Club Helsinki: An Appreciation

Submitted by Seth Rogovoy on August 28, 2009 - 1:52pm

by Seth Rogovoy

After over a decade of bringing the greatest music on the national, regional, and local scene to audiences in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Club Helsinki winds down this weekend with a series of shows culminating in a final performance by Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys on Monday night, when the club will have been emptied of its furniture and when, at the end of the night, the lights will dim, the doors will be shut and locked, never to be reopened again as Club Helsinki.

It’s a bittersweet development.

On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to celebrate the greatest such music venue the Berkshires have ever seen. It’s not even possible to capture the impact that the club has had on the regional music scene merely by running down a list of the stars who have appeared on its tiny stage, although that list includes an impressive lineup, with names like Odetta, Shawn Colvin, Leo Kottke, Mike Gordon of Phish, Don Byron, Hamiet Bluiett, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Fred Eaglesmith, Greg Brown, Levon Helm, Tom-Tom Club, Burning Spear, Graham Parker, and Norah Jones.

The club has nurtured up and coming regional talent including Meg Hutchinson and Sonya Kitchell, local performers now recording for national record labels.

The club has also provided a stage for regional performers to assemble in a variety of circumstances, and for one last time on Sunday, there’ll be a showcase of that talent in a six-hour extravaganza modeled along the lines of the Last Waltz, the Band’s 1976 farewell concert.

More than all this, however, is that, in the best power of art to transform lives, Club Helsinki was a community, a shared community of artists, music lovers, activists, poets, and just people who found a home among the club’s fascinating array of its technical staff, waitstaff, regulars, management, and overseeing it all, its founder and owner, Deborah McDowell, who grew her fifteen-year-old teahouse into one of the region’s most popular restaurants, Helsinki Café, and expanded it into a nightclub.

Countless people who passed through the doors as concertgoers, staff members, musicians, or diners, have had their lives changed. And while this was a collective effort, it was one created and constantly curated and nurtured by Deborah, the visionary behind Helsinki.

Deborah McDowell defied all odds in keeping the restaurant and club going for as long as they did, and although times have dictated that the doors must close on Monday, Deborah should be remembered for all that she accomplished in a brutal playing field where few venues accomplish what she has over the past decade and a half.

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living's editor-in-chief. In his position as a music critic, he has chronicled Club Helsinki's decade-plus existence.

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