Former Pasadena Comedy Cub Owner Reflects on Tom Smothers’ Legacy, Recalls Historic Live Albums

Pasadena’s Ice House is the oldest continuously operating comedy club in the nation, with a meticulous sound system that made it an entertainment mecca for both comedy and folk music fans when it opened its doors to both in 1961.

 It’s been said that more comedy albums were recorded there than at any club in America.

Its original owner, Bob Stane, had good reason to look back this week due to the passing of comic Tom Smothers who with his brother Dick made up the legendary Smothers Brothers duo, who had recorded two of their best-selling albums on its hallowed stage. 

Smothers died of cancer on Tuesday at age 86, but the star made a terrific impression on Stane that’s indelibly etched in his mind nearly 60 years later.

“It was 1964, and they decided to do the Ice House because a lot of their friends had performed there,” Stane told Pasadena Now on Thursday.

Stane sold the club in 1979 and later owned the recently-shuttered folk music venue Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena for decades. 

“The audience is very smart at the Ice House. They’re very well educated and progressive and the brothers wanted a real audience. They didn’t want a Hollywood audience.”

“They wanted real people who understood what they were doing and would react at the proper time. When they delivered their punch lines, the Ice House was perfect for that. And it seated 175 people, which was the perfect size audience to record a show with great energy from the crowd.”

The resulting record was their fifth, entitled “It Must Have Been Something I Said!”, and led to the recording of their sixth there: “Tour De Farce: American History and Other Unrelated Subjects.”  

The Smothers Brothers were comedy superstars by then with lucrative national tours, and by 1967 had a smash hit CBS TV series with “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”

As a result, the recorded shows set off a frenzy among comedy fans, and Stane recalls that the club had to turn away nearly 1,000 people from each performance. Since the small club couldn’t afford the rates the duo usually charged, they managed to strike an unusual deal for the first album’s shows.

“It was very fast. They were very nice to work with and instead of money, we bartered two souped-up motor scooters for them for the first album, and then on the second album we paid cash. It was a regular nightclub appearance.”

“We made a lot of money on it. We charged $2.50 for admission and we made about $4,000 on it,” notes Stane. “That was big money in those days. But the admission price of $2.50 was comical and we should have charged a lot more because we sold out in about 40 minutes. And the phone rang for around 10 days because people wanted to come in.”

“Tom and Dick just really wanted the Ice House and we were thrilled and said we’d pay them for it. They helped us get other acts by actually doing the live recording there and they were extremely nice about the whole thing. They were superstars at the time and they treated us very, very well.”

While Stane has nothing but fond memories of those shows, he looks at the passing of Tom Smothers as part of a sad and all too frequent trend.

“We’re just very sad about Tommy’s passing because we’re losing a lot of people now,” says Stane. “They’re getting to that age and it’s a sad situation and it’s not a surprise but it’s very unhappy feeling that so many of our gang back in the fifties and sixties in the folk music industry are dropping off, and we read about it all the time, in every newspaper.”