Trailblazing jazz clubs — Cadillac Club, Pep’s Musical Bar, and the Showboat — to be honored on the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame

On Mother’s Day 1965, Herb Spivak presented jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis for two sold-out shows at the Academy of Music. At the end of the day, Spivak took a rare pause to bask in the moment.

“I remember looking at the empty theater and imagining all those seats filled because of something I did. That felt pretty good,” Spivak recalled earlier this month, sitting at a corner table at his family’s Bryn Mawr shop, Hope’s Cookies.

Sixty years later, Spivak is set to return to the Avenue of the Arts to be recognized for his impact on Philadelphia’s music scene. On Wednesday, April 30, he will be honored with a plaque on the Philadelphia Music Alliance’s Walk of Fame, commemorating his ownership of the Showboat, a storied jazz club on Lombard Street.

He’ll be inducted alongside two fellow clubs of the era and their owners, both since passed away: Jack Goldenberg for Pep’s Musical Bar, and Benjamin Bynum for the Cadillac Club.

This will be the the first time since the Walk of Fame’s inauguration in 1987 that Philly venues and their owners will be included among the honorees.

“As we look back at what has made Philadelphia such an important musical city,” said Alan Rubens, Philadelphia Music Alliance chairman, “we realized that these clubs made important inroads very early on towards becoming a major stopover for artists. Every touring artist wanted to play Philadelphia because of the venues that we had and the audiences that we brought out.”

Philly R&B group the Orlons will also receive a plaque during this year’s ceremony, as part of a class that includes Stephen Sondheim, Janis Ian, Schooly D, composer David Ludwig, Settlement Music School, and longtime World Café host David Dye.

One of the Orlons’ three gold records was for “South Street,” the song that declared the thoroughfare “the hippest street in town.” If that’s true, said Michael Goldenberg, son of Pep’s owner Jack Goldenberg, then the corner of Broad and South where his father’s club resided “must have been the hippest corner in town.”

Pep’s opened as a restaurant in the 1930s, becoming Pep’s Musical Bar when Bill Gerson bought the space in 1951. Goldenberg took over the 500-seat club in 1957, with two partners, and ran it until 1968.

Two blocks north on Lombard, the Showboat opened in the 1940s in the basement of the Douglass Hotel at 1409 Lombard St. A historical marker stands in front of the building today commemorating Billie Holiday’s frequent residency in the hotel while she was in the city. Spivak and his two brothers bought the building in 1964, with Herb overseeing the club and his brothers managing the hotel.

Spivak rechristened the space as the Showboat Jazz Theatr (the deliberate misspelling a ploy for press coverage) and doubled the capacity of the room to 200 seats, opening a hole in the floor of the hotel to create a makeshift balcony.

Benjamin Bynum opened the Cadillac Club on Germantown Avenue in North Philadelphia in 1965. Like Goldenberg and Spivak, he had owned bars catering to the city’s Black community prior to entering the music business.

Between them, the three clubs hosted a who’s who of jazz greats during their 1960s heyday, including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Nina Simone, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, Cannonball Adderley, and many more. A 1963 recording of the John Coltrane Quartet at the Showboat has circulated for decades through unofficial channels. Yusef Lateef recorded Live at Pep’s in 1964, and Billy Paul named his debut album Feelin’ Good at the Cadillac Club.

Jack Goldenberg often shared the story of the day in 1961 when he received a momentous phone call. “[Vocalist] Dinah Washington called my father and said, ‘You’ve got to get out here to Detroit,’” Michael Goldenberg detailed. “‘The Rev. C.L. Franklin is bringing Aretha out of the church.’ So my father gets in a plane, goes to the church, listens to Aretha, and says, ‘You’re going to be a star.’ And he booked her at Pep’s.”

In August 2017, Aretha Franklin played her final Philadelphia concert at the Mann Center. “I started, really, in Philadelphia,” she said from the piano. “This was back in the early ’60s … I worked at Pep’s on Broad Street and I also worked at the Cadillac Club for years.”

In a 2018 interview with The Inquirer, the late pianist Chick Corea fondly recalled his early days playing these clubs. “My memories of Philly go way back,” he said, prior to a performance at the Academy of Music.

“Unbeknownst to a lot of people, I played a week engagement at a place called the Cadillac Club in the ’60s with Chet Baker and a Philly pickup band… I also worked at Pep’s with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers for a couple of engagements. The early Return to Forever band played at the Showboat, and on our opening night, we walked in for the soundcheck and there was a vocal group on the stage. [That was the first time I heard] the Manhattan Transfer.”

While most of his memories of jazz artists are warm ones, Spivak does recall a contretemps with Miles Davis, notorious in some circles for performing with his back to the crowd. “During one engagement, I calculated the time he spent facing the other way and I took it off his pay. He ended up getting the money, but we had a very big fight and both said a lot of little things that neither of us should have said. Then we shook hands. He was actually a really nice guy.”

The sale of Pep’s in 1968, as rock clubs began to predominate, spelled the end of Jack Goldenberg’s career in music, but the Showboat was just the beginning for Herb Spivak. He went on to book artists for the Spectrum in the arena’s early years, cofounded the original Electric Factory, and created the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a local answer to the better-known Woodstock festival. Bynum’s legacy lives on through his sons, Robert and Benjamin Jr., whose South Jazz Kitchen follows their previous venues, including Zanzibar Blue and Warmdaddy’s.

“These clubs helped create the live music scene that has become such an important part of this city and this country,” said Rubens, the Philadelphia Music Alliance chairman.

Insisting that he’s now perfectly happy selling cookies, Spivak shrugged off such accolades. “I didn’t do anything special,” he said. “It was the acts, not me. I just took a shot at presenting it.”