Katrina Morse: All right, we’re rolling. So, I guess I’d like to begin, if you could give a brief history of the founding of the Phoenix Landing, what your vision was.
Joe McCabe: Probably just right from the start there, when we came to Boston about 23 years ago, and we lived in the usual Dorchester and Southie and them places. And then about 19 years ago I came to Cambridge and I knew that if I was going to live anywhere it would be here. I was still traveling around the world, I wasn’t, I didn’t mean to stay here, if you know what I mean. When I came to Cambridge I thought I’d hang out here for awhile. I passed by this building one day, it was derelict, it was completely covered with, it looked nothing like it is now, it was just covered in posters and garbage and stuff. I looked in the window and the back of it had collapsed down like halfway through the bar there, had collapsed. I got to calling the landlord and he told me to come up. It used to be a bar, it used to be a women’s bar—lesbian bar, I suppose you’d want to call it—a few years before that. And then it had been empty and derelict for about five years, it had burned down. So he said if we rebuilt it he would help us with the license because he had the license, and in them days the license couldn’t travel from here to The Middle East or from here across the street, it had to stay right here. So he couldn’t get rid of the license. So anyway, we decided we’d do it. We build a lot of the bar on a regular Irish bar, standing, talking bar I suppose you’d want to call it, we didn’t envision televisions, we envisioned more traditional music, more Irish-y stuff then. It wasn’t until we got to Central Square that we realized the huge diversity, you know, the Irish were just a tiny minority in this town. So we gradually moved away from just Irish stuff. We tried to use live music for awhile, but The Middle East, it was in full swing, TT The Bear’s was there, The Green Street Grill was still doing music at the time, and there might have been somebody else. Anyway, they accommodated the neighborhood so well that we couldn’t bring anything to the Square. So then we decided we’d try DJs. And at the time house and trance and dance music was all the rage in Europe. A lot of the young Irish kids here that came later after us, in the eight or nine years after us, they were bringing music and DJs. So we put one in on Tuesday night and then one on Wednesday. Before the year was out we were six nights a week DJs. Then in the last fifteen years we’ve got fantastic recognition. Monday night is the longest running reggae/hip hop night in the greater Boston area. Thursday night won an international award for the longest consecutive, unbroken drum and bass night anywhere in the world. So they’ve been here must be eleven years, no, thirteen years for the drum and bass and eleven years for the reggae. Then we have a DJ plays Friday and Saturday night—he’s been here fifteen years. He plays 80’s, 90’s, you know that sort of regular music, chart, pop music, whatever you want to call it. Tuesday we do have live music now. We have the Berklee School of Music. They come up every Tuesday evening and they bring three guests. So you’ll have forty minutes of each band. So we’ve had some great musicians pass through here lately, but they’ve only been here less than a year so we don’t see the whole impact of it, but it’s been fun. It’s been nice to have some live music around.
KM: How would you describe the music scene in Cambridge as a whole? Do you feel connected to it as a community, do you feel like there’s a Cambridge music community?
JM: No, there seems to be a big break in the live music in the last ten years, only the last two years does it seem to be coming back a little bit. For the last eight or nine years people could starve to death being in bands around here. It just didn’t seem to be—even The Middle East went DJs there. I think they’re actually extending the DJ nights because live music was so hard to produce and get people to come listen, it just seemed to have gone out of fashion. But that might be just me. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a live band. I went to see the Steel Pulse last week over in the Paradise. They’re an 80’s reggae band from England. That would be the only live music I’ve seen in six or seven years. I was getting the feeling and the impression that the live music—there used to be the Green Club on Green Street and they used to do all sorts of music, punk, ska, you know that sort of stuff, the real edgy stuff, and I think they’re gone now as well, the Green Street’s gone. TT The Bear’s, most of the time I don’t even know it’s open any more. I never see any action around there. Years ago you’d always see a line and you’d always see trendy musician types hanging around, they’d come up here, they’d get something to eat and have a few beers before the show. But that all stopped. They just weren’t here. I think DJs don’t build a community the way live music venues do for some reason. We’ve had the biggest DJs in America pass though here and people come to see them but they’re usually from somewhere else. You’ll get fifty from Cambridge and the rest will come from as far as Mithuan or wherever. Certain DJs only hit certain people, if you know what I mean.
KM: Is there a particular type of music that you would like to see played at the Phoenix Landing that you haven’t had? Would you like to see more live music as opposed to DJs?
JM: No, not really. I didn’t actually like dealing with bands. Even the worst band I ever had in there thought they were U2. You’ll have fifty people in there on Tuesday night. The band will come, start up, and forty of them would leave. You’d try to tell the band, ‘maybe bring it down a bit, maybe turn your mic’, but they’d never listen. They’re the rock stars, even thought they’d be only fucking seventeen. I found it very hard to deal with bands so I didn’t really miss them when they went. The Middle East, that’s their job, they do a great job at it. I wouldn’t even pretend to be a live music expert. I’ve tried everything here. I’ve tried jazz ensembles, blues, Sunday afternoon I have a couple of kids from the college of music down here come and they work from 4:00 to 6:00. Mostly experimental stuff. They’re using computer generated music as well as instruments. They have drums and guitars but they also have computers and when they sing into the mic and the computer shows a different sound. You kind of have to see it. They’re more scientists than musicians I think. A crew comes up and they wear these white doctor’s coats and they have more computers than instruments.
(Harold interlude)
KM: Can you talk a bit about any memorable shows or artists you’ve had come through here? Do any stick out in your mind?
JM: Yeah. We’ve had some really big…near the end of our live music we had a lot of Canadians. We had the band The Great Big Sea, I don’t know if you know them, they’re pretty big in Canada, and they introduced us to a band called the Tragically Hip. They’re like U2 in Canada, I mean these guys are gods. Because we were Irish we didn’t get too excited about who the Tragically Hip really were, we became friends with them. When they come down to Boston, they have a brother who lives here and I hang out with them and then we go for dinner and drinks and they come and hang out here. If there was one Canadian in there and he’s seeing two of the Hip guys sitting there, within forty minutes there’ll be one hundred and fifty Canadians in here. That did happen to us one Sunday morning, the kids just piled in ‘cause these guys are huge. That sort of thing. And we’ve had ?? from ??, he’s been hanging out here. Colin Farrell hung out with us, he was doing that movie down the street here about the C.I.A. agent [The Recruit]. And he DJ’d here one night.
KM: No kidding.
JM: Yeah, he hung out for about four days. And who else. We had an awful encounter with Shane McGowan from the Pogues. That was some fun. He got here at ten in the morning and he started drinking. And he drank about, I’d say one hundred people, he drank about one hundred people out of the bar. Got them drunk, they were falling out the door. Then I took him over to my other bar about at about 9:00 and me and him started drinking till about twelve. And I put him in the car to go to the airport to go to Chicago to play the next day, and the airport sent him back. So I brought him back here and we stayed here—I’m not sure whether you can print this or not—we stayed here till about five in the morning drinking, a whole bunch of us. Then I brought him home to my house down the street. Put him on the couch, and then we get up the next day, came here and drank all day again. His people were looking for him. He’s got a Scottish guy who minds him. He’s got a minder. He tracked us down. He left with the minder and we thought we’d seen the end of him, and an hour later he came back in the cab again. We were drinking all that night. We didn’t go home that night, we stayed here. The next morning, we had to get rid of him.
KM: He didn’t want to leave?
JM: Ah. And the guy could drink. He could drink for Ireland. Well the funny thing was, in his drunkenness, his pure drunkenness, he’d stop for a minute and he’d write a small poem, you know, and he’d just hand it to you. It’d look like it were leading to something else but I didn’t mind, but he was getting, in his stupor, the drunker he was getting the more artistic he was becoming, it was starting to come out of him then, he was telling stories and poems and singing songs, we actually had a great time with him. We still talk about him. We have a great photograph of him sitting at the bar. He was there by himself for an hour or two. People thought he was a bum, the guy was in bits. I mean he was fuckin’ in bits. I was gonna bring him into the Goodwill to see if he wanted to change his clothes. Filthy! I brought him home and the kids told their mother there was a, what do we call them, not a banshee, a monster, I suppose, downstairs on the couch. So when she came down she said ‘and who the fuck is this guy?’ I said ‘you leave him alone, he’s a friend of ours’.
KM: He’s got a pretty scary aesthetic going on.
JM: Oh yeah, the guy is in bits, but again—when I met him and we got talking and he realized he was in a safe environment, he just, that was it, there were no barriers, no boundaries, he was hanging out with us until it was time for us to go, you know. Till he decided he was going. He might be one of them characters, if he feels uncomfortable at all he probably shuts down or walks away, but because he didn’t feel uncomfortable we couldn’t get rid of him.
KM: Did he cause any problems? Start any fights or get rowdy?
JM: No, well, a few times he did, but you couldn’t fight the guy. You know, you have to take him for what he is, a very drunk artist. Anybody who would actually try and fight him, they’re the assholes, really. This guy had no strength. He had strength to drink, that’s all he had. Like any drunk, when he got really angry he lashed out, but we only had him for three days so I couldn’t tell you his life story or his character. None of us remember any of the angry bit, we just remember him waking up, although he was awake he’d tell a wake up, and then he’d ask for a pen and start writing stuff. Then he’d be gone again for another half hour, you didn’t know where he was. It was a real encounter. But the other guy, Colin Farrell, he knew he was famous and a rock star. We had a DJ in here, a guy from New York. My manager just left yesterday for her week’s vacation—she remembers everything, all the names and dates and schedules and stuff. But we have a DJ comes up from New York, an Irish guy, and in New York he plays to two thousand, three thousand people. But when he comes to Boston he plays a room like this because he knows he can get two hundred people who appreciate him, and we’ll always have a line of fifty outside who can’t get in. So he was playing that night so I introduced him to Colin Farrell and within a half an hour Colin Farrell said he wanted to DJ. He wouldn’t have been as much fun, plus he was a raving alcoholic, a real alcoholic, Colin Farrell. He wasn’t a good drunk, you know what I mean? He actually had a fight with another Irish guy here. They actually physically went at it. That sort of guy—but the other guy [McGowan], just completely different.
KM: Do you get a lot of the Irish community coming into your club?
JM: We do, but there’s less and less. This bar right now is probably ninety-seven percent young Americans. Ten, fifteen years ago there was eighty percent Irish immigrants. A lot of them went home in the last fifteen years. Because the modern immigrant didn’t need to stay away forever. Previous immigrants, when they get on the boat they were never coming back. People are getting on jumbo jets, and as soon as the Celtic Tiger showed up in Ireland, they were gone. I had three brothers here and three of them left with their two wives and the other guy went back anyway and got married back there. America didn’t have, I suppose, the mystique it used to have for immigrants, for whatever reason. Like everything else, if there’s work and a good life in their own country they don’t really want to go anyway, you know? And they did go back. Right now we’re probably ninety-seven percent American. And of that ninety-seven percent at least forty-five percent are Cambridge people. Reggae/hip hop night on Monday is one hundred percent Cambridge. They almost police it themselves. If kids come in from Roxbury or Boston they will tell us and we usually ask them to leave because once there’s a mix—we had a shooting at the pizza shop which we got blamed for. One guy was watching their customer and he went into the pizza shop and the man came over and shot him. He was in our bar, you know. Then another guy got shot in the arm two years later. He was from Medford, I think. The guy that was shot and killed here, he was, not Haitian, there’s another group of Africans that are having a war, they’ve been having a war for fifteen years now. Harold, who are them Africans that keep shooting each other? Not Haitians, the other guys? They’re having a feud?
Harold: Well, the thing was, in the late eighties, ok--
JM: No, no, remember the guy that was killed here, what was he? Cape Verdean. That’s who he was. The Cape Verdeans, nasty. Nobody likes them. They were having a gang war in Boston. They must have killed about ten of them in the last ten years. One of them came over here to Cambridge ‘cause he thought he could get to Cambridge and have a safe night. That wasn’t the case. Anyway, right now, on a Monday night in here it’s one hundred percent young Cambridge people. To cause any grief, to stop any trouble, they will point out people. ‘See those three kids? They’re Roxbury kids, they’re here for nothing but trouble.’ I’ll walk up to them and say ‘hey guys, take a hike.’ And since we’ve been doing that, we’ve been doing that now for about six years, it’s great. These people are our neighbors and friends, you know?
KM: How do you go about booking the shows? I know you have a lot of long-standing people…
JM: That works both ways. Back when we didn’t have residents we would just go to where the action was. See if we liked the music, if we liked the crowd, then we’d approach the DJ. We could always offer them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, because you don’t want to take a guy and give him your Saturday night. That’s how it built. You might take Tuesday and find out that he’s bringing a full house every Tuesday, but he can only work Thursday. That’s how he’d move to Thursday then, and we’d move Thursday back to Wednesday or Tuesday. Eventually they settled in. But now, if the house DJ on Wednesday is leaving he will come to us with a back up DJ. He’ll say, ‘these guys do a show here and here and he’s been with me for so long, I’d like to—‘, so we’ll give him a shot and if he can hold onto the night that’s fair enough. And then through the DJ community, I think we might be the only, or one of the few independent rooms in this area. Definitely in Cambridge and maybe in the Boston area. And we can hold two hundred people. So even a famous guy from England or Ireland, even the bigger cities, New York or Miami, in their respective cities they might be big but when they come here two hundred people is probably the best that most of them can do, you know? It’s like some of the bands I’ve seen at The Middle East over the last twenty years. You wouldn’t get a chance to see them in Ireland because there’d be a thousand people trying to see them. You come in here and you go up there and buy a ticket to The Middle East and be shocked that you’re looking at this band, you know? That’s where we get on the DJ side.
KM: Do you feel that in this area or in Cambridge in general there are certain types of music that are under- or overrepresented?
JM: Can’t say I have, no. Probably not enough representation as I said, if it wasn’t for The Middle East and TT’s they’d have nowhere to play. The Green Club they used to look after the edgy stuff, ska and punk. The Middle East would say ‘I don’t want another punk show.’ So they had somewhere to go, but now I don’t think they even have that anymore. Harold would be able to fill you in a little bit better. I think there are music people in this area who are not getting accommodated. I’m so removed from the live music that I don’t know, you know? Some of them made a huge comeback at The Burren, and there’s another small bar there, Tir na Nog. They were putting country and western, reggae, and regular rock and roll, but they’re gone as well. I used to know the guy who owned the Tir na nOg and all the musicians that played there were members of, remember that band Morphine? Ex members of that, the saxophone player was in a band. And then I know this Irish guy, but they weren’t Irish musicians, they were rock musicians. They all played somewhere, I don’t think any of them played in Central Square. The Middle East won’t take you unless you can bring them one hundred people. We’re not a live music venue. After Katrina I met these two musicians in there who got relocated back to Massachusetts. I thought they were two Irish guys so I approached them. They looked like two Irish guys, they had mandolins and stuff. They were two American guys from the area who had shipped up here, so I gave them Sunday afternoon, just so they got on their feet, somewhere to play. They just needed somewhere to play, they were fuckin’ heroin addicts who just needed to play music. And then six weeks they had about fifteen musicians in there with them. It was a great afternoon. And eventually they…[sirens]…they filtered into the music scene. And they were the guys when I used to go somewhere I’d see them in different bands then, but I’d never see them down there on Central Square, nobody uses them, you know.
KM: Is there anything that you would like to talk about that I haven’t addressed or anything else you feel I should know?
JM: I suppose you should know that the Cambridge Licensing Board is very good to us. They never discourage us from using any type of music, whether it be reggae, hip hop, or punk rock. You know, I think they’d like to see more. If anything happens to The Middle East we’re all dead in the water. If there were not to be there tomorrow Central Square would be derelict. They’re like Union Square and Sommerville, just full of banks and Burger Kings. They bring, I don’t know, maybe two, three thousand people a week to Central Square, as far as I can figure. They do a great job at what they do, and with the licensing board, and it’s well policed. The police are very community orientated, they don’t just come in and arrest everybody write the bar up, they actually do policing, you know? I think that’s it, and it’s a pity my Dolores isn’t here because she never forgets anything, and there has been some great action in here, fun action, all sorts of people. If there’s big bands around here, they usually come in here for something to eat, before and after. I’d spend a whole night in there with a band from Idaho, wouldn’t have a clue who they were, only to find out that they’re such-and-such, they’re really big or famous, but I wouldn’t know. Not that I wouldn’t know them, but I wouldn’t be too excited about it. You know what I mean? I could sit with Bono from U2, I actually did at the Druid one day, him and Larry Mullen. But it never dawned on me that it was a huge, big deal. For weeks after people said, ‘you spent the afternoon fuckin’ drinking with them two?’ But they’re from where I come from anyway, and we’re the same age. Not that we had a lot in, I wish I had his money, but we had enough to keep us going for three or four pints, you know? Stuff like that. Nothing, I don’t think there’s really much else I can offer you. We only do the Tuesday, Tuesday nights are quite a good night for music here, and Sunday afternoon is at their leisure, so if they don’t show up I can’t give out to them because Sunday afternoon is open. They can have it if they show up to play, and if they don’t, well, that’s ok as well. It’s only for them. A promoter can’t come in and put in a band, they have to be these college kids. That was the only stipulation I put on it. If it’s gonna be free it has to be for them. It doesn’t matter how bad your band is or how good you think your band is, at least you get a shot being here. And that’s it. I think if you break out of them confines then I’d have to deal with promoters and band managers. I don’t know how people deal with—I’m a socialist at heart even though I live in this capitalist place. I don’t like to see people feeding off other people, so when these managers used to come up to me and want things for them, you know, like they wanted a fifteen beer minimum for three guys on the stage. So that’s three beers each, I’m thinking. Fucking three guys wouldn’t have a beer, it’d be the manager buying everybody else a beer, making him look good. I suppose managers are like what you see on the television, them Hollywood types, you know, actor’s managers are, what do you call them? They use them for sports men as well. Agents. I don’t like them type of people. I feel like the talent is on the stage or it’s on the field, it’s not this idiot, so I never like dealing with any of them people.
KM: Do you feel like they’re in it for the wrong reason?
JM: Oh, of course they are. They see these young kids, sixteen and eighteen year old kids, probably charging them—the most you can get for playing a gig around here, probably seventy five dollars. You’re lucky if you get a hundred. Seventy five is probably the going rate. This fucking guy is probably charging them forty, and they’re doing all the work, they’re singing and dancing, and he’s, whatever. And then if they do hit they probably have them written up so they never make a penny. I just don’t like them so I always think the worst of it, you know. DJs, on the other hand, don’t have managers or promoters, they are the whole package, you know, and all these DJs are so computer savvy you wouldn’t believe it. None of them hand out fliers any more. You never see a poster for a DJ. You’ll still see them for bands but you won’t see them for a DJ. These guys, they’re live web casting themselves as they’re playing at the Phoenix Landing. And they don’t charge me anything and they don’t bring in a whole crew of engineer types to wire the bar up, it’s all done in front of them. I like it easy. I don’t mind what way it comes as long as it’s not hard, you know. Well there you go, is that it? My interview? It’s funny, it’s my second interview this week! |
