My friend Steve and I were invited to play for a Christmas party and dinner at The West Point Inn on Mt. Tamalpais last week.
The inn is an enchanted place. It was built in 1904 as a stop on the curvy railroad that wound its way up the mountain from 1896 until 1930, when a toll road allowed cars to drive to the summit and avoid the (rather high for its time) railroad fare.
The westernmost point on the line, hence the inn’s name, was where a stagecoach road took off for Willow Camp, which was what Stinson Beach was then called.
The inn survived on hikers for a while after the road opened, but when World War II broke out it got difficult to get provisions, due to rationing, and many of the hikers were off at war and the inn closed. Ownership reverted to the Marin Water District and the building was almost torn down as an eyesore. But a group of conservation minded hikers formed something called the West Point Club and got a lease to save it.
It was a mostly private thing for a long time, but eventually the water district wanted to make it a more public facility. There was a new board elected and the “club” became the West Point Inn Association, sometime in the 1970s. The association rents the rooms and cabins, and holds big pancake breakfasts in the summer and fall.
Aside from the history, the inn’s uniqueness for musicians is the amazing acoustics in the place. There is an outdoor deck around two sides of it, and if you position, say, a bluegrass band, in the corner, everybody on the long deck gets the most perfect sound. Something about the angle of the roof is like those museums where you go to one place and whisper and someone way across the room can hear you perfectly. A plus is a stunning view of San Francisco Bay, the Berkeley hills, Oakland and San Francisco and a bunch of the coast all the way down to Pacifica.
Inside there are two public rooms. They are paneled in wood, have old stone fireplaces, and, once again, phenomenal acoustics. Long story short, if you ever get a chance to play music in this place, jump at the chance.
Steve and I played Christmas tunes during the cocktail hour, then joined the crowd for dinner. Afterward about half the people hiked off down the mountain, since the inn only holds about 23 people in its seven rooms and six cabins. The rest of us gathered in the parlor and we just jammed for a few hours until the innkeeper declared the evening over at 10.
I confess an almost total lack of bluegrass content here. I was on my banjo for the cocktail hour but later we used two guitars, as Steve and I each know a lot of songs to sing, but from various genres. I know bluegrass, country, general Americana, and Steve knows a lot of that stuff but also a bunch of older pop songs from many years past. His uncle was a man named Milton Ager, who was a pretty well-known Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood songwriter of the 1920s and ’30s
Ager wrote, “Ain’t She Sweet,” “Happy Days are Here Again,” and “Big Bad Bill (is Sweet William Now.” So we did a lot of those, and some novelty tunes I know, and some basic sing-alongs like “You Are My Sunshine.”
Toward the end of the evening someone asked, “don’t you get tired, playing so long?”
I thought about it for a moment and replied, “No, we only get tired when we are getting paid.”
