April 12, 2007

By Virgil Hervey

For some local musicians and music-lovers over the last decade, the WEB coffeehouse was a special place. For musicians, it was a place where the audience really listened. For the audience members, it was a place to hear good music in an intimate setting, according to Les Groby, who ran the WEB for the past several months.

“It was the kind of place where the musicians and the audience talked to each other,” he said of the smoke-, drug-, and alcohol-free music venue located in the basement of the First Presbeterian Church.

But the WEB, which has played a role in the village’s music scene for the past 12 years, came to an abrupt end on March 15 when its organizers were required to cancel its scheduled March 17 performance and to remain closed. The reasons for the closing were complex, according to recent interviews with those involved, and include both a lack of insurance coverage and longstanding concerns by some Presbyterians over housing the coffeehouse.

In a recent interview, Groby was reluctant to talk about the closing or to say anything negative about the church.

“The church is more important than the coffeehouse,” Groby said. “They have other problems to worry about. I was told it was about not having insurance.”

He hopes to reopen the WEB in a new location in September, Groby said, but he doesn’t have anything specific in mind as of now.

According to Bill Blocker, chair of the church’s building and grounds committee, the problem with the WEB came up when Charlie Peters, who ran the WEB for five years, passed it off to Groby in anticipation of Peters’ recent move out of town. When Blocker learned that Peters was no longer running the coffeehouse, he asked Groby to fill out a new building use application form. When it was returned, Blocker noticed that Groby had written a note on it indicating that he did not have insurance.

After learning that WEB did not have its own coverage, Blocker said, he checked with the church’s insurance company and was told that the coffeehouse was not covered by the church policy. The way Blocker understands it, the WEB, in order to be covered, would have to be a church sponsored activity, which it is not.

When asked about the likelihood of the WEB ever being sponsored by the church, Blocker said, “A lot of members don’t like it and a lot of members do. I have no problem with it. I’m caught in the middle.”

The only major issue over the years with the WEB’s presence in the church had to do with inadequate electrical service in the space they used in the basement, Blocker said. The church had to spend $700 to upgrade the wiring, when sound and lighting equipment started blowing the church’s circuit breakers. The WEB could only contribute $100 to the cost, he said. The coffeehouse did make occasional donations to the church whenever it had money left over from donations at the door, after paying the musicians.

According to Blocker, the session, which is the church’s governing board, has not acted officially on the WEB’s closure. Rather, when he became aware of the lack of insurance, he and Clerk of Session Bev Price felt they had to act right away, since a concert with McKinney School music students was planned for March 17. They didn’t have time to run it by the session, he said.

“We might be able to work something out with the WEB,” he said. “The first thing we have to do is make sure all the other groups using the church have insurance.”

YSHS and McKinney music teacher Yvonne Wingard learned of the cancellation even before Groby was asked to turn in his keys to the building, when long-time parishioner Juanita Johnson, also a member of the building and grounds committee, informed YSHS Principal John Gudgel that the March 17 scheduled event wouldn’t take place. According to Wingard, the occasion was to be an open mic for her sixth period guitar class. The event, which had been well publicized, had to be transferred on short notice to the high school gym after the McKinney School chili cook-off and ended up being sparsely attended.

“It was an open mic with no mic,” Wingard said.

According to Johnson, a number of kids from out of town were expected to show up and she was concerned that overcrowding would become an issue and that there wouldn’t be enough supervision to be sure the kids weren’t running around in the church.

“We never had a problem with the WEB itself,” Johnson said in a recent interview. “The problem was with the kids sitting out back, listening to the music with brown bags.”

Alcoholics Anonymous is using the coffeehouse space now, Johnson said.

Wingard, who herself had been volunteering at the WEB twice a month since September, said she is sorry to see it go.

Parishioner Dayna Foster, also a WEB volunteer, said she has expressed her disapproval to the session.

“This is a loss to the community and a loss to the church,” Foster said.

Former Presbyterian Church elder Walter Rhodes, whose son Glenn Reed was a frequent performer at the WEB throughout his high school career, said he had seen the church’s involvement with WEB as a “real expression of outreach by the church to the community.” According to Rhodes, at this point in the church’s history, it is especially in need of that outreach.

“As these venues get shut down around town, maybe we should expedite our movement toward a center for the arts,” Rhodes said.

Among the local acts who performed at the WEB Coffeehouse in the past several years are Heartstrings, Magnolia Bolthead, Doctor Skillett, Dave Schumacher, Dawn Cooksey, the Corn Daddies, Paul’s Apartment, and numerous local high school garage bands, such as Short Snack, the one Glenn Reed played in.

“I want to thank the church for the 10 years we were there,” Charlie Peters said from his new home in Washington state.

Deborah Fugett was one of the founders of the WEB, which stands for Women’s Enterprise Builders. As a cooperative association of female-owned businesses located at 100 Corry Street, the group thought it would be a good idea to run an alcohol- and smoke-free coffeehouse in the extra space they had, according to Fugett. It ran at the Corry Street location for two years until the co-op broke up. At that point Fugett and Laurie Dreamspinner moved it to the Presbyterian Church.

‘We were a good tenant,” Fugett said in a recent interview. “For a decade we were respectful and peaceful. Most of the people in the church were supportive. We brought energy into the church.”

Fugett remembers the best feature of the WEB being that it was truly intergenerational.

“It’s sad that it just went poof,” Peters said.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com