Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner

Published in Northampton Living (July 2024)

Three years ago, Chris Freeman, new to Northampton, had a tight circle of friends. Today he has a village.

The executive director of the Parlor Room Collective and the man who took the reins of the Iron Horse insists that the nonprofit, which oversees the club, is a product of his “being at the right place at the right time.” Throughout our interview, which took place a week before the May 15 reopening, Freeman was stopped by contractors, vendors and eager patrons, all of whom he met with his even-keeled enthusiasm. When I asked if he felt like a celebrity in Northampton, he joked, “Yeah, within a one-mile radius.” And then he said seriously, “The Iron Horse is the celebrity.”

It’s true: The club, which reopened to a standing-room-only audience and has sold out shows through the fall, came to be in February 1979. It started out as a small coffeehouse, and soon became a destination for up-and-coming musicians like Tracy Chapman and Shawn Colvin, and a tiny-staged showcase for accomplished acts like jazz legend Wynton Marsalis. In March 2020, when venues across the nation closed when the pandemic began, the Iron Horse was no exception. But the vibrant club remained shuttered. That’s when Freeman stepped in.

Even if he did step into the shadow of the Iron Horse, Freeman’s role in the story is extraordinary.

While growing up in Connecticut, the burgeoning musician dreamed of one day opening at the club. He isn’t sure exactly how the timeline unfolded, but around the same time that he picked up the guitar in high school – after quitting the piano, the oboe, the drums and the violin – he saw his first show at the Iron Horse, the rock band NRBQ, led by frontman Big Al Anderson. “A lot of musicians saw the Iron Horse as a milestone, especially locally,” he says. As he went on to college at the University of Connecticut, he continued to drive to shows in Northampton. He also joined a men’s acapella group and started played guitar on the girls’ side of his dorm. That’s where he met his wife, Kathleen Page.

“We called it ‘singalong time,’” she remembers. “He played crowd-pleasers, mostly. He used to play the acoustic version of ‘Hey Ya’ and maybe a little Matt Nathanson.”

They both fondly remember his first song, “Zamboni,” which, he says, “was obviously about a Zamboni,” and are able to recall the chorus, which, spoiler alert, is also about a Zamboni. But soon he discovered the UConn Folk Music Society, and met the musicians with whom he would form a folk-rock band, Parsonsfield, destined to headline the fourth show at the Parlor Room in 2013. That night, the band was signed to record label Signature Sounds, and over the next decade, they toured widely and produced 5 albums – that is, until the pandemic hit.

As he and Kathleen moved to Northampton in 2021, he and the band were trying to figure out their next steps. “A few band members had left, and I wasn’t super thrilled with the idea of going back on tour,” he says, “so I started working at the Parlor Room doing their booking. That was kind of a transitional period for music venues, too, because the Parlor Room was closed for over 500 days.” That’s when, as a relative unknown in town, he proposed turning the Parlor Room into the Parlor Room Collective, a nonprofit that strives to “enhance the health and vitality of the community through the power of music.” Soon, he started to wonder about the Iron Horse – what was the deal, and if someone else took it over, would they be competing with the Parlor Room? He decided to make an offer

But first he needed help with a business plan. “I had never done anything like that before, so I was definitely kind of learning as I went, but I got so much help from so many people,” he says. The first stop was Valley Community Development, which helped him establish a plan and line up their first donor. Then the large board started to come together, which included members with experience running a nonprofit. Once the purchase-and-sale agreement was made for the Iron Horse, D.A. Sullivan & Sons donated about $100,000 of general contracting work, while Florence Bank donated about $100,000 as well. In total, Freeman estimates that one thousand people donated to the collective’s capital campaign, which has raised $687,000 to date.

“When we first got here, we were like, where are we going to fit in?” says Kathleen. “We were so happy that we bought the house we did, which is only a mile away from downtown and right on the bike path, because we didn’t know at the time that he would be coming here every day. Now he walks to work with Fergus.” (Fergus, the couple’s Australian Shephard, is so beloved by the community that he is arguably a celebrity himself.)

“I one hundred percent could not have done this on my own, and I was not qualified to do this on my own,” says Freeman. “I have a million more questions than I have answers on any given day, and all this is thanks to an enormous community of people.”