Christine called me from the Village and told me her friend, Joe Marra, called her and invited her to his 85th. birthday party. She sat in the front row. We talked for two hours. She tells me a whole bunch of New York stories. We make a coast to coast connection. She’s got Psychic Vampires up the yin-yang too! I made her laugh with my tale of being Psychically Manwhiched by my Nutty-buns. New Yorkers understand verticel living.
“I get it from the top – and the bottom! I’m cooked – like a waffle!”
Christine tells me she hasn’t had a good laugh in a long time.
“No one has a sense of humor anymore!”
“Tell me about it!”
“Joe said he had to fire Bob Dylan because he emptied the joint with his squeaky voice.”
“Like an old squeeze box – with a hole in it!”
We talked about Jewish comedians, Jackie Mason, Heddi Youngman, Mel Brooks. She told me what a “lid” of pot meant. I didn’t know.
Then we turned our attention to her Famous NYC Vampire, Stefan Eins, who sucked the life out of her, he and his crazy stable of art skanks. I learned McGowen and her man moved to California to get into the pot farm business.
“There goes the neighborhood.”
“Stefan has become a inappropriate Shouter. I don’t know what is going to come out of his mouth.”
“Dementia. He should have gotten a manager – years ago! You both should have let me publish all the strange shit you two did together, like got get his giant canvases off that rooftop with a U-Haul. Chaining one of them up to a cyclone fence while you fought with his Austrian skank, is the stuff Art Legends are made of. For ten years the Springtucky Gossip Hens watched my every move. I made a mistake of giving Bottom Nutty-bun, an art book to read. I hope they don’t find out about the Springtucky rocks I sent you.”
Here are photos of Brook and Stefan with the world famous artist. Hermann Nitsch. I am going to see if I can get him to come to Springtucky and perform a Blood Voo-doo ritual. We need one after what happened to our Ducks. They got great Shaman priests in Stanford – no doubt! Neil Laudati has to get Hermann here to make art amends. I told him there were bad vibes lurking in Ken’s mural. You go to pay attention to your whacked-out artist-prophets – and your Master Augur!
If my aura had not been attacked, and severely waffled, I could have put up a stronger light-shield around our beloved Quackers! What a – defeat! You can thank Kim Hafner, who I want at my ritual crucifixion wearing a bloody Mu-Mu! Where were the Christian prayers? I seem to recall reading in the Book of Job the account where God dos away with the reading of animal entrails. A quote from Job in on the Kesey mural. This is the source of the hexes put on our beloved football team. I told you so!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
After our talk, I concluded there is no difference between the Village and Springtcky where I have established a cultural connection that I might put in a formal art show. After being forced to see the world from the eyes of The Seven, I realized Christine, Stefan, and I had many telephone conversation. Add Ben Toney, and Pirate Radio – along with Joe Marra, then one realizes I am their conduit. Who else is talking about these folks – here? A world, within a world. A art place.
I have concluded that Cheryl is a frustrated artist, and doesn’t know it. She should not be informed, and thus – jaded! I am going to let her do her things. ‘Bamboo – Dead’ is her masterpiece. ‘Love Chicken’ is the sequel to ‘Eraserhead’.
Kim Hafner’s extreme efforts to destroy, and keep all cosmopolitan ideas out of her and her families beloved Springfield, in itself is an art piece. She knew, when I did not, that our neighbors sensed I owned cosmopolitan energy, and, they wanted some of that. In this sense she too in an artist, the anti-thesis of art. I see her wearing this hat, and sporting a small goatee on her chin, that can be grown if she shaves there each day. Her plaid Mu-Mu should look like it is made from a Big Family Picnic tablecloth, with a slice of watermelon sewn on. How about, some ants?
To do heap-big Voo-Doo on the poor mental state of artists, is an ancient tradition. Sure we are Coo-Coo! Ms. Hafner brings much attention to this truth, saving me much time and effort. I owe her. She is our Guardian at the Gate. Our critic – AT LARGE! Artists across America will rejoice when they hear her little wiener dog barking.
“She’s coming to the opening of my show? I can just pee my pants!”
Here is my short Art Movie………Art Book vs. Springfield Phone Book – With Dog Pee’
John Presco
Copyright 2018
Cosmopolitan
| synonyms: | worldly, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane, glamorous, fashionable, stylish;
informaljet-setting, cool, hip, styling/stylin’
|
“This is art!”
Posted on October 29, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press
Tonight, my friend Stefan Eins had a show in New York at the Creon Gallery titled ‘The Criminal Core of the Republican Party’. Going to Stefan’s Facebook to see if someone had posted a review, I was blown away after I clicked on the START button. It was hard to stay in focus as my mind was whirled about in a Devil Wind of Chaos. The action was like the twister Dorothy and Toto are caught up in. There is much puckering of lips. I am reminded of Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a staircase’. Is this the Cat Fight of – the century? Or, is this ‘The Kiss Seen Round the World’?
“How dare you kiss my man on the lips!” says my friend Christine.
https://rosamondpress.com/2017/05/31/the-high-noon-blood-train/
A big night for the Night Owl and ’60s Village music scene
Joseph Marra sporting owl suspenders at his 85th birthday party at The Bitter End. Photos by Tequila Minsky
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | For one night earlier this summer, the Village music scene of the 1960s came to life once again on Bleecker St.
The occasion was the 85th birthday party of Joseph Marra, who ran the Night Owl Cafe, on W. Third St.
The fete’s venue was another famous (still standing) Village music club, The Bitter End, a few blocks away on Bleecker St.
In addition to Marra, who was sporting shorts and owl-pattern suspenders, stars from the Village’s musical heyday who once graced the Night Owl’s small stage performed, including the Lovin’ Spoonful’s frontman John Sebastian and bassist, Steve Boone, and Peter Sando.
From around 1963 to 1967, the Night Owl, which was located at 180 W. Third St., between MacDougal St. and Sixth Ave., played host to many of the era’s top acts, as well as some who were just starting out and weren’t well known — but would be soon enough. Local favorites the Lovin’ Spoonful were among the bands that began to make their name there.
Marra’s father owned the building and the space had previously been a restaurant. At first, the music venue had no alcohol, but later did get a liquor license.
“It’s hard, nightclubs in New York,” Marra recalled after the party, recalling all the regulations and red tape, while having a nightcap at Arturo’s pizza restaurant, on W. Houston St. “You’re battling the Fire Department, the Police Department.”
On another note, he proudly recalled, “They said I had the best ear in the business.”
His place drew a young crowd, but he said, “There weren’t drugs. There wasn’t alcohol.”
One thing that set him apart from other operators, according to him, was that he actually paid his acts.
Most of the Village venues from back in that day were known as basket houses, where a basket was passed through the audience to collect cash for the performers.
“My club paid everybody — not like the [Cafe] Wha? or [Cafe] Bizarre,” he boasted.
Recalling some of the memorable talent that played at his place, he said, “Tim Buckley — he could sing five octaves. I had Gram Parsons. He was a Greek god. I had a young Stephen Stills. He was gorgeous, he was blond. Nobody was in the place. Nobody knew him. Mary Travers used to come in my club and sit in the back with her shock of white hair, very serious. They used to call her ‘Big Mary’ because she was tall. And there was ‘Little Mary,’ Mary Vangi, who was a notorious drug addict. … [Peter] Sando, he used to jump off the stage.”
At first, his club catered to the folk scene. But in 1965, he transitioned to rock, which drew acts that people would actually pay to see.
“We had folk singers,” he said. “It was tough. You had 25 people for each folk singer — they didn’t spend any money. Bob Gibson was the biggest folk act I had. In ’64, I paid him $1,000 for a week, the most I ever paid. … I couldn’t make money with folk singers. I had to go to rock and roll. I had The Blues Project, I had the Lovin’ Spoonful.”
Along with the success stories, there were tragedies, too, great talents who just couldn’t keep it together.
“Tim Hardin, he wrote ‘Reason To Believe,’” Marra recalled. “He’d say, ‘Joe, I need $2 for a cab,’ 100 times a week. It wasn’t for a cab. … He was brilliant, but just too messed up on drugs.”
Hardin would fatally OD on heroin in 1980.
Another reason he closed the club, he said, was because he was having ear issues, which he chalked up to the loud rock music.
“I had trouble with my ears and balance,” he said. “It was like I was underwater. My Eustachian tubes were clogged.”
The fact that everyone in the place smoked probably didn’t help matters, either.
At the birthday show, there were also some former Night Owl audience regulars, like Ann Clemente, 77, a retired stewardess who flew in from Seattle just for the occasion.
“He really is a living legend,” she said of Marra. “I first met him when I was a student in 1962.”
Marra lived in the Village and Lower Manhattan for his whole life until moving to New Jersey a few years after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He currently lives in Battery Park City.
“I was down here when they bombed the first time,” he said. “They could have blown my ass up!
“My dad had a tiny, little bar on Downing St.,” he recalled. “I went to P.S. 3.”
Peter Sando, one of the Night Owl’s performers from the 1960s, performed at Joseph Marra’s party.
In another music club connection, the Cafe Wha? building used to be a stable where his grandfather — who had a fruit-and-vegetable business at Bedford and Downing Sts. — would keep his horse.
As for what happened with the Night Owl’s original location, he said, “My dad swindled me out of the building.”
Marra owned a brownstone on W. Houston St. between LaGuardia Place and Thompson St. but sold it in 1992.
“I had no money. I couldn’t eat the bricks,” he laughed.
Before the Night Owl was a music venue, it was a restaurant and late-night hangout, a franchise of Art Ford’s, which also had a location in Midtown. It drew some rough customers along with the newer Village types.
“You’d see these guys gambling — against hippies,” Marra recalled. “There were bowling machines, 20-feet long.”
Some of the patrons had to be catered to…carefully.
“You were trapped,” he said. “Some days I’d be there till 12 in the morning. They’d say, ‘Hey, kid, cook me a steak.’ We would get the musicians, the strippers, the gangsters. It was quite a mix.”
Nowadays, you can find Marra Wednesday mornings at the historic Caffe Reggio on MacDougal St.
“It’s the last authentic cafe, the Reggio,” he said. “It’s like Uncas, the last of the Mohicans.”
At the end of his birthday show at The Bitter End, Marra’s nephew and his assistant tossed out to the crowd T-shirts with a Night Owl design the late Keith Haring made for him 25 years ago. After he closed the music club, Marra relaunched the Night Owl as a poster and T-shirt store / head shop, eventually moving it to a spot closer to Sixth Ave., next to the current McDonald’s; Haring lived on the block, and Marra used to buy things for his own store at Haring’s Pop Shop, on Lafayette St.
“I asked him to do the design,” Marra said. “I said, ‘What do I owe you?’ He said, ‘Give me 100 shirts.’ He had just done an Absolut ad on the back of the buses for $250 million.”
The crowd got free Night Owl T-shirts featuring an original design by Keith Haring.
That Absolut figure might be slightly off, but Marra definitely got a good deal. The former music impresario had one shirt left and, working from the original design, and using a five-screen printing process, made 100 shirts to give away at his birthday party.
David Amram, 87, who was on the Village scene back during the Night Owl’s days, recalled it fondly.
“It was a wonderful, comfortable place,” the iconic multi-instrumentalist reflected. “It was fun. I would go there just to hear people play. The whole commercialization of the music scene changed it somewhat.”
Of Marra, he said, “He was always gracious and made everyone feel welcome. There were no ‘A’ tables. Everybody had an ‘A’ table.”
Rosamond Press 
Leave a comment