Club 47 Pressured by Huge Debt

Club 47, the Cambridge coffeehouse where performers such as Joan Baez and Jim Kweskin's Jug Band got their start, will soon have to close unless it can find some way to pay its $11,000 debt.

The club got into financial trouble because of the rising cost of talent and some bad concert investments, according to Byron Lord Linardos, the club's manager.

Linardos is trying to get big name performers such as Richie Havens and the Chambers Brothers--whom Club 47 helped in the old days--to give a few shows at the club for a fraction of their normal fees.

Regular Crowds

The top personalities draw a big audience whenever they appear, Linardos said. But if the club doesn't draw regular crowds--even for unknown local talent--it will have to close, he continued.

After a three year absence, Linardos returned last December as manager of the ten-year-old club to make a last effort to save the coffeehouse, now located in a chair-jammed basement room at 47 Palmer St.

Known among musicians for its fine audience, Club 47 is "a performance house," Linardos said, where people come to sip coffee and listen intently to folk, rock, or blues.

Low Rates

Linardos said that the club keeps its admission rates low--$1.50 to $3 at present--because it believes that there should be a place where the best contemporary musicians can get a good audience.

The musicians have apparently responded to Club 47's call for help. Wellknown musicians have been appearing lately, drawing capacity crowds. The club cannot afford to pay famous performers what they usually earn, so Linardos is paying them whatever he can afford at the moment.

Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band are giving a special benefit performance this week, and the Chambers Brothers will work next week for less than a third of their usual fee.

But a few one-shot benefits will not be enough, according to Linardos. To stay in business, the club needs a regular audience--the kind it had several years ago.

Back in 1962 to 1964, a devoted band of Harvard students were, said Linardos, "a strong part" of the old club, which was then located on Boylston St. But success came, the lines got long, and that "turned them off," he said.

Now "the majority of people who come in here are high school kids," he commented, although folk and blues shows attract more college students--not from Harvard, but from all around Boston, Newton, and Cambridge.