Up Front

The Club, the Music, the People

Music will soon be the driving force of this intersection.

Twenty years after the end of the Civil War, when horse and buggy were still the best method to “get around town”, detached triple-decker homes had become the go-to architecture for affordable homes in many New England cities.

In 1886, in the Riverside section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a large and unusual building arose at the intersection of Western Avenue and Putnam Avenue. It stood out because it was essentially four triple-decker houses combined into one building, one solid mass, with most apartment entrances on Putnam Ave and two on Western Ave. The neighborhood surrounding it was predominantly working-class: residents with Irish, French-Canadian and Italian backgrounds (it later welcomed immigrants from Jamaica, Haiti, and other Caribbean islands).

Putnam Ave and Western Ave: 1873 (L) and 1913 (R)

Around 1930, a permit was approved by the city of Cambridge to convert the two Western Ave downstairs apartments of this building into an eatery, resulting in the opening of “Ernie’s Luncheonette,” where Ernest Griffiths served hungry customers at 343 Western Ave for the next 30 years. (Ernie obtained a liquor license for his establishment in 1935.)

In 1967, World War II veteran and local businessman Marvin Gilmore bought the entire building and remodeled the first floor, second floor, and basement of the 343 Western Ave address. Ernie’s Luncheonette would then re-open as a jazz nightclub called The Western Front¹. The Western Front’s first incarnation was as a dependable venue for local jazz and R&B bands—as well as some out of town acts. The club also served soul food, that cuisine most associated with Black Americans from the South, but which had its roots in Africa.

The corner of Western and Putnam Avenues, c.1970, before murals were painted on the white walls

May 1972, Cambridge Chronicle

In the mid- and late-1970s, the club started to include reggae DJ nights and to book a small number of local reggae bands, their audiences being drawn from the growing West Indian population in the area as well as from Cambridge kids and college students who were starting to catch on to the reggae sound.

Another remodel occurred around 1980, and what emerged was a club that regularly booked reggae and calypso bands and eventually became the most important reggae music venue in New England for the next few decades. The Front acted as a kind of a “social club” for the local West Indian population, providing Jamaican food and drink, music and culture, news and camaraderie, and was a draw for the underground reggae music scene that had been percolating in Cambridge over the previous decade—it was all of these things at once.

Let’s go inside.

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It’s 10pm on a summer night in 1989. The air is dewey with moisture from the Charles River, which is only a block away and starting to widen on its way to the Boston Harbor. As you approach the Western Front and look directly at the entrance, you see a perfectly-centered large circular plexiglass window framed in the white stucco exterior and protected under the protruding marquee. The striking facade of the building stands out in the neighborhood for its brightness and geometricality, as compared with the two-family homes and triple-deckers looking not much different than they did in the 1890s or the 1940s.

The round window is flanked by two sets of stairways, one for entrance, the other for exit, each with a small landing. It’s time to head inside, but you’ll probably have to push by some people lounging just outside the entry door, smoking a cigarette, talking, laughing, “reasoning.” As you enter the building, your taste buds perk up when you smell the food and you start to hear the deep sound of the bass coming from a sound system, hidden somewhere, ghostly. To the right there’s a glass-encased food warmer displaying Jamaican patties with a variety of fillings. A long bar just to the right looks like it is sunken below floor level a bit, but only because the area to the left of it is raised up, your first indication that the architecture inside this place is unusual and creative. There are about ten stools along the bar, lined up like lily pads in a pond, with a few thirsty patrons relaxing after a hard day’s work.

Before you enter the club itself, you’ll climb a few more steps, find your way past the “door guy” collecting the cover charge, and turn to swing past two table-top video games at the back wall. The Western Front is built on the idea of “levels” and you’ve already passed through a few of them. Another short set of stairs now takes you back down to the ground floor on the other side, where there are round tables with chairs and a juke box filled with reggae and R&B hits. Some bands will set up and play in this spot, but the main events—especially on the weekends—are always upstairs.

Clip from a November 1970 Interiors Magazine article about the Western Front and the architect that Marvin Gilmore hired to design it

If you’re a local with ties to the community, you might decide to go check out who is downstairs in the basement, which acts as a storage space, a kitchen, a band room, a private hangout—and represents yet another level in the Western Front geography. After heading down the steep stairway, you know to knock on the door and wait for someone to see if you’re “okay” to let in. The place is all low ceilings and stacks of liquor boxes, with an old couch and a table and chairs for band members to relax in. Around the corner to the left, a sink and pots and pans in a tight space tell you that you’re in the chef’s domain, where curry goat and rice and peas and those Jamaican patties come to life. This is also the perfect place to build a spliff and pass it around, but likely more than one will be circulating.

Early days of the Western Front, first floor, with stairway to the basement on the right. Note the stylish curves and cutouts and beadboard walls

Heading back upstairs and out into the first floor, if you gaze upward you’ll see an open stairway hugging the wall, tracing a long arc as it rises to the second floor, with little evidence left that each floor was once just a two-bedroom apartment. Because the stairway and ceiling are open, you’ve already been hearing the music coming down the stairs from the DJ spinning vinyl from above.

The stairs are the kind that invite you to climb slowly and take in both what you’re leaving behind and the space you’re entering. If the band has already started (around 11pm), you may have to wait at the top of the stairs to be able to find an opening in the packed in crowd to claim your spot on the floor.

The place is small but feels like a very large house party. At the top of the stairs, there’s just ten feet in front of you before you bump into the small “stage,” raised up less than a foot off the floor. To the left of the stairs is the second-floor bar. To the right, a wall juts out to form a nook where a man named Jah Shirt can often be found, leaning into his place in history. There are more tables and chairs, abruptly ending in the back where the soundboard needs to have room to breathe, along with effects racks, cassette decks, turntables, and boxes of records. If you know the long-time soundman “Tappa Knotts”, you may greet him first and spend some time basking in the music-selecting. When the band’s not playing, a microphone is plugged into the board for deejaying² over dubs, almost always done by local characters with nicknames like Bonito, Fidel Cap, Papa Richie, Mexican, Evah Love, and Jah Shirt, or sometimes singers or deejays from local bands.

You go back and find a spot near the front of the stage and settle in for the band to start playing. The ceilings are low and the speakers are huge. The band is packed onto the very small stage, but they don’t mind. They’re loving the intimacy, the excitement, the faith in the music embodied by the people packed in front of them, most of whom have fallen in love with reggae music and are happy to have found a place where they can feel live music in their bones and be around a diversity of like-minded people.

1981 Lenky Roy at the “Elegant” Western Front

The band might do three 45-minute sets, finishing up after 1am. They’ll play originals and they’ll play covers. If you’re lucky, they’ll have a horn section or a solid percussionist or dedicated background vocalists and they’ll have a lot of energy and the right feel for this music that is trickier to play than most musicians think it is. Many local bands play The Front regularly and have solid followings. By the end of the night—especially if it’s a Cambridge- or Boston-based band—some number of guest singers or deejays will likely get up on the stage and join the band for some freestyling vocals. Because they pop in to do just a few minutes of vocals, they can get the late-night crowd whipped up into a frenzy and inject some late night energy into the dance floor.

Also by the end of the night, Marvin Gilmore, the man who created the club at the end of the 1960s, will come up on stage and play his maracas along with the band (but only if he feels the band was up to par).

Satta at the Front, with Marvin playing the maracas in the upper left (photo by Teague Quinn)

When the music ends, the sound fading, the crowd thinning, some linger, missing the last Red Line train home. They may come back Saturday for more live music or on Sunday for the “deejay jamboree”, or the next weekend for another featured band. While the average music fan at the time didn’t appreciate the meaning and the sound of reggae music, the Western Front was a place to go where everyone did, and it was happy to play its role as a musical and cultural hub of the neighborhood.

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          Behind the scenes: The Band

The night started for the musicians by loading their equipment into vehicles, driving to the venue, dragging their instruments up the long steep iron stairs behind the club, setting up the drums and keyboards and the guitar and bass rigs, tuning up their instruments, doing a sound check, changing the setlist at the last minute, relaxing before getting on stage, playing the music, calling out the changes, mingling with the crowd between sets, hanging by the soundboard or with the bartender, meeting new people, always happy that Mr. Gilmore had reimagined the space that formerly housed Ernie’s Luncheonette as an intimate live music venue on a worthy musical mission.

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Opening music credits in audio version: Zion Dub, live performance by Zion Initiation at the Western Front, 1981. Audio source: Abdul Baki

For more about the history of the Cambridge/Boston reggae scene, as well as live video inside the Western Front, visit my Reggae Dawn page

For more narrative about the development of the Boston-area reggae scene, check out my memoir: MY RIDE THROUGH LIFE (A Cambridge Kid Finds Identity in Dirt Lots, City Schools, and Reggae Beat)

1. The name is a play on the name for the WWI western boundary of the German advance, as well as the name of the street where the club was located.

2. DJing = spinning vinyl, deejaying = rapping, Jamaican-style, over instrumentals