Blabbermouth Night at The Place, 1957

Blabbermouth Night at The Place was recorded by Big Daddy Nord, and the recordings were kept by Mark Green. Before Green burned his entire archive in the 1970s, the Blabbermouth tapes were rescued by poet Tony Seymour. Finally these tapes have been made available for the first time, in an edition of only 50 copies. "Blabbermouth Night at the Place" is a clear, rare window into the social life of 1950s Beat-era North Beach San Francisco.

The Place was located at 546 Grant Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach, and was managed by Black Mountain College Alumni Knute Stiles and Leo Krikorian, both Black Mountain College alumni. It was a bohemian bar where works by such artists as Jay De Feo, Wally Hedrick, and Robet LaVigne were shown, and where Dada Night eventually evolved into Blabbermouth Night. Blabbermouth Night provided an opportunity for the locals - poets, artists, and everyday folk - to make a statement or entertain, in the hopes of winning the night's prize, a mangum of champagne.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Wally Hedrick said of The Place, "Well, it was a social place where you could meet anybody, almost, any time of the day. But we made sure that our gallery was not anywhere near Grant Avenue because there were a lot of little artsy-craftsy places opening up and we didn't want that. So we would go across town to The Place, and they would have their Blabbermouth Nights which were really Dada demonstrations. We didn't know it at the time, but it was just a rerun of Zurich, 1912 - 1914, where people could get up and say anything they want and then everybody'd pound on the tables and drink their beer and just generally raise hell."