He remembers when an unknown singer named Bonnie Raitt got up and sang between sets by a Chicago blues band, and he remembers when the Jefferson Airplane showed up one midnight and jammed until almost dawn with Luther Allison.

Shapiro remembers the birthdays, too, more than 300,000 of them now, celebrated in his place. He remembers when Jessica Simpson came in and the high school girls basketball team seated nearby went crazy.

About the only thing Marsh Shapiro doesn't remember after 40 years at the Nitty Gritty -- the official anniversary was Friday -- was when Karl Armstrong and company huddled at a table and talked about what they might blow up to protest the war in Vietnam.

Shapiro didn't know those guys, but various accounts say the Nitty Gritty is where they did their planning, such as it was.

If the Nitty Gritty needed anything further to cement its status as a legendary Madison landmark, Friday's 40th anniversary celebration provided it. Four decades in one location in Downtown Madison is saying something.

At lunch, Marsh served free cake to happy diners at the campus Gritty on North Frances Street, one of whom, by coincidence, was Jared the Subway guy (he had a black bean burger).

Earlier Friday, Shapiro sipped coffee and in between radio interviews on the big anniversary talked about how it all started and how far he and his wife, Susan, have come from the shot-and-a-beer bar called Glen and Ann's Cozy Inn that they bought in 1968.

Marsh himself never really intended to get into the restaurant and bar business. A Madison native and West High grad, Shapiro graduated from UW-Madison after a stint in the Navy and spent most of the 1960s working for WKOW-TV (Ch. 27).

He did sports, news, and then one day in 1964 management called him in and said they needed a kids' show. Did Marsh want to host it?

"No," Shapiro replied.

But they persisted, and Marsh finally agreed. They wanted him to play a character. Roger the Robber was considered and rejected. Finally it was Blake Kellogg, the newsman, who came up with the winner: Marshall the Marshal.

Shapiro put on cowboy garb and the show ran four years. He knew it was a hit when he handcuffed himself on the air and asked the kids to send in keys to help him get loose and hundreds of keys poured into the station.

In 1968, Shapiro, restless, was considering a broadcasting offer in Chicago and also looking at other business opportunities in Madison. He looked at a shoe store. He looked at liquor store. And he looked at Glen and Ann's, a music and drinking bar at the corner of Frances and Johnson streets.

Shapiro bought the bar and reopened it as the Nitty Gritty on Oct. 3, 1968. He kept the live music -- the first band at the Gritty was called The Tayles -- and after a few months spent refurbishing the kitchen, debuted the "Gritty Burger," a third of a pound of ground chuck on a dark-seeded honey-wheat bun, topped with the Gritty's secret sauce. It cost 55 cents.

It costs a bit more now, but the Gritty Burger is still popular and the exact recipe of the sour cream-based sauce is still secret.

The music endured until 1974. There were many highlights, and Marsh isn't the only one who has said that in those years the Nitty Gritty was the Midwest's top blues venue outside Chicago. Performers included B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Allison, whom the Jefferson Airplane showed up to hear after finishing their own gig at the Field House.

Soon the Airplane joined Allison on stage. "Word got around campus so fast they were standing three deep outside the bar just listening," Shapiro recalled.

That was 1970. It was the next year that a Madison kid named Mike Riegel approached Shapiro in the bar and said he wanted to play music. What kind did Marsh think the Gritty audiences might like?

"I sat him down at one of our picnic tables with five or six old 1950s straight rock and roll albums," Shapiro said.

Which is how Dr. Bop and the Headliners were born.

As the '70s progressed and the counter-culture faded, the Nitty Gritty stopped having live music. It coincided with Marsh moving back into TV. He was a sports anchor at Channel 27 from 1975 to 1985 -- one of his most memorable moments was an hour one-on-one interview with Muhammad Ali -- a run that ended with a change of station ownership.

Turning their sights back full time to the Gritty, Marsh and Susan settled on trying to make the Nitty Gritty Madison's official birthday bar.

No one could they have dreamed how well it would work. There's a second Gritty now, in Middleton. The hundreds of thousands of birthday mugs they've given away show up in bars and family rooms around the world. Probably some people have forgotten how they got there. Marsh Shapiro remembers.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.