September 19, 1969. Exactly a month past Woodstock. America was just beginning to understand the ground-shaking effects that 3 muddy days and 400,000 people would have on its history.
Tricky Dick was just wiring up the Oval Office. The war in Vietnam raged at its bloody peak. Several Cincinnati neighborhoods were still picking up the pieces from tragic riots the year before. Young people were on the streets and demanding change.
A lone youth counselor in Cincinnati knew how to keep them engaged with the Cultural Revolution, but out of trouble.
Enter: Jim Tarbell and The Ludlow Garage.
In an unassuming former auto repair shop at 346 Ludlow Avenue in rapidly-diversifying, uptown Clifton, mere blocks from the weekly student protests at the University of Cincinnati, Tarbell organized help to build a visionary new venue.
It would be a righteous listening room for a new generation. It would feature the avant garde, hard rock, funk, psych and soul acts that stodgy, establishment venues wouldn’t book. It would revel in the cutting edge sounds of the Sixties and Seventies.
“It was a trip just getting into the Garage,” Tarbell told CityBeat’s Rick Bird in a 2009 look-back interview. “You passed through 14-foot-tall, 4-inch-thick wooden doors with 4-foot-high brass handles.”
From the get-go, patrons were “put on notice you’re going into something different,” he said.
“You walk down these huge ramps — used to get cars in and out of the basement — into a huge subterranean room where our macrobiotic food booths were,” Tarbell remembered. “Then, you go up a winding staircase to the upper level where the concert hall was.”
“We had 8-foot-tall high chairs that would hold four people,” he recalled. “Going to the men’s room, you walked into a giant Quaker State oil can. The ladies room was Penzoil. I found all these reproduction oriental rugs for people to sit on.”
Perhaps no other Cincinnati venue has ever been so profoundly in touch with the musical and cultural zeitgeist as Tarbell’s genius club. And, for two unbelievably influential years, people all across the national scene buzzed about the “Fillmore of the Midwest.”
The opening night bill: Grand Funk Railroad, with Lonnie Mack and Balderdash.
A much-abbreviated list of merry players who graced its stage: MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, The Kinks, BB King, Santana, Savoy Brown, James Gang, Humble Pie, Ten Years After, Alice Cooper, Vanilla Fudge, Commander Cody, Golden Earring, The Flamin’ Groovies...
Hometown garage rock heroes: The Lemon Pipers, The Goshorn Brothers, Pure Prairie League.
The peak came in 1970, when The Allman Brothers recorded a show there that would later be released as one of the defining live albums of their career, Live at the Ludlow Garage.
The Ludlow Garage was truly the center of Cincinnati’s countercultural awakening.
But, as the saying goes, “all good things...” Arena rock captured the audience’s attention. Tarbell shuttered the club, became a successful restaurateur and (later) Cincinnati’s vice-mayor.
Now, nearly 50 years later, his amazing club’s legacy is remembered and cherished. And the venue is reborn.
Long-time Clifton denizens and music lovers Dave and Claudia Taylor honor the Tarbell legacy. They’ve refurbished and re-invigorated this special space.
We hope that you’ll come join us as we make special, new musical memories here in Clifton.
Come for the food, stay for the folks, live for the funk. And rock on, Cincinnati. Rock on.
