When my father was still alive, I’d always resisted running the Comedy Cellar, which was the club he’d started in 1980. I went to an Ivy League law school and then worked at a firm in Los Angeles for a few months. Its big selling point was that after seven years as partner you got a one-year sabbatical to do whatever you wanted. I grew up in a house where my father always did what he liked, and by then I just wanted to play music. So I quit being a lawyer.
My father was a musician and nightclub owner. He opened his first place in 1960, a coffee shop on the outskirts of Greenwich Village in New York. He and his friends played there informally and other musicians hung out too. One of them was Bob Dylan – my father knew him but he never had high regard for him. After Dylan became famous, my father had a hard time believing it, to be honest.
In 1969 my dad opened a restaurant on MacDougal Street in the Village. It had a basement that had nothing going on, so he tried a piano bar and folk bar. In 1980, a comedian called Bill Grundfest said, “I’ll bring comedians – you take the bar, I’ll take the door.” That was the start of the Comedy Cellar. It’s where Jon Stewart and Ray Romano were discovered. When Bill left in 1987, my father got more involved, but it was still small potatoes – sometimes they got the waitresses to sit at tables to make it look like there was an audience.