An Interview with Matt Smith: Saying Yes (Club Passim at 60)
I remember the first time I walked into Club Passim, and you probably do too. It was one of those feelings of disbelief: this place that has played such a role in the mythology of the music I love actually exists. And that was followed by surprise: I had thought it would be bigger. I’m not sure exactly how large I imagined it, given how outsized it was in my understanding of folk music, but I distinctly remember being struck that you could sit in the back of the audience and have a conversation with the performer without raising your voice. On Thursday, Club Passim celebrates 60 years of folk music at the Shubert Theater with a roster of musicians who owe much of their careers to the early support of Passim.
I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with three people responsible for the legacy of Passim: Betsy Siggins, who managed Club 47 and returned to run Passim in the 1990s; Jim Wooster, Executive Director; and Matt Smith, the managing director and mentor to countless Boston musicians.
This conversation with Matt gets at the bones of why Passim is so special and vital today. It would be tempting, perhaps, to sit back and bring people to the Club out of a sense of nostalgia for times gone by. But that would be probably unsustainable, and just as important, it would be boring. In this conversation, Matt unpacks the idea of making live music a more strange, more unique experience than simply putting on show after show. It made me think of the closing round for the campfire festival when Zack Hickman brought sticks and made a little campfire in the middle of the room and they shut out the lights. Will anyone ever forget that feeling–the feeling that this is only happening right here, right now, once, and never again? I hope you enjoy this interview with Matt. Whatever you do with music–if you’re an artist or a fan, I believe Matt’s insight will help you have a richer experience. So read up, and then go to a show.
RLR: So maybe we can start with the big picture: 60 years of Passim–how are you feeling about this moment?
MS: I think it’s incredible. We’re getting to a point here for a place that has had three different lives—the Club 47 years, the Passim years, and the Club Passim years–we are now on the cusp of being the longest running part of this organization. That’s kind of the biggest piece of this: we’re looking back and we’re honoring the history–and we’re always excited about where we’ve been–but the whole thing is using that context for where we’re going.
RLR: How did becoming a non-profit impacts the conversations you have as an organization?
MS: I think at a time when it was critical for the organization, it opened it up to the community. It made us, organizationally, rethink the way we were presenting. It was a brand new organization. Programmatically, we were going to be working with mostly the same artists, and more, but it was a retooling to be able to reach out to the community and say: “How do you want to be a part of this as well?”
RLR: What are things you’ve heard from the community over time because of that stance that have made you think about things differently?
MS: People talk about during the Passim years that Bob [Donlin] was kind of a gatekeeper, and that Passim was the prestige gig that you were looking to get to, even though it was still a very humble room. But now, we are always looking out for people and inviting them here. It’s more about what we can do early on in the career and what we can do to help you take the next steps and then send you out. I never want to be a place that holds people back, that says, “No, no, you’re ours. We made you.” That’s an awful way to think about an artist. What’s the point of helping them get from point A to point B, and not helping them get to point C? That growth is what makes room for the next crop of folks coming through.
RLR: Thinking about this anniversary concert, and this slate of performers, including Patty Griffin, Josh Ritter, and Dar Williams, Passim is very much part of their story, going from point A to B and well beyond. What does it mean to you to have them involved in this celebration?
MS: For me, it’s that they get it. They get that we’re all links in this endless chain and it stretches back way before Joan [Baez] and Peter Wolf and will go way beyond Josh [Ritter] and Rose Cousins and Alisa Amador. We wanted to have pieces from each distinct era, and at the same time, being that it is one show, we’re fairly limited to show the breadth of what we present here. Which was frustrating as well, but you can’t have a twelve hour show. I’d love to be able to book an old time band or a Celtic band or any number of things that really tell the story of what has been, and what is to become. When I think of all the student bands that come out of Berklee—they’re fantastic and certainly worthy of the stage, and that’s why we’re booking seven nights a week here. We want to bring in the favorites and fill in the seats, but we also want to blow people away with the thing they didn’t know about yet.
RLR: Booking seven nights is a challenge, and other venues have cut back to only four nights a week in recent years. I distinctly remember coming to a show and there were maybe 15-20 people there, but I overheard you and other staff members just so appreciative of what the artists were doing.
MS: Success is not measured wholly by the number of bodies in the room. There are people that play here because this is the right room for them to play. Obviously, you can’t think like that every night of the week and not go under. There’s certainly an element of selection, even when you’re booking seven nights a week, but it’s how do you get creative with those nights? We just had Peter Mulvey here for seven nights in a row; and Peter is someone who is going to sell out a Peter Mulvey show easily, and maybe two or even three, but this allowed him to stretch out and get weird and do other things. So we had seven nights in a row, and none of them had fewer than 50 people here—that’s outstanding. One of the nights was a play, and completely different kinds of things. One night was celebrating Anais Mitchell.
RLR: That must have been so wonderful.
MS: It was unbelievable. Unbelievable. And it was very cool to see it come full circle because the kernel of the idea of these Lamplighter sessions was when Anais did Hadestown here with a local cast, and Peter was part of that. And just being a part of that, he said, “I want to do things with other people.”
RLR: A lot of people have looked to you as a mentor in their career. What are some of the questions you think it’s important for artists to consider as they’re starting out, and maybe later as they begin to develop?
MS: Part of it is how deep in am I gonna go? The paradigm has changed about what it means to be serious as an artist. Are you going to go full time? Is this what you’re going to do? Now, without merch sales being what they used to, it is getting near to the point of impossibility to rely on your gig and CD income to survive. So it’s the diversification of your own skill set. You’re also really good at graphic design, or web design, or you’re a really great instrumentalist or engineer and you do studio work. Maybe when you’re not doing your own music, you’re tour managing other people, or you’re good enough to be a player in somebody’s band. You look at someone like Mark Erelli, who’s been around forever, he’s not just Mark Erelli, the singer/songwriter. He’s touring with Lori McKenna, he’s touring with Paula Cole and Josh Ritter; he’s producing records, and doing art work for records, and really staying on top of being a bit of a Renaissance man. And you see that with more and more artists—you don’t just see them on the front of an album now, you also see them in the liner notes, having done a million things for other people.
RLR: On the one hand, there’s a different stress point for an artist, because they can’t just play music; on the other hand, do you see a deeper community among artists as a result?
MS: It’s different perspectives, person to person. I remember back in the late 90s, there were artists in the Boston-area scene that would endlessly complain about how competitive it was, and everyone was out for everyone else; I heard at the same time a million other people saying how thrilled they were at the community they had. And I think the ones who were complaining about the competitive nature were also the ones that were creating that vibe in their own world. Are you there supporting other people as well?
We had a great show last night—Hannah Siglin, who I’ve known since she was a first year at Berklee. Now she’s graduated, and is moving to LA. She’s been interning here, she was on the waitstaff here, and she just released her new CD, and the room was stinky with musicians. Every musician on the scene was here, and not just people her age. Her Berklee teachers were here: Mark Simos, and Livingston Taylor. People are coming out to see other people.
Some of those super fun nights we do, when we do our tribute nights—I put the call out to artists and about thirty people end up playing those shows. It’s like the folk music office party because people don’t always get to see each other, because they’re gigging. It’s like the campfire. festivals—everyone gets to see each other and hang out. And to be a room where that happens, that doesn’t just happen by chance, it happens by design; it’s what we’re here for.
I mean, from coming to shows when Bob and Reyann [Donlin] ran the place, and then getting involved as a volunteer right when it reopened as a non-profit, there’s still so many nights where I lock the door and I look at the key, and I’m like, “How did I get this?” How was I that person, where not only do I have the key, but I’m a complete insane person, where I’ll open the door for anything. I’ll come in six hours early so the band can have a space to rehearse. And I’ll do this or that, because the thrill of the job for me is to be able to say yes to the strange—people don’t always get that opportunity.
RLR: So, leaning toward yes feels like a core principle as you think about things that happen by design. Are there other elements of the design that you would name?
MS: Yes: it’s a short ladder here. There’s not a lot of space between the bottom rung and the top rung–meaning that the ladder’s lying down on the ground and we’re all walking on it. I’m the managing director; I also take out the trash and clean bathrooms. We’re a team that understands each others’ jobs and respects each other and we’re all working together. People know that I’m not looking down on anybody. Half our staff, they’re all musicians, and that doesn’t necessarily give them a leg up on anybody, but they’re involved, they’re engaged, they enjoy being here. So we’re able to be nimble within that. If a show goes down for some reason, I got a dozen people I can call and ask, “Do you want to pull something together super quick?” And someone will pick that up and say, “Let me call a couple of people and see what I can do,” and they’ll throw something together that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. How fun is that?
RLR: What were Zack Hickman and Mark Erelli calling that…
MS: [Laughs] Fuck it Friday. That came about when Zack called me on a Thursday because their gig in Maine was canceled preemptively because of weather. He was in the car with the other Barnstar guys and called me, not expecting to do something here, but that’s my easy thing to do. I suggested a late-night show, but he was like, “Our days of 11:00 pm shows are done.” And I said, “What if we do it at 4:00 in the afternoon, and we tell people to bail on work early—and it’s Fuck It Friday.” So we agreed to do it, and I was on my phone, and pulled their press photo of the website, and using the edit tool on my phone wrote with my finger, “F*ck It Friday,” and sent it to them, sort of joking, and before I knew it, that was sent out to their mailing list.
And it became a thing; there was another one where a show fell apart on a Friday and we did an in-the-round show with Zack, Mark, Dinty Child, and Dietrich Strause, also called Fuck It Friday. And we had a Thursday show go down, and Mark was part of that one, Fuck It Thursday. It became a thing—I was at a Della Mae show at The Sinclair and I ran to Matty and George from Lonely Heartstring Band, and they were like, “We should do a fuck it Friday.” All of a sudden people are asking to do a strange thing on a Friday afternoon and I was thinking, “What have I done?”
But we’re booking seven nights a week and we kind of had hit the ceiling on what we could do and all we had left was Saturday and Sunday afternoon. And I started booking those times, and then booking them regularly, and then I noticed half the venues around town were doing them. But think of all the people who can’t go out on a Tuesday night—maybe there’s kids or work stuff, but they want to see music, and all of sudden something they want to see is playing Saturday at 3:00? Especially this time of year, when it’s already dark by then, it’s like a big night out!
RLR: At the beginning of our conversation, you said you’re thinking about this anniversary not just in terms of where you’ve been but where you want to go. So where do you want to go?
MS: There was a long time in the history of Club Passim where every day felt like we could close down by the end of the week. That’s the nature of a new non-profit—we were a bunch of folks just trying to figure out how the hell this was gonna run. We’re not in that position anymore but we’re not solid to the point of being able to truly expand. We’re stable, but we need to be more than stable to intentionally go about new kinds of development programs. We have a good set of programs now, but there are some other ones that I’d like to pursue, and they’re going to take time, staff, and money. A lot of them have to do with artist development and education—this is our wheelhouse, it’s what we do, but we can always do more. So it’s about finding creative ways to bring things to more people.
Looking back gives you context and a rich sense of history. Knowing all of these things and knowing how we got here is such an exciting and vibrant thing, but it is documentary, it is a museum piece. And I want to use that information to inform, and to inspire moving forward. There’s new people coming, so what can we do to make sure the doors are open for them, and they will also say yes?
There are still a few tickets for the anniversary concert. Go. And Passim has a great slate of shows this month. Go. And support this incredible organization, if you can–become a member or make a donation so they can keep saying yes.