A Place Called The Bla-Bla Café

A Place Called The Bla-Bla Café
Sandy Ross
SLR Productions
ISBN: 0-9777227-0-8
Non-Fiction, Entertainment, Memoir
Reviewed by Dave Thompson

For eleven years, 1971-1982, the Bla-Bla Cafe was one of Studio City’s most hallowed haunts, a Ventura Boulevard cafe planted incongruously next to an auto repair shop, with a more-or-less open door policy to new and unheard talent. If the owner, Albie, liked you, you’d get a night onstage. Then it was up to the audience.
The system obviously worked. During its first year of operation, Al Jarreau rose out of the Bla-Bla ranks; so did future Jeff Beck frontman Kim Milford, rockabilly singer Maxine Sellers, a decidedly secular Keith Green, and Sandy Ross, author of this slim (240pp) but never less than engrossing history of the venue. (Other performers included such unknown comics as Jay Leno, Sandra Bernhardt and Robin Williams.)
Drawing upon her own memories and impressions of the club, then drawing in a who’s-who of its other past denizens, Ross has succeeded in formulating that rarest of beasts, a biography of a building that doesn’t let its inhabitants take over. Rather, the spirit of the Bla-Bla hangs over every word, until the performers become merely components in the café’s life, rather than the (more typical) other way around. There was a distinctive vibe to the club and its staff, one that percolated all the way from Albie at the top, to the lowliest of bar staff, and it’s this which Ross paints with vivid flair: from the murals that decorated the walls, to the night when comedian Edward Morris played and danced “Swan Lake” as a solo performance.
It could be a very insular work, a book that appeals only to those who share Ross’ fondness for the club. But her enthusiasm is contagious, not only evoking the image of those long ago days, but also transporting the reader into the midst of them. Ross and the memories take up the first half of the book; the remainder is devoured by lists of performers, of staff, of regular patrons that would normally be of interest only to the performers, staff and patrons themselves. But, by the time you reach them, a lot of them will probably feel like friends anyway, and the Bla-Bla itself will be a home from home.