The Once & Future Freight & Salvage

Nancy Owens started the coffeehouse in 1968 in a used-furniture store named Freight and Salvage on San Pablo Avenue. She simply tacked the word "coffeehouse" underneath the store's original sign. The place held approximately 80 people. Owens was a former preschool teacher interested in trying something new. Musician and folklorist Mayne Smith said that Owens hoped to form "a cultural nexus, which served lunch and sometimes supper." When the doors to the new coffeehouse opened, he added, "musicians started showing up and wanting to play." By the end of its first year, the club had hosted a variety of American bluegrass, blues, folk, and jazz artists, as well as a number of international musicians from countries like Ireland, China, and Mexico.

Celtic musician and co-chair of the Freight's New Home Committee Danny Carnahan remembered, "The moment you opened the door, the smell of soup and fresh-baked cookies smacked you in the face. I always had a snack and got as close to the front as possible, though there were really no bad seats."

Smith recalled, "Between songs or sets, the audience was likely to hear cars going by through the painted front windows and the clatter of cookie sheets from the kitchen."

This cozy, storefront version of the club went on to have a couple of different owners, including Leah Marr and Bob and Deborah Wittig. The current executive director of the Freight, Steve Baker, credits the Wittigs with doing a very good job of helping to turn it into a stop on the international tour schedule of a lot of people. In 1983, when the Wittigs stopped running the club, the musical community that gathered to listen or play there feared that the venue would go out of business. A number of people combined resources to form the nonprofit Berkeley Society for the Preservation of Traditional Music, and they purchased the club. Recently out of law school and working with the Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, Baker managed the sale and obtained the nonprofit status, which the club still maintains. Smith became the first chairperson of the society. The group's mission included a "dedication to promoting public awareness and understanding of traditional music." The founders also wanted to provide a place for up-and-coming and underappreciated artists to play.

Five years later, in 1988, the Freight and Salvage moved to 1111 Addison Street, where it has remained for the past 20-plus years. One of the things that performers and audiences alike cherished about the original Freight was its sense of music as a communal process. As Smith described it, "Everybody at the [original] Freight & Salvage was essentially in the same space, and there were correspondingly few distinctions between kitchen workers (and their kids), audience members (and their kids), and musicians (sometimes with their kids). We were all united by the smell of baking chocolate (and each other) and the love of music." This communal feel carried over into the 1988 new space, where everyone shared the same room, with the tickets, baked goods, and beverages being sold in the back of the room, while the music played in the front.