The last night for the No Exit is tonight---June 30th, 1999. It is/was a throwback to the beatnik days when I started playing there back in 1960 (did gigs there for 37 yrs.) A half inch of dust on the floor---2 inches of wise & funny and angry graffiti on the uniquely aromatic men's room walls...

To paraphrase John Steinbeck-----The No Exit Coffeehouse in Chicago "is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.....iron and rust---a weedy lot next door---gathered and scattered volumes of classic transporting poetry and prose---whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches. Lookin' through another peephole, you might say saints and angels and martyrs and holy men----and you would mean the same thing."

I would add a few more: The "L" train at 3:00 AM going home---18 years of Thursday night gigs---young love better than it'll ever be again--music and friends forever---the espresso machine (before anyone else knew what it was) unfailingly HISSSSSING LOUDLY in the middle of your quiet songs---catching your favorite gal's eyes sparking & sparkling as you do "Stealin"-----the drunken proffit careening down the street saying of his companion one night, "I found her in the bushes in the park under a huge rock, and she's been here ever since."---the elevated tracks 40 feet away crackling and flashing from iced up tracks----but mostly ALL THE PEOPLE. They came to the coffeehouse with too much of one kind of love and not enough of another kind. At the NO EXIT, for all those shining years, they traded and swapped----and then went home incandescently enriched---and sometimes, hand-in-hand.

Some day, I'd love to show you all the photos I took there---but they could never capture the wonder of the memories of all the times and traumas and exhilerations of the best of the good years--the ones before the street and the neighborhood went to hell and desperate folks with little hope made it seem too dangerous to say, "Let's go to the EXIT tonight!" It never (or rarely) was TOO dangerous.

Friends, there will never, ever be a place that was more like our livingroom---a real oasis--with a real palm tree back around 1970. Or was it 1963? It's all fading to a sepia, sun-bleached, air-brushed, sundown long-shadowed memory that'll be here with me as long as I have the ability to recollect. I do wish you'd been there .

Art Thieme