash Grove. Pearl spent the ’80s as a community activist and occasional concert promoter. A reopening of the Ash Grove in the ’90s on the Santa Monica Pier was a short-lived venture, though it certainly seems there is room for a place like the Ash Grove in the current climate of niche music genres and political and social activism in search of an umbrella movement.

“You look at the artists who came out of there… Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal,” says Alvin, “even my brother and I who started hanging around much later than those guys… Everybody had some kind of sense—not that it was political music—that there was politics involved. It do
esn’t necessarily have to be Maoist, Stalinist, whatever leftist tag, but it was music, whether bluegrass or blues, and it came out of communities. It was all folk music in that sense. And these musics came out of some sort of reaction to circumstances, so you had to think about that. You couldn’t just go to the Ash Grove and get drunk and try to get laid… it wasn’t that kind of club. It wasn’t that it wasn’t—I’m sure people did go there and get drunk and get laid—but there was a subtext to it that was really important and gave it that edge. You had to think… you were just a little more well-rounded.”

Watch: Muddy Waters, “Got My Mojo Workin’” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Ash Grove, Ed Pearl, Ry Cooder, Taj Mahal

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