The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 191

PAGE 33 Dclpb Glocson Peggy and Helen Classic Releases Continued From Page 32 gance and total mastery in this fine production. Recommended! MOZART: Flute Concertos Nos. 1 and Andante for flute. (Wilhelm Schwegler, Hans Martin Linde and Peter Thai-heimer, flutes; Wuerttem-berg Chamber Orchestra; Joerg Faerber, conductor in Concertos; Hamburg Symphony; Guenther Neidlinger, conductor in Andante.) Turnabout TV-S 34511. None of these art- ists is a top name, jjO but all have a com- mon affinity for the clear Mozartian style.

There is a lightness, almost casual ease to the music, and everything flows smoothly without lumps in the batter of sound. The sound is good without being special, and one gets fine notes for a bonus. At the half-price asked, a bargain. Days of THERE WAS a time when the night club scene in this city was really colorful. When the club owners themselves were, at least occasionally, as much an attraction as the hired entertainers.

At one time two women were important figures in the entertainment world here. Helen Noga was the voice of the Black Hawk, which she operated with her husband, John, and Guido and Elynore Ca-cienti, and the Down Beat Club on Market street which she and John ran by themselves. Peggy Tolk Watkins, who died late last month, ran The Tin Angel and the Fallen Angel. Pure City The Black Hawk and the Down Beat were pure San Francisco clubs raunchy, free form, bars with music. The Tin Angel and the Fallen Angel were of a different genre, part Greenwich Village and part Paris.

Peggy Tolk Watkins, who created them, was a painter, raconteur and genuine character with a brilliant, erratic mind and a razor sharp wit. It was perfectly possible in those days to go to the Black Hawk to watch Helen Noga boss the waitresses around and it was equally possible to go to The Tin Angel and just to argue with Peggy. Peggy Tolk Watkins had flair. She practically invented camp as interior decoration, at least as far as San Francisco was concerned. The Tin Angel was a veritable museum of delightful odds and ends she had picked up.

And during her term as owner of the club she made it into a nationally known night spot. The original Cinerama film features a bit of The Tin Angel and it was seen in Life and Time and all the other important publications of the era. Odetta's Start Odetta, the incredible folk singer, got her start at The Tin Angel. Quite literally, she learned to be a folk singer hanging out in North Beach and The Tin Angel washer first gig. Long before the Preservation Hall Jazz Band became the darling of the summer curcuit the Tin Angel brought New Orleans jazz to San Francisco with the great blues Lizzie Miles, and the original George Lewis band.

Most of the local traditional groups, such as Bob Scobey and Turk Murphy, played there for varying lengths of time (Peggy was not always diplomatic in her relations with her staff and entertainers) and when the Fallen Angel was opened, the star attraction was Johnny Mathis getting, I think, something like $125 a week. The Fallen Angel was the former tally tasteless gesture, cleaned out all of Peggy's priceless antiques and campy decoration and replaced them with an antiseptic, white-painted interior that looked more like the shower room of a high school gym. Needless to say it was never the same. And the Fallen Angel went down even more quickly, hardly lasting long enough to serve as a springboard for Johnny Mathis. After her career as a nightclub operator was over, Peggy devoted much of her time to painting before she became too ill to work at all.

There was one lovely exhibition of her work at the de Young and several of Iter paintings became, in the form of photos, the cover designs for albums. One of them, which showed Peggy, Max Weiss and a friend, was on a Lenny Bruce album. The Book Max was holding a book with the title "Pigs Ate My Roses" ostensibly written, according to the cover, by Peggy. It was the first Lenny Bruce album and it reached a lot of people in the artistic world and for some time after it appearance, Peggy got offers from avant-garde publishers for the book and people wrote to Fantasy asking how they might buy it. At one point, there had been enough of this sort of reaction that Peggy was seriously considering actually writing the book.

Any title that powerful shouldn't be wasted. Peggy's last few years were spent in and out of hospitals with drastic problems from just about all the heavy diseases available to humans. I hadn't seen her in years, but every once in a while she would call and we'd chat, sometimes for an hour because she was one of the most interesting conversationalists I have ever encountered. An acid wit. a devastating ability to puncture pomposity and the self-righteous pose, she would run down the list of current newsmakers, sticking verbal pins into them.

Medical Problems A couple of weeks before she died, Peggy called one afternoon. She brought me up to date on all her medical problems, operations and hard times. She was half dead already, as far as the physical body was concerned, and she well knew it. But she had a spirit and mind that wouldn't quit and she joked and laughed about it all. and said she was having a ball just being alive.

Only one thing bothered her. She couldn't get a copy of an album by Paul Desmond that had one of her paintings on the cover. She didn't have the painting any more either, and the album was out of print. I found some back in the Fantasy warehouse and sent them to her. They were the last ones left and who had a better right to them? entertainment palace of Sally Stanford, a marvelous building with a magnificent series of rooms Deluding a fountain in an interior solarium.

Upstairs were what might have been called, in earlier times, cribs. But on the main floor the general atmosphere was expensive a-roque. Peggy Tolk Watkins had the knack, as had some of the most successful night club entrepreneurs PEGGY TOLK WATKINS in New York and Paris, of getting interesting people to come to the club regardless of the entertainment of the moment. She was stimulating to talk to herself and that drew interesting people. You never knew whom you might meet at The Tin Angel or the Fallen Angel.

It might be the head of the Ringling Brothers or it might be a newspaper editor. Literally. Peggy ran that kind of place. When the Down Beat Club opened on lower Market Street, Peggy went there opening night, as a kind of professional gesture to Helen and Johnny Noga. In lieu of paying the admission charge, she hand- Two women had big hand in night-club scene wrestled Helen Noga in the lobby.

They should have charged $5 a head to watch. It was hilarious. Peggy eventually phased out of the night club business. She got involved with the Weiss brothers who operated Fantasy Records then and later had an interest in the Black Hawk. But that didn't work out, and eventually Kid Ory took over The Tin Angel and in a monumen W-sf.

RECORD BREAKS: Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony will release all the major Tchaikovsky orchestral music in a pair of Vox Boxes, three discs each. In addition to the six numbered Symphonies, it will contain the "Manfred" Symphony (No. 4), the big tone poems including "Hamlet," "1812 Overture" and all that. julian White, pianist, will perform works by Copland, Berg, Prokofiev, Bartok and Hinde-mith at 8 p.m. Friday, in Hertz Hall on the U.C.

Berkeley campus. RECORDS TAPES COMPONENT SYSTEMS Rnuw 101 i BtlvftJm-TiburflnlWnoff This World, Sunday, July 8, 1973..