The Mayor of MacDougal Street (34 page)

As for what was being written, there was a lot of agitprop stuff, but that was by no means all that people were putting down. Fred Neil was writing personal, subjective stuff from the very beginning, and Bobby picked up on that very early on. In a way, the whole question of who influenced whom is bullshit. Theft is the first law of art, and like any group of intelligent musicians, we all lived with our hands in each other’s pockets. Bobby picked up material from a lot of people, myself included, but we all picked up things from him as well.

In fact, I think I was the first person other than Bobby to record one of his songs. The way that came about was that one night we were hanging around in the Kettle, and by that time Bobby had already acquired quite a reputation as a songwriter, though only among the local crowd. A bunch of us were sitting at a table, and this guy came in and walked up to us, and he looks down at Bob and snarls, “So you’re the hot-shot songwriter, huh? All right . . .” And he reaches into his pocket and slaps a twenty dollar bill on the table, and says, “I’ll bet you can’t write me a song called ‘If I Had to Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You.’” That was an old joke title, one of those things like “When the Bed Breaks Down, I’ll Meet You in the Spring” or “Take Back Your Heart, I Ordered Liver.”

Bobby stared down at that twenty, and at that point in his career it must have looked as big as a window shade. So he looks the guy in the eye, and says, “Oh, yes I can.”

We agreed that the money would be deposited with Babe the bartender and that the guy would come back around the same time the following
night. Sure enough, the next evening the guy comes in again, and Bobby reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheaf of paper, and he has not only written a song to the title, it has six long verses. So what could I do? I had to record it.

I did that song with the Red Onion Jazz Band, and they all thought I was crazy. They would look at the lead sheet and say, “Jesus, that’s a strange chord change there,” and I would say, “I know. Just play it.” And I could not memorize all those lyrics—they were too insane—so I read them off a sheet of paper. If you listen closely to that album, you can probably hear the paper rustling, and I also mess up at one point and start to laugh—I think Bobby was in the studio, making faces at me.

Within a couple of years, Bobby changed the whole direction of the folk movement. The big breakthrough was when he wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” because in that song he fused folk music with modernist poetry. The tune was borrowed from an old English ballad called “Lord Randall,” and it was in the same question-and-response form, but the imagery was right out of the symbolist school. It was not a flawless work—the “clown who cried in the alley” always sounded to me like the verbal equivalent of a painting on velvet—but the overall effect was incredible. I heard him sing that for the first time during one of the hoot nights at the Gaslight, and I could not even talk about it; I just had to leave the club and walk around for a while. It was unlike anything that had come before it, and it was clearly the beginning of a revolution.

Incidentally, Bobby would never admit to having read any poetry. He always pulled his “I’m just a country boy” act, which irritated the hell out of me—and incidentally had a very negative effect on a lot of the people who came after him. They fell for that pose and thought that masterpieces should just drop on their heads out of the sky while they were walking down 4th Street. Of course, Dylan didn’t invent that myth; romantic naturalism had been a strain in poetic circles since at least the eighteenth century, along with a strong element of
nostalgie de la boue
, this fascination with misery and despair. And that skein runs from Robert Burns, through Baudelaire and the Beats, to the singer-songwriter scene: “Oh, I am such a sinner! Oh, I am so depressed!” Snore . . . The parallels between Dylan and people like Rimbaud and Mallarmé were being talked about almost as soon as he started writing, and I don’t know if he was aware of them before that,
but he checked them out pretty early on. Somewhere in my bookcases I probably still have a paperback collection of modern French poetry with Bobby’s underlinings in it. I have never traced any of the underlinings to anything he actually used in a song, but he was reading that stuff very carefully.

When Bobby went in that direction, it opened the floodgates. A lot of other people followed his lead, but he had a jump start, and for a few years he was clearly out in front of the pack. I mean, Paxton was a pretty experienced songwriter by that time, but he deferred to Bobby. Ochs worshipped the ground Bobby walked on—it actually became a sort of fixation, and did him a lot of harm. And that’s not to mention Eric Anderson, David Blue, Patrick Sky . . . The list goes on and on.

I had been writing songs all along, but rarely for public consumption, and I figured out pretty early that I did not want to be in that particular race. Of course, I had always been a cheerful participant in the folk process, and if I felt like a song could do with some chopping and changing, I would rewrite some lines or add a verse or two. I even put together a few blues of my own, but blues is different. Blues is like a kielbasa, those long Polish sausages: you don’t sing a whole blues, you just cut off a section.

Bobby’s example spurred me to broaden my range and increase my output a little, but not by much. First of all, I was in the middle of a songwriting explosion, and there was no shortage of material for me to choose from. There were unknown songwriters like Joni Mitchell out in the hinterlands, and there was a grapevine that reached all around the country, so as far as new songs went, I was surrounded by an
embarrassment de richesse
. Second of all, by the time I started writing I already had a large repertoire of songs that I had chosen very carefully, and very little of my own stuff came up to my standards. Over the years I have written enough songs to fill several albums if I included all my culls, but if I write a song that does not stand up to the rest of my repertoire, I ditch it. As the Bible says, “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” I am absolutely ruthless about this, because I have no incentive to pad my repertoire with second-rate material of my own when I could just as easily add some first-rate material by someone else.

Furthermore, the more self-consciously “artistic” the writing became, the less interest I had in taking part. As someone once said, “When I hear the word ‘art’ I release the safety catch on my Browning.” That whole artistic
mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility. Dylan has a lot to answer for there, because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything—he was Bob Dylan and people would take whatever he wrote on faith. So he could do something like “All Along the Watchtower,” which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can’t go along it.

Of course, that sort of sloppiness did not begin with Dylan. There was already a long tradition of poets writing things that sounded wonderful but made no sense. Poetry is automatically suspect to me, because if you are a good enough poet, you can make bullshit sound so beautiful that people don’t notice that it’s bullshit. I used to hear Dylan Thomas over at the old White Horse Tavern back in the 1950s, and when he had had enough to drink—which was frequently—he would recite his poetry, and my jaw would drop. It was beautiful, gorgeous stuff, and he recited it marvelously. But when I would go back and look at it on the page, a lot of it was bullshit. Not all of it, by any means, but I would challenge anyone to explain what some of those things were about.

I eventually came to the conclusion that you should never say anything in poetry that you would not say in prose. Poetry has the same obligation to make sense as any other statement made by the human mouth. That was something that was driven home to me by reading Ezra Pound, of all people. Pound’s poetic oeuvre includes some of the most piss-poor obscurantism ever to sully a page, but he also wrote
The ABC of Reading
, and that book taught me that poetry is first of all obliged to make sense, because if it doesn’t, no one will read it, and if no one reads it, it might as well not be written. As for songwriting, if something has a pretty enough melody or a strong enough arrangement, people will listen to it even if the lyric makes no sense—but that does not make it a well-written song. When songs get pretentious, overflowery and obscure, the songwriter is proclaiming that he or she is an artist, and the whole concept of “art” as we understand it today is an early-nineteenth-century intellectual construct based on a set of what I consider to be false romantic notions. I think it was a good thing that, back in the Renaissance, people like Michelangelo were treated like interior decorators. A well-written song is a craft item. Take care of the craft, and the art will take care of itself.

All of that being said, Leonard Cohen used to point out that the greatest problem for a writer is that your critical faculties develop faster than your creative faculties, and it is very easy to get so wrapped up in what is wrong with your songs that you quit writing entirely. I developed some very sophisticated theories about what made a good song, and while I think that on the whole they were sound, they also served as cover for an absolutely immutable, self-imposed writer’s block. What got me out of that was spending more time with both Leonard and Joni Mitchell. They had no patience with my excuses and rationalizations. They just said, “That’s nonsense. Any damn fool can write. So write, and stop complaining.”

There was no arguing with that, and though my output was never prolific, over the ensuing years I composed about two dozen songs that I like well enough to consider “keepers.” The first one that I recorded was about MacDougal Street, since I have always believed the old maxim that you have to write about something you know, and God knows I knew that. I had a lot of good times on that street, but by the mid-1960s the hard drug epidemic had hit, and it was getting pretty ugly. The song I wrote about it was called “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again”—a terrible pun that has nothing to do with the lyric—and it was heavily influenced by the work of one of my favorite poets, François Villon. Villon’s approach seemed particularly appropriate because what he did back in fifteenth-century France was very similar to what we were trying to do in the 1960s. His poems were not folksongs in any sense, but he wrote in the vernacular of his place and time. In fact, many of his poems are written in Parisian thieves’ argot, and the slang gets so thick that they are practically unintelligible to modern readers—but even though you cannot understand every word, this gives his work a liveliness that very few writers of that period can match. On MacDougal Street, when we were talking among ourselves, we used a kind of hipstercarny slang that most of the people in our audience would not have understood—which was one of the reasons we did it—and I tried to use this language to capture the feel of what was going down at that point:

 

 

 

 

B
y the mid-1960s the Village scene was going stronger than ever, but something had been lost as well. More and more people were moving away, buying houses in Woodstock or wherever, and there was less feeling of camaraderie.
³³
You could tell where things were headed when Andy Warhol and his “beautiful people” showed up at the Gaslight. That towhead was like a vulture—when he appeared, you knew the fun was over.

All things considered, we hung on longer than we had any right to expect. Once the big money came in, the changes were inevitable. Rents went up, costs went through the ceiling, and how much can you charge for a cup of coffee? It used to be that people would just hop on the subway, go down to the Village, wander into a club and see who was playing, and if they didn’t
like what they heard, they’d walk out and catch somebody else. When the clubs started having to charge admission, you couldn’t do that anymore.

In the meantime, the music itself was changing very rapidly. The folk revival had largely been a reaction to the pop scene of the 1950s, which was so insipid that we were driven to seek out alternatives. It was either that or “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” (Of course, there was also Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but by the late fifties they were out of the picture, replaced by Fabian and
Blue Hawaii
. In any case, to someone weaned on jazz, even the good rock ’n’ roll seemed pretty simplistic, and once the corporate machine took over, we dismissed the whole genre as pinhead music.) In the 1960s we got a new wave of pop, with people like the Beatles doing genuinely interesting and creative work, and that was a very different situation. So basically we had our moment and then the scene moved elsewhere. Some of us made a lot of money, and a lot of us made some money, and a few became stars, and a few got hurt. In retrospect, I think it was a very good, productive period, though not as important as some of the participants would like to believe. I remember one time Phil came back from a recording session, and when I asked him how it had gone, he said, “How did it go? I’ll tell you how it went. We have just changed the entire course of Western music!” And he was serious. That is an extreme example, but it gives an idea of the feeling that was going around.