By Peter AaronThe original Cavern Club, arguably the most famous small music venue in modern history—it birthed the Beatles—was open for 16 years, from 1957 to 1973. Gerde’s Folk City, the nexus of the Greenwich Village folk revival of the early 1960s, existed for 27 years (1960-1987). CBGB lasted for 33 years (1973-2006). The Fillmore East and Fillmore West? Just four years apiece (1968-1971). But the Towne Crier, one of the Hudson Valley’s most beloved music spots, has kept the melody lingering for a full five decades: Throughout 2023, the cozy nightery, which is located in Beacon, has been celebrating its 50th year. And, as with any great club or concert hall, it’s an extension of the person who books and runs it.
“It’s a place for listening,” says owner Phil Ciganer, who opened the venerable venue in 1972. “My rule of thumb, when it comes to booking the acts, has always been: ‘Would I purchase a ticket to see this act?’ And if the answer is ‘maybe,’ then I won’t book the act.”
It’s unclear how many “maybe” or “no” answers have run through Ciganer’s sage mind during his many years of running the club. But the “yes” responses have resulted in the staggering gallery of names that have graced the stage of this temple of music over its lengthy, ongoing run: Mose Allison, Arlo Guthrie, Levon Helm, Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, Leon Redbone, David Byrne, Suzanne Vega, Ola Belle Reed, Pete Best, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, David Bromberg, Judy Collins, Pat Metheny, Dr. John, Roger McGuinn, Freedy Johnston, the Bacon Brothers, Buckwheat Zydeco, Roseanne Cash, Nils Lofgren, the Clancy Brothers, Taj Mahal, Commander Cody, Ani DiFranco, Herbie Mann, Shawn Colvin, 10,000 Maniacs, Elizabeth Cotton, Bela Fleck, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, McCoy Tyner, James Cotton, Dave Mason, John Mayall, Dave Edmunds, Ralph Stanley, John Scofield, Mimi Farina, Richard Thompson, John Scofield, Al Kooper, Gillian Welch, Steve Forbert, NRBQ, Joan Osbourne, Ricky Skaggs, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Phoebe Snow, Country Joe McDonald, Maria Muldaur, Livingston Taylor, Andy Summers, John Abercrombie, Steeleye Span, Southside Johnny, Leo Kottke, Tony Levin, David Lindley, Paula Cole, Michelle Shocked, and Bobby Short make up a mere fraction of the epic list.
“I’ve never had second thoughts about leaving my old job to do this,” says Ciganer, who grew up in Brooklyn and in the 1960s worked as a day trader in the Financial District. Far more seductive to him than the lure and greed machine of Wall Street were bohemian Bleecker and McDougal streets, during the height of the neighborhood’s famed contemporary folk-and-rock boom. “My life then was a real dichotomy,” he remembers. “Every night after work I’d make my way to the Village, where the club scene was just exploding. I saw the Mothers of Invention at the Garrick Theater [May 1967, Frank Zappa and company’s first time in Manhattan]. I saw Cream, Dave Van Ronk. Joni Mitchell, when she’d just moved to New York. James Taylor, the first time he played in town.” Sit down with Ciganer and he’ll regale you with further terrific tales, like that of his befriending a pre-fame Jimi Hendrix when he was still known as Jimmy James, and taking drives, getting high, and eating apple pie with the guitar god. “Nobody was bigger than life then,” he stresses. “There’d be jam sessions where Hendrix or Jerry Garcia would just show up and play.”
At age 21 Ciganer was so successful at his Wall Street job that he was offered a seat on the New York Stock Exchange—which he declined. “I had a hard decision to make,” he says. “But I really wanted to spend more time in the clubs at night and get more involved in that world, so I quit. Word spread about that, and everybody [at his former employer] thought I had loose screws. My mom told me, ‘Well, if this other stuff doesn’t work out you can always go back to Wall Street,'” he says with a laugh. Ciganer opened a hippie boutique called Ye Olde Selective Service Shoppe, which offered draft counseling and sold art supplies, tie-dye apparel, and other items, and he organized some Brooklyn jam sessions and outdoor concerts. By the dawn of the following decade, though, the novelty of New York nightlife had worn off, and he set his sights on Austin, Texas, where the underground scene was just beginning to bubble up.
Before heading south, he took a detour through the Dutchess County hamlet of Beekman to drop off some sculptures a friend had purchased. There, he noticed a rustic little 18th-century building that had once served as a stagecoach stop and general store. The place stuck in his brain. “I was moving to Austin to open a club there, and my friend in Beekman said, ‘Man, you should stay here instead and do something with this building,'” recalls Ciganer. “So I said, ‘How about a coffeehouse?’ ‘Great idea!,’ he said. So I decided to try it for a couple of months, and if it didn’t work out I’d just go to Austin, like I’d planned.” He’d never leave the region.
Decorating the place with dry goods left over from its general store days that he’d found in the basement, Ciganer opened the Towne Crier’s initial incarnation in 1972. Befitting the small space, the fare was mainly acoustic folk, and it wasn’t too long before the music’s father figure himself had blessed the new club with an appearance. Ciganer had booked the erstwhile Clancy Brothers member Louis Killen (who would later transition to become Louisa Jo Killen) for a three-night residency, but when car problems prevented the English folksinger from making the first date he put out the call for willing replacements. “The phone rang, and it was Pete Seeger on the other end,” the proprietor says. “He said, ‘I hear you need some help over there.’ So that night he came by and played. At the time, I couldn’t believe it was happening.” Thus began a long and loving relationship with the local folk grandaddy, and, soon after, shows by Seeger’s friends Odetta and Richie Havens that added to the venue’s burgeoning reputation. Ciganer returned the favor, helping organize the Seeger-cocreated Clearwater Festival AKA the Great Hudson River Revival amid his involvement in the World Peace Festival and the Bear Mountain Festival of Music and Dance.
By the mid-1980s, Ciganer was looking for a larger place, one where he’d be able to bring in bigger artists and offer food service as well. He settled on a former barbeque restaurant in Pawling, giving it a Southwestern makeover and launching it as the relocated Towne Crier in 1988. The nightclub’s profile continued to rise, attracting many of the notable names mentioned above as well as frequent prominent audience members. “When Jeff Daniels played, that was a big night,” says Ciganer about the show by the folk-singing Hollywood luminary. “We had people like Meryl Streep and Timothy Hutton showing up in limos.” The club’s support slots and open-mic nights proved increasingly fruitful, yielding many, as the owner terms it, “diamonds in the rough” who’d later become headliners themselves. Getting his start in the wood-paneled room was a teenaged Rufus Wainwright, who made his debut there as the opener for his parents, Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. Another alumni act of the Pawling site that has gone on to greatness is the locally based, internationally touring folk rock band the Slambovian Circus of Dreams.
“Phil just has this antenna for good stuff,” says the group’s leader, Joziah Longo, who will perform with his bandmates at the Towne Crier on December 16. “He comes off like your grouchy uncle sometimes [laughs], but he really makes things happen. He saw us at one of the open mics when we were just starting out and he set us up to back folksinger Bill Miller, which really worked out well. Things just got bigger and bigger for us from there. Phil’s really pragmatic, he knows how to provide a structure where artists can really be free.”
After more than 20 years in Pawling, Ciganer began searching for a new home for the nightspot. “The landlord and I had kind of a rocky relationship, and the town had taken an economic downturn,” he explains. “I didn’t know where I wanted to go, but I did know I wanted to get out of Pawling.” (Today the old Pawling location is another top venue: Daryl’s House.)
He scouted other areas, but the focus kept coming back to Beacon, where his friend Pete Seeger had lived for decades. “I was getting a lot of invitations from other communities, but I wasn’t really feeling any of them,” Ciganer says. “There’d been all this talk about Beacon having a renaissance, since the Dia art museum and [hotel/restaurant] the Roundhouse had opened here, but I wasn’t so sure about that then. Things were still pretty rough in Beacon at the time.”
But one day his realtor called and implored him to look at a huge empty warehouse on the city’s Main Street. “It was just a shell, completely gutted,” he recounts. “My friends said I was out of my mind to think about moving the club there. I told the realtor to give me half an hour to walk around the neighborhood and think about it. I did that, and my vision started kicking in. ‘People in other parts of the world can make a house out of bamboo or practically nothing,’ I thought. ‘So I can definitely do something with this place.'”
And so he did. In 2013 the third and most spectacular manifestation of Ciganer’s living shrine to music was unveiled to delighted audiences. World-class musicians are a steady presence in its large main stage room, which boasts table seating and wait service for its kitchen’s menu of innovative comfort and ethnic food selections, house-made pastries, and full bar. The facility also features a cozy cafe space that hosts small-scale acts and the open mic showcases that Ciganer still monitors for up-and-coming talent. “I just want people to feel at home and feel comfortable when they come here,” he says. “Good sound and good food—besides good music, those are the main things we always make sure we have.”
As Ciganer and the Towne Crier and its staff celebrate a half century, has he started thinking about retirement yet? “I still feel healthy, I’m still itching to do this,” he says. “For me the reward is almost nightly, when I see people who come here and end up beaming from having seen a great show in a great place.”
Towne Crier Cafe
This article appears in December 2023.
