The Cantab Lounge
By Joshua Miller
Assistant Metro Editor, Boston Globe
A live music and cheap beer kind of summer Thursday.
It was after dark and I was standing in a packed Cambridge dive bar. Not any dive bar, mind you. It was the Cantab Lounge, an 87-year-old establishment beloved for its live music and cheap booze.
Last week, surrounded by scores of people waiting for a concert to start, I was trying to get a read on the owner of the place. Why, when COVID shut this dingy bar down, did a successful private equity guy from Concord buy it? What, exactly, was Tim Dibble (below) up to?
The Cantab is not the oldest bar in Cambridge, but it’s old enough that you or someone you know almost certainly has a story about it. A great concert, a drunken night, reading a poem on an open mic.
I remember going there in my mid-20s, listening to wonderfully upbeat, loud brass, my feet sticking to the gross floor. My parents remember going there, too, many decades earlier.
For Dibble, the important part of his Cantab story started in the 1980s, when he was living on Fenno Street in Cambridge, not far from Paddy’s Lunch. He met a woman named Maureen. Their first date was at what’s now called the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. Their next several dates were at the Cantab.
It became their place. They loved listening to musician Little Joe Cook (below), an anchoring Cantab presence, who played several times a week. Sometimes they’d go two nights in a row, hearing him croon the same songs with the same joy.
Time marches on. Tim and Maureen got married, had kids, moved to Concord. Decades passed. And then, during COVID, they saw a story in the Globe: the Cantab was up for sale. Owner Richard “Fitzy” Fitzgerald was selling it. “We’re very much hoping that someone will come forward and keep the place going,” his daughter told the paper in 2020.
Tim and Maureen talked. They had the desire and the means, so they went for it. “It was a really special place for us and we wanted to keep it going,” Tim told me. The trick was doing it in a way that people still felt it was the Cantab, still felt it had the spark that’s carried it through the years.
The process of bringing a dingy dive bar, beloved but not well maintained, into modernity without killing its spirit was no small feat.
Before reopening, they fixed up some essentials, like putting in new floors, connecting the sewage line to the street (it had been linked to the pizza place next door), putting in a modern keg system, and adding in accessible bathrooms and credit card readers. But they left the Christmas lights and Budweiser light fixtures along the bar in the 137-person capacity space upstairs, and the underground nightclub vibe remains in the 100-person space downstairs.
There were inevitable troubles post-COVID shutdown, but by the end of 2021, they got the Cantab back in action. Now, a few years later, it’s humming with a wide variety of music, from country to jazz to dancehall, seven days a week. Poetry readings continue, too.
Kylie Connors, the general manager, told me her bar still has the cheapest beer around, and a great, eclectic variety of musicians coming through, for whom the space isn’t too small or too big.
I pressed Tim on how his private equity experience translates to owning a dive bar. He demurred at first. But eventually he said there’s one striking similarity, and it has to do with Connors: “Hire really good people, and then once you know and trust them, stay out of their way.”
Connors does all the hard stuff, he told me, laughing. He and his wife just come for some shows, like the one I was at last week, where musician Michael Marcagi was playing.
For more than 40 years, Maureen Dibble has loved the Cantab. “I’ve never had a bad night here,” she told me. A bad dive bar beer, yes. But never a bad night.
She reminisced about the late Little Joe Cook, and told me his music was an important enough part of their life that she and Tim have a painting of Cook in their house in Concord.
“Music is good for the soul,” Maureen said, as Marcagi came to the stage.
I stood in the back, feet wonderfully not sticking to the floor, and listened to a band I had never heard of. What a joy to be lost in some great new-to-me tunes.
Marcagi said he felt lucky to be ending pretty much a year and half on tour at the Cantab. “It feels right,” he said, “to be at a sweaty dive bar.”