When, within the late Sixties, Kathy Garness wandered down a cobblestone block to the nook of Lunt and Glenwood avenues, she had no concept that the Rogers Park coffeehouse she discovered there would change her life.
“I keep in mind seeing this type of cavernous place there. It was all darkish, however there was music coming from it,” Garness says of her first encounter with No Exit coffeehouse. “I may odor teas and the espresso … an entire ambiance that wafted out the door.”
Garness was one in all numerous youth of their teenagers and twenties who made coffeehouses like No Exit right into a second residence in Chicago. She even attributes her work as a botanical artist and pure lands steward for the Northern Illinois area to the politics and environmentalism she was uncovered to there.
No Exit and lots of different comparable Chicago cafés — notably It’s Right here, the Amazingrace, the Why?, Medici on 57th and Ali’s on 63rd — had been all a part of the people revival motion. From the tip of the Nineteen Fifties by way of the early Nineteen Seventies, acoustic music and songs from rural areas grew to become fashionable with the American public — particularly younger individuals.
Coffeehouses had been key to that development, providing younger audiences and the musicians who performed for them a protected gathering place with out alcohol.
“You had an entire viewers of youthful individuals who had by no means heard this music earlier than, and it sounded far more uncooked and actual than what was occurring on the radio,” says Mark Guarino, creator of “Nation and Midwestern: Chicago and the Historical past of Nation Music and the People Revival.” “It actually was type of an underground subculture.”
Most of the folks performers who grew to become family names — like Steve Goodman, Michael Smith and Fred Holstein — bought their first gigs at these coffeehouses. They usually started as music followers themselves, seeing different folkies play and becoming a member of this burgeoning group of Chicago.
One was Artwork Thieme, who was an everyday performer at No Exit for over three a long time. The proprietor on the time, Joe Moore, gave him his first probability in 1959. Thieme died in 2015.
“They’d a $1 cowl, and he made one-quarter [of whatever money came in],” says Thieme’s son, C.T. Thieme. “It price him extra to get again residence than he made that evening.”
Moore credit Dodie Kallick, one other native musician, because the originator of people music on the No Exit. As soon as Kallick was a constant act, extra musicians and folks followers adopted. “[It’s] how the espresso store labored — issues grew in it,” Moore stated in a 1977 interview. “[A] chess event grew in it, the people singing grew in it.”
With out the coffeehouses, younger individuals would have been locked out of the dwell music scene. Some group organizations, just like the YMCA, even arrange coffeehouses as a result of they had been so motivated for younger individuals to have a social place that didn’t rely on alcohol.
Different cafés opened explicitly as efficiency venues — It’s Right here, additionally in Rogers Park, may seat a number of hundred individuals. It was generally known as “Kiddie Huge Time,” after the native younger folks hopefuls who would get the prospect to carry out when the period’s largest stars, together with John Denver and Joni Mitchell, weren’t placing on a present.
Wanting again, lots of the regulars from the ’60s and ’70s say these locations helped form them and discover their group. That impression lives on: Lesley Kozin, whose mother and father owned No Exit after Moore, says that even at this time at her favourite neighborhood bar, she’ll instinctively lookup when somebody enters to see if she is aware of who it’s — simply as she would do on the No Exit.
Kozin says of the pull of the group: “If it was a spot that known as to you, chances are you’ll by no means go away.”
No Exit grew to become fashionable for chess tournaments every Sunday (high left). House owners Brian and Sue Kozin (high proper) at No Exit. The stuffed armadillo on the mantle above the No Exit Stage (backside left) was named Claude for his saddle and reins, after actor Claude Rains. Claude can nonetheless be discovered within the previous No Exit storefront, now Le Piano. A photograph of Roger Benson, Jan Burda and Vic Radin (backside proper) in 1981 at No Exit.
Solar-Occasions file; Rogers Park West Ridge Historic Society; C.T. Thieme.
By the late Nineteen Seventies, the heyday of the people revival had handed, and cafés both needed to adapt or shutter. In 1977, Leslie’s mother and father, who had been regulars and workers, purchased No Exit.
For the coffeehouse to outlive, Brian and Sue Kozin turned it right into a venue for extra than simply folks music. Within the ’80s and ’90s, No Exit placed on poetry readings and comedy nights. Comic Michael Shannon carried out there repeatedly for a number of years; he went on to write down No Exit right into a sketch on “Saturday Evening Reside.”
However the important character of the group didn’t change. Over the 22 years they owned No Exit, the Kozins spent nearly as a lot time chatting with shut pals on the regulars desk as they did behind the counter. Nobody round to reply the telephone or make a drink? No downside — any patron was welcome to do it themselves.
The Kozins would host No Exit vacation events as effectively. “The No Exit Thanksgivings had been epic,” Lesley says. “It was only a bunch of us — we name ourselves hippie cousins.”
In 2000, No Exit was one of many final of its sort to shut in Chicago. It held on for so long as it did due to the Kozins’ ardour.
“We simply by no means made any cash off the rattling place. … We barely made a dwelling,” Brian Kozin says. “You recognize, it’s in regards to the music. It’s not in regards to the cash. If it had been in regards to the cash, we wouldn’t have been there.”
However with these coffeehouses, younger Chicagoans misplaced an necessary “third area” — a spot to name their very own, spend hours speaking with pals and see native musicians check out new songs. “I’d like to see one thing like that return once more,” C.T. Thieme says.
