Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe

Tuesday, December 15, 2009, at 05:02PM

By Eric Richardson

A friend and I took a trip up to Hollywood last night to see Joe Purdy at the Hotel Cafe and, for once, no one fell asleep.

It's a long story.

The night marked at least the fifth time I've seen Joe play, four times now at the Hotel Cafe and once at an event at the old Conga Room on Wilshire. Combine that with the fact that I own three of his CDs, and you can get a general sense of my impression of his music.

It was my first time out to the Hotel Cafe in a long while, and it got me thinking about the venue that really defined my taste in L.A. music. Way back when the Hotel Cafe was half its current size and still just an all-ages coffee shop, I used to say that if the venue offered a monthly pass, I would have been there two or three times a week.

Looking through the artists on my iTunes, Eric Hutchinson, Erik Penny, Jay Nash (though I had met him before, actually at that Joe Purdy Conga Room show), Jim Bianco, Joe Purdy, Pedestrian, Quincy Coleman and Steve Reynolds were all acts I first heard at the Hotel Cafe. That's a nice little chunk of my music collection to have come out of a then-40-seat venue.