The Ash Grove Film came into my periphery during the FAR-West 2023 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 in being honored as Best of the West artists. Now I understand why that ad was important.

How long does it really take to make a movie? You can’t have that answer without knowing what the movie’s about. It’s about us, about politics and protest, about how we fight back with art.

And why this movie? I asked covert folk activist Joel Tepp what was important about the Ash Grove years. He gave this response:

“Musically, it was absolutely essential. The fact that both Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones came…because it was necessary to stop there. Because they already knew that it was a key place, not because it was the world’s most favorite venue, but because it was the place that supported all the stuff that would never have gotten out to the public without coming to The Ash Grove.”

Singer, songwriter, and record producer Wendy Waldman concurs: “Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE came through the Ash Grove as it was one of the major stops on the national folk/blues/roots tour. I would say the Ash Grove was a foundation block in the building of my musical understanding, and one of the greatest personal moments was when I myself appeared there as an artist. Wow! So fortunate to have been there all those years, and it lives on in my heart and in my work.”

Steve Gillette, Folk historian and Storykeeper, told me: “I first went there when I was in high school. For me it was one of those glimpses of a counter-culture that helped my metamorphosis from my Orange County naivete.”

Ed Pearl was honored with FAR-West’s Best of the West Award in 2013 for his lifelong commitment to bringing the people’s music home to Los Angeles, bringing the people to the people. FolkWorks covered the event in this article.

The Ash Grove Film website starts with this excellent photo of Ed Pearl sitting on a car, and a quote from Bob Dylan:

“I knew…that there was a folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove. I’d seen posters of folk shows at the Ash Grove and used to dream about playing there.” — Bob Dylan, Chronicles

The more I asked around, the more I found myself in Fred Aronow’s predicament of having so much great information that it’s almost impossible to hone it down into a linear storyline.

Fred Aronow is a veteran filmmaker who’s worked in Los Angeles for the last 40 years. He started in New York working with Shoshoni Productions working 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 the Cannes Film Festival Critic’s Week. His footprints are on  the PBS Special Black Coal, Red Power; the made-for-PBS feature A Secret Space, and the independent Guyanese feature Aggro, Seizeman. His work has continued his focus on issues of justice, human dignity, ecology, access to healthcare and the many issues that negatively and positively affect the daily lives of people around the world. Fred and I have been discussing this topic via Zoom and through emails. The more I research, the more questions I have.

me: I think this project that you’re working on, the Ash Grove film, is fascinating and extremely important.

FA: Well, I think so, and that’s why I’ve spent 10 years working on it. Every so often. I wonder, was that the right choice?

me: It was the right choice, yes. Gathering up the history of Folk is extremely important to me.

FA: Well see, that’s one of the reasons…there are a lot of reasons why I engage in this strange activity, and one of them is that people who weren’t there have no way of knowing about it, no way of knowing what the texture of it was, what the culture of it was, about the relationships people built between themselves to make all these things happen.

me: So 10 years 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 ’50s and ’60s, and he worked on, he 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 a few photographs of six or seven photographs from Ed Ruscha. And he’s one of these Los Angeles artists that did all of the groundbreaking stuff in the fifties and sixties and still doing art, wonderful stuff, new stuff all the time. Ed Ruscha has a 50-60-year retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum right now. He’s an older guy – must be 87. And I was, shall we say, successful in speaking with his studio manager. She understood what I was doing, and then explained to him what I was doing. I sent them thumbnails of those photographs and he’s going to let me use them for free, which is wonderful. Which you can do if somebody is alive.

Me: Right.

FA: 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, what’s the word? 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 all the stuff in his (Charle’s 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: Anyway, 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. He was a young man, about 24, 25, maybe 26. He was a little hazy on his age. He wanted to appear younger. At that time, Phil, who was a still photographer and sort of mechanically inclined, 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.”

Years before this, a group had been a meeting at Ed’s sister’s house out in the San Fernando Valley on Friday or Saturday nights, and they bring their instruments and they sing. That’s one thing people did in the fifties. People within this music and this group sort of defined by music and politics, the people who had worked on the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948. I dunno if you know about all this history…

Me: Not even a little.

FA: Henry Wallace was vice president under FDR in 1944. Everybody knew that FDR was going to die. He was really frail. Henry Wallace was the Secretary of Agriculture in the ’30s under FDR, and he invented the Ever-Normal granary system.

When you drove across grain-producing regions, you’d see these big grain silos, which Henry Wallace invented to even out grain production over good years and bad years. And it really helped; farmers would be able to sell as the market proceeded, not have to sell immediately. So he was a pretty smart guy. But Henry Wallace didn’t think we really had to have an Iron curtain falling across Europe. The party bosses did not want Henry Wallace to become president. He was a little bit too much to the left as described in those days.

So he was pretty quickly shuffled out of the administration, and ran as an independent candidate in 1948 under the Progressive Party. Parallel to that, Pete Seeger and a bunch of other people – Cisco Houston, Bess Lomax Hawes, Huddie Ledbetter, Josh White – were all in this music thing that had to do with a progressive politics. And of course, when it got into the early ’50s, they were all red-baited.

me: I wonder how much people remember that term.

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, and it wasn’t the whole of 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: …so Ed’s sister Bernice out in the San Fernando Valley, basically people from the UCLA Folk Club…many places had a Folk Club. I organized the Folk Club in my high school.

The purpose of the Folk Club was not to present polished artists. The purpose of the Folk Club was to sing, to sing these songs. So 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 level of thought 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 it is seeking a sense of community that you can’t find elsewhere. Yeah.

FA: So this is the atmosphere within which Ed Pearl finds himself taking on the role of a producer. It’s like a group atmosphere. It isn’t like, “I’m going to be a producer and conquer the world.” It’s going to be a place where we can be together in the room and have this music. He was also already booking people. There was an echelon of people who were a little bit more ethnic, not quite as commercial, but commercial enough to go into a club. People like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Josh White, and Burl Ives.

Me: I grew up on some of these records.

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 Limeliters and 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.”

Me: Yep. This is an album I grew up with.

FA: 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 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: The Ash Grove became the place that gave people their first entrée into becoming a performing artist on stage on the West Coast, because Ed would book them for five or six weeks – worthwhile to get in your car and drive the station wagon out with the whole two- or three-piece band. And then Ed would try to find some other places to play also while you’re out there.

 

FA: So these old masters – people who are now 50 or 60 or something, which seemed old to all these 20-year-olds – these people had recording careers in the twenties and thirties, and some of them just had local careers playing for dances or their family, or in their churches or whatever. But the Ash Grove was the place where parents of teenagers who wanted their teenagers to be exposed to cultural breadth. When I was 13 years old, my mother would drive me to the Ashgrove and leave me there and come back at 10 o’clock at night and pick me up.

Me: Oh my God. Yeah. The parallel in my generation and living in Michigan was the roller rink. There was not that much culture happening at the roller rink, I can tell you that. Not anything worth cultivating.

FA: Wendy Waldman said, “My mother used to drop me off – 13, 14 years old – and just leave me there. And I’d just hang out. And I listened to whoever was playing.” Ry Cooder did this in a very organized way. He talks about it that way. He says in his interview – this is part of the film – he says, “I went there and I made sure to get there by 6:30 so I could get my chair. Front table. So I could see what the fingering was going on, on the guitar, and nobody else could get my chair. And I just had to concentrate and remember it all.” Of course, in those days, you didn’t have little recorders, you didn’t have cameras. Remembering was something you actually had to do.

Wendy Waldman: “I spent my teenage years at the Ash Grove, which is interesting in itself because I was underage and it was 21 and over. Somehow the management there allowed us kids in if we were discreet and stayed in the back, out of the way. Consequently many of us, myself included, got the greatest education in American folk and roots music possible.”

Steve Gillette: “In the fall of 1961 at UCLA, Dennis Olsen, Tony Hill, John Ciambotti and I formed a bluegrass group. We entered a traditional music contest at the Ash Grove. I had been there three times before, going back to 1958 to see Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson, Scruggs and Flatt, and then Laurendo Almeda and Sally Terry. At the end of the eight- or nine-week contest, the judges picked us third. My old friend Stu Jamison was first and a beautiful young woman who sang Israeli folksongs was second. Later, Tony Hill took some lessons from Clarence, and Clarence made a tape recording of about a dozen songs, first playing the song slowly and then up to tempo.”

FA: And from my point of view to make a document 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. In the 1950s, there were two music union organizations in the city of Los Angeles: one for black performers, one for white performers. That didn’t change until 1958 or 59. It was almost impossible to put onstage a racially integrated group. A lot of changes have happened.

me: But at the same time, even though on paper, in the law books, a lot of changes have happened…some of this is still very, very pertinent today.

FA: Of course. And then there’s the whole issue about polarized cultures. And this is a nation that has lived with polarized cultures since its founding and it still exists. 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.

One of the things Ed did was he consciously booked – it’s usually the case that you book two acts. You book the opening act and then the headline act. And he would book two acts. One would be a white group and one would be a black group. The white group would attract its white audience. The black group would attract its black audience, and they would be sitting in the same room.

FA: this is sort of a different strata of what was going on at the club. And then of course, one of the other strata of what was going on at the club was the involvement of politics outside the club.

But this was the sixties. This was the anti-Vietnam War movement. This was the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963 or 63, Ed gave the Freedom Singers a six-week gig, so they could come out to the West Coast. They could finance themselves to come out to the West Coast and sing in the Ash Grove. But while they were performing in the Ashgrove, go and do all the other fundraisings and tea parties and everything all over the Los Angeles area to raise money.

Me: So what did people do for housing when they came out for these six-week gigs?

FA: Ed had an apartment across the street. Sometimes they stayed at Ed and Kate’s house. Sometimes he was not extremely professional in this particular way. I mean, he wasn’t putting people up in a hotel. Maybe towards the end, maybe, but at the beginning, it was all done on a couch surfing basis.

John Cohen has a story. There’s this whole story about Mabel Carter coming to sing at the Ash Grove, which we don’t get into in the film at all.

Me: Oh, really?

FA: Well, I mean, it’s just too much. It’s its own story.

ME: It sounds like there are a few of those.

FA: She had a one-week gig, and day before she was supposed to come out, she gets a call from Laugh-In or Heehaw, one of these TV shows, and they want to put her on national TV. So she calls up and says, “Ed, I know I have a commitment to make the date, but I got this call to do National TV, this thing that’s very big.” He said, “Oh, go do it. Go do it. Go do it.”

But she (Maybelle) was on tour with Johnny Cash and June Carter before she was June Carter Cash. They were not married. He was married to somebody else. I don’t know who that was. I forget. And so Ed was saying, “What am I going to do? I have all this advertising out.” John Cohen was the guy organizing this whole thing to get Maybelle Carter out to the West Coast, out to the Ash Grove, and the whole thing fell through.

Finally Johnny Cash says, “Well, I’ll play those dates.” Okay, who’s going to complain about that? He played a weekend at the Ash Grove, and John Cohen describes how he’d been doing these big concerts and these big auditoriums. He had big, large stage gestures. When you’re working that kind of a show, it’s a different thing than working with 190 people within sneezing distance. And so what he did… he (John Cohen) said that Johnny came out on the stage and he said, “I know you all came to hear Mother Maybelle, and I’m really sad that she can’t be here, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to sing you some of her songs.

He got out an auto harp, and he put the auto harp down on the chair in front of him, and he strummed the auto harp like this. (Fred makes a motion with his hands.) He sang.

Me: Oh my God. That’s amazing. I don’t suppose there’s a recording of that.

FA: No, I don’t think so.

Me: Probably not. Or we would know about it.

FA: Yeah. When she finally got done with the TV thing, and she came out, it was a month later or something. Ed had also helped her book a gig in Phoenix and someplace else. But John Cohen was the guy who was sort of her road manager. I guess New Lost City rambles were backing her up.

So they came to Los Angeles and John met her at the airport and she’s walking down and he says, “Maybelle, where’s your guitar?”

She said, “Oh, I put it in luggage.”

He said, “You put your guitar in luggage…”

“Oh sure. I always do that.” They picked it up and they all went by car to Phoenix – all of them in one car. I mean, that’s the sort of level on which all of this was happening.

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?

Ed Pearl seemed to be using The Ash Grove as a community organizing space that included political activity as well as music, giving the Black Panther Party access to the office mimeograph machine so they could crank out their stuff. The same was true for Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott.

Steve Gillette: 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. After that, Pearl went on to produce a show on KPFK radio called Up from the Ash Grove.

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.

 

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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.

 

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.