Canter's Rock on Rye: The Kibitz Room Serves Up an Eclectic Menu of Matzo and Music

By David Wild, Rolling Stone, 2/4/93, p. 11+

Could tonight be the last Schmalzt?

Amid all the laugher and pastrami, there is an undeniable feeling of nostalgia in the air as the weekly Tuesday-night jam gets underway just after 9:00 p.m. in the Kibitz Room of Canter's the famed Los Angeles delicatessen. Since the Thirties, Canter's has served up late-night Jewish sustenance to everyone from Jack Benny and Bugsy Siegel to Phil Spector and Guns n' Roses.

For more than a year now, the Kibitz Room – a tiny bar off to the side of the restaurant, with orange booths and lots of lowbrow ambience -–has been the site of an unlikely hot new scene that's best described as Woodstock Meets the Borscht Belt. The Kibitz [the word is Yiddish for offering friendly advice or wisecracking] started out as an ultracasual jam session among a small gang of mostly twenty-something pals—including members of the young L.A. bands the Wallflowers and the Freewheelers—for whom Exile on Main Street, Music From Big Pink and Neil Young's Tonight's the Night never went out of heavy rotation. Other like-minded local combos that joined in included the Imposters, the Flood and Girls Bones Found.

The Kibitz Room has since turned into a major L.A. draw. Slash of Guns n' Roses, Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes and members of Pearl Jam, Jellyfish, and Mary's Danish have all been guest Kibitz jammers. Joni Mitchell, Johnny Depp, Saturday Night Live's Mike Myers, singer-songwriter David Baerwald and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have checked out the scene. The jam sessions—which go on till 2:00 a.m.—have helped some acts get discovered [the Imposters are about to sign a major-label deal], led to countless new friendships and love connections and increased the receipts at the Kibitz bar from several hundred dollars a week to thousands on Tuesday nights alone.

>Many veterans of the first Kibitz jams are here early tonight, anxious to get their own bonding and playing in before the scene-making masses start sweeping in from Fairfax Avenue sometime before midnight. Most will be gone by the end of the night, when those who jam get to eat for free—only the musical director of the evening gets paid.

"I turned twenty-three last week, and here I am, talking about the good old days," says singer-guitarist-songwriter Jakob Dylan, Bob Dylan's youngest son and the leader of the Wallflowers, as he shakes his head and laughs. He and the rest of the band are back in town from a tour with the 10,000 Maniacs during which the Wallflowers sometimes performed a "People Get Ready"/Crazy Love"/"The Weight" medley that has been one of the Kibitz Room's standards. "It's so pathetic," says Dylan, sitting in a booth with his girlfriend Paige. "I sound like one of those gold guys on Cheers. But in the beginning this place was really something fantastic and different.

Of course, how could a venue where one can hear "You Are My Sunshine," "Queen Jane Approximately," and "Hava Nageela" played on the same night not be a little fantastic and different? And certainly the L.A. music scene was lacking something different. It was the Wallflowers' keyboardist, Rami Jaffee, who first saw the need for such a place. "In L.A. there are all sorts of selfish little scenes," says Jaffee, the Kibitz Room's original music director and the man who decides which jammers get to eat free at night's end. "Everyone's got their little clan in this town. There's death rock downtown. There's all that heavy metal and hair spray on the Sunset Strip. It's a mess. The result is that you have a lot of musicians left who don't fit in with any of those worlds."

For years, Canter's was the place in L.A. where all worlds collided. "Everybody came here because we were the only twenty-four-hour place in town," says Marc Canter, whose grandparents founded Canter's and whose parents own it currently. Over the years, Canter's has served over 20 million bagels and 24 million bowls of chicken soup—a lot of them to rock legends. "Elvis would come in after playing the Pan Pacific," says Canter, who books the Kibitz Room. "The Beatles would come in after playing the Hollywood Bowl. Frank Zappa was in all the time. In the Sixties, you couldn't get into this place. All the hippies with munchies ended up here. Now we're full again with the hippies of the Nineties."

Rami Jaffee started Kibitzing at Canter's while attended Fairfax High School. "This is where I spent first period hiding out from school security guards," says Jaffee. It was Kibitz 101 for me." Many bands later, Jaffee hooked up with the Wallflowers, who started hanging out in the Kibitz, eating, drinking $1.30 beers, and listening to the jazz players on weekends and sneaking onto the piano after hours for sing-alongs. After discussions with Marc Canter—an old pal of Jaffee's and, incidently, Slash's,--the Tuesday jams got under way. "There were forty people the first night," recalls Jaffee. "Fifty the next time. Then hundreds."

Soon enough, the Kibitz Room—along with Largo, a place across the street where TV actors once read poetry, and Damiano's, the best pizza joint in L.A.--started changing the complexion of this Fairfax-district strip otherwise dominated by stores with Hebrew writing and Jewish stars and such nonrock spots as the Shalom Retirement Hotel. 'Oddly enough, Fairfax is turning into the Sunset Strip of the Nineties,' says Andrew Slater, who manages the Wallflowers and plays guitar with his own band, the Kibitz regulars Ragged Glory. 'Somehow it's actually come a cool place to be.'"

"It became a fun place to go in the City That Oversleeps," jokes Morty Coyle of the Imposters. "The real stars weren't the big names who dropped by but the guys who played all the time."

Observers of L.A.'s local musical culture--such as it is--spot a trend. 'There are a number of places popping up in town with folk idealists doing good things,' says David Baerwald. 'Pay-to-play policies killed most of the old great L.A. clubs. The only people who could get gigs were rich kids. A lot of the stuff happening now is at private parties--its becoming cocooning music.' The original Kibitzers have discovered it's hard to keep their mellow musical cocoon private. '"When we first stared, I remember thinking, 'This is the right idea,'" says Luther Russell of the Freewheelers. 'This is the way things are supposed to be.' Like some others, Russell doesn't come around much anymore. 'The whole thing got out of hand--out of our hands.'"

"Some girl came in one night and looked once and said, ‘Is there another Kibitz that's, like, a club?' says Jaffee with a chuckle. "And there are lots of people who come in wanting to know what the hell a ‘kibitz' is. Maybe we should start a jamming chain nationwide."

"Anything that's really happening in this town starts happening for everyone," says Dylan. "Don't get me wrong, this is a great thing for L.A. But it's strange because in the beginning, the Kibitz was special for us. And now it's special for a lot of people."

Indeed, there are still plenty of special moments tonight as an ever-changing assemblage of players gets up to jam. Dylan and Russell share the mike for wonderfully sloppy versions of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and the Beatles' "Two of Us." Later, Dylan leads the way through a memorable cover of John Prine's "Great Rain." Closer to midnight—when it's difficult to get to the bar—Ragged Glory offers a riveting "Cowgirl in the Sand," featuring amazingly Neil Young-like lead vocals from Gary "the Freak" Williams, who sells kitchen supplies to Canter's for a living.

Sure, the tap beer's gone up to $1.40, and security's been added to the Kibitz scene, as have some rock & roll decorating touches that ink some of the young old-timers. And yes, most of the Capitol A&R department is in attendance tonight. But if the Kibitz isn't quite the private musical clubhouse it once was, most of the veterans still talk fondly of their paradise lost.

"Whatever happens to our band or the other guys down the line," says Jakob Dylan, "I will always say that the coolest part was that one year when we were all hanging out in the Kibitz Room, making our record, just a bunch of pals playing ‘The Weight' and ‘My Girl' with a lot of heart and no industry bullshit. I think it's always gonna be my favorite year."