Iron Horse Founder Jordi Herold’s Memoir Tells His Musical Stories

In 1979, a young social studies teacher named Jordi Herold opened the Iron Horse Coffeehouse in Northampton, with little sense of what would unfold over the next quarter-century.

Under his watch, the Iron Horse became a cultural hot-spot, expanding into a 170-seat music hall in 1989 after hosting some of the best blues, rock, jazz and folk acts around, while also giving needed exposure to up-and-coming artists like Suzanne Vega and Shaun Colvin. Herold sold the venue in 1994, but he stayed on to book acts for the new owners for the next decade, as they expanded into the Pearl Street Nightclub and Calvin Theater. All told, that’s 25 years at the helm of a vast musical control center, stretching south to Hartford and up to Brattleboro, Vt.

Now, Herold tells his story in “Positively Center Street,” a new memoir co-authored with longtime Valley Advocate music editor David Sokol. He’ll read sections of the book at Real Art Ways in Hartford on Thursday, Nov. 6. He spoke with CTNow about writing the book and working at the Horse, as it came to be known.

CTNow: What made you want to write your memoirs at this point?

Jordi Herold: In 2006, when I’d already been gone from the organization for a couple of years, my mom passed away, who had been inspirational in me doing this kind of work, and my first child was born. I realized there was this whole life for me — family life, a business life, something that I created that was enduring — that all happened before my kids were born. That was the real impetus: before the memories faded for me, before the boxes of ephemera got too moldy, I would try to get something down that would capture the essence of that.

I approached a number of people who, for various reasons, weren’t the right fit. When I spoke with David [Sokol], we realized that there was a lot of synergy there. At first I approached him with something modest, both for financial reasons and trying to start a project with a scope that would just get done. I thought it should be like a long-form New Yorker piece, something that was 10-20 pages of typescript with some illustrations and anecdotes…Something they could hold in their hands. David said, “Let’s talk.”

So, we sat down and we talked, and we talked, and we talked. It ultimately became about 30 hours of interviews, and it sort of coincided with my semi-retirement and David’s semi-retirement… He proceeded to see what made sense to him, and I really let him go with that for the most part. There were one or two things I thought sounded a little bit whiny, and some things got added back in. We realized that no matter how long you talk, you can’t talk about everything. As much as I talk about stuff that we associate with arts centers — Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, and so on — we had hosted every singer-songwriter in the known universe, and singer-songwriters had gotten short-shrift in the manuscript, so we beefed that up a little. By and large, he came out with a layout of the material that I was quite happy with… If there was an impetus for birthing the book with the birth of my children, I wasn’t going to turn 60 without the goddamn thing finished. My bucket list wasn’t the Great Wall of China or jumping out of an airplane — I have jumped out of an airplane, I guess — it was getting the memoir in a published form and get some art up on the walls.

CTNow: There are some amazing photographs, calendars, handwritten notes, contracts, letters, and so on in the book. Did you have boxes of stuff that you kept all these years?

JH: There are fundamentally two sources for that material. One is that I’ve always been a packrat for that kind of ephemera, so the 15 years that I owned the place and the next 10 years that I did all the programming for the subsequent owners, I was just constantly filing away this poster, that photo, this roll of snapshots, and so on. They were in big boxes that you sift through, like you sift through sand. There are some folders of old menus or recipes, but by and large it’s a nightmare. For a while in the ’90s, I had an intern who then became an assistant, who had worked in the archive collection at Bill Graham Presents and Wolfgang’s Vault, so he got a certain bunch of stuff together.

On the opposite end of that spectrum was David, who was the production manager but also the music editor for the Valley Advocate, almost the same time that I owned the club, from 1979 to 1994. I should send you a snapshot of my place here, where stuff is spilling out of boxes. But you go to David’s house, where there’s rectilinear shelving on the walls and there’s “A” for “Abba” or “Archie Shepp.” Next to every LP or CD is the press kit, and next to every press clip is the piece that he wrote. It’s scary. You would expect him to be so anal that he’s wearing latex gloves all the time, but he’s totally down to earth, and even nutty professor-looking. But his files and his archive: it’s frightening. Any time we needed something, he was able to pull it out.

CTNow: What emerges, considering all the people who’ve been touched by the Iron Horse, is a cultural history of Northampton.

JH: Yes. Also, the venues in Hartford seemed to come and go. So in a way, the Horse, at 38 minutes up the road, has also been the club for Hartford. There were years — I don’t mean a year or two, but rather a decade — where I wouldn’t advertise in Springfield. I would advertise in Hartford, because that’s where my peeps were. It was constant 203 and 860 on the phone for tickets. You could just chart it in that non-technical way to see what was going on. For awhile, there was a jazz space [in Hartford] called Lloyd’s, and rock rooms like the Webster, and now there’s Infinity Hall obviously, taking a big step up. But for 35 years, if you were going to see Hartford’s own Brad Mehldau in a club, you would probably go see him in Northampton.

CTNow: What will the format be for the event at Real Art Ways?

JH: [Executive director] Will [Wilkins] and I will each do some opening remarks, then I will read as in a standard author reading for 20 minutes or whatever feels comfortable for the audience. Then Will will be my public interlocutor and put me under the hard glare of his questioning light, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A, if he hasn’t managed to get everything out of me that the audience wanted to know. That’s the format.

It’s interesting to me — I wouldn’t exactly say joined at the hip, but the Iron Horse is a nominally for-profit enterprise and Real Art Ways is in the non-profit arts sector. That said, there are a lot of similarities and parallels between the organizations. They started there in 1975 and didn’t really get a lot of public traction until 1979. The Horse opened in 1979 within spitting distance of that, and you can look at the history of programming, either at the venue or presented by the organization, whether that’s as diverse as Allen Ginsberg… You wouldn’t actually expect it from a nightclub, but the Horse has functioned as a cultural heartthrob for Northampton, just as Real Art Ways, to a significant degree, has done for Hartford.

POSITIVELY CENTER STREET: AN EVENING WITH IRON HORSE MUSIC HALL’S JORDI HEROLD takes place on Thursday, Nov. 6, at Real Art Ways in Hartford. Showtime is 7 p.m. Tickets are free. Information: realartways.org.