← Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
Takin' A Walk - Music History with Buzz Knight
Buzz Knight Welcomes Alan Pepper and Billy Altman to Explore The Bottom Line's Legendary Music History Journey
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- [00:01]
Alan Pepper
Taking a Walk.
- [00:01]
Buzz Knight
I'm Buzz Knight and welcome to the Taking a Walk podcast. Now, before there was a playlist, there was a room. Before algorithms decided what you'd hear next, there was Alan Pepper standing at the back of the bottom line in Greenwich Village, betting everything on the artist who would define generations. As owner of one of New York's most legendary music venues and the co Author of Positively, 4th and Mercer. Alan didn't just book shows and he created the stage where Bruce Springsteen proved he was the future, where countless careers were launched and where music history was written night after night. Today we're going to dive deep into the stories behind the stage. The village scene that changed everything and what it really takes to recognize greatness before the world catches on. And with Alan, we'll be joined by his co author Billy Altman next on Taking a Walk.
- [01:01]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:34]
Billy Altman
Please welcome aboard the Johnson family.
- [01:37]
Commercial Voice
The whole fam's here for the Disney Cruise.
- [01:40]
Alan Pepper
So you know we came to play. And listen. The adults are gonna have a ball. First we're chilling in the infinity pool.
- [01:48]
Commercial Voice
Onto massages at Sense's spa, then gliding.
- [01:52]
Alan Pepper
Into Star wars hyperspace lounge for a toast.
- [01:55]
Commercial Voice
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- [02:45]
Alan Pepper
Where you need them, whether it's in person with a local State Farm agent, on the phone, online, or through their mobile app.
- [02:52]
Billy Altman
Don't take a chance with insurance coverage.
- [02:54]
Alan Pepper
That may not meet your needs.
- [02:55]
Commercial Voice
And don't settle for insurance that may.
- [02:56]
Billy Altman
Only be halfway there when you need it.
- [02:58]
Commercial Voice
Get State Farm like a good neighbor.
- [03:00]
Alan Pepper
State Farm is there. Taking a walk.
- [03:08]
Buzz Knight
Well, Alan, it's so nice to be with you. And Billy Altman, it's so nice to be with you on the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [03:16]
Billy Altman
Great to be with you.
- [03:17]
Alan Pepper
Same here, Buzz.
- [03:19]
Buzz Knight
So, Alan, the bottom line at 4th and Mercer in Greenwich Village became the room in New York City. Take us back to that wild beginning. What made you open a music venue in the Village and what was your vision from that first time?
- [03:36]
Alan Pepper
Well, it's like I say in the book, possibly for the Mercer, which Billy and I have just completed, the bottom line was not only a physical place, it was really a concept of live music. And it developed from years and years and working in clubs and presenting music to a way that Stanley, my partner and I thought that music should really be presented, meaning that it should be in the foreground, not the background. And that it was. We wanted to open a music room where the thing that we were selling was not food and booze, but the thing that we were selling was music. And to that extent. Also, the concept was to have a.
- [04:29]
Billy Altman
Club.
- [04:31]
Alan Pepper
In what would be like an intimate little theater. So with that in mind, we actually put together a stage crew that other clubs didn't have. It was so new that we'd actually have two guys mixing sound, one house and one monitors stage hands to help the band in a lighting person. It was a full crew. I think there was six people. And in a club that was unheard of. We had no minimum. So you just had admission when you came in. That's all you had to pay for. We instructed the waitresses not to hassle anybody for drinks, to let them enjoy the music. And we took the attitude that food and beverage were there if you got thirsty or hungry, but under no circumstances was it something that was required. We got cash registers that slid open, they didn't ring, and we even had heavy duty paper and plastic utensils so that people were not disturbed by china and silverware as somebody was performing. So we really did think it out.
- [05:56]
Buzz Knight
I was just going back in my brain historically, and I felt like I was at that Jerry Jeff Walker show at the Bottom Line as you were explaining the scenario there. Alan, I'm so glad that you, after Talking to you a few years back that the book was able to come together. How did you and Billy come together on this?
- [06:20]
Billy Altman
After the club had closed in early 2004, I was asked to do a piece for Tracks magazine, which was kind of a short lived magazine that Anthony DeCurtis and Alan Light were involved in. And they asked me just to write up a thing about the club closing and some, some would somewhat of a history. And the piece came out really, really well and I interviewed Alan for it and of course I had been going to the club. My first show at the club was February of about a month after the club opened in 1974. My last show coming as a patron of the club, as a journalist was about five weeks before the club closed in early 2004. So I was there pretty much over the entire run of the 30 years. So. And I went to hundreds and hundreds of shows. So working on the article was a pleasure for me. I mean it was a sad moment because the club had closed, but to be able to relive some of those memories and then Alan can pick up the story from there. Fast forward about many number of years later.
- [07:22]
Alan Pepper
Well, what happened was I wanted to write this book for legacy purposes because I felt Stanley and I did something really special and I wanted to be a record of it and I wanted to tell that story. Had made a deal with a writer, not Billy, somebody else who was working with me, but he had a family situation which upset him so much that it was difficult for him to work on the book with me. And then I tried to reach out for a bunch of other writers.
- [07:59]
Billy Altman
And.
- [08:00]
Alan Pepper
I kept coming back to that article that Billy had written. Cause it had made such an impression on me that I actually bought several copies of it and I have it to this day. And a very good friend of mine said to me when I was telling her about the difficulty I was having finding a writer and I read her Billy's article, she said well that's your writer, that's the guy. So I reached out to Billy to see if he was interested and he was and we started to work again.
- [08:35]
Buzz Knight
I love the pace of the book in terms of all the great stories from this fascinating array of people. As somebody who grew up in Stanford, Connecticut and would go to New York City a lot work in New York City. So a lot of names that were very familiar to me. Alan, you first and then Billy, who are some of the ones in particular that you really enjoyed talking to and letting them tell their stories of bottom line, music history.
- [09:08]
Alan Pepper
Well the interesting thing. Well, obviously Springsteen. And he was very generous because he gave Billy 25 minutes. Billy was the one who did all the interviewing, and he did a great job. And he did a great job translating those interviews to the written page. There was so many people to interview, and we only got in a portion. But truthfully speaking, as Billy pointed out to me time and time again, we were covering 30 years of music. And so we had to be very judicious in those people that we selected. Because, as Billy pointed out to me in the beginning, because I said, I want a neural history. And he said, well, if you do, we've gotta do it chronologically. Which I agreed with, because it made total sense to me. And the one good thing that set us on a path was I had written down every show that we ever did. So I had from opening night till the very last night, along with people who sat in and ticket prices. So it gave Billy a path. I gave him a guide. And then he's got an extensive background in music and music history, so he was able to wind through this thing. I kid him because I've always said he was dealing with like a musical Rubik's Cube and he just had to line up everything. So rather than. To answer your question specifically, rather than Springsteen, which I was very gratified that he gave Billy the time. I was very moved by some of the things that Billy told me that some of the people mentioned, not only about me, but about working at the club. And that gave me an enormous amount of emotional satisfaction. Billy, you did the heavy lifting. So who are the people? Who are the people that you enjoy?
- [11:22]
Billy Altman
Well, it was fascinating because, as Alan said, you know, because the fact that the bottom line wasn't one particular style of music, you know, anything in the entertainment field could be on that stage from night to night. It wasn't a club that was known for the scene in the Hangars out and, you know, wasn't CBGB's or Studio 54. And again, because of the enormous time frame. So you had rock, you had folk, you had blues, you had jazz, you had country, you had spoken wor, you had theater pieces, you had, you know, at Cabaret kind of stuff. So trying to be judicious and who we spoke to, you know, we tried to get a list together. And Alan kept sending me endless lists of people to talk to. But what was great was that almost from the. From the very beginning, every artist that we approached, with, I don't maybe one exception, and talking to over 100 people that I talked to everybody had warm feelings about the club, had great respect for Alan and Stanley, about how the club was run, and then talking to people that worked at the club. So the great thing about being able to work on this and the many interviews that were done is that many people were excited to tell stories about things that happened at the club, things that mattered to their careers. And Bruce certainly was at the top of that list. But then people like Darlene Love, one of our great, great singers, and her whole path towards playing at the Bottom Line in the early 1980s and coming from Los Angeles to New York and staying at Alan's house and wearing some of Eileen, his wife's clothing, because she'd come with barely a little suitcase when they were working on Leader of the Pack, the great show that ultimately wound up going to Broadway. Some of them were great and some of the stories for me were very, very touching. You know, in the 90s when. When the club had their In Their Own Words series, where it was a bunch of songwriters and they were trying mix and match songwriters. And Alan did one show and he can tell you the story of how it happened. But Roger McGuinn from the Byrds and Pete Seeger did one show together, and this was in 1993 and 1994. Remarkably, it was the first time that the two of them had ever been on a stage together. When you could think about the fact that the Byrdes had, of course, had a giant hit with Pete Seeger's Turn, turn, turn in 1965. But then it turned out that Pete Seeger had been one of McGuin's idols from when he was a kid growing up in Chicago and taking banjo lessons at the Chicago School of Music. And Roger was able to give me almost a minute by minute rundown of the whole day of that performance, of spending the afternoon with Pete Seeger, going out to dinner at the Mineta Tavern in the middle of the Village. And then he mentioned to me, he said it was raining out and I bought a $10 umbrella on the street. He says, I still have it. It sits in the corner of the room. It's the Pete Seeger Memorial Umbrella. So some of those very touching stories meant a lot to me as a journalist and just a music fan and to hear these wonderful, wonderful connections. Also John Hyatt, talk to. He's a really funny guy and he was terrific. I can share one great story from the book that he shares. He talks about coming to play in New York and, you know, as a struggling singer songwriter and. And, you know, if, if you stayed at a hotel, you know, the record company would book it for you and charge it to you. So as many young people, and Alan can tell you much more than me about this, many people wouldn't stay at the hotel. They'd stay with a friend or something and hired would come to New York and he had a friend who'd moved up from New York from Nashville, who had been an opera trained singer, a classical singer, who then wound up on Broadway in Sweeney Todd as one of the villains in Sweeney Todd. And he was a good friend of John's. And so he said that, he told me that he, he was staying with his friend and he said to him, he said, listen, you think I should take voice lessons? And his friend said, you never, never take voice lessons. And so Hyatt says, but I told him, but you know, I can't sing. And he said, his friend said, I know, but you still shouldn't take voice lessons because whatever that little thing that you have will get ruined if you took voice lessons. So there were such surprises when, when I was able to, to interview some of these remarkable people, you know, running from, like I said, from Darlene Love to, to, you know, to Bill Sheft, the comedy writer for David Letterman, to Paul Schaeffer, to Lenny White, the great, great jazz fusion drummer who played in Miles Davis pitches brew, to Betty Buckley, the great Broadway star. So that's how wide our net was.
- [16:09]
Alan Pepper
For this book and some of the stories. Billy talked to Joey Stefko, who was the Detroit with Meatloaf, and he sheds a lot of interesting stuff about Meelov and Flo and Eddie and the Turtles and Flo and Eddie at the Bottom Line was always one of my favorite holiday traditions. I think they played 10 Christmas, New Year's Eve thing. And Howard Kaelin occupies several pages in the book and is hilarious. I mean, I've read this stuff over and over again. I still laugh when I'm going back and reading stuff, you know, Buzz, as easy as somebody might think writing a book like this is, it's not. I mean, it took Billy and I, I think a couple of years to put it together. And I had been working on it on my own for several years. But the advantage, although it was painful, the advantage of working with somebody like Billy, he's a disciplined journeyman, he's a great writer. And so he and I had moments of great fiction when he, he basically schooled me. You know, he, he said there were certain things that I brought to the table that I felt certain about and he pointed out to me on many occasions that you have to let. He didn't want it to be a thousand page tome. And he very clearly pointed out to me, you have to let speak for the rest of everybody. You can't interview every waitress, you can't interview every stage manager. And even when it came to music, I mean, there were times along the way that I felt that we were missing the boat. But he constructed such a roadmap. He's done an amazing job. The.
- [18:11]
Buzz Knight
More.
- [18:12]
Alan Pepper
And you can tell that by the accolades we've been receiving by people who were reading the book. Everybody talks about how well written it is, tip of the hat to Billy. They talk about how well organized it is and what the flow of it is. All of that. I mean, all of that is from Billy. But it ain't easy, and both of us have the scars to prove it. But it was. I mean, there were. Let me put it to you this way. There are still three more books, at least that could be done because it was just too much to cover.
- [18:55]
Billy Altman
Yeah, I would say that, you know, we had spirited conversation. Let me put it out. But one thing I will say is that because Alan is such a great fan and so passionate about music and about artists, that he showed me pathways in terms of who we would go to speak to. And I think he had a sense of which people would be able to really give me good stories and help us move through different areas of time, different styles of music that would help make it work. And again, one of the great challenges of the book is the book is as much about New York and the New York music scene and radio in the industry. So being able to kind of get all of those. But Alan's connections and his ongoing friendships with everybody on Earth, World's biggest Rolodex, perhaps, really helped clear. Clear that path for me a lot, because I knew going in that the people that we would be approaching would be forthcoming. Which, of course, for a book like this, is incredibly, incredibly important.
- [20:03]
Alan Pepper
Buzz. Let me just say this. When we sat down, you know, when you're. When you're trying to find a writer, it's a dance. Just like if you're courting. If you're dating a new person in your life, you're kind of getting to know them, but it's a dance to see if you two could actually dance well together. And I sat down with him and I said, okay, look, there are certain things that I'm really sure about. I want it to be an oral history, because I didn't see doing the story, the bottom line, without the voices of the people who were there. So I said, not only the musicians, but the customers and the people who work there. And I said the other thing that I'm really sure about is I want there to be a presence in this book of my partner who's no longer here to fill in the story, and my wife who's been very important to me as a muse and, you know, somebody that I connected with at an early on, an early age around music. Actually, I said I wanted their presence to be in the, in the book. And then the last thing I said is I don't want it to be a bunch of funny stories that happened at the club to show how wacky people are. I want it to have a narrative. I want it to be a beginning, middle and end. And along the way we'll include the wacky stories and we'll include people's idiosyncrasies. But to me, it's got to have, it's got to have a narrative. And those are things we never argued about. Those are things that he bought into immediately. And fact, one of the things, in retrospect, when I look back at him, he was very committed to giving me exactly what I wanted and sometimes I didn't see it, but very protective of me. So the book is very much A, what I wanted it to be and B, what my initial vision was, which is pretty remarkable when you think of all the ways we could have just gone, you're off in different directions. So I'm very pleased and very happy and I'm most gratified by the response it's getting, not only from people who worked at the club, but fans of the club. I'm getting emails from people who are still saying, I'm reading the book. I'm loving it. I just want you to know how much I'm enjoying how much I'm enjoying the book. So I'm very happy with the way everything turned out.
- [22:50]
Commercial Voice
We'll be right back with more of.
- [22:52]
Alan Pepper
The Taking a Walk podcast.
- [22:56]
Commercial Voice
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- [23:56]
Commercial Announcer
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- [25:54]
Commercial Voice
Welcome back to the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [25:57]
Buzz Knight
Well, since we call this podcast Taking a Walk, I have to ask you both a little bit of a lightning round question here because there's so many characters that are in the book that were part of the bottom line. So, Allan, you first. If you could take a dream walk with someone, who would you take a walk with? I don't care where it is. Maybe it's around where the bottom line was situated. But who would you take that walk with? And then, Billy, same to you.
- [26:24]
Alan Pepper
I would take it with my partner Stanley and my wife Eileen. You know, hands down, it would you.
- [26:30]
Billy Altman
See through all history or from the.
- [26:32]
Buzz Knight
Bottom line, whatever you wish, but I, I think we'll lean bottom line.
- [26:37]
Billy Altman
I, I would, I would envision that Buddy Holly did not die in his plane crash and that he was still living on 5th Avenue and 8th street, right by the, by the arch of Washington Square park, and would, and he would talk about shows that he went to at the club as an older guy. Things were so terrific there.
- [26:57]
Buzz Knight
That would be pretty amazing. I love your imagination, Billy, for sure.
- [27:02]
Alan Pepper
Hey, Buz, I just want to point out something to you, something that I pointed out to Billy early on, but he didn't need me to point it out, where the bottom line was. On that corner directly across the street was Folk City. That was the place that Dylan got that review, I believe. So Dylan basically found his commercial voice on one Corner of West 4th and Mercer and Bruce Springsteen on a parallel corner. So that's a very, historically speaking, that's a very valuable piece of musical real estate.
- [27:42]
Billy Altman
Yeah. And one thing that's amazing in the book is as Alan talks about one of the Springsteen shows, and they were completely sold out because there was such a buzz about it. And Alan told me the story of a woman who came up and wanted to get in, and there was no room. It was standing room only. And they had already squeezed in like sardines, anybody they could. And the woman actually said that to Alan. She said, you know, years ago, 10 years ago, wait, 15 years ago, right across the street, Bob Gillen had his show at Folk City. And I can, I have to get in to see now Springsteen doing something that's going to maybe mean as much. And they squeezed her in like a sardine.
- [28:23]
Alan Pepper
Both Stanley and I pushed her, pushed her in, but she was an older woman. She wasn't a teenager. She was somebody in her mid-30s. And she literally start to cry on the street corner. And we said, okay, you're going to wind up hearing much more than you're going to see. And we just pushed her in like two guys unloading furniture in a big truck.
- [28:48]
Buzz Knight
You know, I had an episode I recorded with Danny Fields, the character of. Of all characters from the Ramones and Lou Reed and so much history. So we were walking through the area, and he certainly lamented what he missed in terms of, you know, so much, you know, great energy and great vibes in. In the day. Have you both been around that neighborhood lately? And how do you feel when you're by there thinking of what was and what is no longer there?
- [29:24]
Billy Altman
It's just a loss, you know, I lived in the village throughout the 1980s and then was living up near West Point, about 50 miles north of New York. But my daughter, over the last number of years, had been living herself in Greenwich Village. And anytime I'd walk through the park and go through the corner there, and you just feel a loss of the culture of New York. And obviously, you know, cities change, neighborhoods change. The neighborhood physically is still the same. Washington Square Park's still there in the middle of everything. But just to know that you could be veering down the street on Mercer, and you get to the corner there, and it's just another building. And as you know, there's no sign up there. There's no plaque or anything like that. And so I always feel that. But you also feel I get a flood of memories. So when I go by, it's bittersweet on some levels. It's like when you go by an apartment building for anybody that's lived in apartment buildings, all this. You walk past an apartment building that you used to live in, and you go, gee. And you feel bad that you don't live there anymore, because you might have loved living there, but you wouldn't have stayed living there. So I think the passage of time for me has made it more bittersweet. I certainly, for the first number of years after the club was closed, you just walk by and you'd start clenching your fists. How could NYU have kicked these people out of there? My God.
- [30:49]
Alan Pepper
I actually have friends and acquaintances who tell me that they can't walk up that block, that they'll take a different route rather, and it'll take them a little longer, but they'll take a different route to get to where they're going, because it's still so painful to them after all this time. It was interesting when we were fighting NYU over the lease and trying to stay there. We were getting, or they were getting emails from, and one student wrote to them and said, I'm so disgusted with the way you've treated the bottom line. But more than that, I'm disgusted when I walk through the village and I see your banners on all these different buildings, it's like it's become your fiefdom. And that was from a student. The guy who was the president at that time did not see the value of what it was offering the student body and the city. He saw it just as a prime piece of real estate that they weren't getting enough rent for and that it was severely under market. Whereas the president before looked at the club as something of value for the university to support as well. You know, our fate was based on the guy who took over.
- [32:17]
Buzz Knight
You know, well, knowing what you know now of nyu, don't you sometimes think, well, maybe in the current environment, the way they have embraced aspects of the community and the way they've diversified everything that they do as an educational institution, that maybe they would have thought about it differently today?
- [32:40]
Alan Pepper
Yes, I absolutely do. And I'm. That's a very good point. I've absolutely thought about that. At the time, we were working feverishly to try and come up with a solution. And we were offering them, especially because of Clive Davis School of Music. We were offering them internships. We were offering them a lot of things that would have been of value to the students who were in that program. And to them, it was all about rent. They didn't want to hear about anything else. But yes, and that was the vision of the guy who was in charge. But as you point out, time goes by, new people take over, and people tend to see stuff differently. So, yes, I absolutely think if there was a different administration there. Listen, just to set this record straight, NYU was not wrong in wanting back rent that was due to them. And they were not wrong and they were not wrong about trying to move ahead to resolve the situation. But at the same time, where I think they might have been a little bit mistaken, there were better ways to resolve the situation. And once again, the guy who's making the decisions made the decision that eviction was the. You know, we had actually made a deal with them. But. And it's in the book, we'd actually made a deal with them. But at the last minute, they came to us with something that was so egregious that we. That we couldn't go along with them, so.
- [34:31]
Buzz Knight
And you had what would have been a burgeoning affiliation with Sirius xm. That would have been part of the future as well. I mean, it would have. That would allowed for, you know, other creative outlets, for sure.
- [34:47]
Alan Pepper
Yes. And I was. There was a discussion going on. Yeah, I won't even get into it. Yes, that could have been very valuable to everybody, but it was not meant to be.
- [35:03]
Buzz Knight
Do you sometimes wonder now in the future whether NYU is going to have this book be part of a course curriculum around the history of music around where the university is? I could imagine that.
- [35:18]
Alan Pepper
I could too, depending on who the. Depending on who the instructor is. Yeah, absolutely.
- [35:24]
Buzz Knight
Well, I have a feeling either one of you or both of you would somehow have your fingers on it if that occurred. Is that is my imagination gone wild?
- [35:33]
Alan Pepper
Al I would encourage NYU to use this book as part of their curriculum and order a lot of books. I would have them make it required reading for many of their classes.
- [35:49]
Buzz Knight
I think that's marvelous. I want to touch on the radio side of things, having been an observer of it and then a part of it as a part timer there in, in New York for WNEW FM and then over the years seeing other markets where radio stations had these incredible collaborations with. With clubs. Talk about the significance of WNEW FM to the Bottom Line.
- [36:21]
Alan Pepper
New was very, very important to me. First as a fan, I started listening to NAW way before the Bottom Line was open. And historically speaking, New, along with FM radio comes at a very interesting time because you have Woodstock and you have the success of Woodstock, which advertised basically on FM radio. The success of Woodstock showed record companies that there was a major audience out there that they were not reaching and a potential audience. And this audience was being nurtured by FM radio. It was training. AM radio used to play songs that were two and three minutes long and. Or two and a half minutes long. FM radio was playing album cuts. They weren't just playing singles and they were playing much longer tracks. And in that sense they were cultivating an audience and teaching an audience how to listen as opposed to having a very short attention span, wanting to go from one song to another song. And FM radio was also didn't have any borders. They play all kinds of music. You could go from jazz to folk to rock. And New was very successful at doing stuff like that. You could go to Led Zeppelin and Billie Holiday to whatever. So it was cultivating again an appreciation of all different kinds of music to younger people. And if you look at how the albums were marketed at that point. The covers were fascinating, the liner notes were interesting. And history music started to play into this, too, in terms of liner notes, in terms of origins of certain stuff, and reverence for older musicians who came before. And what started happening is AM radio would basically be playing things by writers from the Brill Building. FM radio was playing songs that were written by young guys who went out to get a guitar and to see if they could do it by virtue of seeing the Beatles. So there was a whole change that was happening. So we wanted to do live what New was doing on the air. We wanted to be the live version of what that radio station was doing. So I went from a fan being very excited to meet someone like Pete Fornitel, who was one of the first people that I connected with, to having deep relationships with Vin Skelsa and Meg Griffin and a whole lot of other people who populated that radio station. Dennis Elsass, Tom Herrera. I knew all those people, but I knew them as friends. I didn't know them just as somebody who. That I would. I would listen to. That station was so important to me, to tell me, discover music, to help me learn as a. I remember, I told him this. I remember being in my home doing something and hearing this songwriter, Loud and Wainwright sing a song called Motel Blues. And I stopped in the middle of my living room. I couldn't move, straining to hear every lyric, every part of the lyric that he was singing. Those things didn't happen on AM radio. They only happened on FM radio. So AEW was quite important to me.
- [40:22]
Billy Altman
And let me point out that I think what Alan was just talking about really speaks to what the bottom line offered us throughout its entire existence. Alan's passion for music and wanting to share it with people. In other words, it wasn't just sitting there. Dollars and cents. We're going to get this rack coming in. We're going to make this much money this week. Although Stanley's partner suddenly wanted to watch for the pennies and the nickels. But the idea is that Alan's lifelong job on the planet, in many respects, well, a great deal of it has been to turn people onto music that he thinks they should be turned onto. And of course, Alan, you know, one of his great heroes was Bill Graham, you know, who did the same. That's what Bill Graham did at the Fillmore. You know, he tried to just put shows together with different kinds of music to get people interested. And as Alan was saying, FM radio throughout the late 60s and early 70s up to really kind of the end of the 70s, I would say, especially, was a place where you could hear just about anything. You didn't have to go from. From station to station to hear different kinds of music. If you listen for a half an hour to WNEW or some of the other stations later, you know, you would hear this mix of everything. And the bottom line, as Alan said, wanted to present that on stage every single night so that whatever, who, whatever act was playing the bottom line that night, that's what the club was. It could be a jazz club one night, it could be a folk club the next night, it could be a rock and roll club the next night, it could be a comedy club the night after that. And I think it all just spoke to, you know, Alan's passion as a fan of music. And I've spoken about this before. A lot of the most memorable clubs, especially in a city like New York, were bar owners who started presenting music. In other words, the music came to them and they just started presenting acts because it helped bring more people in, et cetera, et cetera. But Alan and Stanley wanted to present a listening room from the word go. And it was the music that was the driving force. And I think because of that, their respect for artists and audiences really set and Buzz, you've probably been to a million clubs yourself. You know, there's a lot of club owners we've met over the years who really don't like the audience that much. There are club owners who really don't like the music acts that much. They think everything's a necessary evil to keep everything going. And at the bottom line, that was never what it was about. It was about respect for the customer and respect for the artist.
- [42:55]
Alan Pepper
Buzz, I'll tell you an interesting story. You know, I take this stuff very personally, and, you know, I. I try to put acts on that I thought my whole key was you put on an opening act that nobody's ever heard of, and hopefully they do so well that the audience who came to see the headliner walks out talking about the opening act. So the pairings were very important to me, or as Vin Skelser always says, the perfect segue. And when I mismatched, and I did mismatch, I took that very personally. So there was one show where I mismatched so badly based on a misconception of what I thought the music was about, that it wouldn't come out of my office during the. When the artists, I'd go downstairs during the intermission, I'd see people I'd schmooze, I'd hang out. I was so embarrassed at my mismatch. I just stayed upstairs. I did not want to walk around downstairs. That's how personally I took this stuff.
- [44:03]
Buzz Knight
What was the mismatch, Alan?
- [44:05]
Alan Pepper
Oh, you don't want to know.
- [44:06]
Buzz Knight
Oh, I desperately want to know. Because that's some of the fun of, I'm sure, thinking about this.
- [44:14]
Alan Pepper
Historically, you know who Bette Davis was?
- [44:18]
Buzz Knight
Bette Davis?
- [44:19]
Billy Altman
Yeah.
- [44:20]
Alan Pepper
Not the actress. No. Bette Davis was, for all intents and purposes, she lived with Miles Davis and I think was married to him. Bette Davis was the one who basically pushed Miles in the direction of not only going electric, but, you know, to reaching out and to incorporate much more of what was happening. She turned him onto Sly. She turned him onto a lot of stuff that she thought he should be aware of. And so basically, for that creative period, she was a muse on a lot of levels, all right? And she was a performer who sang. But she come out on the stage and do one of those fuck me. You know, like, whatever, whatever. You know, really pushing the envelope to a point of, whoa, what is the. What is this? And I paired her with an older gentleman who played jazz piano and had a gospel thing happening or blues thing happening. Les McCann. So Liz McCann was drawing an older audience that was like totally into jazz. And Les McCann was doing a certain kind of thing. Bette Davis was on the. Suck it. Fuck me. And I went, holy shit. Holy moly.
- [45:41]
Buzz Knight
You knew something was a little awry.
- [45:43]
Alan Pepper
Oh, my God.
- [45:45]
Buzz Knight
Well, that pro, she probably taught Miles the trick of turning his back on everybody, I imagine.
- [45:50]
Alan Pepper
No, that. That he already learned a long time before. I know.
- [45:54]
Billy Altman
Yeah.
- [45:55]
Buzz Knight
Where are the tapes from the live new FM broadcast? Does anybody know?
- [46:03]
Alan Pepper
Mark Chernoff told me that at the point.
- [46:08]
Buzz Knight
Am I going to cry? Am I going to cry at this, Alan?
- [46:11]
Alan Pepper
No, no, no. He told me that some of the. He. He intervened and just spoke to somebody there and said, you can't destroy a lot of this stuff. And he said, theoretically, they're stored somewhere. He knows. He knows where it is. I don't. But I have. We've put out a number of bottom line shows on record, and several of those were the new broadcast. Taking a look.
- [46:43]
Buzz Knight
Yeah, I remember there was a limited run of them. Right?
- [46:46]
Alan Pepper
Yeah. And so those, like the Harry Chapin show, which was wonderful. Kenny Rankin, there's a lot. And then we have a lot of stuff in our archives. Cause I have a lot of those tapes that we can't get clearance for we have a phenomenal whatchamacallit hole and O show where they sound fabulous. And, you know, we can't get clearance on. We have Billy Joel, you know, we have a lot of really good stuff and we just can't get clearance on any of it.
- [47:15]
Billy Altman
And there's also a number of things that are available on Wolfgang's Vault, if you know that website. Yeah, there are a lot of bottom line shows that you can listen to from there, which for me was very helpful working on the book. The Dolly Parton show is on there, for instance, when she came and played in 1977 and very smartly removed all of her fake nails when she started to finger pick the guitar and one of them fell off. And then she just stopped her show and proceeded in front of Mick Jagger and Springsteen and every big record company person in New York just took a second down there. She's just talking to everybody. She's just taking the fake nails off. No. Damn it. I can play this G chord without this.
- [47:56]
Buzz Knight
Oh, that's fantastic. Listen, the book is wonderful. I encourage you to get Positively fourth in Mercer. It is a look at not only the music history and the bottom line, but it's a look at New York history, Greenwich Village history. I am so grateful, Alan Pepper and Billy Altman, that you. You took the time to be on Taking a Walk. And I. I just loved going back and. And it brought back. I love the way you describe it, Bill. Yeah, a lot of it is bittersweet memories when you're by there, but when you read the book, it's all sweet memories.
- [48:32]
Alan Pepper
You know, Buzz, first of all, thank you very much for that. But one of the things I've been impressed about and actually has made me feel great is one of the things consistent in the reviews. Everybody, he says it's not nostalgia. It's. It's not a nostalgic trip down memory lane that it offers so much more, which is what you just pointed out. So thank you for saying that and thank you for the kind words.
- [49:04]
Billy Altman
Absolutely.
- [49:05]
Buzz Knight
Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
- [49:08]
Alan Pepper
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast.
- [49:12]
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- [49:14]
Alan Pepper
Friends and follow us so you never miss an episode.
- [49:18]
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Taking a Walk is available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [49:27]
Alan Pepper
We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.
- [49:35]
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Do you think this one's still good. Free milk.
- [49:38]
Alan Pepper
Oh, mate, that expired in 1993. Dang it. Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.
- [49:49]
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Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.
- [49:52]
Alan Pepper
Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.
- [49:54]
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It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.
- [49:57]
Billy Altman
Please welcome aboard the Johnson family.
- [50:00]
Commercial Voice
The whole fam's here for the Disney Cruise.
- [50:02]
Alan Pepper
So you know, we came to play.
- [50:04]
Commercial Voice
And listen, the adult are gonna have a ball.
- [50:08]
Alan Pepper
First we're chilling in the infinity pool.
- [50:11]
Commercial Voice
Onto massages at Sense's Spa, then gliding.
- [50:14]
Alan Pepper
Into Star Wars Hyperspace Lounge for a toast.
- [50:18]
Commercial Voice
We're even gonna kick back with Mickey.
- [50:19]
Alan Pepper
On Disney's private island.
- [50:21]
Commercial Voice
That's how we get down. Cause Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play.
- [50:27]
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- [51:01]
Alan Pepper
This live check in is brought to you by State Farm. Por que elienestar de tu familia ta mien meresa protecion. When we had our first baby, I had it all planned out, right? Everything, apps, books, todo. Now that baby number two is here, I'm definitely going more with the flow. Hi, I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and I've learned that with family, it's not about being perfect, it's about showing up every single day. Breathe respira, change a diaper, and I guess, repeat like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.
- [51:32]
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