The Five Spot

Once the hippest place on earth

Entirely by chance, a blog called “Off the Grid: Village Preservation Blog,” published a piece yesterday with the above title. More than one commenter has pointed out that the piece from last night could have had Monk in the title as well as Andy and Edie, and they are correct, although I wanted to center the piece on how they entirely altered our conception of fame. Andy, of course, was the author of the phrase, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” which gave birth to the phrase, “fifteen minutes of fame,” and you don’t have to look further than Tik-Tok influencers and the Kardashians to realize how right he was.

But the Five Spot was at the center of the piece, too, and there was another phrase back in the day that captured that memorable club perfectly: painfully hip. I left out of the piece the fact that the jazz pianist Bill Evans was at the table next to ours that night, and I’m sure there were other hipsters there who I didn’t recognize. This photo, taken from the Village Preservation Blog, is a good example of how notable was both the club and its denizens:

It’s captioned, “A back table at The Five Spot. From left to right: sculptor David Smith, painter Helen Frankenthaler (back to camera), Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, unidentified man, Anita Huffington, and Kenneth Koch, New York City, 1957 photograph by Burt Glinn.”

I included the following tale, which I’ll recount here, in a reply to a comment from my old Village Voice friend and editor, DiFi, who recalled her own trips to the Five Spot back in the day to see Thelonious Monk. I was telling the story of that night at the Five Spot one time at the Lion's Head sometime in the mid-70's, and I had a couple of the regular hangers-on pretty intrigued. I didn't put this in the story -- it didn't fit its theme -- but I told the people at the Head that my girlfriend and I sat there at our tiny bandstand-side table, which we were able to score because we got there so early -- for at least a couple of hours before Monk took the stage. I had almost no money. We were paid $25 a month as cadets and much of that went for cokes and burgers at the cadet cafeteria in Grant Hall on the weekends, so my girlfriend and I were nursing our $1 beers -- one dollar! -- and were down to the last couple of sips when a new round arrived at the table. I told the waitress I hadn't ordered it, but she just shrugged and rushed off to take another table's order. During the evening, at least one other free round of beers mysteriously appeared while Monk was playing. When I was finished telling the story at the Lion’s Head, the bartender that night, Tommy Butler, stood there polishing a glass and asked me, "Did you ever wonder how those free beers got to your table?" I allowed as how it had been a mystery for all those years. "I was the bartender," Tommy said with one of his great smiles. "I figured anybody who wanted to see Monk so bad he would go to the Five Spot in a cadet uniform deserved all the drinks he wanted." Here’s a photograph of the guy who sent those rounds over to our table, one of the greatest bartenders who ever worked behind the stick in the Village:

Tommy Butler

To illustrate just now painfully hip the Five Spot was in those days, sometime later that year, 1966 or early 1976, my girlfriend broke up with me, writing in a letter that I was “just too weird” for her. Of course the fact that I also took her to the midnight show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem might have had something to do with it. We sat in the first row of the first balcony. A joint was passed down the row to us from one direction followed by a bottle of Ripple from the other as an all-star lineup that included Gladys Knight and the Pips, Joe Tex, Solomon Burke, and the Temptations burned up the stage with hits like “I heard it through the Grapevine,” “Cry to me,” “Ain’t too proud to beg,” and “Hold what you’ve got.” the midnight shows went on for hours. I’m sure we didn’t leave the Apollo until 4 a.m., maybe even later.

I lost touch with her until just after “Dress Gray” was published in 1979 and I received a letter from Susan Meyland-Smith, now married with (I think) four children. She wrote that she remembered breaking up with me, and she remembered why, before confessing that those nights in New York City on my arm had made her the hippest mom in Kirkland, Missouri, with the stories she told of the Apollo and another night when I took her to see a then-practically-unknown band, the Grateful Dead, at the Gaslight on McDougal Street, which probably held all of 75 people.

Painfully hip, indeed. Come to think of it, going to see Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot and being passed a joint at the Apollo was a little out-there for a secretary from Staten Island. Looking back, I guess it was a little out-there for me, too, at age 18 and 19, on the loose in New York City with a beautiful girl on my arm and a headful of wonder at all that was before us.

The Village Preservation Blog published a very famous poem by Frank O’Hara that goes a long way to capturing the feel of that time and the Five Spot and in a larger sense that’s so very hard to put across, what it all meant. The blog introduces the poem this way: “His tribute to Billie Holiday, “The Day Lady Died,” concludes with his remembrance of listening to the singer at the Five Spot near the end of her life.”

The Day Lady Died
By Frank O’Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   
in Ghana are doing these days
                                                        I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

From Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara.

That, my friends, is painfully hip.