Jabberwock
History
The Jabberwock stood at 2901 Telegraph Avenue, at the corner of Russell Street in Berkeley, and ran as a folk club and coffeehouse from the early 1960s until July 7, 1967. The building had a previous life as the Tsubo, a jazz room opened by Glenn Ross in September 1961 that shared the premises with the jazz station KJAZ-FM; Wes Montgomery recorded his live album Full House there on June 25, 1962. The Tsubo closed that October, having put its owner deeply into debt, and the room reopened under the Jabberwock name. Under Bill "Jolly Blue" Ehlert it became one of the central venues of the East Bay folk scene -- and, more consequentially for what came after, the room where the musicians who would form Country Joe and the Fish played in earlier configurations. Bruce Barthol, Barry "The Fish" Melton and Country Joe McDonald all passed through it before the band existed, and returned to play it often once they did. The club closed in July 1967 and the building was demolished two years later.
Its Place in the Scene
A Berkeley folk coffeehouse that functioned as a feeder room for the electric bands that followed. The Jabberwock sat on the acoustic side of the 1965-66 divide, and the East Bay's political, folk-rooted strain of the scene -- Country Joe and the Fish above all -- came up through it rather than through the San Francisco ballrooms.