Table of Contents
Also by Elijah Wald
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Chapter 1 - Prehistory: Youth in the Outer Boroughs
Chapter 2 - Jazz Days
Chapter 3 - Folk Roots and Libertarian Anarchy
Chapter 4 - Washington Square and Beyond
Chapter 5 - The Guild and Caravan
Chapter 6 - Where the Real Money Was
Chapter 7 - Friends and Recordings
Chapter 8 - Lewis and Clark Revisited
Chapter 9 - California
Chapter 10 - The Commons and Gary Davis
Chapter 11 - The Gaslight
Chapter 12 - Changing of the Guard
Chapter 13 - The Blues Revival
Chapter 14 - The New Song Revolution
Chapter 15 - The Waning Days of Babylon
Chapter 16 - Last Call
Afterword
Index
Copyright Page
Also by Elijah Wald
Escaping the Delta:
Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
Narcocorrido:
A Journey into the
Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas
Josh White: Society Blues
For Andrea
Acknowledgments
Dave died before this book could be completed, and it would have been impossible to finish it without all of the people who made their interviews with him available. Whenever possible, I contacted interviewers and got their permission, and I am grateful and pleased that not one of them refused the request. However, I was not able to reach everyone whose interviews I found, and hope that if I have used anyone’s material without permission, they will understand the special circumstances.
In the course of this project the material was worked and reworked so many times that I am not sure what ended up being used, and therefore I give equal thanks to all the people who did interviews that were consulted: Jim Allen, Scott Barretta, Ronald Cohen, Art D’Lugoff, Aiyanna Elliott, Bob Fass, Beth C. Fishkind, Pete Fornatale, Emily Friedman, Cary Ginell, Cynthia Gooding, Mark Greenberg, Stefan Grossman, Bill Hahn, David Hajdu, Mike Joyce, Roy Kasten, Peter Keane, Jeff Kenney, Marty Kohn, Jody Kolodzey, Joe LaMay, Christine Lavin, Doreen Lorenzo and Michael Scully, Kip Lornell, Rod MacDonald, Sonny Ochs, John Platt, Bruce Pollock, Mike Regenstreif, Ralph Rush, Anthony Scaduto, Vin Scelsa, Michael Schumacher, Richard Skelly, Michael Stock, David Walsh, and Robbie Wolliver. (And if I’ve missed anyone, please forgive me . . . ) I also must thank George Auerbach, Suze Rotolo, and David Massengill, who among other things steered me to material I otherwise would have missed.
Both Dave and I conducted some further interviews to fill out missing details. For their time and insight, many thanks to Roy Berkeley, Oscar Brand, Lenni Brenner, Tom Condit, Gina Glaser, Al Graham, Lee Hoffman, Sam Hood, Barry Kornfeld, Tom and Midge Paxton, Aaron Rennert, Irwin Silber, Patrick Sky, Terri Thal, Wavy Gravy, and Izzy Young.
For various and sundry sorts of assistance along the way, thanks first of all to Andrea Vuocolo Van Ronk, without whom none of this would have been possible, and further to Mary Katherine Aldin, John Cohen, Ron Cohen, Charles Freudenthal, Mitch Greenhill, Martin Jukovsky, Don Paulsen, Eve Silber, Happy Traum, Richard Weissman, Stefan Wirz, and undoubtedly a number of other people whose names would be here if I were better organized.
A thousand thanks to Lawrence Block for his introduction. For editorial comments, thanks to Jeff McLaughlin. Thanks to my agent, Richard P. Mc-Donough, for finding this book a home, and to Ben Schafer at Da Capo, who has been itching to be its editor for more years than any of us cares to remember.
Foreword: Back in the Day
Early in August 1956 I boarded a train in Buffalo and got off seven or eight hours later at Grand Central Terminal. I found the clock under which I was supposed to meet Paul Grillo, and remarkably, he was there. I’d recently completed my freshman year at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Paul had been one of my hall advisers. (In this capacity he and his roommate had mentored me and the other fifteen or twenty residents of my freshman dormitory.) Now, during a three-month work period, Paul and I were going to room together, along with a third fellow, Fred Anliot.
Paul had already found a place for us to live, and furnished me with the address—147 West 14th Street. He pointed me toward the subway and sent me on my way. I took the shuttle to Times Square, the IRT to 14th Street. I got a key from the landlady—Mrs. Moderno, if memory serves—and climbed three flights of stairs to a very large room with bright yellow walls.
We lived there for two or three weeks. Then we decided the place was too expensive—it was $24 a week, split three ways—and someone, probably Paul, found us a cheaper place at 108 West 12th Street. The rent there was $12 a week, but that didn’t make it a bargain, and we were just about bright enough to realize we couldn’t live like that. Within two weeks we were out of there and installed in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor at 54 Barrow Street, where the rent was $90 a month. It must be a co-op by now, and it’s probably worth half a million dollars. Back then it was a terrific place to live, and I was there until the end of October, when it was time to go back to school.
So I was in the Village for only three months that year, and that’s awfully difficult to believe. Because I met so many people and did so many things. I was working five days a week from nine to five in the mailroom at Pines Publications, on East 40th Street. I spent nights and weekends hanging out, and where I mostly hung out was MacDougal Street.
That very first night in New York, I had two addresses to check out, and managed to get to both of them. One was a jazz club called Café Bohemia, at 15 Barrow Street, where I nursed a drink at the bar and listened to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. The other was the Caricature, a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street, where a fellow I’d met a year earlier at Camp Lakeland—we were both counselors there that summer—was a regular player in Liz’s nightly bridge game.
I could have met Dave Van Ronk there that first night—at Liz’s, not at the Bohemia—because, as he mentions, it was a regular place of his. But I met him instead at one of the Sunday sessions in Washington Square Park, which is where I quickly learned to spend my Sunday afternoons. The circle was always overflowing with people playing instruments and singing folk songs, and there was something very special about the energy there. This was, you should understand, before the folk music renaissance, and before the curious synthesis of drugs and politics made college kids a breed apart. The great majority of collegians were still gray-flannel members of the Silent Generation, ready to sign on for a corporate job with a good pension plan. Those of us who didn’t fit that mold, those of us who’d always sort of figured there was something wrong with us, sat around the fountain in Washington Square singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and feeling very proud of ourselves for being there.
The only thing wrong with Sunday afternoons was that they ended at six o’clock and some of us figured that there ought to be a way to keep the party going. For a while, 54 Barrow Street was our after-hours. Our apartment—living room, bedroom, kitchen—filled up with people with guitars and banjos and voices, and the party went on for four or five hours. I’m not sure how long we hosted it. We passed 54 Barrow to other Antiochians when we had to go back to Ohio, and they may have kept the party going for a while, but eventually it moved to larger quarters on Spring Street.
By then I was a lifer. I’d visited New York twice with my parents—my father had grown up in Manhattan and the Bronx—and I’d always assumed somehow that I’d wind up living there, but it was during those three months tha
t I became a New Yorker and, more to the point, a Villager. I’ve lived in other places—Wisconsin, Florida—and in other parts of New York City, but Greenwich Village has always drawn me home, and has indeed been my residence for most of the past thirty years. I started out, you’ll recall, on 14th Street a few doors from 7th Avenue. Since then I’ve lived on 12th Street, on Barrow Street, on Bleecker and Greenwich and Jane, on Charles, on Horatio, on West 13th. Now, for about a dozen years, I’ve been on West 12th a few doors from 8th Avenue.
“Why should I go anywhere?” Dave said of the Village. “I’m already here.”
Whenever you got here, it was better ten years earlier.
That’s what people say now, complaining about gentrification. It’s what they said twenty years ago, complaining about tourists. It’s what they said forty years ago, complaining about hippie kids.
I suspect they’ve always said it. I suspect they said it to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Floyd Dell.
It seems to me—because I was around then, because I remember it fondly, because it was gone alas like my youth, too soon—that Greenwich Village was a very special place during my first years in it. And the people who just moved here yesterday will probably think the same themselves, when their youth is as remote and as inaccurately recalled as is mine.
Once, back in the early sixties, I decided to leave New York. I told Dave I was going to return to Buffalo. He was incredulous and asked why, a question I was somehow unable to answer. “Well,” I managed, “that’s my hometown. That’s where I’m from.”
He thought about it, then looked off into the middle distance. “I know a woman,” he said, “who was born in Buchenwald.”
Dave Van Ronk and I became friends during my first three-month stint in New York. The friendship lasted for forty-five years.
I couldn’t begin to guess how many times I heard him sing. I caught him at no end of venues in New York, but I also managed to catch up with him in Los Angeles and Chicago and Albuquerque and New Hope, Pennsylvania, and somewhere in Westchester County. There was never a time when I didn’t want to listen to that voice.
One night he and I and Lee Hoffman sat drinking in her apartment—she was then married to Larry Shaw—and cowrote a batch of songs that wound up in The Bosses’ Songbook. (Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent was the subtitle, and nobody got author credit for any of the songs; a note in the introduction explained that most of the authors were on enough lists already.) Another song of mine, “Georgie and the IRT,” wound up on his second album. Some years later, I provided the liner notes for another album, Songs for Aging Children.
When Dave died, I spent a couple of weeks playing his records. The music lasts. The song’s there, and so’s the singer, present in every note.
What fades, what’s hard to recapture, is the off-stage presence. The nights—and there weren’t enough of them, just handfuls scattered over the years—spent sitting around and talking. Dave was self-taught, and never did a better teacher meet a more receptive pupil; he knew more about more subjects than anyone I’ve ever met.
I wish to God he hadn’t left us so soon. And I wish this wonderful book he’s given us could be a little longer. But then I wished that of every set I ever heard him sing. And Dave had a long-standing policy of never doing more than a single encore. You should always leave them wanting more, he said. And he always did.
I was pleased and honored when Elijah Wald asked me to write an introduction to The Mayor of MacDougal Street. The task has turned out to be far more difficult than I’d expected, and I can’t say I’m happy with the result.
Dave doesn’t really need someone to open for him. I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’ll get off the stage now, knowing at least that I’m leaving you in very good hands.
Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
July 2004
1
Prehistory: Youth in the Outer Boroughs
Back at Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, where I went to school, along with the rack, thumbscrew, and bastinado, they had the curious custom of announcing grades in the final exams and then making everybody hang around for an extra week before turning us loose for summer vacation. Presumably they did this to reinforce our belief in Purgatory.
Needless to say, to a bunch of twelve-year-olds this was all of a piece with the spanking machine rumored to be kept somewhere in the basement. The nuns who taught us probably shared our views in this matter, for it fell to them to keep a facsimile of order among a seething, fidgeting mass of twenty-five or so preadolescents. In retrospect, I almost sympathize with them.
Our seventh-grade teacher, whose name I recall as Sister Attila Marie, tried desperately to keep us amused. Since her usual boffo shtick—twisting a miscreant’s ear until the audience howled with glee—seemed inappropriate to the circumstances, she resorted to subtler forms of torment. She led sing-alongs: as I recall, her big number was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” She read us stories: I’ll never forget her reading of “The Lady or The Tiger”; her voice, in both timbre and accent, bore an uncanny resemblance to that of Jimmy Durante. And once, in a dazzling display of creativity, she hit on a program guaranteed to keep the class stupefied for an entire day: she required each pupil to give a fifteen-minute talk on “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” We had a day to prepare.
Me, I was ready. I had given the matter careful consideration, but to be on the safe side I jotted down a few notes, and I showed up filled with the anticipatory delight of the born ham. Seating myself at my desk, I resigned myself to listening to a sorry series of future postmen, priests, abbesses, lawyers, and nurses squirmingly tout their dismal aspirations.
Fortunately, I hadn’t long to wait. I was the first kid in the second row. When my turn came, I confidently strode to the front of the class: “What I want to be when I grow up,” I began, “is a migratory worker—which isn’t just one thing. I want to travel from town to town doing odd jobs to make enough money to move on . . . ” I was just coming to the part about the boxcars, but I got no further. Sister Attila Marie was charging at me from the back of the room, her face an all-too-familiar beet red. She was screaming, “A bum! You want to be a bum!”
Needless to say, the moratorium on ear twisting was lifted there and then.
I was born in a Swedish hospital in Brooklyn, on June 30, 1936. When I started to swell up to a rather enormous size at an early age, my grandmother used to swear I’d been switched. Whenever I’d trip over something—which was frequently—she’d say, “Oh God, it’s the Swede again.”
My father and mother separated very shortly after I was born. I never met the man, and I have never felt a pang or so much as a twitch of curiosity about him. What you don’t know, you don’t miss. Until I was nine or ten years old, I was sometimes with my mother and sometimes with one or another of a succession of “aunts.” Some were better than others, and one of the better ones was Emma “Mom” Hogan. She had been a rumrunner for Legs Diamond back in Prohibition and had even managed a speakeasy, so naturally I thought she was the greatest thing since canned clams. She loved jazz, and in that house the radio was always playing: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie—I heard them all, sometimes on live broadcasts. Fats Waller had a regular show on Sunday afternoons, of which I was a devoted fan. Boy, I loved that guy! Years later I got to know Herman Autrey, Fats’s trumpet player, and when I told him how much I had loved his playing on that show, he laughed and said, “I don’t know how you ever heard me. They wouldn’t let me face the mike, just stood me in a corner and made me play into the wall.” I remember Eddie Condon, too, and the Chamber Society of Lower Basin Street. The small combos were my favorites, because they sounded like they were having fun.
Around 1945 my mother and I moved to Richmond Hill, in Queens. At first we stayed with my grandparents and my Uncle Bill, but the place was too small for all of us, so my mother took a furnished room a few blocks away. I hated Richmond Hill. There were trees, det
ached houses, backyards—and paralyzing boredom. It was a neighborhood of working stiffs, all trying to be oh, so respectable. Sundays were especially excruciating. Of course everybody had to go to church, and afterward the kids weren’t allowed to change out of their Sunday best. No rough games, because you might tear something or get dirty. Mostly we would stand around on the corner, glaring down at our insistently shiny shoes. Everybody was perfectly miserable, even the grown-ups.
The move had a few compensations, though. My grandfather had been a semiprofessional pianist, playing in Catskill resorts around the turn of the century until my grandmother snagged him and put him to work. He knew all the pop songs of that time: Harry von Tilzer, Harrigan and Hart, Ben Harney, and of course Scott Joplin. “That was music,” he used to say. “This jazz stuff sounds like the tune the old cow died with” or, for variation, “like a nanny-goat pissing in a dishpan.” He was a country boy, and had a delicate way with the language.
I have only vague memories of hearing him play: I recall “The Maple Leaf Rag” and a rip-snorting version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” guaranteed to send any six-year-old into transports of martial ecstasy. Unfortunately, by the time we moved to Richmond Hill, there was no longer a piano in the house; my uncle had chopped it up and thrown it out, saying, “What do we need this for? We’ve got the radio.” He was a thoroughly modern American, with no interest in such archaic devices. He also threw out the autographed copy of Buffalo Bill’s autobiography.1
My grandmother was Brooklyn Irish, and time had stopped for her somewhere around 1910. She was a great storyteller, with an incredible memory for detail, and an indefatigable singer. She never stopped singing except to talk or eat—something was always either coming out or going in. And she didn’t have a great voice, but boy was she loud; she drove the neighbors nuts. Most of her repertoire had been learned from her mother in Ireland, and I picked up all sorts of songs from her: Irish music hall numbers, rebel songs, ballads, minstrel songs, tearjerkers—I can still sing “The Gypsy’s Warning” from beginning to end. I learned versions of Irish tunes with Gaelic choruses, though no one in my family had spoken Gaelic for hundreds of years; to us, they were just a succession of nonsense syllables: “Shonegga hanegga thamegga thu, baleshlecoghelee aushmedatheen.” Many years later, Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church, that went something like:Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay,
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 1