The streets around the old Peden Steel Co. warehouse ran mostly deserted after dark in 1964. Its neighbors were a casket company and a vacant roller-skating rink. But John Peden decided he could give people a reason to venture to the corner of Hargett and West, on the fringe of downtown Raleigh. Peden, an N.C. State freshman who shocked Raleigh society with his long hair and beard, saw possibilities for the building when his father moved the company out to North Boulevard. He envisioned something along the lines of the coffeehouses in Cambridge, Mass., which he had visited in prep school. He wanted a place to hang out with his Raleigh friends and new ones from NCSU's School of Design, play and listen to music and talk with others who had begun to plug into the fledgling youth movement.

For 14 tumultuous months, Peden ran the Sidetrack coffeehouse, the destination for the young and adventurous in the mid-1960s. The corner room, with its low stage and mismatched wooden chairs, meant that someone's lonesome enthusiasm for painting, or old movies, or jazz, or politics, or folk and blues, could find company and inspiration.

With music by such rising stars as John Hammond and Doc Watson, poetry readings, jazz performances, art exhibits and an intensely political atmosphere, the Sidetrack was Cup A Joe, Amazon.com, the Cat's Cradle, Lump Gallery, myspace.com and Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary rolled into one.

The coffeehouse lasted only as long as Peden remained in Raleigh. The building that housed it is long gone, replaced by a Dillon Supply warehouse. And the Sidetrack's story is unknown to most of the last two generations, to the young people who trek to the area's bars and restaurants today. But for its denizens, now in or close to their 60s, it was a place of passage.

"It changed my life," said Art Rogers, who documented the Sidetrack's history with his camera before moving to California for a successful photography career. "There ought to be a plaque or a statue: 'Here sat the Sidetrack coffeehouse.' "

The first hippie

With a father who founded a steel company, presided over the Carolina Country Club and worshipped with other wealthy congregants at Christ Episcopal Church, John Hoover Browne Peden hit young adulthood in ways that made him stand out in the slow-paced Raleigh of the day.

He often walked a different road from his society peers. While other kids went to Daniels Junior High neatly but discreetly dressed, the ninth-grade John might show up in a Brooks Brothers suit and bowler, and carrying a cane, says longtime friend Harry Stewart.

As he shuttled among Eastern prep schools, Peden found a new direction. He went from liking the smooth, folky Kingston Trio to preferring the acts at Club 47 in Cambridge, where traditional singers such as Lightnin' Hopkins and new stars including Joan Baez had performed. These artists were much on Peden's mind when he came back to Raleigh in 1963.

"He was so clearly a part of what was getting ready to happen in the '60s," said his sister Melissa Peden, seven years older than John. "I refer to him as the first hippie."

He grew a beard and wore his hair long. People called him Jesus Peden. When he roared by on his BSA motorcycle, "it was like mothers' clutching their babies to their chests and crossing to the other side of the street," says Barbara "Bunny" Church, a Broughton grad and Peden's first wife.

The city, home to about 95,000 people and with just one section of the Beltline complete, had seen few public signs of the youth movements developing in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Raleigh was more like the '50s, more "Andy Griffith Show" than "Easy Rider."

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.

Smith didn't really know who Watson was. He had never heard of the Sidetrack. The night was a revelation.

"I thought that it would be a fairly elegant place," he said. "It was just a little corner of a warehouse."

But the music the two Wades heard that night, that many people heard during Watson's several nights at the Sidetrack, made up for any lack of ambience.

"What word would I choose to describe how I felt?" Smith said. "Electrified, stunned at the speed of his fingers and the way he played single strings, and the clarity of the sound. Each note was like a piece of gold, so amazing.

"We stayed to the last note. When we left I remember thinking that I had never heard anything like it and that in some way I had been changed by it, that I was in an altered state of existence."

War and civil rights

Times were changing fast in the Sidetrack's day. The civil rights movement was in full swing, with significant federal legislation passed in 1964 and 1965. The Vietnam War was escalating and opposition was rising.

There was no doubt about where the Sidetrack stood. Behind the stage were the first peace and equality signs many Raleigh people had seen. From West Street, passers-by could see posters for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been formed at Shaw University in 1960, and the Congress of Racial Equality.

Len Chandler's songs of civil rights and politics suited the diverse crowd of students, professors, artists, interracial couples and bikers.

"We had all these guys who were the motorcycle guys in Fayetteville," Peden says. "They had been called into active duty because of Vietnam. They got on these high-powered motorcycles and drove to the Sidetrack. It was not unusual to have 20-30 motorcycles out front. They were as much pacifists as we were."

Some were uncomfortable with the idea of all those outsiders gathered in one room. Rumors flew that the Pedens were embarrassed by the Sidetrack.

"I think everybody in the family was almost ... proud?" Melissa Peden said. "I don't know that we were proud because it was so strange. Every aspect of it was different."

Herb Jackson, one of Peden's childhood friends and an art student, along with painter and future wife Laura Grosch, cleaned out another room in the warehouse to showcase their art. He had held a 1964 show at the old Olivia Raney Library at Hillsborough and Salisbury streets, so there was a constituency for the Sidetrack exhibit. But the club spooked some Raleighites.

"I think there some people that were afraid to come," said Jackson, who like his wife became a nationally known painter. "[The Sidetrack] was just a little bit too far out for some people."

And some didn't appreciate its politics. In early March 1965, someone threw a smoke bomb through the Sidetrack's window. According to an N&O story, the device crashed through a plate glass window and exploded. It was, Officer M.G. Clifton said, a sulfur smoke bomb "of the kind used by the Army." No one was hurt, and the poetry, blues, bluegrass, jazz and coffee kept flowing.

Another night the Klan, or people thought to be the Klan, sent a delegation. Peden recalls that it was poetry night, which was not terribly well attended. Suddenly about 25 or 30 guys came in, looking as if "they had come to cause trouble. We had our SNCC and racial equality posters facing out. We wanted to be as confrontational as possible, and they returned the favor."

The Sidetrack crew got along with the police -- they didn't sell alcohol and helped send runaway teenagers back home. A couple of squad cars showed up, lights flashing. The visitors took the hint and headed home, according to Sidetrack veterans.

Moving on

In July '65, Peden and Bunny Church traveled north to the Newport Folk Festival. They watched the fabled performance when Dylan came out with a Stratocaster to play loud rock 'n' roll. Many fans were outraged. Peden and Church thought it was great.

Once again, Peden was ready for change.

He played in the Heavenly Blues Band, an electric combo with guitars, harmonica, bass and drums. The band got at the mood of the day, perhaps better than the soft acousticisms of the Sidetrack.

"If I had wanted to be the Kingston Trio earlier, I wanted to be Dylan or Mike Bloomfield," Peden said.

There were other reasons to move on. Business didn't flow as smoothly as it had at Peden Steel. Sidetrack regular and performer John Snakenburg recalled tension when something wasn't getting done fast enough, or well enough, or finances weren't working out.

"We were very young, and doing business was the last thing on our minds," Snakenburg said.

Peden had heard that his family was going to sell the building to Dillon Supply: "The writing was on the bare brick wall."

As near as anyone can remember, January 1966, 40 years ago this month, marked the end of the Sidetrack. Peden headed for San Francisco, hoping to join the emerging scene with Heavenly Blues Band. They hooked up with Bill Graham, who booked them a gig at the Fillmore concert hall -- the date actually made it onto one of those famous psychedelic posters. But their lead guitar player was held up and the band never materialized in California.

Peden wound up in New York as a photographer of fashion and valuable guitars. But in Raleigh, many people still remember him as the long-haired adventurer who started a place for people who cared about certain new and interesting things.

"It was so wonderful that he undertook to do the Sidetrack," Jackson says. "It was sort of a focus of energy. There was great music, great conversation."

"When it closed, I felt it was our loss," Wade Smith said. "That was a singular time."

(News researcher Susan Ebbs contributed to this report.)