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HENRY DILTZ: Hootenanny night on Mondays at The Troubadour café was the
folklore night in the middle of Hollywood. It was called Doug Weston’s Troubadour
and was on Santa Monica and Doheny. It’s still there – Doug Weston isn’t, but the club
is. He was a theatre guy and he had bought a great big room, like a warehouse, with
cement floors with a big stage at one end. The place also had a kitchen and in the
front there was a room, which in the old days had been McCabe’s music shop selling
guitars, strings, picks and stuff. Some time in the late Sixties it became a bar. It was
where most of the folk singers sang and everybody hung out there; every night you
would see everybody – Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn
– all those people were down there; it was a home for them every single night for years.
There was another club called The Ash Grove which showcased the very traditional
folk music, with mandolins and things, but The Troubadour was the place where all
the recording and commercial acts and, to my mind, the more exciting acts played,
certainly the more famous ones.
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Doug Weston outside The Troubadour, November 1972
CHIP DOUGLAS: Monday Hoot night at The Troubadour was the whole deal. It meant that if you had a guitar and
you were in line you were going to play. Everyone would get up on stage and perform and that’s how I became aware of who
everyone was. Every Monday I was there, either in the showroom or in the bar, just having fun. We occasionally would get
up on Monday nights but it was more of an observation thing for me.
JOHN STEWART: Anyone who was on the scene plus people who’d just walked through the door would
get up and play. And it remained the place to play and the place to hang out well into the Eighties.
JACKSON BROWNE: It was a place where you could glimpse some of the great music and
great performers. If you wanted to play you’d show up at around four o’clock in the
afternoon and you’d sit in an alcove with a growing number of hopeful people and you’d get
your name on the list. Eventually it became such a showcase that record companies and
managers would call to get their artists a slot so they’d only take about four of the people
who were waiting. It was a cool thing to do on a Monday afternoon, to sit around and sing
in front of a window before they opened it up to take names around seven o’clock.
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Top: The Byrds at The Whisky A Go Go, 1968
Middle: Joni Mitchell at The Troubadour, 1974
Bottom: The Doors at The Whisky A Go Go, 1967
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RUSS GIGUERE: I did The Troubadour Hoot once a month for two years and The Ice House Hoot on Sundays once
a month. The hardest one was always The Troubadour – I would be so nervous. I knew that if I wanted to do this for a living
I better get over it and the best way to do that was to play at The Troubadour all by yourself. If you could do that 24 times,
then it toughened you up and taught you what an audience was, how to control yourself and keep from wetting yourself
during a show and things like that.
RICHIE FURAY: Both The Whisky A Go Go and The Troubadour played a big role in my life. Buffalo
Springfield was the house band for six weeks at the Whisky and that’s where we became a very, very tight
band. That was as close as we ever got. And when Poco started playing we used The Troubadour as our
rehearsal hall in return for playing in the evenings for next to nothing.
GARY BURDEN: It was a venue where a lot of opportunities were created for a lot of young
musicians. So many great people were exposed to the public and were encouraged and went on
to have careers as a result of Hoot night: Jackson Browne, the MFQ, The Byrds. It was a Mecca;
it was a red light on the map. The Troubadour witnessed the end of folk music and the start
of folk-rock. The Ash Grove before that was more important as a venue. For me, The Troubadour
was a place where my friends played; it’s where I first saw James Taylor and it was the first place
Joni played when she made her first album. It was the club of our family of friends and players.
The Whisky A Go Go was another venue which was more rock ‘n’ roll and The Troubadour was
more folk and folk-rock. That was the scene.
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CHIP DOUGLAS: Roger McGuinn (he was Jim McGuinn then) was frequently up on stage. One night The Dillards
came on stage and that transformed me; I was a bluegrass banjo fan already and I’d never heard those guys and suddenly there
they were and I really thought they were something – great memories.
RUSS KUNKEL: Everybody has a club that they were at during that period of time every single night
and for us it was actually the Whisky. You got to know all the waitresses – maybe a little more than you
should have – we were young and it was a whole big world out there. Actually, I think we were fresh meat
for some of those waitresses.
JOHN STEWART: Everybody who was in rock and folk music hung out at The Troubadour bar
– everyone from Kristofferson to Doug Dillard to all the bands that were playing there. Doug
Weston was notorious for getting a rider that whoever he got to play there would have to play
there again. That went for Elton John; he first played there and then four years later, when he
was playing places like the Hollywood Bowl, he would play The Troubadour as well. I think when
punk came along The Troubadour went down.
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RUSS GIGUERE: Elton John played there, Oscar Brown Jr played, everybody played The Troubadour. I’ve been told
people now pay to play there so it’s knocked the shine off. It was the place. If you were a musician who wasn’t working and
was out of money you were at The Troubadour. It was great like that. Wild Man Fischer was one of the craziest acts I’d ever
seen. He’d get on stage and play his body – he was insane. They’d put him on the Monday night Hoot to clear out the
audience and the thing that was funny was as soon as he went on stage the audience would start pouring out and all
the people in the bar – Henry, myself, all the musicians – would pour in. He was so interesting!
BOYD ELDER: That’s where I first ran into a lot of people, including Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda,
Jack Nicholson and Terry Southern, the writer that worked with them on Easy Rider.
JACKSON BROWNE: It wasn’t exclusively folky but it was a folk club. Acoustic, semi-acoustic
folk-rock bands and electric bands would play there. It was a big deal when they got the liquor
licence at the bar because then it became an annex to Tana’s next door and so it wound up with
a lot of actors and directors in there too. Tana’s bar wasn’t very big and it was expensive.
The Troubadour was more of a dive and at any given time people were coming through there
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to see music happen. You might be standing there and Crosby would literally blow by, two
18-year-old girls under his cape, looking over their shoulders and disappear into the night.
Or Odetta would be sitting there talking with Al Cooper, or something wild. People who knew
each other wound up running into each other there, great conversations would happen. It took
me a long time to be willing to spend much time in the bar because it was such a hang. I was
having a crisis in that I thought I’d been around forever – I was about 20 and I thought
I was dying on the vine.
ERIK JACOBSEN: The Troubadour scene was totally wild. I used to go there and get drunk.
I was dosed there once by somebody, right at the bar. It was also where I discovered Norman
Greenbaum. Now there’s a folk-rock song and one of the biggest hits ever cut in Los Angeles:
‘Spirit in the Sky’.
JACKSON BROWNE: I would see Ned and the Eagles there and we all knew every one of the waitresses – they were
all the sweetest people. Everybody was so kind to us; you’d go in and the cook would look underneath the big door of the
grill and say ‘You hungry? You want something to eat?’ It was like Wendy and The Lost Boys. There was one waitress who
was always trying to catch me drinking and I didn’t drink then but even a sip of beer and you would be out. The night I turned
21 I passed out upstairs in the office after lunging at my friend’s girlfriend. I didn’t know how to drink – it takes a long time
to learn how to drink.
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J. D. SOUTHER: The Troubadour was having a really great year the year that I was there in ’69. That
was the year that I really figured out that I could write songs with the guitar and my poetry, and I saw
almost every songwriter that was in our vein at The Troubadour: James Taylor, Neil Young, Laura Nyro,
Tim Hardin, Van Morrison, Elton John, Kris Kristofferson, Joni Mitchell. I mean who didn’t play there?
Everybody played The Troubadour in ’69 and at the end of the summer CSN&Y played their first gig
at The Greek. So, as I was beginning to really learn to put together songs that said what I wanted to say
and made sense from the other side of the stage too, I was seeing all those people. We just lived there;
I stayed there all the time and almost every week somebody great was there.
RUSS KUNKEL: The Whisky was more my club because when my band, Things To Come
moved to Hollywood we were hired to open for Gene Clark who had just left The Byrds
and the Whisky had just turned from its R&B Motown era to doing other things. It started off
with Trinny Lopez and Johnny Rivers and then they went for R&B Motown acts for a while.
We turned up as it started to showcase more folk and rock. Gene Clark was managed
by a man named Larry Spector, who also managed Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda who
were making Easy Rider at the time. He also managed us and got us the gig at the Whisky
opening for Gene.
The managers of the Whisky, Mario Maglieri and Elmer Valentine, liked us a lot. They thought
we were a breath of fresh air for some reason and Mario hired us to be the house opening act.
We played the Whisky for 19 weeks in a row. Mario would say, ‘I want you kids to be here
every night at half past four so that you can have dinner because if you’re going to play for me
you’ve gotta eat. I don’t want you getting any skinnier than you are.’ So we would show up and
eat dinner with the help at the Whisky every night and then we’d open.We opened for Gene Clark,
The Hollies, The Byrds, The Electric Flag, Cream, The Doors; we shared a bill with Chicago Transit
Authority, which became Chicago.
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STEPHEN STILLS: I was so ready to move on from New York and The Troubadour was too much like New York for
me. I liked it up at the Whisky on the Strip. Bands sounded better because it was built with electric music in mind. The Troubadour
was a guitar shop and then a couple of years later the guitar shop became a bar. And the room was really good for acoustic
music but when bands started playing there it wasn’t so great. I imagine The Beatles were much like that at the Cavern.
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