Genesis
This page is intended to commemorate the work that went into the
creation of Peacock Coffeehouse in Jamaica Plain and to honor the
20th anniversary of its founding in February, 1986. At the time, I
was 30 years old and Peacock was to become the major focus of
my life for the next two and a half years. Peacock Coffeehouse
grew out of my involvement in something called People's Music
Network, which was a loose affiliation of political musicians
which existed in the early 1980's and still does exist today. I had
organized a music series at the Modern Times Cafe in Cambridge
over the past year or so and then I found myself with the
opportunity to move to Jamaica Plain, where I had first lived when
I came to the Boston area for graduate school. In the process of
organizing the music series,I made a number of contacts with local
musicians, some affiliated with PMN and some not. When I moved
to Jamaica Plain, I accompanied my roommate at the time, Ben
Tousley to the First Church Unitarian of Jamaica Plain, where the
pastor was a college friend of Ben's named Terry Burke. When I
walked into the Parish Hall, I saw this beautiful acoustically rich
space and pretty much on the spot, I proposed to start a coffeehouse
series there. There was some interest in the church community and
at least two persons who were willing to help me out with getting
something started. These persons were Loren Disney and Paul
Trainor and between the three of us, we drew up a plan for getting
the coffeehouse off the ground. It was Paul who came up with the
name Peacock Coffeehouse, in recogniton of the Peacock Tavern
which existed in Jamaica Plain during the revolutionary war era,
close to the site of the current-day Faulkner Hospital. I brought
with me the resource of one Herb Robinson, who became my sound
engineer,starting with my second performance at Modern Times.
Herb was very much a founding partner along with Loren and Paul.
Discussions started in early September, 1985 and in February, 1986
we were ready to present our first Peacock Coffeehouse production.

The First Two Shows
The first show at Peacock Coffeehouse in February, 1986 featured Dennis Pearne and Marianne Kreitlow, who were performing together at the time as a duo, Emory Disney (Wood), Loren's wife who sang and played harp and Rob Krikorian, Jamaica Plain resident and well-respected singer songwriter in the community. One of the best things that I did with Peacock was to make sure that our ties to the community were strong and that community residents who were performers were featured when we could do so. We drew a little over a hundred people to our first performance, in part because I went up and down Centre Street and plastered a poster on every single pole and window that I possibly could in the Downtown area. Downtown J.P. prior to Peacock Coffeehouse's first production was a sea of blue posters with an artistically rendered Peacock, courtesy of David Noyd, on each one. Off to a good start, what could I do to keep the momentum going? Time to pull out the ace in the hole! I had the good fortune to work with Tracy Chapman for one of my Modern TImes concerts, where she performed for free as the featured act one night in August, 1985. I was not going to be able to get her for free a second time (in fact, I paid the performers on the very first night) but we were on good terms and I contacted her to come over and perform for me in Jamaica Plain . Tracy would be the featured act and have two opening acts, local J.P. musician Andy Holiner and a PMN associate from Vermont named Katherine Rhoda, whose performances I always enjoyed at the semi-annual PMN conferences. Only problem that night was a musical cabaret performance being produced by the J. P. Arts Council at the Footlight Club. The leader of the arts council, Helen Hummel (who later became a great friend and supporter of Peacock) proposed a joint promotion to which I agreed and that night, there was a virtual sea of people moving between the coffeehouse on one side of the street and the Footlight club on the other side. Tracy was a little late and had some difficulty getting to the performance, but when she hit the stage, she was in fine form and gave one of her typically riveting performances. After that night, Peacock Coffeehouse was for real and had arrived.

Getting Through A First Year
The first two concerts were a wonderful success and after only those two performances, Peacock was getting a good reputation and yours truly was being flooded with artist promotional materials presenting an array of enviable choices for future shows. The Mid-1980's was the crest of the second Acoustic Folk Renaissance and some truly wonderful work was being done by local, national and international artists in contemporaty folk music. The next two shows were not as successful as the first two as I decided to present shows that I personally found to be artistically satisfying but didn't have the draw of what would turn out to be our core audience. The April show featured Ben Tousley, well respected and a good draw paired with Dianthe Myers-Spencer, a black female performer who was nothing short of terrific but not exactly well-known. The May show featured Huellas, a group of exceptionally talented young Latin musicians who I adored but outside of the South End and Cambridge-Somerville, were not well enough known to draw on the basis of their name alone. They would have required a certain kind of concentrated promotion which later I became good at but this time around, what I hoped would be a dream concert drew only 50 people and was something of a bust. I decided to scale back and promote the summer performance series on one flier, with our characteristically artistically rendered peacock wearing sunglasses. The shows were strictly local performers who were more akin to traditional acoustic folk artists audiences came out to see. Both our June concert with Ken Perlman and David Goldfinger and the July concert featuing Cindy Mapes opening for Bob Franke did well, with close to 100 persons coming out to see Bob. At the time, everyone was covering Bob's classic songs (Thanksgiving Eve, For Real, Hard Love and The Great Storm is Over) and on that July night, he was as good as I have ever seen him perform. Peacock was turning into a place where great performances would be rendered, something that would carry on up until the very end of the series. In the Fall, I went with two shows in October and November, shows I enjoyed presenting (featuring the first of two great performances by Geoff Bartley) but which were not really strong draws. In December, Peacock needed an energizer and found one in the person of a very well-known local musician who was living in Jamaica Plain at the time and who back as early as September let me know that she would "love to play at Peacock Coffeehouse", Patty Larkin! Her show the night of December 4th was packed to the rafters and her perfomance that night was simply astonishing. Peacock was going into 1987 floating on Cloud Nine.

Getting Through A Second Year
Peacockwas in a wonderful position at the beginning of 1987, with Sally Rogersslated for the January show, Peggy Morgan and Bette Phelan with anencore from Rob Krikorian and Katherine Rhoda scheduled for Februaryand Flor De Cana with Dean Stevens scheduled for March. Things werefalling very nicely into place and looking back,I had a combination ofskill and luck going for me at that time that only now I canappreciate. The incredible thing is that in the Summer and Fall of1987, it would only get better. When things got harder the followingyear, I think it was hard for me to accept that. But I'll get to thatpart later. The Spring of 1987 saw the founding of competition calledKookaburra Coffeehouse at the Green Street Tavern in J.P.,founded by mycross the street neighbor, Luzelena Beltran. Kookaburra was avant gardeto Peacock's relative mainstream fare. Luz brought some fliers forKookaburra to the Spring shows and I agreed to do cross promotion forour mutual benefit. The two coffeehouses and the Annual Wake Up TheEarth festival in May of that year amounted to the founding of averitable music scene in Jamaica Plain which has continued up to thepresent day. March's Flor De Cana/Dean Stevens concert was a tremendoussuccess, due in no small part to the marketing savvy of RosemarieStraijer-Amador (now Rosi Amador of Sol Y Canto), probably the onesingle person I learned the most from in the course of my work onPeacock. The success of that concert allowed the coffeehouse to coastthrough April, May and June until the late, great Dave Van Ronk came totown in July,1987 and played to an audience of a little better than 150persons. It is true that success begets success,as the money fromDave's concert allowed me to book an exceptional Fall season, beginningwith the return of Patty Larkin in September and the return of Flor DeCana in October, in a joint conert with an ensemble from Atlanta calledElise Witt and Small Family Orchestra. That October concert was thesingle best concert I ever produced at Peacock, one where Herb'stechnical abilities were put to their best test mixing and matching 12different musicians. November saw the return of Geoff Bartley with theintrepid Bernice Lewis opening for him and then December saw thecombination of Marcia Taylor, late of the Bright Morning Star ensembleI first saw many years ago while living in New Brunswich (and who wasalso my guitar teacher for awhile) and the great Cheryl Wheeler, who Iset up for guitar and piano only to learn that she only used her guitarto perform her songs. Every show that Fall was well received and Ithink I lulled myself into a false sense of infallability when I bookedan concert and coffeehouse series for the first six months of 1988.

January-June, 1988
January 1988 for Peacock Coffeehouse started out with a gong so to speak, with the performance of the Do'A World Music Ensemble at the Jamaica Plain Arts Center produced by Peacock Coffeehouse. Why the Arts Center? After many years of negotiation with the City of Boston and Breuggers' Bagels company, the Jamaica Plain Arts Council was able to establish an Arts Center on the site of the former firehouse on Centre Street and as I was now good friends with Helen Hummel, I offered to do a concert series at the Arts Center to help them successfully get off the ground. Today, unfortunately, the Arts Center is no longer there and the firehouse is now occupied by J.P.Licks Ice Cream.The first two shows of 1988 at the Arts Center were succeessful. The firat featured the Do'A World Music ensemble from New Hampshire, my first experience working with CREA and Richard Smith whom I later worked with while living in the Portsmouth area. It was a nice way to start off the series. The second show at the Arts Center featured Andy Holiner and Alice Johnson, later to found the band Wildest Dreams opening for John Gorka. This was a very successful show and we were filled to capacity. At the church, however, the January and February shows were not well attended and soon it was apparent that the schedule I had booked spread the resources of the coffeehouse too thin. The March and April shows at the Arts Center were more modestly attended and the shows those months at the church were not weel attended at all, in part because I booked two acts that were from out of the area. By the end of April, even with the successes of the earlier shows at the Arts Center, we were broke and I felt I had to cancel out May show at the Arts Center. This was a mistake, for as soon as I cancelled the show, we received grant money from the New England Foundation for the Arts to help support the show. I was also unable to contact the acts directly and cancel, which made for some hurt feelings. It is true what they say about the adage that the show must go on and it should have. In June, we produced our final show at the Arts Center featuring Kim Wallach opening for Robbie O'Connell which sort of broke even. The final May and June shows at the church again were not well attended and after the last show, having lost my two original partners and having made plans to try and live outside the Boston area, Peacock was closed.

Epilogue
Producing the Peacock Coffeehouse shows was one of the highlights of my life to date, maybe the best thing I have ever done. Loren, Paul, Herb, myself and later Marianne produced a total of 44 shows in 2 1/2 years time. Musicians came to Jamaica Plain that never appeared there before or since and with all the ups and downs, those were exciting times. I did concert promotion work the following year in New Hampshire and I also worked with Club Passim when it reopened following the death of Bob Donlin, but there is nothing like having your own place for expressing your own vision. I worked with great musicians and I would like to think that Peacock has left a legacy. In the words of my freind Paul Rogoshewski, J.P. is a remarkable "village by the water" and it was a privilege to contribute to its cultural life.