By Rachel Burke

It was the fall of 1933. Prohibition had ended a few months earlier, and folks were in the mood to hoist a few.

Warren Bennett and Jack Trainor meant to oblige them.

The friends pooled their finances, bought an old gas station on Holden’s Main Street, brought in a couple of barrels of beer and began selling it by the glass. They called their roadhouse the Blue Plate Bar, a name inspired by the practice of restaurants and diners at the time to serve meals on blue plates, hence the term “blue plate special.”

Special the place was, and has remained.

— The Landmark, June 26, 2003

On October 18 and 19, The Blue Plate Lounge, Holden’s home away from home for local musicians, will be hosting a two-day music festival in celebration of its 75th anniversary. The weekend festivities will take place at the Lounge (located on Route 122A in Holden) and will include performances by numerous musicians including The Dinosaurs, Chuck and Mud, The Prairie Oysters, Rufus Leaking and many more.

During the early ’70s, the Blue Plate became a haven for local bands thanks to the efforts of Michael’s brother, Paul “Tiny” Stacy.

“It’s been a very important place for the local music scene for a number of years,” said Michael Stacy, the grandson of Warren Bennett. “Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Tiny ran the entertainment and a lot of bands in the area started their career here. Our background is pretty historic. We’ve had a lot of interesting acts over the years and we were always eclectic about having different types of music.”

Mike Stacy at The Blue Plate Lounge

Ed Sheridan joined the Blue Plate in the early ’80s, starting as a musician and bartender, and eventually became the music coordinator. “They dragged me off the street and made family out of me,” Sheridan said. “The Blue Plate was well before its time in terms of bringing in world music. It gave a lot of local musicians their starts because it allowed all different types of music. It became a destination to play. A lot of clubs had come and gone in the Worcester area, but the Blue Plate has always been there, especially for jam bands and folk bands. It seems to be an institution, that a lot of musicians play who came from Worcester. It was always a hometown crowd; you could go there and play and always guarantee yourself a good time.”

Walter Crockett, lead guitarist of the Prairie Oysters, also became a Blue Plate member back in the musical evolution period. “The real glory days were during the ’70s and ’80s,” said Crockett. “I played with a few bands, Zonkaraz and The Prairie Oysters, back in the early ’70s and we made the Blue Plate happen. Tiny Stacy asked Zonkaraz to play back when we were just a trio and pretty soon we were packing the place with 200 people on a Saturday night. Zonkaraz basically opened up the room to music for the Blue Plate. It became a big place to play and was a good place for folk rock and blues acts. It has always been the kind of place that people liked to go and dance and have a good time.”

In addition to the live entertainment, Blue Plate’s 75th anniversary party will also include food and beverages available at a low price to make the event both memorable and affordable for all customers who have supported the Holden landmark over the past 75 years. Souvenir laminates will be sold for $5, which will buy admission to the weekend events.

“For the anniversary, we’re trying to gather all the people together who’ve supported Blue Plate for all these years,” said Sheridan. “We’ve called in as many bands as we can find so we can get a piece of nostalgia out of this. We’re trying to get together with anybody who played in Worcester and has a warm spot in their heart for the place.”

The anniversary party will not only be an eventful celebration for all devoted Blue Plate customers, but it will also be a memorable reunion for all musicians in the Worcester area who have performed there over the past 40 years. The headlining acts will take the stage on Saturday afternoon, play into Saturday evening, and return the following day to perform Sunday afternoon.

“I think the anniversary will be a nice tribute to the people who have kept it alive over the years,” said Crockett. “I think it’s great that it’s still there. After all these years, people still play there, and I think it will be wonderful if it lasts forever.”

Blue Plate Anniversary Concert, Oct. 18 and 19, $5 cover. Saturday 1-5 p.m.: Chuck and Mud; 5 p.m.: Walter Crockett and Prairie Oysters; 7-9: Dinosaurs w/ Guests; 9-11: John Murphy. Sunday Noon: Zydetones; 2-4: Rufus Leakin; 4-6: Jason James [pending]; Plus many surprise musical guests.

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He was Tiny in name only

By Jim Keogh

Tiny Stacy died in parts.

Diabetes claimed the big man chunk by chunk — a toe here, a part of a foot there, what remained of his legs blackened and unusable. Toward the end of his life he held court from a bed in his mother’s Holden house, staging what was in essence a stationary farewell tour where his fans came to him, to watch samurai movies, swap tasteless jokes, talk politics, debate conspiracy theories. If you let your guard down he’d sell you a water filtration system, which he was still marketing. It was all somehow perfect, like he was participating in his own eulogy.

Tiny, all 6-4, 350 lbs. of him, didn’t wade into life’s pool, he cannonballed. His youth was about experience, with a capital “E.” In August 1969 he traveled to Max Yasgur’s farm in tiny Bethel, N.Y. for the Woodstock concert, posing as a newspaper photographer — camera hanging from his neck, no film in the camera — to get within 10 feet of the stage.

Tiny Stacy meditating on the Blue Plate stage.

The music, and the spirit, and the acid, all inspired him to bring musicians into the family bar, the Blue Plate, which he co-owned with his brother Mike. Soon, Tiny was a fixture on the scene, bumping the place out not just with local bands, but with some Woodstock-era icons like Country Joe and the Fish, Wavy Gravy, and even beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (he also pursued but could never land an appearance by Alan Ginsburg). When the Rolling Stones played at Sir Morgan’s Cove in 1981, Tiny was in the front row working security; a photo to prove it still hangs in the Blue Plate.

A bar was a dangerous place for Tiny to visit, never mind own. He fought addictions to drugs and alcohol for years before climbing out of that pit. Tiny never approached anything at half-speed, and after he attended a lecture given by the Dalai Lama in Amherst, he was smitten with the man and his faith. Tiny became a devout Buddhist, shed his demons (most of them) and went to work as the security chief for the Dalai Lama during his visits to America. (Tiny explained to me the real fear was not that somebody would try to assassinate the holy man, but that the crowd of adoring acolytes who greeted him everywhere he went would inadvertently crush him, killing him with love.)

There was something a little Forrest Gumpish about Tiny, how he materialized at big events or wound up standing shoulder to shoulder with famous people. He talked casually about his friendship with fellow Buddhist Richard Gere, and insisted he babysat for the young Uma Thurman and her siblings when her father, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, taught at UMass.

But ultimately, he was more Blue Plate than Beverly Hills. Tiny sold his share of the bar to his brother in 1980 but continued as a music booker and bouncer (the art of being a bouncer who preaches nonviolence, Tiny said, could be summed up in one word: patience). When I began my career as a reporter in Holden, Tiny became a quick friend: the first time I met him he took me to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre for a crash course in Buddhism and a vegetarian lunch with some monks. How can you not form an enduring allegiance to someone after an introduction like that?

The night Jurassic Park opened Tiny called me and said, “Let’s go see some dinosaurs.” Tiny, who at this point was on crutches, nearly passed out from angina as he reached the top of the second-story steps in the old White City theater, with me right behind him. As he started to wobble, I wondered how the hell I was going to break his fall if he went — lives were in danger, and the other one was Tiny’s.

He took some medicine and got through the episode okay. Inside the theater, we sat next to a drunk guy who was eating from a gallon carton of ice cream, then slumped face first into it — stone-cold unconscious — about half-way through the movie. When the credits rolled, Tiny shook the guy awake, and told him we’d drive him home, which we did. The moment was quintessential Tiny; the entire night was quintessential Tiny.

When he died in 1994, his service drew about as eclectic a group of people as may ever have been collected in Holden — Tiny’s cannonball had rippled out far and wide. The eulogies were plentiful and heartfelt, and the best line was supplied by Walter Crockett, faxed from Texas, in which he described the Blue Plate of the Tiny Stacy era as “the honky tonk on our road to enlightenment.” And Tiny Stacy was its Zen master. o