The Ash Grove Film came into my periphery during the 2023 FAR-West Annual Conference. We were in full swing when Fred Aronow asked about getting an ad into the digital program guide. Some mental acrobatics, a technology check — sure, we can do that! We put a full page ad in the back, congratulating The Chambers Brothers for being honored as Best of the West artists. Now I understand why that was important.

I contacted Fred to see what’s going on with the film. What I got was an insider’s view of making a documentary, and an insider’s view of the early Los Angeles Folk scene. I wanted to know how this documentary was being put together. How long does it really take to make a movie?

Fred Aronow is a veteran filmmaker who’s worked in Los Angeles for the last 40 years. He started well before that in New York, working with Shoshoni Productions  on the groundbreaking PBS series Vanishing Wilderness. He worked with the Winterfilm Collective on the production and international release of the feature documentary Winter Soldier, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival Critic’s Week. Fred’s work has continued his focus on issues of justice, human dignity, ecology, access to healthcare and other topics that negatively and positively affect the daily lives of people around the world.

me: So 10 years, you say, you’ve been working on this.

FA: People started working on it in 2008, other people: Jerry Kay, who was an employee at The Ash Grove and remained a friend of Ed’s. He lives in Santa Cruz. And his stepdaughter, who is (Ramblin’) Jack Elliot’s daughter, Aiyana Elliot, was directing this film. Her husband is Dan Partland, who does films for PBS and National Geographic. She had just finished making the film about Jack. So she started on this project in 2008, working with Jerry Kay as sort of the line producer and also working with Ed (Pearl.) Ed was part of the crew that did all these interviews with people, many of whom have now passed, which is interesting in many ways. I mean, it’s interesting historically to have their comments and have their actual viewpoint. It makes it a little difficult to finish the film.

me: How so? Explain that.

FA: Well, in terms of getting licensing, you have to go through a trustee or an estate or this or that. A lot of the people who’ve done the photography that we’re using – there are two principal people. One is Phil Melnick, who was also an employee of the Ashgrove. And Charles Britton, who was a photographer in the Los Angeles area. He worked with artists in the fifties and sixties, and was very involved in politics. And both of those people have now passed away.

me: You said over the weekend you were hunting down a tile mason. Did you find him?

FA: Yes. Now he’s not really a tile mason. Right now he’s an artist. He became the durable power of attorney for Charles Britton’s Estate. And he’s the guy who managed the whole thing of Charles Britton’s studio contents being archived at the Getty Research Institute. However, Charles had a gallery, which was selling very fancy finished prints. So this guy has all these prints at his house.

Many of the images that I got from the Getty Research Institute came from contact sheets. I even photographed negatives. And then with Photoshop, I turned the negatives into positives. I did all kinds of weird things to make this happen.

I also used six or seven photographs from Ed Ruscha. He’s one of these Los Angeles artists that did groundbreaking stuff in the 50s and 60s and is still doing art, wonderful, new stuff all the time. Ed Ruscha has a retrospective (Ed Ruscha/ NOW THEN) at the Los Angeles County Museum right now. He’s an older guy – must be 87. I was successful in speaking with his studio manager. She understood what I was doing, and she explained to him what I was doing. I sent them thumbnails of those photographs (of his that I wanted to use) and he’s going to let me use them for free, which is wonderful. Which you can do if somebody is alive. Charles Britton, when he alive, was very attached to the Ashgrove and would not bat an eyelash. But now of course, I’m dealing with the Getty Research Institute.

me: Getty does nothing for free. I already know.

FA: But I’ve had really good experiences working there. I spent about three weeks there, eight-hour days. And this was fairly proximate to the time when this stuff was actually donated. None of it was cataloged. It was all in boxes. I just went through boxes and boxes, I think 24 boxes of material. The contents of his (Charlie Britton’s) studio, which was of course fascinating. Dreamt about a lot of it. Didn’t have anything to do with the film, but wonderful stuff.

me: The artifacts of research are always so fascinating.

FA: So it’s been that kind of a thing. I’ve been working with this other photographer, Philip Melnick, who passed away in October, 2023. We did an interview with him at his house in Albuquerque.

Before the inception of the Ashgrove, Ed Pearl was producing concerts in the Los Angeles area. At that time, Phil was a still photographer and sort of mechanically inclined. He was also able to help by setting up the lights and stuff. He was sort of Ed’s right-hand man in terms of putting those concerts together.

After these three or four concerts, which were quite successful, Kate and Ed and Phil went to Coffee Dan’s on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t have it in the film yet. I don’t have a place to put it in the film, because this level of detail, if I started that at the beginning of the film…our first cut was three and a half hours long.

I have this great tourist kind of postcard from the 1950s of Hollywood Boulevard at night with Coffee Dan’s right there. But I can’t use it.

me: can you send it to me for the interview?

They sat around in Coffee Dan’s, saying, “We’re doing these concerts, we’re being successful, but a concert is really not what we need. We need a place.”

me: Now you’re talking about the inception…

FA: So there’s this whole thing happening in the background which became known as Folk music. Of course, it wasn’t the whole of Folk music. There was country music, there was Black church music, White church music, Cajun music, and there was Polish music and Jewish music…

me: All of those are folk music.

FA: There’s a very strong undercurrent: the thing that attracted a lot of people to Folk music is that they could make their own music. And making the music, especially making the music with other people, is a very strong social vehicle.

Now, if you want to go up on a super-elevated thought level you could say: Well, this was a time of the breakdown of people going to church, of people moving out to the suburbs and not living in an ethnic enclave. Local communities being torn apart. Young people wanted a group sense. And this music became the vehicle by which they could do that.

me: The root of seeking a sense of community that you can’t find elsewhere.

FA: So the roots element was there, but it was not the dominant feature. The dominant feature was the sort of organized high-energy sound of people like the Kingston Trio. And those were the people that Ed could book.

So they had this little meeting at Dan’s coffee shop. And they raised a little money and they found a place, and they were sort of raising interest among their cohort of people. And they finally opened in June of 1958. In July or August of 1958, the Kingston Trio released “Tom Dooley.” Super-hot hit. And this attracted a lot of people to the Ash Grove. The Limeliters were organized at the Ash Grove.

me: Oh, no kidding. Okay. This is a Roger McGuinn connection.

FA: Their first album, a big hit, was actually recorded at the Ash Grove. A number of people recorded albums there. And so there was this whole thing going on: this Urban Folk continuum, the Urban part of the Folk music continuum.

me: The Urban Folk Continuum. This is a very catchy phrase.

FA: And from my point of view, to make a documentary about this subject and its milieu, how it reflects on what’s going on now, what might happen in the future, how it talks about what young people can do with their lives. How it talks about diversity, how it talks about the real changes that have happened since 1950. It was almost impossible to put onstage a racially integrated group. One of the things that Ed had as a spoken intention was to use music to break down cultural polarization.

me: How much is that specific message in the movie?

FA: It is in the movie, it is quite clear.

me: Did you yourself end up interviewing anybody?

FA: Oh, yeah. John Cohen in Upstate New York; Arthur Hughes, NYC; Gordy Alexandre and Jerry Kay in L.A., and Ed Pearl, in addition to interviews done previously. Jackson Browne in Santa Monica.

After we did this whole review of everything…there were holes in the story. We decided what the storyline was, vaguely, and whether we really had the material to tell that story. And there were two important people who were employees of the club: There was an interview with one of them, but it wasn’t a focused interview. It wasn’t shot very well.

Anyway, so we did those two interviews, and then we found Phil Melnick, who was that photographer I mentioned before, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had a different viewpoint on how the club started and what was going on there. He was part of the inside group, but a little distant from it. He wasn’t really a music person. He enjoyed the music. He photographed a lot of the musicians.

me: That probably makes a good juxtaposition.

FA: And by the time we were working on the film, the Chambers Brothers had sort of reorganized themselves and did a couple of Ash Grove-related shows at the Improv, which is the site where the Ashgrove was. I went to one of their rehearsals at Willie’s house, and I said we really need to make this part of the film. At that point, they were not in the film at all. And they are now a really major part of the film. We eventually did, I think, two interviews or maybe three interviews with them in various ways. One of them – we’re unfortunately not using it – was really wonderful. All of these guys are still very much involved with their church life. So we went to Willie’s church and they made some video of him in rehearsal with the chorus.

me: How does the movie end? Do you go into the demise of The Ash Grove?

Steve Gillette provided me with backstory that can be found on the web: “In the early morning hours of April 23, 1969, fire struck the club and destroyed most of the showroom and front entry hall. After four months of work and fund-raising and benefits done for the club by the Byrds, Canned Heat, Jim Kweskin, Albert Collins and the Firesign Theater, the club re-opened pretty quickly.

A second fire occurred on June 7th, 1970. Pearl continued to present highly polarizing political programs and films. There was an awkward situation when a group of employees picketed the club demanding that they be allowed to unionize. On November 11, 1973 a third fire completely destroyed the club.”

FA: The film goes to the ending of the Ash Grove on Melrose Avenue in 1973 and Ed Pearl’s determined quest to reopen it. The film allows people who were part of the Ash Grove (and the audience) to reflect on the impact of that experience on themselves personally and on the strength of the diversity of music and life that people are creating and enjoying today. More to the point for us today, the music lives on. The spirit lives on.

So that’s a film. Unless it’s really finished, it’s really hard to see what’s there.

***

When I saw Fred in person at the 2024 FAR-West Annual Conference, there was a new cut of the film. Fred is working tirelessly to make this movie more marketable without compromising the story, working to make the number of licenses needed less daunting, less expensive. In my last communication with Fred, he was getting on a train from NYC to DC. There’s always a train in a Folk story.

Read the full interview, including more things that won’t be in the movie, here: The Ash Grove Film: A Time Capsule in its Chrysalis Stage

 

debora Ewing writes, paints, and screams at the stars because the world is still screwed up. She improves what she can with music collaboration, peer-review at Consilience Poetry Journal, or designing books for Igneus Press. Follow @DebsValidation on X and Instagram. Read her self-distractions at FolkWorks.org and JerryJazzMusician.com.