press coverage

Langdon Street Café:
One of Vermont's Best Music Destinations

For some of the best live music in the state, head over to Langdon Street Café some night this week. So says Vermont Life Magazine which has just listed Langdon Street Café (LSC) as one of the best 16 places to hear music in Vermont.

Ed Dufresne, in charge of booking performers, is excited about the range of high-quality musicians being drawn to the café.

"We want to keep featuring an array of good local talent," he says, "but increasingly, we're attracting regional as well as touring acts from all around the country."

"Musicians really like to play here," he continues, "because it's not a bar atmosphere with all the din and noise and socialness of a bar going on. It's a place where people concentrate on the show."

Two stellar examples of the café's success in drawing regional acts are the upcoming concerts on April 21st and 28th.

April 21st, will feature a new trio, The Tough Cats, a folk indie bluegrass band from Maine that has been receiving a lot of attention.

April 28th, Session Americana, a six piece band that was voted Boston's best live folk act in 2006, returns to the café. Session Americana's music, a wide slice of country/blues/traditional/old time music is performed around a single microphone, giving it a kitchen jam session kind of feel.

"They're top-notch musicians," says Dufresne, "and they obviously love playing here, because they're not making a lot of money. They love the room and the way they're treated so they continue to come back every other month."

No Cover Charge

There is no cover charge at the café. Mid-way through a set, someone passes a bucket around for donations. That way, Dufresne points out, people coming to hear the music, directly and voluntarily support the artists.

If the bucket comes up short of the agreed upon fee, the café makes up the difference. They've been very pleasantly surprised by the crowd's generosity and plan to stick to this arrangement for the time being. Their hope is that as the community becomes more aware of the exceptional quality of concerts being offered, that the crowds will grow and so will donations.

The café's owners and workers recognize the need for better and more extensive advertising. People in Montpelier, Dufresne says, are very supportive of live music, but do not necessarily know or recognize the names of some of the up and coming performers.

"The only way I can change that," he explains, "is if we have more money and more detailed advertisements to talk about what's coming."

While artists might normally shy away from working a room with no cover, he says the café's collective ownership lends credibility to this structure.

Vision and a Dream

At its core, Langdon Street Café is just that - a café. They serve local beers, organic wines and coffees, espresso, tea and a light fare menu that includes a variety of baked treats and desserts that are beginning to attract a following. But behind the café there is a larger vision and a larger dream.

About two and a half years ago, five friends with more passion and enthusiasm than experience, came down from the Northeast Kingdom where four of them had been living, and opened the café. Meg Hammond, one of the original owners, describes their vision this way.

"When I was twenty, I took a trip to England. A friend took me to his family pub, where dogs, kids, teenagers, parents and everybody was hanging out and drinking something and they were all there together playing music. It didn't lead the 20-somethings away from the family core. What we do in America, separating ourselves, it becomes a hidden thing the under 21s are doing. What we're about is building a village, a strong family core."

So began this worker-run, collectively-owned café where workers can become owners by sweat equity, buy-in and the desire and right fit for the place. The system is fluid. The original five owners dwindled to three, one took a leave of absence and then there were two, a worker became an owner and then there were three, and the owner on leave returned, so now there are four.

"We're all there for a greater reason," Hammond says. "We want to empower people to start their own business and we want to bring culture back to the United States."

She says that our culture has gone so much to electronic media for entertainment, that many people have lost the appreciation for the magic of a live performance.

"We're trying to show people that there is all this great wonderful live music out there that isn't on the radio, that can only be seen live. That's part and parcel of the mission. Getting people to see live music and appreciate what artistry can be done on stage in a moment, rather than captured on film in 25 takes."

A Place to Feel Comfortable

"We want to give people a place to feel really comfortable," Hammond says. "I never had that as a teenager. We see these kids come in and I'm running from behind the bar to play with them. We give mothers a breath of fresh air playing with these kids."

Some may have the impression that this is a place where only hippies or young people with young kids or the alternative crowd can feel comfortable.

Not according to Noah Hahn, (one of the collective's owners and the bass player with the Friday night Honky-Tonk band, Mark LeGrand and the Lovesick Bandits). The word is beginning to spread. They're seeing more and more legislators and lawyers, folks in suits as well as overalls; people pulled in by a local jazz band or some great lilting Irish music or sultry Latin jazz are making Langdon Street a music venue to check out during the week.

One of the café's older patrons agrees. She says, "The very diverse crowd the café attracts is the most interesting thing. You'll have a popular band coinciding with an art opening. There are babies, ancient people, no real room to dance, but people are dancing, fabulously delicious sandwiches and a really nice huge mix of cultures and ages. Not what you'd expect for a coffee shop. It's funky enough that it doesn't matter what you're wearing – the food is good, people are lovely. And there are great art shows on the walls sometimes."

"What I get out of the café," says newest owner Darcy Gagne, "is the sense that I am doing a really good thing for my community in a place where I want to make my home and I do feel like this is home. I come down here at 7 a.m. and I feel like I am doing something really positive for a place that I've grown to love. It feels really good. People that I work with are easy to get along with and we work a lot on our meetings and everything runs smoothly. If we keep at what we are doing and work hard, we'll definitely succeed and we'll be around for a long, long time.

Working hard and staying open seem to be the key, literally as well as figuratively. This quote from Noah Hahn sums up the café's approach to their business.

"We were originally closed Mondays, and then we were open every Monday except for the last Monday of each month, and now," Hahn said with a happy shrug, "we're just open all the time."

Open indeed.

[Reprinted with permission of the author.]

hours

Mon-Thurs 8 am to 11 pm
Friday 8 am to 12:30 am
Saturday 9 am to 12:30 am
Sunday 9 am to 11 pm