By Neal Pollack
The No Exit will celebrate its 40th anniversary in September. Since its founding in Evanston in 1958, the cafe has regularly hosted musical performances, including sets by Steve Goodman, Art Thieme, Bob Gibson, and Irish folksinger Christy Moore. It has been the subject of skits on Saturday Night Live and at Second City and was featured in the River Phoenix movie A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, whose director, William Richert, read poetry there when he was a high school student in Evanston. Three generations of bohemians have called it home.
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When the Kozins took over in 1977, they were the fifth owners. By that time the cafe’s heyday as a music venue was over. As Brian likes to say, “We cleverly bought this place at the end of the folk boom.” Nevertheless, in 1984 the Kozins moved the No Exit to its current location, a fairly spacious and irregularly shaped storefront on Glenwood Avenue. These days live entertainment brings in only about 20 percent of the cafe’s business. The Kozins admittedly have lost touch with current trends, as illustrated by the disastrous attendance at a recent “electronica” night, and they don’t have time or energy to search for new acts. “If a musician doesn’t come to see us,” Brian acknowledges, “we don’t even know they exist.”
Then one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, a longtime regular named Cindy Olsen was puttering around in the cafe’s kitchen. Olsen had just moved back to the neighborhood after a sojourn in Wicker Park, and she told Brian how much she’d missed the No Exit.
“I was surprised that it happened just like that,” Brian says. “So’s everybody else. People heard us talking about it, and they went, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re going to sell the place.’ Nobody ever really quite believed it. We didn’t quite believe it either. But now we do.”
For now, Brian will focus on his art, hang out, and maybe work part-time for a downtown jewelry merchant who he says admires his handmade rings. Sue plans to occasionally wait tables at the cafe. Brian may also work there from time to time, “to make the transition easier, make it known that there’s a day where people can come in and see us. I wouldn’t mind working a shift there for minimum wage. That’s all we’re making there anyway. It would be a real novelty to work a night there and come away with money that didn’t have to go to pay bills for the cafe. I wouldn’t even mind working as a dishwasher.”
