Short life of the cool spot in the high desert

"And when it was over, it felt like a dream," warbled Neil Young in "Broken Arrow," one of his finest early pieces. The dream of lasting a long time is what anyone opening a nightclub, roadhouse, or other music-entertainment venue hopes for. When it comes to feeling like a dream, of course, you've heard what they say about the '60s -- if you remember them, you probably weren't there to begin with.

The average life span such businesses can look forward to in Santa Fe tends to be about six to seven years. That is, if you're lucky enough to get past the first few months. Figuratively speaking, Cerrillos Road and Guadalupe Street are littered with broken rock dreams.

Get a half-life

That the Paramount Nightclub (which closes its doors forever at the end of June) had a run of seven years is extraordinary, and all those involved in making it happen are to be applauded. Its passing might prompt a precipitous decline in the number of national touring acts that stop in Santa Fe to deliver the kind of rough 'n' ready, often beer-soaked, and occasionally ecstatic shows that all the Lunas, Club Wests, and other clubs in the past have hosted.

If you look around town today, you'll find that audiences don't do much dancing at "theaters," such as the Lensic Performing Arts Center or the James A. Little Theater. Evangelos staked its claim as Santa Fe's smoky downtown hangout of choice long ago and doesn't need national touring bands on the menu. The virtually brand-new WilLee's Blues Club can't really squeeze enough people in to guarantee the necessary receipts; no wonder the promoter of the recent Sonny Landreth show moved it to the James A. Little.

Bruce Dunlap's smallish Gig, on Second Street, offers an intimate and mellow, nonrowdy atmosphere. Warehouse 21, which certainly can be rowdy (as far as decibels are concerned), isn't really a club, and the musically adventurous High Mayhem Studios on Lena Street could be a bit too far off the grid -- artistically, if not physically -- to become wildly popular; plus, they don't sell alcohol or food.

Until the next attempt to get a full-time traveling-roadhouse-attraction scene going in town, it may be that the local live-music lover may have to set his or her sights farther north on N.M. 285/84, at the Camel Rock Casino. Or south perhaps, along Interstate 25 to the dazzling Sandia Resort & Casino complex. Either way, music lovers could find a steady diet of acts such as Bobby Goldsboro reviving "Honey," or a choreographed quintet of eighth-generation Temptations soundalikes, or other faded pop stars on the Indian-gaming-parlor circuit.

Trail of beers

While we can only speculate about what the future may hold, the past is always with us, forever in soft focus and golden hues. Longtime locals recall clubs now long gone, nightspots with names like Bourbon & Blues and the Turf Club, both of which could be found along Cerrillos Road in the '70s.

Guitarist and songwriter Jack Clift, who has been here since he was in eighth grade, recalls another Cerrillos Road watering hole called El Corral, where he played his very first professional gig. "An enormous fight broke out at one point," Clift recalled. "Some guy ripped a leg off a table to use as a weapon." Similarly, the recently departed country hangout Rodeo Nights was ironically characterized by one person as a place where "you could go to get your face stomped."

Grisly tales of fear and loathing on South Cerrillos Road notwithstanding, when the subject turns to the history of music and nightclubs in Santa Fe, all roads lead directly to the Line Camp Restaurant and Dance Hall. As fate would have it, the Line Camp was in Pojoaque, but that detail doesn't conflict with it being remembered as the area's archetypical, mythical nightspot. Indeed, most folks agree that the Line Camp was the venue that put Santa Fe on the map for touring musicians. Before the Line Camp came along, a show in New Mexico pretty much meant Albuquerque.

The building that housed the Line Camp from 1979 to 1986 -- still in use today -- dates back to 1934, when it was owned and operated by Candido Valdez. Brothers John and Julian Harvey purchased Valdez's Pojoaque Canteen (as it was then known) and unveiled the Line Camp on Mother's Day 1979. Over the next seven years -- the Line Camp's doors closed May 8, 1986 -- the list of musicians who entertained at the venue grew to include John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, Three Dog Night, Taj Mahal, Keith Richards, Blood Sweat & Tears, Bo Diddley, Etta James, Joe Ely, Country Joe McDonald, Flaco Jimenez, and many others.

John Harvey, now employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, recently characterized the live shows as the "honey" that drew the crowds to the Line Camp. But he admitted it was the beer and liquor that most of his patrons made a beeline for, and he maintains that you can't have a successful club without liquor to offer customers. He and his brother decided to close the Line Camp in 1986 when police stepped up pursuit of late-night drunken drivers along N.M. 285/84. "We were drawing people from Santa Fe, Española, and Los Alamos," he explained. "And they all had to get in their cars and drive home after the shows were over."

Those who regularly frequented the club agree the Line Camp was a place where people went to get loose and party. "It was so twisted in there," said Clift, adding that along with alcohol, cocaine often circulated freely, a detail that makes one look at the club's name in a different light. When the club closed, John Harvey boasted to The New Mexican, "We never had a stabbing or shooting." Asked to sum up the Line Camp's allure during his interview with Pasatiempo a couple of weeks ago, Harvey quoted one of the touring musicians, who called the club "a swampy oasis in the middle of a dusty wasteland."

High, dry, and fly-by-night

By the time the Line Camp called it quits, downtown Santa Fe had a music-oriented nightclub of its own. Club West operated in a somewhat narrow space at the intersection of Sandoval and Alameda streets.

Local musician Al Faaet recalls hearing jazz pianist McCoy Tyner at Club West at the end of 1984 or beginning of 1985 and names a subsequent night when Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition blew the lid off the place as a highlight. Faaet was involved in bringing live music to a restaurant called Comme Chez Vous, which was located in Plaza Mercado between 1988 and 1990. Faaet described the Comme Chez Vous music vibe as decidedly experimental and improvisatory, a precursor of High Mayhem. He fondly recalled one particular group that played the room, comprising Tom Guralnick on bass saxophone, Wells Jones on guitar, Zimbabwe NKenya on bass, and Faaet on drums.

There have been other brief aberrations. In fall 1996, a small space located along Second Street behind Santa Fe Stone opened as the Poorbox Theater with a fine concert by the East Coast jazz group TanaReid. Subsequent shows featured Zimbabwe NKenya's African Space Project, but by early 1997 interest had waned and the Poorbox closed soon thereafter.

Another short-lived experiment in live entertainment happened from 2001 to 2002. Located not far from the site of the Poorbox Theater at the Candyman Center, the so-called Dam Cafe (the name was short for Amsterdam) was a cramped two-story space that played host to the earliest incarnations of the avant-garde noise band Invisible Plane, which is High Mayhem's house band. The Dam Cafe brought out a younger crowd, and the vibe was good, but the place didn't even last a year.

The major Santa Fe nightclub that bridged the period between Club West's demise and the opening of the Paramount was Club Luna -- the Southwest branch of a small network that included similar operations in Texas and Florida. Between the time it opened in the summer of 1992 and the time it closed in October 1994, Club Luna was a happening place.

Located in the 500 block of Cerrillos Road near its intersection with Paseo de Peralta, Luna was a cavernous space that had a narrow balcony along one side, from which one could watch the action below on the dance floor. A separate lounge room had a pool table. Lots of interesting acts played Luna, including Danny Elfman's Oingo Boingo, John Hiatt, Freedy Johnston, Pavement, and Michelle Shocked, who was the headliner that October night in '94 when the music died. But the most famous Luna shows, by far, happened over a hot July weekend in 1994 when Smashing Pumpkins played on two consecutive nights in preparation for the band's starring role in the Lollapalooza Festival. The place was packed, wall-to-wall, with people, and the joint was truly jumping.

At the Paramount, the national entertainment was an eclectic mix (the club also regularly offered opportunities for local bands and DJs and hosted the 2004 High Mayhem Festival). One of the venue's first national bands was Cracker, which played countryish alt-rock; its last was Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards and her quartet. In between were Lucinda Williams, Jonathan Richman, Los Lobos, Koko Taylor, Rickie Lee Jones, Warren Zevon, Chucho Valdés, Eliades Ochoa, Tinariwen, and even an extremely popular and entrancing group of Tuvan throat singers. Not everyone, however, was enthralled. One heard grumblings about the club's sound system, and some folks were upset to find very little seating.

Artist and designer Michael Motley, a frequent concertgoer and clubgoer, objected to having to stand throughout an entire show. Asked what his dream nightclub would be like, Motley identifed his preference for a venue that wouldn't serve liquor or allow smoking. And while he admits that nightclubs are always going to be fueled by "booze and smoke," he echoes the sentiments of many middle-aged concertgoers when it comes to cigarette smoke.

There were nights at the Paramount when it seemed that half the audience had pledged to consume a pack of smokes every hour. Even performers complained about the smoke, and flutist Herbie Mann demanded a smoke-free environment when he played the Paramount's smaller venue, Bar-B (at the time of Mann's concert, it was known as a "cigar" bar).

What then, does it take for a club to succeed in the City Different? It seems clear that the music itself needs to focus on the bluesy, folkish, countrylike roadhouse sounds -- those grittier and dustier genres that go hand in glove with a Wild West image. For the most part, it would seem that alternative rock is still an Albuquerque thing, as are the heavy doses of mainstream and avante-garde jazz that Albuquerque's nonprofit Outpost Performance Space purveys.

And while many older concertgoers forgo cigarettes and liquor, there appears to be consensus that a club can't have a viable life expectancy without offering alcohol. Food, too, seems to be a draw. Indeed, Motley said his dream venue would be a place that provided "a great meal and a wonderful show." Which, as he points out, is what most of the enduring jazz clubs in major cities have realized.

Paul Boileau, a sometime concert promoter and performer, agrees that food and drink are essential elements. Like Motley, Boileau looks to New York City jazz clubs as a model. Accordingly, he yearns for the day when a Santa Fe nightclub could offer acts in two- and three-night residencies that would give the players an opportunity to settle in, relax, and build rapport with an audience over time. Until that day, though, we will consider ourselves lucky when another full-time nightspot opens, and the stream of one-nighters resumes.