‘THE WILDEST PLACE
Celebrating a truly great dive
There was a time, perhaps a halfcentury ago or less, when Canyon Road was better known for making art rather than selling it.
Artists found places to live and work on its dusty roads, and gathered often to debate art, life or whatever other subjects might come to mind.
And at the center of it all was Claude’s.
It was a place that drew the free spirits, the wannabes, the tourists (“See a real, live artist!”) and just about anyone passing through the neighborhood. Cowboys and politicians drank elbow-to-elbow with writers and painters.
“It was one of the truly great dives of America,” said Jack Loeffler, environmental activist and collector of aural histories and traditional Southwest folk tunes.
Artist Eli Levin, who prominently featured Claude’s in his book “Santa Fe Bohemia,” said in a phone interview
that he first stepped into Claude’s in 1964 when he rode his motor scooter down from Taos, where he had been living for about a month after hitching across the country, to check out this “arts and crafts road” he heard about in Santa Fe.
He met a few people, said he was looking for a place to stay and ran into a newsboy who took him to see his father’s available rental, and also got an offer from the owners for a job tending the bar.
“I got an apartment, a job and friends all in one afternoon,” Levin said with delight at the memory.
It also was the place where, Loeffler said, he “discovered the satisfying feeling of being shot at and it missing me.” It’s not as if someone was gunning for him, he said. A fellow was showing off his pistol and it accidentally went off.
“The bullet missed me, but made a hole in the window,” Loeffler said.
Some saw Claude’s as a wild and woolly place — but maybe it depends on when you hung out there.
On the Albloggerque blog in 2005, Johnny Mango (aka Jon Knudson) wrote that he was a bouncer at Claude’s in 1970, calling it “probably the wildest place in the state of New Mexico.”
“... Claude’s attracted such a mix of cowboys, Indians, Chicanos, artists and writers, freaks, politicians and full-time road warriors that every night was a total eruption of fists,” he wrote. Comments from readers also mentioned stabbings and fights.
But Levin, who said he drank there for years “until I gave up drinking,” said he doesn’t remember it that way. “I thought it was a very friendly place,” he said.
Well, there was the one time when a man and woman, both gay, were dancing together, he said, and the woman got mad at her dance partner and “threw him across the dance floor,” sending him into the band playing that night and scattering the drum set. But the guy was OK, Levin added.
Loeffler said he saw another side of the bar, too, when lobbyists and lawmakers exchanged cash over the tables. “You could watch votes being bought and sold,” he said. “It was incredible, amazing to behold.”
‘I really liked her’
Claude’s was named after its founder, Claude James, who bought what was a grocery store with a small bar and turned it into her own place, according to the book “Turn Left at the Sleeping Dog” by John Pen La Farge. He wrote that her father was Henry James, a managing editor at the New York Times, and her mother was French.
Levin said he believes she opened her bar some time after World War II ended — a Matthews Gallery blog put the date at around 1956, with its closing coming in the late 1970s.
“It was a big lesbian colony; she was kind of the center of it,” Levin said of the Canyon Road environs. “Claude looked like the classic, what we used to call a ‘diesel dyke,’” he said. “She looked like a bulldog, kind of. I remember her being a little morose. She was old already and past her prime.
“I really liked her ... . She made everything seem like Paris in the ’20s.”
Loeffler, who worked as a waiter/bouncer for her around 1962, recalled that Claude loved to dress up on occasion and direct the pianist at the time to accompany her on her favorite song, “La Vie en Rose,” made famous by French singer Edith Piaf. Since she usually dressed in slacks, a shirt and a sports jacket, one night a customer razzed her for wearing a fancy gown after she sang her song.
“She put her cigarette out in his ear,” Loeffler said.
Levin said that, besides working in the bar, he also worked in Claude’s home as a kind of houseboy.
“She was getting ready for her mother to come visit her and was trying to clean up her act,” he said of some home improvements he undertook.
“Mostly,” he added, “I’d wait on her. She wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning, would play with her little dogs, and I would sit and talk with her. She just wanted someone to order around.”
Some tall tales
Claude’s bar is long gone now, though, with its former location at 656 Canyon Road now housing fine jewelry at Silver Sun Gallery and Tresa Vorenberg Goldsmiths.
But it lives on in paintings by the artists who made it their watering hole. Levin himself featured Claude’s in a number of his works.
And Alfred Morang, who died in 1958 in a fire in his studio behind the bar, painted “The Women at Claude’s” and other images from the gathering spot.
Loeffler said it was the place he first met and recognized as a kindred spirit writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey, who later became a close friend.
The Matthews Gallery blog tells a story from Cheryl Ingram, co-owner of Silver Sun Gallery, of a time around 1970-71 when legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix is said to have strolled in and asked the musician on stage if he could play with him. Not surprisingly, he readily agreed.
On a more local note of fame, Levin said he noticed some tough-looking Indian guys drinking one night and one of them bragged that he was the greatest artist in Santa Fe. What’s that all about? Levin said he wondered about the man who seemed a “loudmouthed nobody.”
“It turned out it was T.C. Cannon,” he said, “who was more or less one of the better artists in town.”
Levin claimed the people in the galleries in Claude’s footprint tell a lot of stories about the place, but many of them are not true.
But, he added, “It doesn’t matter if they’re true or not.”
It all just adds to the legend.