Book ‘Em, Nan-O!

Nancy Covey Once Again Organizes Talent For McCabe’s as Guitar Shop Turns 50

Left to right: Elvis Costello, Nancy Covey and Richard Thompson at Covey’s farewell concert at McCabe’s, June 30, 1984.
Photo: Ellen Griffith.
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Left to right: Elvis Costello, Nancy Covey and Richard Thompson at Covey’s farewell concert at McCabe’s, June 30, 1984.
Photo: Ellen Griffith.

“Nancy Covey had a profound influence on my musical youth, although I was not able to put a face and name to my teenage experiences until a couple of weeks ago.” columnist Phil Gallo recalled in a September 29 Variety editorial. “Covey ran the venue at a time when my musical tastes were being shaped, in this case largely by folk-based musicians whose music had no correlation to anything being played on the radio or in any other venue in Los Angeles. McCabe’s was a slice of heaven.”
McCabe’s Guitar Shop turns 50 this year, and Covey, who booked the venerable Santa Monica vender’s back-room concerts from 1974 to 1984, had brought live acts to the intimate music haven across three decades.
Covey, a Palisadian, also helped organize a royal fete for the half-century-old store at UCLA’s Royce Hall. No less than Covey’s husband, Richard Thompson, Pretenders singer Chrissy Hynde, Los Lobos, Jackson Browne, Peter Case, David Lindley, Jennifer Warnes and others who started there or played McCabe’s early in their careers paid homage to the legendary little music shop that could at the October 2 concert.
“My mother bought her first guitar there,” Covey tells the Palisadian-Post. “That’s how I first knew about it. I went away to college and to Europe with a backpack and I came back in the early ‘70s.”
Covey intended to return to Oregon, where she attended college, and continue a hippie existence. So she went to McCabe’s looking for odd jobs.
“I needed gas money to get to Oregon to teach there,” she says. “ I needed $30 to get back. Thirty dollars! You could drive from L.A. to Oregon for $30 back then.”
Robby Kimmel, a musician in the Stone Ponies who day-jobbed it at McCabe’s, on 3101 Pico Boulevard, hired Covey.
“He ran the concerts at McCabe’s and I started out by cleaning the house he shared with his girlfriend. He was doing a concert in Santa Barbara and he needed help answering phones. After a week, he said, ‘Wow, you’re the person I’m looking for.’”
Kimmel convinced Covey to delay her Oregon plans and work at McCabe’s for $75 a week.
“The shoe fit,” Covey says. “After six months, I was hooked.”
Upon Kimmel’s departure a year later, Covey took over booking gigs. Covey’s big discoveries included Vince Gill and John Hyatt (who opened for John Lee Hooker) “my main discovery. I was just blown away by him. He’s quirky and great. It was his first L.A. gig.”
Covey flew to England to convince future husband Thompson to play.
“He hadn’t played in America,” she says. “He came over, we fell in love and there you go.”
Thompson went on to record the famous heart-wrenching divorce album “Shoot Out The Lights” with ex-wife Linda Thompson. Thompson and Covey, married for 24 years, have a son, Jack, 17, who attends Crossroads and plays bass in a band called Mangrass.
McCabe’s has enjoyed many memorable moments. Joni Mitchell sat in with Eric Andersen, and Covey indulged her love of roots, Cajun and blues music by booking those genres’ top practitioners. Covey recalls that “Los Lobos called me…They wanted to play for free and they actually played at our wedding in Malibu.” But the best McCabe’s concert ever booked may have been Covey’s June 1984 going-away party.
“All these people showed up: Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon. And then Elvis Costello came,” Covey says. “This is a 150-seat theatre. When Elvis walked onstage, the audience was enthralled.”
The Royce Hall show earlier this month was no less magical.
“I hadn’t produced shows in a long time,” Covey says. “So the first people I called were the people I felt had a real connection to McCabe’s: Jackson Browne, Los Lobos, the magician Ricky Jay.”
The house band included Thompson and Van Dyke Parks, while Covey was able to detour Loudon Wainwright and Blind Boys of Alabama from their respective tours to perform on the UCLA stage, filled with musicians for the closer: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”
“[Former L.A. Times music critic] Steve Hochman said it was the best concert he had ever seen,” Covey says.
The music industry has seen many of its institutions crumble recently, from the Tower Records on the Sunset Strip, to New York’s CBGB and the Bottom Line; places where music history was made. Covey admits she is surprised to find McCabe’s still strummin’…but she understands why.
“It’s because of Bob Riskin,” Covey says, noting the shop’s founding father, whose mother was actress Fay Wray. “He’s been in the back of this little office for the better part of 50 years. McCabe’s is not a chain, it’s not corporate. It’s one man’s vision.”
Covey knows why so many top-flight musicians have gravitated to McCabe’s over the decades.
“I budgeted it so I could pay the musicians really well,” Covey says. “Besides, they were playing in a guitar shop. All musicians love to be in a guitar shop.”