Cafe Wha?

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Cafe Wha? at the corner of MacDougal Street and Minetta Lane.

Cafe Wha? is a club in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York City that has been home to various musicians and comedians. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, The Velvet Underground, Kool and the Gang, Peter, Paul & Mary, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and many others all began their careers at the Wha? During the 1960s, it was owned by Manny Roth, uncle of David Lee Roth.

A little known appearance of the Jimi Hendrix Experience occurred on a weekend in early August 1967. Are You Experienced had not yet been released in America but word of their recent Monterey Pop Festival appearance was beginning to spread. The Café Wha? had scheduled The Animals along with Richie Havens for a Friday night show, but when people began to arrive they learned that lead singer Eric Burdon had cancelled due to a sickness with one of the band members. Instead, Havens would headline the show with the Jimi Hendrix Experience as the opening act. Their set consisted of most of what would be on their American debut. The performance was so powerful that when it came time for Havens, he slowly walked to the stage dragging his sitar behind him, turned to the audience and muttered “How do you follow something like that?”. The reason for this rare appearance of the Experience was speculated to have been a favor from Hendrix to the club owner for a fee of a few hundred dollars. There was also the connection between the Experience manager, former Animals bassist Chas Chandler. Cafe Wha? is located at 115 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West 3rd Streets, and is about two blocks from Washington Square Park.