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Peter Lesses writes: I pursued two degrees in music at Indiana University. Then after living in New Orleans in the 70s, I became interested in rare antiques. I came back and got a Mass. Dealer’s number in 2001 and am presently a jaded 85-year-old volunteer at the Somerville Museum. I wrote a booklet for them, The Somerville, Mass. Dairy Collection, and an article explaining it for Milk Route, the dairy periodical. Their editor forwarded it to The Somerville Times and was printed by them on May 12, 2021. Currently, I hold memberships in the Merrimac Valley Bottle Club in Chelmsford, the Civil War Roundtable of Lynn and the Waltham Stamp Club.

Peter Lesses

Déjà Vu

The chords from a melodious guitar
Float through the air and carry through the café.
It is the familiar Flamenco tremolo,
And insistent rhythms of the “Recuerdos de la Alhambre”,
Leading up to climax inexorably with insistent base note attacks,
As the perpetual suspense summons up the Iberian soul.
The pathos of Frencisco Tarrega haunts the memory
And conjures sounds of tambourines and the rattle. click of castanets.

A shadowy figure slouches across the square.
Who could it be nonother than John Jervis.
Andalusian music is his beat,
While for the “Mayor of McDougall Street”,
Appearing at Club Pa-SEEM,
It is the song “The House of the Rising Sun”.
Introduced by the legendary Bob Donlin,
“Now folks, let’s give a hand for Dave Van Ronk.”

Then that same familiar figure in dark telltale suit,
With radiant face and silvery hair,
Enters the deco diner on Brattle Street,
“There’s a concert tonight”,

On the second floor of that building opposite Winthrop Square.

Listen, the performance, the music, sublime.
Oh no, not again, “The Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Glucks’s “Orfeo”,
Heard it at least one-thousand times.

— Peter Lesses

John Jervis, a Cambridge fixture, was a classical music guitarist, who played in restaurants in Harvard Sq. during the 80s. He passed frequently by Cardells’s on Brattle St., now gonso. Previously, he toured the US with Tiny Tim and Bob Dylan and left permanently for Lawrence, Kansas in 1989. He made only one recording of classics and Spanish music and died in 2021, lamented by all those here and there.

Dave Van Ronk was a popular folk singer and guitarist from NYC, who appeared at Club Passim on Palmer St. in the halcyon days when the Donlins ran it. Locals used to call it Pa-SEEM with the accent on the second syllable, but Bob Donlin always called it Passim from the Latin. Dave was present at the Stonewall Inn, when it was raided in 1969 by the NYPD.