Fire truck with lights on parked outside the Nitty Gritty downtown
The recent fire that temporarily closed the Nitty Gritty on North Frances Street brought the realization that few restaurants or bars have endured in Madison longer than the Gritty, which opened Oct. 3, 1968.
For longtime Madisonians, it’s impossible to think about the Nitty Gritty without remembering, too, its colorful founder, Marsh Shapiro. As it happens, this December marks the 10th anniversary of Shapiro’s death, age 74, from brain cancer.
I was just a kid when I met Marsh in the early 1960s. It was at a party at my parents’ house on Woodside Terrace. Besides my sister and me, Marsh was the youngest guy in the room. He’d started working for WKOW-TV/Channel 27 while still in college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My dad was the station’s general manager. Marsh did a bit of everything there, news reporting, running a camera. Then one day in 1964 my dad asked him if he’d like to host an afternoon kids’ show.
“No,” Marsh replied.
An unacceptable answer. Marsh acquiesced. High level discussions ensued about the character Marsh would play as host. Roger the Robber was considered and discarded. Finally, news anchor Blake Kellogg delivered the clincher: Marshall the Marshal.
Marsh hosted the program for four years. He once told me he knew the show had arrived when he handcuffed himself on the air and asked kids to send in keys to help him escape. The station was deluged with hundreds of keys.
It was 1968 when Marsh left TV and he and his first wife, Gail, bought a campus area shot-and-a-beer bar called Glen and Ann’s and renamed it the Nitty Gritty. Marsh said they got the name from a 1960s song by Shirley Ellis.
“We liked the song, and we liked the name,” he said.
The previous bar had featured live music and in the early years the Gritty did, too, great music, much of it blues. B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Luther Allison all played the Gritty. One night that Allison played, members of the Jefferson Airplane, who had finished their own gig at the Field House, showed up, eventually joining Allison onstage.
“Word got around campus so fast,” Marsh recalled, “they were standing three deep outside the bar just listening.”
One of those people standing outside might have been Glenn Worf, a Madison native like Shapiro. Worf once told me that as a teenager he spent many nights with his nose pressed to the window outside the Gritty, trying to absorb the music inside.
“I’m not sure I’d have been a musician without him,” Glenn said, referring to Shapiro. “Once in a while he’d take pity on us and bring us Cokes.”
For the past three decades, Worf has been the bass player in an illustrious band fronted by Mark Knopfler.
During this time another Madison kid and aspiring musician, Mike Riegel, asked Shapiro what kind of music he could play that might fly at the Gritty.
“I saw him down at one of our picnic tables,” Marsh told me later, “with five or six old 1950s straight rock ‘n’ roll albums.”
So was Dr. Bop and the Headliners, one of the greatest of all-Midwest bar bands, born. Marsh called me when Riegel died, in 2005, and I wrote a newspaper column about the band. “Everybody had to have them,” their manager, Ken Adamany told me. “You couldn’t have a nightclub if you couldn’t book Dr. Bop.” Their first gig was at the Gritty.
In 1975, Marsh went back to television, returning to Channel 27 as sports director. It was the year he married his second wife, Susan, and they kept the Gritty, refocusing it as more of a restaurant.
One highlight of Marsh’s sports reporting was an hourlong exclusive interview with boxer Muhammad Ali, engineered by Madison sports agent Greg Campbell. Ali knew Madison and kidded them about it. He’d suffered one of his few defeats in Madison. “They still got that old barn?” he’d say, referring to the Field House.
At the restaurant, Marsh took the “front of the house” role while Susan worked behind the scenes. They developed a secret sauce hamburger, the Gritty Burger, that endures today. And they established the Gritty as Madison’s “official birthday bar,” a great schtick that resulted in stories like one Marsh shared with me in spring 2000 when he received a postal letter from a UW–Madison student named Tom Paprocki who was studying abroad.
“I am currently on board a train in Russia,” Paprocki wrote. He’d just celebrated his 21st birthday in Moscow and nobody cared. Would Marsh give him his free birthday drink when he returned to Madison? Of course he would.
Marsh and I only had one small falling out. When George Motz was researching his classic book, “Hamburger America,” he came to Madison and enlisted me to take him to a great burger joint for possible inclusion in his book.
I took Motz to the Plaza and Dotty’s. Marsh was incredulous. How could I bypass the Gritty? I mumbled something about Motz not being able to eat three burgers, but that likely wasn’t true. When we left Dotty’s he got two orders of fried cheese curds for the road.
Marsh stepped away from the Nitty Gritty in 2010. There was a second location, in Middleton, by then, and he’d helped more than 400,000 people celebrate their birthdays.
The Nitty Gritty Middleton Facebook page reported last week that the Frances Street location would be reopening soon, “in the next couple weeks.” Good news. I’ll be in for a Gritty Burger and a toast to my old friend.
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