We received this letter from Peter Shawhan '75, who was the manager of the Postcrypt Coffeehouse during 1973-75. Pete was kind enough to scan in these photos he dug up from those years.
[UPDATE 8/19/04: Bill Christophersen sent us further info about the people in these photos! see his notes below.]
[UPDATE 1/29/06: Patrick Flory sent us further info about the people in these photos! see his notes below.]
Tuesday 02/20/2001
| For what it is worth, I was a student at Columbia from the fall of 1970 through the spring of 1975. I began going to Postcrypt as a freshman during 1970-71. I began working there, helping to open, serve refreshments, announce acts, and clean up, during my sophomore year in 1971-72. I took a leave of absence during 1972-73. I returned as a junior in 1973-74. I can't remember exactly when I took over as the manager, but I think I did so during the middle of my junior year. During senior year in 1974-75, I was the manager for most of the year, turning it over toward the end of the school year. In addition to doing scheduling and operations, I occasionally played at Postcrypt, and also performed in the Furnald Folk Festival (something which was then a big spring semester event, with the audience overflowing the Furnald lobby onto the lawn outside) during my senior year. I graduated in the spring of 1975. | |
 |
Tiberio Nascimento. Tiberio was from Brazil, and was an astonishingly talented and well-educated classical guitarist. For someone who was slowly learning a few chords, it was jaw-dropping to sit on the lawn on South Field next to him and listen to him play. He would often start out sitting there alone, and end up a few minutes later with a small audience of people who found that they were mysteriously unable to continue walking past while he was playing. |
| Jonathan Ben-Asher. Jon was an intense bundle of nerves, often worried about something, but very much a presence whenever he was in a room. Some of the songs he played were very funny. |  |
 |
Roland Parkin. I did not know Roland that well, although I remember him as an effective performer. |
| Leslie Calman. Known as Cal to most of the people around Postcrypt, she played 12-string guitar with fingerpicks, and had a talent for getting a driving rhythm going with her music. Cal was very politically conscious, and a strong feminist. You never had any doubt where she stood about things. Many of the songs she sang had a social or political point. I seem to recall seeing in a magazine that she ended up as an Economics professor at Barnard, or something similar. |  |
 |
Eugene Holmes. Gene was one of the most natural, unself-counscious, relaxed people I knew. The words in his songs stretched into a drawl that kind of shaped itself around the notes. |
| Jenny Adams, singing. Jenny was probably the most compelling performer at Postcrypt in those days. If I remember correctly, her father was an Army general, and she had grown up on U.S. military bases all over the world. She had a strong but fluid voice that had a way of getting inside a listener. She sounded somthing like Joni Mitchell, but her voice was deeper, smokier, and had more body to it. One of her songs, a lament about the perennial misunderstandings between men and women, had the following tag line (chords in parentheses) -- "I've got those (C) over-intellectualized, (A) constantly conceptualized, (D) verbalized, (G) analyzed (C) blues." I can't remember the verses, but it had the whole audience collapsing in helpless laughter every time she sang it. |  |
 |
Jenny Adams, lighting a candle. Back then, when I was taking and printing my own pictures, this was one of those which I really liked. This picture was taken, hand-held, on Tri-X (ASA 400) film, by the light of the single candle which she was lighting. The light meter in my old Olympus rangefinder camera couldn't measure light that dim, but since the settings were manual anyway, I just opened the lens all the way to the maximum aperture and shot at the slowest shutter speed I thought I could handle without making the image unrecognizably blurry -- 1/8 or 1/15 of a second at f1.7, maybe? Jenny didn't have the patience to pose for more than one of these, so one shot was all I got. Fortunately, it more or less worked. |
| Peter Shawhan. That's me, playing at the Furnald Folk Festival. My wife laughed really hard when she saw this picture. She'd forgotten how long my hair was back then. I still have the guitar in that picture, by the way. |  |
 |
Postcrypt audience. Notice the haze in the air? Lots of people still smoked back then. The view is probably a little clearer these days. |
| Doug Vanderhoof, 1972. Doug was one-third of Grace, Doug and Charlie, one of the premier acts on campus back then. Doug was an acoustic and electric guitarist whose style leaned toward Hot Tuna and the Grateful Dead. He was a couple of years ahead of me in school, so I didn't know him all that well, but he was an excellent musician. That's Nick Iversen, a frequent performer at Postcrypt, sitting in the audience on the left side of the photo, framed in the doorway. |  |
 |
Michael Muller, 1972. Michael, my predecessor as the manager of Postcrypt, played Renaissance lute songs on classical guitar, as well as more modern folk songs. He was also an artist. I am fairly sure that he had painted the picture which can be seen hanging from a pipe on the wall behind him in this photo. |
| Musicians, 1972. Sorry, I only saw them play a couple
of times and can't remember their names.
[Bill Christophersen: Al Johnson and Mike Kahane, then known as Rock Possum. They did material from the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Dillard and Clark Expedition and Youngbloods, as well as several originals ("Big City Vampire"). The band expanded later that year to include a fiddler (me) and a spoons player (Mitch somebody) and added more country and bluegrass numbers to the repertoire. The name changed, at that point, to Possum (dropping the Rock, emphasizing the country). In 1973 we expanded further to include Jenny Adams and Marty Cutler (banjo). The name changed to Leaving Trunk at that time.] |
 |
 |
Performers, ca. 1975. These guys played bluegrass, all
fast flatpicking guitar runs and high, tight vocal harmonies. I can no
longer remember their names, although one of them might possibly have
been Erik Frandsen.
[Bill Christophersen: the Fly By Night String Band (Kevin Krajick on guitar, Scott Kellogg on mandolin, myself on fiddle). The band, with the addition of multi-instrumentalist Scott Ainsley, toured with the classic bluegrass act Bill Harrell and the Virginians and put out an album on Fretless records.] [Pat Flory: That's our little group, the Morningside Mountaineers, with David Forbes on banjo, Ezra Black on guitar, and myself (Patrick Flory) on the fiddle. I'm from Louisiana and moved to NYC in 1973 to go to grad school at Columbia. I met those two guys soon after I got there. Not long after this picture was taken, 15 year old Bela Fleck joined our group. Don't you wish you had a photo with him in it?] [Andy Stevens: so is it the Fly By Night String Band or the Morningside Mountaineers?!] |
| Intermission, ca. 1973. From left to right, Joanne Parnes, Tom King and Mark Lebwohl. Joanne was, I believe, the first Barnard student ever to obtain the permission of the Columbia administration to enroll in the Contemporary Civilization course, where she was the only Barnard student in a class of 25 or 30 Columbia students, including me. Life has never been the same since. We met in the fall of 1970, married in the fall of 1978, and are the parents of Mark, who will be entering Columbia in the fall with the Class of 2005. Joanne earned a PhD in Modern European History from Columbia, later earned an MLS from SUNY Albany, now works as the Library Media Specialist in a high school library, and still uses many of the things which she learned from Contemporary Civilization and Humanities at Columbia in working with her current students. Tom King, my sophomore-year roommate in Livingston Hall (now Wallach), went on to become the flight surgeon for an A-10 squadron in the U.S. Air Force. Mark Lebwohl, like Tom, went on to medical school and, the last time I heard, was the head of the Dermatology Department at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. |  |
I hope you like the photos. Thanks for all you have done to keep Postcrypt going. I didn't realize how much I had enjoyed my time there, and how much I missed it, until I sat down to scan the pictures. I hope you have some good memories of it too.
Regards,
Pete
pbs23@columbia.edu