By Jane Roy Brown, Boston Globe Correspondent November 20, 2006
NORTHAMPTON -- It was a very '70s idea: Open a little club, serve some simple food, bring in some folk musicians, some folk - rock and blues, maybe. But the music would be more for atmosphere. At night, candlelight would illuminate the faces of people talking earnestly across tiny tabletops. Loners, scribbling in their journals, would look up every so often to signal a waitress for another espresso.
Speaking to a reporter for Northampton's alternative weekly newspaper, the Advocate, in 1989, 10 years after he started the Iron Horse Music Hall , Jordi Herold humorously recalled his dream of opening a "Bohemian cafe, with candles and wine and cheese and breadboards with little peasant loaves on them." It was, well, a simpler time.
Herold, then a recent graduate of Hampshire College in neighboring Amherst, abandoned his romantic notion for a time to teach in the Amherst public schools. When he found he couldn't shake his dream, he and a business partner bought what would become the Iron Horse in Northampton. The music was tame, in keeping with its role as backdrop -- strictly classical, jazz, and folk. As the owners discovered their true passion, the peasant loaves and cheese melted into the background and the music took center stage, literally. The club started to gain a reputation as a breakout venue for national talent. Tracy Chapman, Wynton Marsalis , Suzanne Vega, Stanley Jordan, George Winston, Michelle Shocked -- all honed their chops at the Iron Horse before moving into the big time . Herold's intuitive ear for new talent, his willingness to research the business and talent sides of the music scene, and his keen appreciation of all kinds of music gave him the kind of feelers that have built recording empires. "It's like some of the same sense you got when Tracy Chapman played here," Herold recalled in his 1989 interview. ". . . As soon as she went on stage, the buzzer went off. It's like that woman sang just four notes and I knew what was happening. You remember those moments."So do the patrons of the Iron Horse, who, 27 years after the doors opened, still line the sidewalk in front of the club on Center Street to check out little-known performers who have generated an insider buzz or to hear new sets by established favorites like Leon Redbone and Roomful of Blues . Seating is first-come, first-served, even for ticket holders, ensuring those lines. For those who attended live shows in their youth, stamping your feet to keep the blood flowing on a frigid February night may bring on flashbacks of waiting for the Byrds to open at Fillmore West or the Allman Brothers at Boston Garden, or even Bob Dylan or Joan Baez at Club 47 (now Club Passim ) in Harvard Square . The stage is busy on weekdays (Tuesdays through Thursdays and the occasional Monday) as well as weekends, sometimes billing two shows a night .
Inside, it's a time warp -- little tables with candles, a mezzanine, a menu harking back to a time when nachos were exotic to college kids. The only things missing are cheese fondue and cigarette smoke. Nobody seems to miss the smoke, and, as one blogger recently replied to a patron who had the nerve to dis the Iron Horse menu online, "Dude -- it's bar food!" As for the cheek-to-elbow intimacy of the place, Herold's wisdom on the subject is: "There might be a bigger, padded seat at the civic center, but you're not going to be 10 feet away in a room the size of a big living room, from who could very well be the same [caliber of] artist."
Herold wound up building his own sort of empire, Iron Horse Entertainment Group, which books live music and other performing arts at Northampton's top concert stages: the Calvin Theatre and Performing Arts Center, Pearl Street Nightclub, and an outdoor summer series at the Pines Theatre in Look Park. A division called Iron Horse Presents produces concerts at other New England venues, including Boston's Berklee Performance Center and the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square.
Meanwhile, the music bookings have stayed eclectic, mixing flower-child faves with brash newcomers. November's lineup, for instance, features both Aztec Two-Step , a band popular in the '70s, and Enter the Haggis (punk-folk bagpipe). These are the kinds of acts that are hard to come by outside of bigger cities, and the arts-minded emigres to the hill towns around Northampton show up for a lot of them. As one gray-haired patron said on a brisk night while waiting for doors to open for the early show, "Thank God for college towns."
Jane Roy Brown, a writer in Western Mass., can be reached at janeroybrown@verizon.net.
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