Beatnik spirit is alive and well at club; Cheshire man makes documentary about Cafe Nine’s Beatniks

By Jeffery Kurz, Record-Journal staff
 
CHESHIRE — “AM, FM, MBAs and Ph Ds, HMO’s and ICUs, there’s nothing left but your life to lose.” Add a conga drum and you have, via the syncopat­ed patter of Floatin’ Fred, a pretty good updating of beatnik poetry. For the past seven years, the beatnik spirit of the 1960s has been alive and well every Monday night at a small club in New Haven, Café Nine. Now the venue’s revival spirit has been captured on film, in a documentary called “300 Mondays: Beatniks, Music, and the Birth of a Scene.” The 1 ½-hour documen­tary intersperses wide­ranging performances, in­cluding poetry, percussion, folk music and a healthy dose of avant­garde fare, with artists sit­ting around talking about why they do what they do.

“You always see some­thing new at a beatnik show,” observes Frank Critelli, a Meriden song­writer and performer, in the film. “And after 300 shows, that’s quite a feat.” The video was shot on a single night, the 300th “Monday,” on Feb. 17. Check your calendar and you’ll notice the date land­ed on a Friday this year, which attests at least to the quirky nature of the whole enterprise. Actually the idea, says filmmaker James Camp­bell, was to try to capture the largest turnout possi­ble, and everyone knows Friday night’s a better bet than Monday. Critelli said Café Nine typically schedules cele­brations on Friday. “When they do special shows they do a Friday night extrava­ganza,” he said. Campbell said he was intrigued by “the openness of it. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get.” The film will show at Firehouse 12 in New Haven Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. following a reception. Afterwards, a party will take place at Café Nine, which is about a block away. Campbell will also have DVDs available for purchase.

The Cheshire resident has parlayed a hobby into a small production compa­ny, Reflection Produc­tions. A case manager for the state Department of Mental Retardation, Campbell started out film­ing biographies about four years ago “and I ended up getting more and more equipment.” He and his wife, Diane Campbell, then began filming concerts put on by local bands and he recog­nized he had found a niche market. Many bands can’t afford the high production costs typical of such films. Campbell scanned the Café 9 site on the Web, searching for potential clients, and that led to a meeting with Critelli and discussions about how they could promote the lo­cal music scene. Campbell zeroed in on the beatnik night, started by Café Nine’s Ed Leonard, “which I thought had a kind of unique element to it.” Critelli, a familiar per­former at Meriden’s Daf­fodil Festival who also per­formed during the city’s recent bicentennial cele­bration, says beatnik night gives artists a rare oppor­tunity to experiment “and try things out” and do what they wouldn’t risk in more conventional set­tings.

“Nine times out of ten I’ll try a new song out at a beatnik show,” he said. Campbell used two cameras to make the film, which captures more than a dozen individual perfor­mances, and says he learned a lot of creative tech­niques in putting it together. “I think we learned that there are a lot of stories that are un­told and we could be the vehi­cle to tell them,” he said. “It was fun to go back to that scene,” said Diane Campbell. “That’s what’s become fun, we’ve made friends and it’s opened up a whole scene to us.” Campbell is now working on other projects, including a film about autism, and recognizes the potential value of his beat­nik documentary as an example of his abilities as a filmmaker. But he’s also just happy with the video itself.

“I think even when it’s gone we’re content with it,” he said. “If all we do is show it at Fire­house 12 and get a good show­ing and have a great night, that would be enough. But I think it clearly has opened up new av­enues.”

jkurz@record-journal.com 203.317.2213

(Cheshire resident James Campbell’s film, “300 Mondays,” will be shown at Firehouse 12 in New Haven Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.)