Cafe Bizarre - Beatnik club

Found- a rare piece of Beatnik ephemera, a card from New York's Cafe Bizarre with the phone numbers and name of Rick Allmen who started the club in 1957. The Cafe Bizarre was one of the better known clubs to capitalise on the beatnik phenomenon, and the venue for many counterculture poets and musicians of the period. Musitron Records even recorded an album of Beat festivities at Cafe Bizarre in the late '50s. (In the post-beatnik-era Andy Warhol discovered The Velvet Underground there.) Another band who played there was the Lovin' Spoonful who described the place as a 'little dump' (1965 -post its Beatnik Glory).They played 3 gigs a night and were paid with tuna fish sandwiches, ice cream and occasionally peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. More can be found at Rock and Roll Roadmaps.

I Was a Beatnik

From a Christian book We Found our Way Out by James R. Adair and Ted Miller (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids Michigan 1965.) People tell their stories 'of how God led them from the confusion of false religions and philosophies to a life of peace in Jesus...a first hand glimpse into many heresies.' The Beatnik chapter gives an insight into a vanished world. Others escaped from communism, Armstrongism, Satan and Theosophism...many other contemporary portrayals of Beatniks have them as followers of Eastern religions.

I Was a Beatnik

  The day I turned twenty I thought I knew all there was to know about life. Yet the kind of life I was wrapped up in was filled with idle conversation, liquor, and pep pills.
  I was living piecemeal by doing commercial art off and on. Most of the time I sat around in the back booth of a dark little tavern and played things "cool," beatnik-style.
  I was fairly proud of that title "beatnik." I read a lot of philosophy, looking desperately for something on which to hang the threads of my life. Nights I wandered aimlessly to my noisy beat retreat and sat. There I would stay with my little clan of beatniks until the wee hours of the morning, locking hornrims over some discussion subject and working it to death.
  I was getting fed up with life, which seemed so cheap. And I was sick of trying to look "way-out." I felt I had gone to "Nowheresville," that I was too tired and too old and oh, so weary. I hated myself.
  One night after I got back to my room from the tavern, I stretched on the floor and looked over my books to find one I thought would be light reading. I decided on Early Will I Seek Thee, by Eugenia Price.
  At first the book's literary style captivated my attention. It was sheer simplicity. I turned on one of my very, very blue jazz records and began to read the style–not the message.

  After I had scanned the book, the record ended and the needle was scratching its way back and forth. I picked up the needle, turned off the machine and sat foggy-eyed and unthinking for quite some time. Then I started the book again on the first page. This time I read the message.