Of course, all of this was not just happening at Washington Square. There was a constant round of parties, jam sessions, song swapping, and hootenannies. The interest was obsessive, to the point that for a while there, except for my political friends, I did not associate with anyone who was not involved in folk music in one way or another. That kind of passionate attention pays off, in terms of being able to learn songs, play, sing, or whatever one needs to do. I was learning more music, and learning it faster, than I have ever done before or since.
The most regular venue for our get-togethers was a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street called the Caricature. This was not like the later coffeehouses that would emerge on that block, in that it was by no means a performance space. It was a tiny place, with an even tinier back room where we were permitted—permitted, mind you—to pick and sing, as long as we did not disturb the marathon bridge games out front. It was a snug, I suppose you would call it, with just room enough for two tables and some benches. The owner was a woman named Liz, and she had the patience of a saint. She would be out there trying to play bridge, with all of us flailing and wailing in the background, and just once in a while she would come back and say, “We’ve got a very, very difficult rubber going. Could you keep it down a little bit?” She did like the music, though she rarely commented on it, and she was very good to us. If it had not been for her cheeseburgers on the cuff, I probably would have died. She made great cheeseburgers, and the free ones were the biggest and the best. She was altogether a great lady, although she also could be tough when she had to be. She ran me out once or twice, and I remember her running other people out as well.
As best I can recall, the person who brought me down to the Caricature was Roy Berkeley, the Traveling Trotskyist Troubadour. At that time, Roy was hanging out with the Shachtmanites, another fringe-left group, and I was with the anarchists, and the Shachtmanites were among the only people who would talk to us. He was also one of the central figures over at the Caricature, and there were several people who started to hang out there because they were drawn to the Shachtmanites, for whatever reason, and then followed Roy down to the scene. As usual, it was a constantly shifting crew, but some of the regulars in that circle whom I have not mentioned up to now would have been Pete Goldsmith, Paul Schoenwetter, Perry Lederman, Curly Baird, Marty Jukovsky, Dorothy Carter, Bruce Langhorne, and Dave Woods. Dave was a big influence on me, because he was a real musician, a jazz guitarist who had studied with Lennie Tristano and did some country blues picking for his own amusement. He knew theory, knew how all the chords worked and how to build an arrangement, and he was only too happy to show me or anyone else who asked. I latched onto him, and it was like having coffee with Einstein a few times a week.
Quite a few of the regulars did not play but just enjoyed hanging out and listening to the music. There was Roland Dumontet, for example, who was something of a Mack the Knife character—God knows what all he was mixed up in. He was part of the motorcycle crowd, and always got the best-looking women. Women did not say Roland’s name, they swooned it. He was just perfectly creepy, with one drooping eyelid and an air of lurking menace. (Which is as good a moment as any to mention that one of the advantages of both anarchism and folk music was the number of young women who seemed to be attracted to the scene. Some were singers, but a lot just hung out on the fringes, and the anarchists were all deeply committed to the principle of “free love.” The Caricature drew a bunch of girls from Music and Performing Arts High, and there were pregnancy scares at least twice a month—some girl would come rushing in, grab another by the arm and drag her outside for a consultation.)
Weekends were the big party nights, especially since a lot of the musicians were still living over in Queens or Jersey. We would start partying on Friday, and it would all kind of build to Sunday. On Sunday we would crawl out of bed sometime after noon and make our way over to Washington Square. We would play there until five o’clock, when the permit ran out, and then we would grab a bite to eat at Mother Hubbard’s or a place on 8th Avenue that we called “the secret deli” because it had a back room that could not be seen from the front room. Then we would shoulder our guitars again and head over to the American Youth Hostels building on 8th Street, where the old Whitney Museum used to be. Mike Cohen had a job with the AYH, and arranged for them to host a regular hootenanny every Sunday from seven to nine. Mike ran it some of the time, and then Barry Kornfeld took it over. So we would spend a couple of hours there, and then all of us would troop down to 190 Spring Street, in what is now SoHo, where the real party would begin. Roger Abrahams, who would later become a prominent folklorist, had an apartment there, and after a while some other people moved in and it became a sort of rat’s nest of folk singers. (I also remember a Peruvian guy named Inti, who was living there with a pet monkey. God, I hated that monkey.) On Sunday nights we would be distributed through two or three floors. One apartment would be all bluegrassers—the shit-kicker ghetto—and then there would be rooms full of blues singers and ballad people, usually taking turns and trading off with the same guitar. The rooms were small and ill lit, very crowded, and insufferably stuffy, and the music would go on until four or five o’clock in the morning.
Those Spring Street parties led directly to the opening of the first Village folk music venue, and the beginning of my professional career, but before I get to that I must make a brief digression.
Much as I loved playing music, it was not earning me a penny. The jazz gigs had dried up and no one was hiring blues howlers from Brooklyn. At this point I was mostly crashing at what we called the Diogenes Club, named for the place where Mycroft Holmes held court in the Conan Doyle stories. A bunch of us from Richmond Hill had chipped in $5 a month each to rent a loft at 350 Bowery, between 3rd and 4th, so we would have a place to hold parties, bring girls, or to crash if we got stuck in Manhattan. We had all brought our record collections and pooled them into a sort of common library; we had a rule at that time that no one was supposed to buy a record that anyone else had bought, thereby maximizing our group purchasing power. Since this was common space, nobody was supposed to actually live there, but of course a number of us did, particularly me and one of my political buddies, Lenny Glaser. No one cared much, and people like my jazz pals Danny Frueh and Eddie Kaplan were happy that there was somebody around regularly who could keep an eye on their record collections, since after a while, there were a lot of people with keys, and stuff began to get ripped off. So I crashed there, or over at the Libertarian League hall, or with one or another girlfriend.
I was managing to keep body and soul together, but it was pretty lean pickings, and eventually I decided that I needed a real job. Since I was itching to see a little more of the world, my solution was to ship out with the merchant marine. Mitch Mitchell, whom I knew from the Libertarians, was a member of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, and he pulled some strings for me and got me my papers. For a week or two I had to get up at eight-thirty every goddamn morning and go down to the union hall in Brooklyn and throw in my card. Eventually I got a berth on a tanker, and over the next year or so I shipped out twice, once to New Orleans and once to Wilmington, California.
I liked that life a lot, though it had some disadvantages from a musical standpoint. I was a messman, and I had brought a guitar on board, an old Gretsch. One night I was standing my watch, and some big seas came up and I could not get down to my cabin in the fo’c’sle to close the port. When my watch finally ended, I went down and there was my guitar, gently bobbing up and down in several inches of water. I wiped it off as best I could, but as it dried out, the back just peeled up like a window shade. So I had to get another guitar, which I did in New Orleans. I was walking down the street and saw this beautiful Gibson J-45 in the window of a secondhand shop. I had planned to sign off the ship and spend a couple of months there, soaking up what was left of the jazz scene, but I had to have that guitar and it cost $150, which was more than I had saved up. So I got hold of the radio operator and bor
rowed a couple of hundred from him, and then I had to sign back on the ship to pay him back.
That period in the merchant marine was the most regular work I ever did, and also my first chance to do any real traveling. Except for that summer in Shaker Heights and a couple of times when a radical companion and I hitched out to Chicago for one reason or another, I had never been out of the New York area. It was all new to me, and I have believed ever since that the best way to see a town for the first time is to come in on a ship. I will never forget my arrival in San Francisco: we came in through a huge fog bank, and suddenly there was a cutoff, just as if somebody had drawn a line in ink, and the sky was completely clear, and looming up over us was the Golden Gate Bridge. As an introduction to San Francisco, you just cannot beat that.12
We docked across the bay in Richmond, but I had a little time off, so I took my duffel bag and my recently acquired Gibson and got a lift over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Walking up the Embarcadero, I passed a saloon where a traditional jazz band was playing “Ace in the Hole,” a song I had never heard before but that became one of my favorites. I went in and introduced myself to the band. I had just picked up my pay, so I was relatively solvent. Not for long, though. In one wonderful afternoon they introduced me to the mysteries of steam beer and poker dice, and I remember very little else.
That was my second trip, and it kept me out of New York for almost six months. Now, the great advantage of seafaring as a profession is that if you steer clear of the poker tables or if you’re lucky at cards, you accumulate lots of cash. I have always had the card luck of Wild Bill Hickok, so in self-defense I started up a small blackjack game in the crew mess room—the point being that if you play by Las Vegas rules and have enough capital to ride out the occasional bad night, the dealer simply cannot lose. On the home journey, I made out like a bandit, and I paid off the S.S. Texan with $1,500 and a six-ounce jar of Dexedrine pills provided in lieu of a gambling debt, not to mention a half kilo of reefer scored off a Panamanian donkey-man for $20 while trundling through the Canal. In short, I was loaded for bear.
Coming back from a long stint at sea is a kind of Rip Van Winkle experience. Old friends have left town, old girlfriends have new boyfriends—it is all familiar places and strange faces. Most seamen deal with this situation by taking another ship, which only makes the problem worse the next time they come home. Before you know it, shipmates are calling you “lasttripper” or “chicken farmer”—as in “Boys, this is my last trip; this time I’m gonna save my money and buy me a nice little chicken farm in Georgia.” It’s a trap.
After a few days of aimlessly banging about the Village, spending money like a drunken sailor (apt metaphor, that), I decided that I had no place here anymore, that there was a big world waiting for me, and that as soon as my money ran low, I would ship out again. After all, what kind of future could I expect from music? I had been hacking away at it for three years, and all I had to show for my trouble was a taste for Irish whiskey and a borderline case of malnutrition. What’s more, I really liked the sea. The work was hard, but I got a kind of masochistic satisfaction from being able to cut it—besides which, it was actually a healthy way of making a living, something I had never dreamed existed. Obviously, I did not want to spend my life working in the mess, chipping rust, and painting on layers of red lead, but I was sure that I could move up pretty quickly and was already dreaming of becoming first mate. The money was good, and I liked the men I worked with and the sleazy gin mills in the sleazy refinery ports where we blew our paychecks. In short, I was hooked.
Even if I had still been intent on a musical career, it was obvious at that point that folk music was not a serious option. I was not about to jettison all my hard-earned prejudices, and in any case I could never have made it as a slick cabaret artist à la Josh White or Theo Bikel. And for us neo-ethnics, there simply was no place that wanted us onstage. Not a single venue in all the greater New York area.
Nonetheless, when Sunday afternoon rolled around, force of habit took me to Washington Square. Force of habit, hell—I couldn’t wait to get there, in my bell-bottom dungarees and Lundeberg Stetson from the ship’s slop chest, brown as a nut and hard as a nail. I was looking forward to pulling rank on my middle-class folkie friends.
My reception was the very model of Village cool: “Oh, hi. You’ve been away?” There was a lot of excitement in our small circle of balladeers manqué, but it had nothing to do with the return of Ishmael from the seven seas. Rick Allmen, who was the landlord at 190 Spring Street, had taken note of all the folksingers hanging out there—probably while desperately trying to collect his rent—and he was opening a coffeehouse in a big old garage on 3rd Street that supposedly had once been Aaron Burr’s stable. As the troops explained: “We’re sort of helping him fix it up, laying down a cement floor and painting and like that. He’s going to feature folk music, and we’ll have a place to play.”
“Wrong,” I said. “Fattening frogs for snakes,” I said. “The only time you’ll get on that stage is when you build it,” I said. But for once my knee-jerk skepticism failed me. From time to time I would drop by the site and there they would be, troweling, whitewashing, hammering, and sawing. I had to admit that it was starting to look pretty good, but I still didn’t believe there would ever be a payoff. Then the job was done, and good as his word, Rick offered a spot in the opening night’s show to any of the crew who was interested. He even extended the offer to me. Of course, payment was another matter. If the club took off, there would be plenty of money for everybody, but in the meantime it would have to be on spec. “It’s a con,” I said. “Not one of us will ever see a nickel out of this . . .” and I immediately accepted. What the hell—it took a long time to spend fifteen hundred bucks in those days.
The Café Bizarre, which was what Allmen called his room, was the first Village coffeehouse to feature folk music—or any formal entertainment at all for that matter—and it became a howling success that shortly begat clones all over the country. In concept and design, it was a tourist trap, selling the clydes (customers) a Greenwich Village that had never existed except in the film Bell, Book and Candle. The ambiance was cut-rate Charles Addams haunted house: dark and candlelit, with fake cobwebs hanging all over everything. The waitresses were got up to look like Morticia, with fishnet stockings, long straight hair, and so much mascara that they looked like raccoons. I swear I even saw some poor clown in a Frankenstein outfit wandering around the set.13
The Bizarre opened to the public on August 18, 1957, and the entertainment was no slapdash affair. There was a real stage, a sound system, a light script, a suitably spooky MC, and we even had a director: Logan English. Poor Logie had recently graduated from the University of Kentucky as a drama major and was a fine, if somewhat mellifluous, folk singer. His problem was that he took his job seriously. More to the point, his problem was us. We thought all of his elaborate stagecraft was a crock of shit, and took sadistic delight in deliberately missing our cues, tripping over the furniture, and provoking him into screaming fits of rage. We couldn’t help ourselves; he was so funny when he blew up.
In fact, the Café Bizarre and the rigid formalism of the show were such flatulent frauds that we might have walked out in a body had it not been for the fact that the opening night headliner was to be Odetta. We had heard the Odetta and Larry at the Tin Angel album, and by then I think I had her first solo album as well, and she had made an incredible impression on us. Her presence lent the program an artistic legitimacy that—at least to our way of thinking—no other performer could have done, except perhaps Pete Seeger.
I am not certain who all was on that bill. The one review I can find mentions me, Logan, Bob Brill, Luke Faust, and Ellen Adler, as well as an unnamed “skiffle” group, but there were certainly other people involved, including Roger Abrahams, Roy Berkeley, and Judy Isquith. We each took a turn, doing four or five songs apiece, with a full set by Odetta to close the show.
My set opened the second ha
lf, and I was scared out of my bird from the minute the house lights went down. This was my first experience with the real thing. Damn, it was exciting! I snuck out to stage center in the dark and was “discovered” by a single spotlight a few seconds after I had started my first song. The effect was stunning—at least it stunned the bejesus out of me. I was so dazed and scared and exhilarated that when I came off the stage, I had no recollection of what I had done while I was up there.
I still do not know what I sang or said, but I remember very well what happened immediately afterward. I was shaking like someone who has narrowly missed a fatal car crash, and just as happy, when up came Odetta herself with a great big smile on her face—and she has a smile that could melt diamonds. “That was wonderful,” she said. “Do you do this for a living?” I told her, no, I was a merchant seaman on the beach and I meant to ship out again as soon as my money ran low. Well, she said, if I was interested, she could take a tape of mine out to Chicago to Albert Grossman, the owner of the Gate of Horn. Of course, she could not make any promises, but there might be a gig in it for me.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 7