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Raleigh had a few outposts of hipness: Jimmy Thiem's downtown record shop, where you could find jazz, blues and folk records; Poole's music store, where they let budding pickers play some of the guitars; sessions at Del Reno's and other downtown jazz spots; the coterie of young bluegrass musicians living on Ashe Avenue; Norman Delancey's trendy clothing store on Hillsborough Street; and the old Varsity Theater, where outsiders turned up for the midnight show of "Thunder Road."

People who might visit those places, the musicians and the creative cast at the School of Design, needed a hangout of their own.

"The kind of music that we loved and were playing -- there really wasn't a venue for that," Peden, 60, said in a call from his New York City photography studio.

James M. Peden, his father and a businessman from the heart, struck a deal with John: He could use the warehouse, but would have to submit a business plan and pay rent.

"We had kind of a sweetheart deal -- we had to pay rent but it was something we could bear," John says. "We actually thought that we could make a profit."

The place to be

With this deal, Peden and his design-school and other friends went to work on the Sidetrack.

"We built it out of scraps," he said. "We figured out that you could put a seven-watt bulb inside a V8 can and it would make kind of a cool light. My sweet mother sewed us burlap curtains to cover all the windows."

After a brief shakedown period, the Sidetrack slated its formal opening for Dec. 1, 1964. Peden expected a modest turnout -- enough for "a casual game of cards," he said. The actual event reflected the excitement of having such a place in Raleigh.

The newspaper covered the opening, billing the Sidetrack as "Raleigh's first coffeehouse." So many people showed up that the fire marshals shut it down.

It was the start of a run that seems even more amazing in hindsight. Within months, the Sidetrack, conveniently located between D.C. and the Florida folk scene, went from a place where Peden and crew could hang with their girlfriends to a nightclub booking national talent. The Jim Kweskin Jug Band, with a young Maria Muldaur singing and fiddling, drove down in a Dodge van to perform at State and the Sidetrack. Kweskin and his freewheeling crew were the cream of the folk and blues world at the time, appearing on network TV as well as at festivals and clubs nationally. First-class jazzmen Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd turned out.

"Peter, Paul and Mary came and sat on the floor and talked politics all night," Peden said. "We had Len Chandler, a guy who was a big influence on Bob Dylan. Somebody gave us a piano and we had jazz night. We had poetry night."

When Bob Dylan and Joan Baez appeared at State's Reynolds Coliseum, people thought they might stop by the Sidetrack. But the closest sighting came when Harry Stewart and some friends from Ashe Avenue saw the folk-star couple emerge from the back of the Velvet Cloak hotel.

No matter. Patrons got nights of acoustic blues from John Hammond Jr., whose record-exec father discovered both Billie Holiday and Dylan. For a buck they heard the great young singer's bent-note vocals, slide guitar and harmonica. That summer, crowds went from a handful to a hundred.

Wade Smith, one of North Carolina's top defense attorneys, was 27 in the summer of '65, when his friend Wade Hargrove told him that a guitarist named Doc Watson would play the Sidetrack. Watson, who had made his first solo albums for Vanguard Records, had played the Newport Folk Festival, but at Peden's coffeehouse, people could sit almost as close as you are to this newspaper and watch Doc play.

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