'So Weird But Amazing': An Oral History Of Sidewalk Cafe & Antifolk

For the first time in a quarter of a century, the antifolk movement is without a home. Late last year, the scene's seemingly unkillable headquarters, Sidewalk Cafe, was sold to a pair of restaurateurs, who appear eager to make some changes to the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue A. But the new owners also inherited a long-running backroom music scene, and a scrappy community of oddball songwriters, poets and artists who'd made a nightly residency of the open mic (arguably the city's oldest) since 1993. While it's unclear what will become of the venue, the consensus is that eviction is imminent.

Sidewalk Cafe was ceremonially laid to rest on Saturday, the final night in an emotional month of farewells coinciding with the last-ever Antifolk Festival. It was a generation-spanning reunion, with Sidewalk faithful, including Regina Spektor, Adam Green, and Jeffrey Lewis, gracing the small stage alongside newer acts like sourdoe and Horra. Lach (pronounced latch), the man who founded the scene and kept it going for so long, read a poem over FaceTime from his home in Scotland.

The vibe — not unlike many nights there — was mischievous/mournful, alternating between earnest tributes and gallows humor. Phoebe Kreutz, a longtime Sidewalk fixture and accomplished joke folk, summed it up: "You didn't have to be good to play Sidewalk, but you had to be awesome."

The space will soon close for two months of renovations, and few are expecting to be invited back once it reopens. In the eyes of many devotees, the most surprising thing is that it took this long. Others say they're confident that antifolk — that hard to pin down label, as much an aesthetic as a musical genre — will surface elsewhere. It's happened before, they note, though that seems like a lifetime ago now.

Below, a dozen Sidewalk alum reflect on the unique community they built, and what happens after the walls finally close in on that tiny room "where everything happened."

: The scene started when I finally had my fill of the West Village folk scene in the early '80s. I moved to the Lower East Side and I opened up a club on Rivington Street between Clinton and Suffolk in a loft space that I'd gutted. I would sleep on the stage during the day and then I'd open up the club at night, like around midnight and we'd stay open until like 12 in the afternoon the next day. It was a completely illegal after hours bar and it was originally called the Hidden Fortress. But it quickly became known as the Fort. That's where antifolk was born.

Around the same time that I opened up the Fort, the West Village was having the New York Folk Festival. I didn't feel as if anybody playing was actually a folk musician. They were singer-songwriters with guitars. So I decided, well, if they're gonna call themselves folk, we're gonna call ourselves antifolk. And we'll have the Antifolk Festival. Instead of the hootenanny, we'll have the Antihoot. And that's how it all started, with fellow misfits like Cindy Lee Berryhill, Kirk Kelly, Roger Manning, and Billy Nova.

We lasted there for like a year and a half and finally the cops came around and gave me two weeks notice that I had to move on. I decided to see if I could bring the Fort into another club. The first club I brought it to was Sophie's. When Sophie's moved to Fifth Street, we moved with her. After Sophie's, the next long stay was at the Chameleon Club, which was next door to where Sidewalk is now. That's when Beck arrived on the scene and became an anti-folker.

I moved to San Francisco for a year and came back to New York, but I was planning to move to Europe. I visited a friend of mine who was bartending at Sidewalk, Laura Sativa, a rock and roll stalwart of the East Village. She told me the owners were looking to do something with the backroom and asked if I wanted to bring the Fort back to New York again. I was like, "Nah, I don't think I wanna run clubs anymore, I think I'm gonna go to France." And she was like, "Well, will you just talk to these guys and maybe give them some ideas?"

So I basically made a deal that I would run the back room for like a week or two and get them up and running. I ended up staying there for 15 years.

An early Sidewalk show flyer (Courtesy of Herb Scher)

: Lach had just started booking shows at Sidewalk and had just started the Antihoot on Monday nights, but I didn't know anything about that. I was there to see Brenda Kahn, but I stayed for Lach — and I think Adam Roth, rest in peace. The back room club was smaller then, with a gigantic view of a basement pool table, but all along the walls were plastered newsprint and Xerox articles of the history of antifolk from all of these long-gone New York periodicals that had written about the scene back in the late '80s. I'd never heard about any of this, but between acts, I read the news, oh, boy.

JOE BENDIK(musician): Back then, the only way to get a gig was to do the Monday night Antihoots. Technically, it was an open mic, but it went beyond that. This is where you made your name. Lach was the MC and was quite vocal in his opinions with devastating timing. If an act came off all big headed and tried too hard to prove something, he would let you know it. He gave it to me a few times too. I deserved it.

HERB SCHER(musician; photographer): There were a stream of running jokes including a litany of stock "sponsors" of the Antihoot, such as "Eddie's Air Guitar Shop." There were little rituals like "new song applause," and Lach's introduction of the evening where he would exhort people to forget about what number they drew and use the time they were hanging out to meet someone, get in a relationship, break up and write a song about it and perform it later that night.

The creative energy of Sidewalk extended well beyond the stage. There were constantly projects underway that required artwork, photography, reporting, and writing. Before everything shifted over to Facebook it was considered practically a requirement to create a flyer to promote your own shows. Some of these were wildly inventive and beautiful. Jon Berger published a number of 'zines about Sidewalk... they represent the same kind of anything goes creativity in their pages as was occuring on stage.

LACH: The Antihoot was the heartbeat of the scene, and it usually ended about 3:30 a.m. Whoever was left I would play a set to. I called it, "Set for the Waitress, the Walls, and the Weirdo." And then when my set was done we would have what we called the "Chamomile Campfire," where we'd all sit down and have chamomile tea at four in the morning and watch the sunrise and tell stories and talk about the acts who played, who do we think deserves a shot at a gig, who needs some help, about maybe if they need some help getting sober or something like that. When we'd leave Sidewalk at 5 in the morning we'd end up in Tompkins Square Park until 9 a.m., just keeping the party going.

JEFFREY LEWIS(musician; illustrator): It was free to get in, and I was often bored and lonely. I also became accidentally aware that Sidewalk Cafe had an open mic on Monday nights. In the fall of 1997 I started writing some songs, and in the spring of 1998 I was determined to become a part of the Sidewalk scene by playing the open mic every week. Lach was the head honcho running the open mic and after my second open mic there he told me I could play a gig at Sidewalk, and I was elated. I was shy and reclusive, just sitting and silently drawing, but I very much wanted to have friends in the scene and wanted to be part of the community of regulars there.

KIMYA DAWSON(The Moldy Peaches; solo artist): Sidewalk Cafe was where everything happened. I had just quit drinking when Adam [Green] booked a Moldy Peaches show there. I walked into a little room that would quickly become my second home. I was pretty straight out of rehab and scared and raw. There was, to my surprise, an amazing recovery scene there. And it was like this magical creative support group.

NICOLE ATKINS(musician) My first gig was right after 9/11. I remember calling Lach and being like, "Hey, I'm kind of scared to come over there." He was like, "Nicole, terrorism has been around since the age of the dinosaurs," and for some reason that reassured me.

After that first gig, I just wanted to be there all of the time. I remember watching Regina Spektor play a song on one guitar string and thinking: 'This is so weird but amazing.' Then I ended up just kind of living in my truck on Avenue A. I would change clothes and brush my teeth at Sidewalk. Sometimes people would need a place to crash if they pulled a late number. I had a 1980 Dodge Ramcharger. You could fit a lot of people in it.

I went to college with the Avett Brothers, and I remember one night I'd gotten them a gig at Sidewalk. John Popper from Blues Traveler was sitting at the bar. I went up to him and was like, "Hey man, can you go on stage and play harmonica with my friends?" He was like, "I will if you buy me a whiskey." I probably shouldn't have, because he was very drunk. But then he got on stage and absolutely killed it. There are so many stories like that.

JEFFREY LEWIS: One particular highlight for me in that era was when Daniel Johnston himself came to play at Sidewalk. Lach knew that Daniel was my songwriting idol, and so I got to play an opening set. I had a memorable trip to the downstairs bathroom where I was joined by Daniel who plopped down on the toilet seat next to my urinal. There was no privacy in the bathroom in those days because any private toilet stall would have become a junkie haven. Not many people get to meet their idols, far fewer people get to play a gig with their idols, and surely even fewer people get to have their idols drop trou and sit down on a toilet right next to them!

LACH: Jeff Buckley used to come to the Antihoot quite often. I mean his main club was Sin-é on St. Marks and that's where he recorded "Sin-é Live." Jeff was one of those guys where you know, the first six seconds of watching him you're like, "Holy shit, this is the real thing."

JEFFREY LEWIS: The year 2000 seemed like a watershed, like the upwards momentum of the Moldy Peaches was pulling the whole Sidewalk scene upwards with it like the tail of a comet. When the Moldy Peaches signed to Rough Trade Records of London, and started to tour in England and get multi-page spreads in the regular music press it created a rift of jealousy in the rest of the scene, with all the rest of us trying to cling to crumbs in their wake. There were also an embarrassing number of Moldy Peaches clone bands springing up, with male and female co-vocalists, back and forth lyrics, irreverent lyrics and garage-antifolk tunes.

The tremendous success of the Moldy Peaches in places like England and Germany created new young fans and performers in those countries who were interested in seeing other antifolk acts, so a lot of Sidewalk people began to be able to do tours in England and Europe, and the antifolk scene made a lot of international friends, who also often came and played and hung out at Sidewalk in the early years of the 2000s. So the early couple years in which Sidewalk and Antimatters was the entirely of our musical world had irrevocably exploded.

Kimya Dawson and Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches in 2001 (Credit: Kimberly Mossel)

: 2001 saw former members of The Moldy Peaches 2000 reunite as The Moldy Peaches and then get signed to Rough Trade records. Lots of Antifolks acts got noticed around that point — including Jeffrey Lewis, Regina Spektor, Nellie McKay a few years later. The years after the Peaches encouraged a huge wave of DIY enthusiasts coming into the club.

LACH: There was almost like there was new waves of antifolk every three or four years. I wanted to leave for about two years before I left. I looked at it like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I had to find my Charlie, man. And I really lucked out in finding Ben [Krieger] and Somer [Bingham] to take over the scene, as well as Anne Husik.

SOMER BINGHAM(musician; booker, 2014-2019): When I first came to the open mic, I was working a day job in an office and was depressed after a bad experience with a mainstream artist who offered to produce me in his all-female project. That came crashing down in an all-too stereotypical #MeToo moment, and I thought I'd lost my "big break."

So I wandered into Sidewalk in 2006 in an effort to bounce back. I became a regular immediately, and was inspired by artists like Shilpa Ray, Vincent Cacchione (Caged Animals), Erin Regan, and Dan Penta (Hearth) who frequented the open mic. There was this endless flow of creativity — a sense of community — and the rush and nervousness every time I got up to play, hands shaking as I tried to impress my friends and peers and heroes. Lach, who first brought music to Sidewalk, became a mentor and friend, and Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend casually suggested I learn to run sound and join the crew. I lost my day job and became a professional audio engineer, and eventually took over the booking of Sidewalk — after Lach passed the torch to my predecessor Ben Krieger, and up until it closed.

RAY BROWN(musician): Herb Scher invited me to Sidewalk Cafe in 2009 to interview me about the old days of antifolk, and that's when I first saw the open mic in the backroom. I'd been involved in the antifolk scene in the '80s, and when I saw the mic in action it put the songwriting bug in my head, and a couple of months later had written some songs, and started playing the mic, and then gigs. For me, knowing that next Monday night I was going to Sidewalk would motivate me to write a new song, and almost all of my songs were written with the Sidewalk audience in mind.

JONATHAN BERGER: In 2011, Sidewalk closed for renovations. It started with an expired liquor license, I think, but they took the chance to fix everything under the sun. Upon return, the bar was shiny. The restaurant looked imposing. The furniture was tony. The place had been invested in.

After the renovation, Sidewalk instituted the Krieger Burger, an insider priced hamburger for regulars that cost only five dollars: a loss leader to reward the community that stayed through thick and thin. The regulars, thin on cash, grew very much thicker that winter.

ANNE HUSIK(booker 1999-1997, 2011-2019; musician): After booking with Lach for a few years in the 1990s, I'd vanished for about a decade. But I came back in 2011 and they let me book one night a week. I brought in a different crowd then what was going on there — old punks from the Max's and CBGB's crowd, people I'd met at Otto's, that sort of thing. The thing that didn't change was that it felt like my living room. It was just a place that I could do my thing and nobody would question me about it. I did like the old food better.

RAY BROWN: When Beau Alessi and I formed RAYNBEAU in 2014, and Sidewalk started becoming more Ravewave, it was so exciting to be a part of a new chapter of the Sidewalk story. We discovered that people like dancing and rolling on MDMA more than drinking beer and listening to sad poets. TOSKA showed up with an electronic act and a smoke machine. It was also around this time that people started chanting "BURN DOWN SIDEWALK" and "KILL 4 RAYNBEAU." We knew we were on borrowed time, and chanting helped deal with that.

JEFFREY LEWIS: I never strayed too far from the club. It remained a significant part of my life and not a year would go by when I wouldn't at least pop in a few times. But I never again was a hardcore regular like I was in 1998-1999. Still, I'd often go through phases of being a regular, and I always knew that I could pop in any night of the week and see free music, and usually bump into somebody I knew.

ALISON MOP(guitarist, sourdoe): [My bandmate] Zara and I went to Sidewalk in May for our first open mic, and Somer was like, "Hey, do you guys want to do a show?" After that we just kept playing shows, at Sidewalk and elsewhere. We had so many gigs that I ended up having to move in with Zara and her mom, because it was convenient for me to keep traveling four hours into the city. Now we're roommates.

ZARA(vocalist, sourdoe): It's entirely on Somer and Sidewalk's community that we've had any success. Everything we'd heard about performing in the city just made me so nervous. But it was different there though, like a family.

: Someone had looked up online and seen that 94 Avenue A had been listed for sale for a couple of years. We knew that Pini [Sidewalk's longtime owner] was looking for a way out.

LACH: I'm pretty sure these are people from the outside who see a money pot on Avenue A and I would rather the scene leave the club than be watered down in any way or try to kowtow to, you know, the equivalent of somebody saying, "You guys can keep going but will you keep it down?" [Editor's note: Efforts to reach the new ownership were unsuccessful.]

JOE BENDIK: The thing is it's not so much Sidewalk, per se, that will be missed. It's the creative community of diverse talent that found a home. It's a place to try out new songs and ideas in front of other writers and musicians (along with the usual suspects). Nothing whips a song into shape more than performing it there for the first time. I'll miss that the most, but hopefully the spirit of Antifolk will strengthen and grow. I'm a pretty blind optimist at times, despite some of my lyrics.

HERB SCHER It would be sad to think that the heart of the Sidewalk scene was ending. I don't think it will, and I'm looking forward to the next show whenever and wherever it might be.

KIMYA DAWSON: We all encouraged each other and help each other challenge ourselves. I don't know that my sobriety would've stuck had I not walked in that door. I now have 20 years off the sauce and more than 10 albums under my belt. And I have the kind of friends that I didn't even know existed. We were showing each other the true depths of our souls in that place. I genuinely love the friends I made there and consider them family. I literally might not have survived or ever written a solo song without Sidewalk.

JONATHAN BERGER: Maybe this isn't a complete end of the Sidewalk community I've been a part of a little longer than forever. Maybe a new crop won't replace me just yet. We'll see after renovations, I guess.

ZARA: It felt like we were all brought together to say goodbye to this special place. There was a straight up magic energy there, and I'm so grateful I got to be a part of it, even if it was only for a little while.

LACH: It's a sad moment in New York music history but, you know, New York has always been a city about change. Somebody will say, "You know what, fuck this! I'm gonna open up my own club in my garage or in this warehouse that nobody knows about, or this other club's gonna give us a chance." I really think so. At least I hope so.

Sidewalk's last night. (Scott Heins / Gothamist)

These interviews have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.