Mercury Café presents
Muddy’s Chronicles
Secrets of the last Great Coffeehouse
Book signing with Author Bill Stevens
Philosophical coffeehouses, those hotbeds of liberal ideas, poetry readings,
strange cigarettes and all night jazz sessions, were a hallmark of the Beat era.
Muddy’s coffeehouse hosted the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan; beat poet Jack Micheline spoke his lyrical prose on Muddy’s stage. Virtually all of Denver’s mayors and Colorado’s governors walked through the doors during its illustrious career. As a sometimes halfway house for runaway teens, Muddy’s was also home to jazz musicians who came and jammed after their regular gigs, and a place to talk politics or Nietzsche in a convivial, relaxed atmosphere. It housed The Slightly off Center Theater Company and hosted the Muddy’s Summers of Jazz. Muddy’s was more than a coffeehouse: it was a Denver institution for nearly twenty years.
On Sunday, December 21 at 2 p.m. author Bill Stevens will be signing copies of “Muddy’s Chronicles,” an uproariously funny, nostalgic, and melancholy look at one of the West’s best known java joints, at the Mercury Cafe, 2199 California St. in Denver. Stevens, previously a private detective, martial arts instructor, restaurateur and dance instructor, has written several short stories and is currently doing research for another book. “Muddy's Chronicles” is his first full length novel.
The Muddy’s idea began in 1975 as the brainchild of Joe DeRose. It started as a debating club for a few sociology graduate students from the University of Colorado in an old downtown hotel in the 2500 block of 15th Street. It was a marriage of convenience, cheap rates and poor students. Denver urban renewal broke up this union,(about 1978), forcing the students to scurry about fifteen blocks up into north Denver, where they reopened at 2200 Champa St. Muddy’s morphed into a bookstore that couldn’t support it self and in desperation added coffee, then pastries and sandwiches and finally an old manual lever espresso machine. Surviving on a month-to-month lease, under the mainstream radar and against all odds, it became the wildly successful “Bistro of the Night,” open from 7 p.m. until 4 a.m., until it finally closed the doors in 1997.
More information at http://muddyschronicles.net
Mercury Café presents
“Muddy’s Chronicles” Secrets of the last Great Coffeehouse
Book signing with Author Bill Stevens.
Sunday, Dec 21 at 2 p.m.
Admission is Free
Mercury Café
2199 California Street, Denver
303-294-9258
www.mercurycafe.com
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