A Freewheelin' Time (10 page)

The Street

Bleecker Street was
the Times Square of Greenwich Village because of all the tourists who gravitated to its numerous clubs and bars, especially on the weekends. The music club the Village Gate was just down the block from the Bitter End, with the Bleecker Street movie theater in between. Walking from one place to another with a detour onto MacDougal Street meant passing all those other clubs and coffeehouses: the Gaslight, the Figaro, Rienzi’s, Fat Black Pussy Cat, Café Wha, and numerous others.

The Gaslight was down a short flight of stairs from street level, in a basement with exposed pipes and a low ceiling. It lacked only the bar flies and the liquor license necessary to accommodate them, but the Kettle of Fish bar was right up the stairs in the same building, so that wasn’t too much of a problem. The Kettle became the “office,” as in, Where is so and so? Upstairs in the office.

Dave, Terri, Bob, and I were at the Kettle often, particularly if Dave and Bob both had a gig at the Gaslight. We would go upstairs between sets or at the end of the night and sit at a table with other performers on their way on or off stage. Inevitably the guys would begin telling bawdy stories, mocking the traditional folk ballads by replacing the plaintive lyrics with the filthy double entendres from old raunchy blues songs (Dave knew every single one ever written, word for word).

At one point Terri leaned over to me and said: I have a good title for a ballad—I had a cunt nine inches long.

I looked at her, wide-eyed: I had never heard the word
cunt
before and could only guess what it meant. But I didn’t want her to know that, so I laughed as she continued the “folk process” with this new ballad. My education expanded in every direction with Terri and Dave.

The Gaslight had a variety of performers taking turns on its tiny stage. Hugh Romney, later known as Wavy Gravy, was a hip philosopher–joker man–performance artist. Taylor Mead read, or more correctly, performed his poetry on a regular basis. He looked like one of the illustrations of a character in the Mother Goose book I had as a kid, a mischievous Jack Spratt with a whiny voice. The musicians were a more eclectic group than the nearly polished or the well-polished folk musicians hired for weeklong gigs at Gerde’s or the Bitter End.

Peter Stampfel was the young Greenwich Village version of Grandpa Jones, the Grand Ole Opry performer with a banjo. I thought Peter was terrific. He played the fiddle, guitar, and banjo, stomping his feet and kicking his skinny legs out while he sang mostly off-key in a strong nasal tenor voice. I don’t know why, but it worked. He could sing anything he wanted, and he did.

When he teamed up with Steve Weber to become the uniquely madcap Holy Modal Rounders, the two of them were a sight to behold. Peter was tall and skinny, but Weber was even taller and skinnier and could carry a tune. They wrote and covered a wide spectrum of songs, music with and without genre. Sui generis. The Rounders started out as a duo but expanded to include various musicians who came and went over time. They played with Sam Shepard and Tuli Kupferberg, who with the poet Ed Sanders were known as the Fugs, also in a class by themselves. It was mutating music–spoken word madness, neither ahead or behind the times. You could call it psycho-delic or psychedelic folk music, depending on your point of view.

As the unofficial gatekeeper of the Gaslight, it was Dave Van Ronk’s job to have the tourists stay in their seats for a few sets on a slow night, or to hustle them in and out quickly in order to take in as much money as possible on weekends. The Bitter End seemed like a legitimate club by comparison. It was on street level, around the corner from the Gaslight, on the more touristy Bleecker Street, and had a bigger stage with a real backstage for the performers to hang out. If there was a pecking order to these up-and-coming folk and stand-up comedy places in the early 1960s, the Bitter End was just below the more established Village Gate, also on Bleecker. The Gate was primarily a jazz club where I first heard the Modern Jazz Quartet, Lionel Hampton, Mose Allison, and the truly unique Nina Simone—but it was dipping its toe into folk music.

The other places where musicians played were basket houses that attracted students and tourists and characters who sat all day and night, next to piles of papers and books, nursing stale cups of coffee. Everyone was prey for an old Village character named Maurice, the newspaper and magazine troubadour. Tall and bone thin, with a long white beard and white hair, he roamed the streets, cafés, and clubs of the Village selling old and new magazines and newspapers. He handed out free copies of a local paper, the
Villager,
for a cup of coffee and then regaled you with tales of the great writers and thinkers who had passed this way or that during his tenure. The only person who could best him on political history was Dave Van Ronk.

You’re full of shit, Maurice, Dave would say to him affectionately but definitively, and that ended any further discussion on the topic.

Maurice, a Village character

Denizens

Charlie Rothschild,
who had a hand in booking the acts at Gerde’s, was levelheaded and friendly, with a wry sense of humor. There is more to life than folk music, he’d say. He seemed to observe the antics and absurdities of the tightly knit, overwrought, often jealous, quasi-incestuous, and hermetic folk community of the Village with a sage detachment. All this gave me the impression that he had a life apart from folk music. He did have a day job—in folk music—working for the manager Albert Grossman. No matter: Charlie was capable of seeing beyond what was in front of him; I figured he had to have other interests.

Charlie started representing the singer Carolyn Hester as early as 1960 and got her signed with Columbia Records. From Waco, Texas, Carolyn possessed a lovely silky and slightly nasal soprano voice that didn’t always get its due on recordings. She was luminous and beautiful on stage and off. I remember being thrilled when someone told me we looked like sisters, and she enjoyed it when people thought she was on the cover of Bob’s
Freewheelin’
album.

Carolyn made songs come to life when she sang them. She could sing any genre of slow song and turn it into a haunting ballad. “Summertime” from George Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess
was an unusual choice for folk venues; but when she sang it you could hear a pin drop.

When I met Carolyn, she was married to Dick Fariña. Though Dick played music, he spoke of himself as a writer. He would read aloud from whatever he was working on—a book, a poem, or an article. He and Bobby got on very well. They would talk and laugh and riff on stuff together. Dick said he was going to write about Bobby. I got you down, man, he’d say. Listen to this.

He read his description, focusing on the way Bob pumped the air with his knees, and Bobby loved it. He loved Dick’s writing: You write like a poet, man, he told him.

J
udy Collins was one of the female singers around the Village in the early years who evolved easily and gracefully from being typecast as a sixties folksinger to becoming a singer of all kinds of songs, including her own, later in her career. Charlie Rothschild began representing her in the late 1960s.

April 30, 1966, was the publication date of Dick Fariña’s book
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
and it was also the night he died. I was in the Limelight bar the next night as the news spread that he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident on the West Coast. I ran into Judy, a close friend of Fariña’s, and she was a wreck. I was without words. It was shattering news.

J
osé Feliciano was about seventeen years old when he showed up at Gerde’s and the other Village clubs and coffeehouses. He was only two years younger than me but I still felt like his big sister; I looked out for him.

José was a vessel filled with music. He was physically compact and strong, with a mellifluous yet powerful voice. He was charming and scrappy and knew where to go and how to get there; being blind didn’t hold him back. I used to help him up and down the steep flight of stairs from Gerde’s basement onto the stage. He’d take my arm and pretend to guide me, so I’d know who was leading whom. Quietly he would ask me why I couldn’t be his girl instead of that guy who talked funny, and then he’d do an imitation of Bob.

With someone I knew who had a car, we took José for a day trip to Coney Island. All the way there and back, in the manner of Bobby McFerrin, José made music with his voice, his feet, and both hands, tapping and slapping on every part of the car within his reach.

J
ack Elliott was the son of Woody and Bob was the son of Jack—that’s what folks said, and in a way it was true. For those who didn’t know Woody Guthrie except from his recordings, his photographs, his books and those written about him, and the many stories people told about him, Jack Elliott was the one who animated those images. His storytelling, his singing style, and the folksiness he projected all came from his time traveling with Guthrie. But Jack never possessed the political fiber that Guthrie had woven into everything he produced. And Woody Guthrie was the real thing. Jack and Bob and whoever else was working on developing themselves in Guthrie’s image had to do just that—develop an image and work it in with who they were, whether they came from Brooklyn, New York, Hibbing, Minnesota, or Anyplace, U.S.A.

Politics was not part of Jack’s persona. He was a low-key, deadpan, very entertaining, funny man—he was wonderful to be around. He did ramble, but it was his way of talking rather than his geographical traveling that gave him the name Ramblin’ Jack. He would start a story and wander all over the plains and tundra before the tale was concluded, or, more accurately, before he let his words trail off into the distance.

Jack was a good-looking man of average height with a warm and pleasant demeanor who smiled most of the time and was wonderfully off the wall. Jack may have been born in Brooklyn as Elliott Adnopoz, yet there was no trace of that in him, except that he knew his way around New York City really well. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was all cowpoke.

He would show up and hang around, then be off again to play a gig somewhere and return a few days or a few years later. When he hit New York City in 1961, rumors of anticipation preceded his arrival. He had been traveling around Europe for several years performing in clubs and on the streets with his buddy Derroll Adams and was finally returning to the States. By age thirty, he’d already recorded a number of record albums that bridged the gap between those of the legendary folk balladeers Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger, and of course Woody Guthrie.

Ramblin’ Jack made music the way he told stories. He was always on stage, or maybe it is better to say he was never
on
stage. He was the same person whether he was on stage or off. Jack had no artifice in his art. That was his artistry: he was completely natural.

Bobby looked up to Jack and they bonded early on when folk music was making itself over, heading into the mainstream. Jack would call Bobby up on stage at Gerde’s, where they would perform together more as a comedy duo than as serious folksingers. They played off each other’s quirkiness. Later Bob went off on his quest and Jack was left unacknowledged in the dust of Bob’s hard and fast drive out of the picture, as were others. There might have been some hurt feelings initially, but no animosity. It all worked itself out eventually, and they remained friends.

B
ruce Langhorne was a student at New York University and commuted to the Village from Harlem. He was an unassuming and charming man with an easy smile. His presence was strongly felt through his exceptional facility as a musician proficient on several instruments. He was Bob’s vision for the Tambourine Man—a song written about a lonely night Bob had spent wandering the streets after the two of us had quarreled.

An unfortunate encounter with an exploding firecracker resulted in the loss of part of two fingers on Bruce’s right hand. We used to kid around that Bruce was the American challenge to Django Reinhardt, the genius Gypsy guitarist whose left hand was badly burned in an accident when he was a child. Bruce was a guitar magician: though he was incredibly versatile, his sound was unmistakably his own. He was a highly sought-after accompanist at recording sessions and gigs for musicians working in any style.

M
y first sight of Odetta performing seared an image in my brain. She is standing in a circle of light with her guitar, and when she begins to sing the power of her voice obliterates everything else. All there is in the world is this one woman’s voice. Behind her, slightly off to the side and also in a circle of light, is her bass player, Bill Lee. Except for his arms and fingers, he hardly appears to be moving. He is a small man and the bass is very big, but you know he rules it. Together they make music of no genre. It is jazz, it is blues, it is folk. Above all, it is dramatic. I was engulfed by Odetta’s voice almost the same way I was when I first heard a John Lee Hooker record.

Many times in the years following I spent time with Odetta and watched her perform, but it was hard to lose my feeling of awe. She was soft-spoken, with a soothing voice that belied the profound power and depth of sound she could produce when she sang.

Bill Lee, the filmmaker Spike Lee’s father, was primarily a jazz musician and he didn’t appear to relate to this folk stuff easily. He was quiet and kept to himself, but Bob went over to talk to him, drawing him out, bringing him into the scene.

Odetta and her music might be unclassifiable, but she ran with the folkies probably because they embraced her musical diversity. The borders surrounding jazz were more defined. You couldn’t sing, “The Water Is Wide,” a traditional folk ballad, in a jazz setting in those years. The folk world included everything that wasn’t easily classifiable. Folk music could be an amalgam of other genres: bluegrass to country to blues to gospel to traditional, and so on. Odetta could sing within and without all those styles, and then some. The folkies loved her.

E
ric Weissberg played the banjo predominantly and Marshall Brickman the guitar. They played together in a bluegrass band and separately with other groups. What I remember most about them, however, is how funny they both were offstage. They could easily have been a comedy act. Marshall Brickman went on to work with Woody Allen and become a writer of Broadway shows. Eric will always be the best five-string banjo picker this side of Earl Scruggs. A fine musician all around, he is best known for the soundtrack of the movie
Deliverance.

Bill Cosby was a stand-up comedian in the early sixties, one of many who performed at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street. Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, and Flip Wilson, and comedians who never made it as far as those guys did, honed their special genius straddling a stool in front of a brick wall at that club, the Gaslight, and the other venues on the street.

Noel Stookey, who became the Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary, incorporated his stand-up routines into his musical sets. He was very funny and was famous for his sound effects, particularly a routine he did about flushing toilets. Woody Allen was incredibly nerdy and almost painful to watch as he clutched into himself, knees facing each other and elbows into his chest, his skinny fingers playing at his mouth as he tried to befriend the microphone. His eyes bugged behind his big eyeglasses as he whined his way through incongruous stories of incompetence and neurosis. The audience related, and loved him.

Bill Cosby was another matter, suave and good-looking and sure of himself. He made his observations about the trials of getting through life ridiculously funny almost because of his poised and self-assured manner. He and Bob bonded in ambition early on, but Cosby wasn’t around long. He was not headed anywhere but up. He was not a downtown bohemian outsider; he was a cool dude making his way fast. One afternoon Bobby and I were lounging at an outdoor café and Cosby came into view driving a red convertible. He waved to us as he headed toward the West Side Highway and beyond to fame and fortune.

A
nother regular at Gerde’s Folk City was the Flower Lady, a middle-aged woman with a stocky build and a heavy walk. She always wore the same clean and neatly pressed shirtwaist dress of no particular color. Her faded yellow hair was in a neat bun at her neck. She carried a big bouquet of red roses and silently went from table to table at the club, offering her flowers for sale. She never spoke and she never changed her blank expression. A few of us speculated that she didn’t speak English. Now and then someone would try to engage her in conversation, but when nothing ever came of it, she was left alone.

“Here comes the Flower Lady” eventually gave way to no comments of any kind when she walked in the door, making her way past the bar to the customers sitting at the tables. One warm evening a few of us were sitting outside on the loading dock around the corner from Gerde’s and we watched a sleek black Cadillac pull up to the curb. The door opened and the Flower Lady climbed out with her bunch of roses. She took no notice of us or of our dumbfounded expressions as she heavy-footed her way into the club to do her night’s work.

T
here were so many talented people who practiced their art form and sharpened their skills during the period of the Greenwich Village renaissance of the sixties. To become a legend or a star wasn’t always the point. Many did what they loved to do and became known for it far and wide, and others did what they loved to do and managed to make a living at it. Still others burned out and lost their way.