Cafe Wha? (Amy Winehouse)

Let's be honest up front, hunter: Amy Winehouse never headlined Café Wha?. Her American debut happened a few blocks east, at Joe's Pub, on January 16, 2007, with the Dap-Kings behind her and Jay-Z in the room. But the Winehouse connection to this basement on MacDougal Street is real in the way that matters for a pilgrimage: Café Wha? regularly hosts tribute nights — "The Music of Amy Winehouse," "The Unforgettable Songs of Amy Winehouse" — where her songbook gets sung on a stage soaked in sixty-plus years of music history. And that history is the real headliner here. Before Amy's era, this subterranean room launched Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

The Scene

Café Wha? plays itself in Greetings from Tim Buckley (2012), Daniel Algrant's portrait of folk singer Tim Buckley and his son Jeff. The film's 1966 flashbacks stage Tim's Village gigs at the real club — look for the marquee in the Greenwich Village sequences — and Jeff Buckley (Penn Badgley) is shown walking past it, stalking the same streets where Dylan once posed for the Freewheelin' album cover. It's a fitting cameo: the movie is about musical inheritance, and no room in New York has handed more careers to the future than this one.

As for Amy: the club keeps her flame in the most literal way. Tribute vocalists front the Café Wha? house band for full Winehouse sets — "Rehab," "Back to Black," "Valerie" — in the same basement where the 1960s happened.

The Backstory

Café Wha? was opened in 1959 by Manny Roth — an actor and World War II veteran — in a former horse stable at 115 MacDougal Street. You descend a steep staircase into a basement he floored with broken marble he laid himself, walls spray-painted black to feel like a cave. Capacity: 325. Performers played all day and got paid from baskets passed through the crowd. Bob Dylan, in his memoir Chronicles, called it "a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining room with chairs and tables."

Dylan arrived in New York on January 24, 1961, and within days was on that stage — his first regular job was playing backup harmonica behind Fred Neil and Karen Dalton. Five years later, a kid calling himself Jimmy James was fronting the house band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. One afternoon in the summer of 1966, Chas Chandler — bassist of the Animals — wandered in, heard him tear through "Hey Joe" and Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," and invited him to London. Jimmy James became Jimi Hendrix, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born.

Roth gave up the club in 1968; it spent the '70s and '80s as Café Feenjon, a Middle Eastern restaurant, before being revived under its old name. Today it's a full-time live music venue fronted by the Café Wha? house band.

What to Look For

Descend the stairs and you're in it: the low-ceilinged basement room, the stage where Dylan and Hendrix stood, the blue-glass candlelight the club has kept since 1959. Check the calendar before you go — the room runs tribute nights (Amy, among others) alongside the house band's high-energy sets.

Getting There

Café Wha?, 115 MacDougal Street, New York, NY 10012, in Greenwich Village.

Subway: take the A/B/C/D/E/F/M to West 4th Street–Washington Square and walk a block or two south. Shows run most nights; check cafewha.com for the calendar and tickets — tribute nights tend to sell.

Trivia

• Folk legend Dave Van Ronk on Roth's legendary cheapness: "By the time he got finished with a penny, you could no longer see the Lincoln on it."
• Amy Winehouse's Joe's Pub debut was with the Dap-Kings — her first performance with the band, and her first American show, period.
• The Village Voice's Amy Linden, reviewing that Joe's Pub night, wrote that Amy "smacked r&b back to life. In four-inch pumps."

The Hunt Clue

Down steep stairs where the marble's been laid,

Where Dylan blew harp and Hendrix got played —

The Wha? still swings in the basement shade,

And Amy's songbook gets its serenade.

One-one-five MacDougal, don't be delayed —

Dear hunter, the legends never fade.

Photo by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0