The Mayor of MacDougal Street (36 page)

For a while there, it seemed quite likely. The people who run the music business are always on the lookout for a trend. When the Beatles came along, there was a momentary panic: “What’s going on? Here we’ve been selling Pat Boone all these years, and all of a sudden this happens! How can we retool the assembly line?” They had scouts combing England from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall for any Englishman with an electric guitar,
and then there was an audible sigh of relief when they managed to manufacture the Monkees: “Whew, we got it licked. Now we can manufacture groups, package them with a good, reliable system of interchangeable parts, market it, and we’re all gonna get rich, baby.” That’s the way their logic works, and when Dylan hit, they all descended on the Village. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, and since Dylan was kind of weird looking and had that scratchy voice, they were open to the idea that there might be other stars out there who did not fit the standard pattern. So for a moment it seemed genuinely possible that just by doing more or less what we were doing already, any one of us might suddenly wind up a millionaire. Naturally, all kinds of people got their heads twisted out of shape and began making desperate grabs for the brass ring, and I was no exception.

I had nothing against rock ’n’ roll—it was a perfectly reasonable extension of some of my favorite music. I had always loved Fats Domino, whom I considered the master of understatement, and Little Richard, who was the master of overstatement. I thought the Beatles were sweet and amusing and had some very interesting ideas, especially when George Martin got involved. And I loved Frank Zappa and the Mothers, who were working for a while at the Garrick on Bleecker while I was playing upstairs at the Café Au Go-Go. Frank was the best amphetamine guitar player I ever heard, and he was also such a marvelous lunatic, one of my favorite people. So I was open to a lot of the new sounds that were coming through, and for a while I actually became kind of fascinated by the possibilities inherent in electronic music—though in the end I came to the conclusion that the most efficient and advanced instruments are still the ancient ones. I enjoyed fooling around with tape loops and weird electronic gizmos the same way I enjoyed fooling around with jugs and kazoos, but neither can keep my interest like a good guitarist or trumpet player.

I resisted the temptation to form a band for several years, because I have always preferred to work as a soloist. I really enjoy going
mano a mano
with my audience, and after doing it for so long, that is the way my mind works. Still, by about 1967 I was beginning to feel like the only kid on the block who didn’t have an Erector Set. Everybody I knew was going electric and getting rich and famous, and they all had thousands of dollars in their pockets and were eating at La Grenouille and smoking Larañagas, and it
was embarrassing. And there were the record execs, with pens in their hands, saying, “Put together a rock band and you too will have Cuban cigars, eat Caspian caviar, and smoke ganja from Afghanistan.” Who was I to shovel shit against the tide of history? I have always believed that nothing is too good for the working class, and here was a chance to put my beliefs into practice. So I called up my old buddy Dave Woods, and we formed the Hudson Dusters.

Dave is one of the finest musicians I have ever known, a versatile jazz and blues guitarist and a deft and cunning arranger. (I have been playing what is essentially his guitar chart for “Come Back Baby” since the late 1950s.) With the Hudson Dusters, our idea was to make a pile of money while exploring some of the untapped musical possibilities inherent in the standard rock band lineup. On the second point, I think we succeeded surprisingly well. Dave is one of the hardest-working men I ever met, and with me cheering him on, we indulged our love of Charles Ives and made a polytonal rock ’n’ roll record. We were doing things like arranging songs simultaneously in two keys, with the chorus in both keys, resolving into key A, then returning to the chorus and this time resolving into key B. In retrospect, I can see why that didn’t sell, but at the time it seemed like a stroke of genius.

The band was excellent, with Dave and me on guitar, Pot (Phil Namanworth) on keyboards, a guy named Rick Henderson on drums, and Ed Gregory, a sometime associate of Jimi Hendrix who is the best goddamn bass player that ever walked the face of the earth. I felt like a kid with a new locomotive and a basement full of track, and that remains one of the few albums of mine that I enjoy listening to. Among other things, I managed to cut a couple of vocals that I am particularly proud of—though that was a matter of luck more than planning: We were recording between tours, so although I had come down with a hideous case of flu, we couldn’t cancel the session. As a result, I went into the studio sick as a dog, and somehow the flu had an effect on my voice that was as if someone had been messing with the octave valve. All of a sudden, I had an entire falsetto register that normally was not there. I started to sing, and I was going up and up and up, and I was still getting the notes, so I thought, “Whoopie!” and cut “Dink’s Song”—technically the best piece of singing I have ever done
on record—and a couple of other numbers. We finished up the session, and when I got into the cab to go home, I had to write out my address, because I could not say a word.

My record label at that point was Verve/Forecast, and for once I had a guy at the company who was really behind me. I also had a song that was an absolute, no-question, sure-fire hit. Joni Mitchell was living in New York by that time, and we were spending quite a lot of time together, and I had concluded that she was the finest songwriter on the set. Both as a person and an artist, she presented the unusual combination of a very determined personality working in tandem with a kind of ethereal quality. Her songs were always carefully crafted, but the artistry was often very subtle. I would have missed some of their finest points if I had not actually read the lyrics, because when you heard her sing them, these marvelous effects would just drift past you, and it was only when you saw them in print that you realized how much work went into them. But there were also songs that were obvious masterpieces from the first time you heard them. One day we were sitting around, and she played me “Both Sides Now,” and I immediately knew I had to record it. Our only disagreement was about the title. It was clear to me that the feeling of the clouds was a sort of motif, running all through the song, and I thought she should call the song “Clouds.” Naturally, she refused; she liked her title, and she stuck to her guns, and I stuck to mine. So when I recorded the song, I called it “Clouds (from Both Sides Now).” The next year, she recorded it with her original title—but she called the album
Clouds.

With a song like that, I knew I simply couldn’t miss. Woodsy and I put together a nice, subtle arrangement (based on a riff we copped from the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday”), and I sang it very plainly, so people could really hear the lyric. My man at Verve smelled a hit, and he got on the phone to all the disc jockeys around the country, prepared a big ad campaign and the whole nine yards. The idea was to break it slowly, one market at a time, get it on the radio and let it build, then jump on the wave as it began to crest. Everything went perfectly for a month or so—it was moving up the charts in Cleveland, in this town, in that town—and then Judy Collins came out with her version and promptly sold eight billion copies, and that was that.

Basically, it was the luck of the draw: I had a high pair, drew three cards, and came up with nothing. It did not help that MGM, which was the parent company of Verve/Forecast, was already well on its way into bankruptcy, though I did not have any idea of that at the time. They were MGM, goddammit—who knew that a year and a half later they would be auctioning off Dorothy’s ruby slippers?

In any case, that was my shot at the rock world, and I found it an uncomfortable match. I remember one gig in particular, an early-morning TV show in Philadelphia called something like
Aqua-rama
. It was one of those teenage dance shows like
American Bandstand
, only their gimmick was that they shot it in an aquarium, with huge tanks of fish all over the place. They did not have the facilities to do live music, so I had to lip-synch, which I had never done before and swore never to do again. I try not to phrase my songs the same way twice, so if I were going to lip-synch properly, I would have to listen to my record over and over and memorize the way I had happened to sing it on that day, and I can imagine nothing more boring. So there I was, moving my mouth out of sync with the music, and all these kids were gyrating around—we didn’t really play dance music, but they were there to boogie and would have danced to an amplified cricket. And as each couple went past the camera, they would flip it the finger. Then we had a bit of banter with the host—I remember saying, “Actually, I only came here to see the piranha, but you’ll do”—and trucked off to the next lousy club date.

Maybe if we had kept plugging away, or if we had had better representation, or this, that, or the other thing, we would eventually have gotten somewhere, but I shortly concluded that it wasn’t worth the effort. For one thing, I was going broke because the clubs weren’t paying any more for the band than they did for me as a single, but the expenses were five times as high. Meanwhile, I was feeling more and more constricted by having to fit myself into an ensemble. I was used to being able to chop and change my sets as I went along, and having to do the same goddamn songs every night was excruciating. So what with one thing and another, the Dusters disbanded and I went back to doing what I did best.

The record companies did not give up on me for another few years. I bounced from Verve to Polydor and from there to Cadet, and they gave me
impressive recording budgets, and we worked out some pretty interesting arrangements, with strings and horns and what all. I enjoyed that, at times, and it gave me a chance to do some material that I would not have otherwise done—everything from Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” to “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack in Kealakakua, Hawaii”—though I also was coaxed into doing some arrangements that even at the time seemed overblown and buried the material. In any case, in another few years the Folk Scare was well and truly over, and the major labels had figured out that I was never going to sell a million records, and they stopped coming around.

That was not a particularly pleasant feeling, and I felt frustrated for a while, but then I adjusted to the situation. In a way I was lucky, because the people who arrived between 1963 and 1968 thought they had found Fat City, and when the money dried up, it was a terrible shock—some of them haven’t adjusted to this day. Since I had gotten into the business before there was any money to speak of, it was relatively easy for me to come to terms with the thought that what goes up must come down. What is more, I have always been something of a doom crier and had been predicting grass growing on MacDougal Street for years, so when the scene shut down, I felt the satisfaction of a Seventh Day Adventist on the day the world really does come to an end. And as a Village resident, I enjoyed being able to walk down the street without having to fight my way through the hordes of tourists.

I had to tour a little more than I liked, but between the concerts and some teaching I was making a reasonable living playing the music I loved, and that was a hell of a lot more than I had expected when I started out in this business, or than my education or my family background would have led anyone to predict. So for the last thirty years I have been fighting a reasonably successful holding action, and as the Irishman who fell off the Empire State Building said as he passed the forty-first floor, “So far, so good.” I am still making my own musical choices, and people have kept coming to the shows and buying the records. There are perhaps two hundred people in the country whose musical opinions I really care about, and most of them like my work, and that was the object of the exercise from the get-go. Being a musician—even a good musician—is not a ticket to
ride. It’s a job, and at times it can be very hard work. But then someone will come up and say, “Hey, Dave, I heard you in 1962 in Samarkand,” and that’s nice. I never made a fortune—as a matter of fact, I have often been deeply in debt—but dammit, this is what I wanted to do, and I have been able to do it for almost fifty years, and I haven’t had to do anything else, and what more can I ask? I wanted to be a musician, and I am a musician, and that’s what it’s all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the tin pan bended, and the story ended.

T
his book was born over the course of many nights, sitting around in Dave’s apartment on Sheridan Square, talking, eating the amazing meals he would spend hours preparing, and listening to his library of recordings. The original plan was for us to work together, with me doing historical research and a good deal of the writing, and Dave providing the flavor and the first-person slant. He did not plan it as an autobiography, and had a long list of people he wanted to interview—he taped conversations with about a dozen of them—with an eye to producing the definitive history of the Greenwich Village folk years.