On the face of it, me at the Gate of Horn seemed pretty far-fetched. That was where the big kids played: Josh White, Theo Bikel, Odetta herself. On the other hand, I was a pretty arrogant young dog, so why not? Was I not a vessel of the Great Tradition, a Keeper of the Flame? In any case, I had nothing to lose. I thanked the nice lady profusely and told her I would get a tape to her directly.
With some difficulty, I got a demonstration tape made—tape recorders were expensive, and thus rare in my circle—and a mutual acquaintance volunteered to get it to Odetta before she left for Chicago. I remember thinking the tape was pretty good, and by this time I had convinced myself that within a few short weeks Destiny would summon me to the Windy City and my rightful place as King of the Folkniks. (That word had not yet been coined, but you get the idea.)
My money was still holding out, so I was in no great hurry. The days passed. I was sleeping on couches and floors—no point in getting an apartment, since soon I would be in Chicago surrounded by worshipful acolytes (mostly female) or, barring that, back at sea. Parties almost every night. Songs sung and learned. I worked on my guitar playing. I was drinking a lot. No word from Chicago.
Weeks passed. This was getting downright embarrassing. I had been telling everybody who would listen that Odetta had taken my tape to the Gate of Horn and I would be following it forthwith. I offed the remnants of my half-key of dope to a friend for a hundred bucks, but the end of my money was still visible on the horizon. Chicago remained mute.
Finally, I could stand it no longer. I was almost broke, I was drinking like a fish, and my nerves were stretched like piano wires. This thing had to be settled once and for all. I made up my mind to hitch to Chicago and find out what the hell was going down.
Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and call Grossman? And why hitch-hike? I had enough money left for a bus or even a train. (It would never have occurred to me to fly out there; I had never been on a plane in my life.) As to the first question, this was far too important a matter to be handled over the phone, and in any case my association with the radical left in those McCarthyite days—not to mention the fringes of the underground drug culture—had given me the firm conviction that all telephones were tapped and thus not to be used for anything but casual chitchat. As to the second, hitchhiking was the way we traveled. We had all read Kerouac, after all. Money would be saved for food and drink.
Hitching to Chicago was easy. You just stuck out your thumb near the entrance of the Holland Tunnel, headed west, and switched to public transportation when you got to the Illinois suburbs. The main problem was sleep. It was about 900 miles and took roughly 24 hours, depending on how many rides you needed to get there. There were some rest stops on the recently completed Ohio Turnpike, but if the cops caught you sleeping, they would roust you, and when they found that you had no car, they would run you in. You could get thirty days for vagrancy, so it was a good idea to stay awake.
I girded my loins with a huge meal at the Sagamore Cafeteria and set out with high hopes, my Gibson, a spare shirt and some clean underwear in a shopping bag, and fifty bucks or so in my pocket. For good measure, I brought along a handful of Dexedrine pills to keep the sandman at bay and for the edification of the fine fellows who were going to pick me up. I think they were already illegal then, but I had never heard of anyone being busted for them.
I got lucky with my first lift in New Jersey: a trucker going all the way to Akron. I gave him a couple of Dexies and took a couple myself, just to be sociable, and before I knew it we were pushing that semi 85 miles an hour down the Pennsy Turnpike, babbling at each other like happy lunatics. It was like that all the way, one long ride after another, right to the outskirts of Chi.
I took a bus to the Loop and taxied from there to the near North Side and the Gate of Horn. The whole trip had taken about 22 hours—great time—and I was still wide awake. In fact, I was jazzed out of my skull. It was midafternoon. I was unannounced and unexpected. There was nothing for it but to try the door and, if no one was home, wait until somebody came to open up. The door was open, so I stepped inside.
The room had that seedy, impermanent look that all nightclubs have when the house lights are on. The staff was taking chairs down from the tables and setting up for the night. At the bar, a heavy-set man with graying hair, in a too-tight suit was talking to another guy. The stage was unlit and empty. I figured that tight-suit was in charge, so I walked up to him: “Excuse me, but are you Albert Grossman?”
He wore glasses and had a blank, unblinking gaze. “Yes,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I did a show with Odetta a few weeks ago and she brought you a demo tape of mine. I’m Dave Van Ronk.”
A gray voice, no inflection at all: “I never got a tape of yours from Odetta.”
Suddenly I wasn’t high anymore, just tired. I was on my own in a strange city, and the vibes were spooking me plenty. (To keep the record straight, I later found out that Odetta had never got the tape in the first place. My intermediary had blown it.)
So I told him my sad tale, how I had hitched all the way from New York, blah, blah, blah. He heard me out noncommittally. “Well,” he said, “you’ve come all this way . . . Why not audition right now? There’s the stage.”
This wasn’t going according to my script at all, but maybe I could still pull it out. I got onstage and launched into a set of my biggest flag-wavers: “Tell Old Bill,” “Willie the Weeper,” “Dink’s Song,” and suchlike. I could see Albert plainly—the house lights were still on. His face had the studied impassiveness of a very bad poker player with a very good hand. All around me chairs and tables scraped and thumped, glasses and silverware clinked and rattled, but I forged on. This was D-Day, goddamnit, and I was showing this hypercool Chicago hick how we did it in Washington Square.
I’m afraid that’s just what I did.
When I got off, Albert still had not batted an eyelash. “Do you know who works here?” he asked. “Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me,” he went on, “why should I hire you?”
I could have killed him on the spot, but I contented myself with screaming in his face, “Grossman, you son of a bitch, you’re Crow-Jimming me!”
Back out on the street, where I belonged, I made some quick decisions. I had planned to call some friends on the South Side and hang around Chicago for a few days, but I was so bummed out that all I could think of was getting back on the road and holing up in New York until I could find me another ship—Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego sounded about right. A life on the rolling waves was beginning to look good again.
My first ride going east was with a bunch of young guys who were doing some serious partying. A jug of bourbon was being passed around, and I gratefully took my turn when it got to me. Just what I needed—a few belts of that rotgut and I crashed like the Hindenburg. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake: “Hey, we’re getting off the thruway; you’ll have to get out here.” Groggily, I grabbed my guitar (I had almost given it to a wino back in Chi) and got out of the car somewhere in Indiana.
There I stood, half loaded and half hungover, coming down off speed in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with my thumb stuck out like a gooney bird’s beak. I stuck my other hand in my pocket—it was chilly—and, sure enough, my wallet was gone. It was a perfect moment.
Now this is the hook: it wasn’t the thirty or so bucks—those would have gone anyway in another few days—but my seaman’s papers were in that wallet. The Coast Guard issues those papers and waxes very suspicious when someone reports them missing. It seems they fetch a good price on the black market, and sailors are not always immune to temptation. I would have to testify before some kind of board, and there would have to be an investigation before I could get those papers replaced. It might take six months or a year before I could get a new set and ship out again, or so I had been told when I first got them. Furthermore, with my politics and
all my Commie friends, it had been a small miracle that I was given them at all. Hearings and investigations were simply asking for trouble: the powers that be would probably assume I had handed my papers over to some filthy Red who was on the lam from the forces of freedom and righteousness. A big mess all around. I was on the beach permanently.
So that’s how I became a folksinger. Like most great career choices, it was a decision by default.
5
The Guild and Caravan
For better or worse, I was going to have to make a living in folk music. The problem was, how? Most of the other musicians on the scene had jobs or were students getting money from their parents. I had never had any regular work aside from my stint in the merchant marine, my family had no money, and I hadn’t even finished high school. I had nothing to live on except what I could beg, borrow, steal, or—less frequently—earn as a singer. There were no clubs that would hire me or anyone like me, and no one insane enough to sponsor me for a concert.
For a while, I took to busking, playing for tips in bars. That was something that most of the people I knew refused to get into, but I ran into a guy in Washington Square Park who had a voice that was even louder than mine, a tall black man from Maryland named Andrew. He sounded a lot like Vaughn Monroe, and his specialty was things like “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” He and I would hit the bars up on 8th Avenue in the 40s, and on a good night we might pick up as much as seventy-five or a hundred bucks each, which was incredible for that time. Unfortunately, after a month or two the city started one of its periodic cleanups, and since the bars had no license for live entertainment, the cops started to descend on them. The bartenders would see us coming in, and they would take us aside and say, “If you even take that guitar out of the case, we’re gonna have to throw you out.” We tried to sing in the streets, but that was no better—the cops moved us along immediately. So that was that. Andrew hopped a freight and I never saw him again.
There were, however, some rays of light on the horizon. As I was walking down MacDougal during those first days back from the sea, I noticed a tiny storefront with a new sign saying “Folklore Center.” I thought, “What the hell?” and went right in, and that was when I met Izzy Young, who would be a key figure in the Village scene for the next decade or so. I guess Izzy was in his mid-twenties at that point, and the first thing I remember noticing about him was his ears, which stuck out like mug handles. He had rented this place on the block between Bleecker and 3rd, and it was exactly what the name said: the folklore center. It was a place where you could buy folk music records, books, and accessories. People would leave guitars or banjos to be sold on consignment, and he had strings, picks, capos, odds and ends. But more than anything else, what it almost immediately became was a sort of clubhouse for the folk scene. Izzy was the switchboard: if anything was happening to anyone on the scene, Izzy would find out about it and broadcast it to the world—whether you wanted him to or not. If you came into New York and needed to know how to get in touch with somebody or to leave a message, you would go into the Folklore Center and ask Izzy, and he would probably know all about it, or failing that, he would let you leave a note on his bulletin board. If you had no fixed address, you would have your mail sent care of the Folklore Center. So everybody on the scene was coming by on a regular basis to get mail or check the notes on the bulletin board, and that made it even more of a central meeting place.
There had been places where musicians met before that, like 190 Spring Street, but different crowds went to different places. When Izzy opened that little hole, there was suddenly a place where everyone went, and it became a catalyst for all sorts of things. There were picking sessions, and Izzy even held a few concerts there to help out singers who needed a gig and couldn’t find one elsewhere. I did two or three of those, and a review of one in Caravan says the crowd was so big that “the back room was well-filled with standees who, from there, could only listen”—which, if memory serves, would not have required a very big crowd. I first ran into Moe Asch of Folkways Records at the Center. In fact, by the next year, I was living on MacDougal Street and I must have met hundreds of people there. It became so much like a club that there was a sort of running joke that Izzy never actually sold anything. A few years later, Dylan wrote “Talking Folklore Center Blues,” and the tag line to one of the verses was “You don’t have to buy anything. Do what everybody else does. Walk in, walk around, walk out.”
Izzy was not a musician himself; the closest thing he did to performing was English harness dancing. Every once in a while, he would put on his harness and bells and take off down MacDougal Street. It was a wonderful sight, and he was actually pretty good at it. He was extraordinarily energetic, and constantly organizing—concerts, get-togethers, projects of one sort and another—and he was a real asset not only to the New York scene but to the whole folk music world. By the mid- to late 1960s, there were folklore centers all over America, and every single one was inspired by Izzy Young. At the same time, he was constantly scuffling to make ends meet. I think it was because, although he had incredible enthusiasm and a lot of good ideas, he was too diffuse. He was the kind of person who was great for a one-shot deal but had trouble sustaining anything. So no matter how popular the Center got, it was always in trouble financially. Still, he kept it going for years and even made a living out of it. Not a great living, but those were easier times—otherwise, none of us would have made it through. I knew people who were paying $25 or $30 a month for a two-person apartment. Not a good apartment, but it could be done.
Another ray on the horizon was the beginning of Caravan magazine. In a way, it was not really a magazine—it was a mimeographed fanzine, run off on 8½-by-11-inch paper stapled together at the edges. That was the brainchild of Lee Shaw, formerly and currently Lee Hoffman but then married to Larry Shaw. Lee and Larry had been editing a sci-fi ’zine, and Lee had dedicated a couple of issues to her favorite folksingers. At that point, there was a great deal of overlap between folk fans, the fringe left, and the sci-fi crowd—all three offered new, interesting ways of looking at the world and a chance to mingle with like-minded souls who were equally frustrated with the monochrome oppressiveness of Eisenhower America. Of course, not all of us became fans; Roy Berkeley says that he avoided ever picking up a sci-fi book, because he was sure that he would become so addicted that he would never leave his room. Nevertheless, sci-fi provided us with another kind of common language, and the attraction worked both ways: for a while, Harlan Ellison was one of Caravan’s record reviewers.
The first issue of Caravan appeared in August of 1957 and opened with a diatribe by one “Blind Rafferty” titled, “The Elektra Catalog—A Sarcophagus.” This was an all-out attack on the old-guard folk scene as represented by the label that was home to Bikel, Brand, White, Gooding, and so forth, and it read as follows:Sitting in front of me, I have a copy of an Elektra Records catalog. Somewhere in the background an LP of folksongs by Clarence Cooper—also on Elektra—is warbling innocuously. Since I write better when I’m annoyed, and since both the catalog before me and the ditties in back of me annoy the bejesus out of me, I might as well take this as a starting point for my favorite kind of essay—a diatribe.
A casual thumbing through Elektra’s catalog gives one the impression of wide scope ingeniously combined with selectivity. Obviously the people in charge know their folk music and have worked tirelessly to disseminate this knowledge to the world at large. Certainly there is no lack of variety—Israeli folk songs, Old English and Haitian, Turkish, Spanish, Mexican, Blues, and Mountain Style, and God knows what else. But a good catalog is nothing more than a good catalog, and before we pat its engineers on the heads for a job well done, let’s examine some of the records.
For example, Festival in Haiti (EKL-130). Since I have neither the record nor album notes at hand, I will have to go chiefly by memory, but I have heard and read the contents of same thoroughly.
Jean Léon Destiné, the star performer
on this album has a rather pretty voice, sort of a Harry Belafonte type. Most of the accompaniment is supplied by drums. Like everything else on this record, the drumming is remarkably smooth and proficient, and if we are to believe the jacket notes, this is the REAL AUTHENTIC music of Haiti, in all its primitive vigor. Fortunately, this is not the case and you can settle the matter for yourself with little effort. Listen to some of the records cut on location in Haiti by Harold Courlander, and released on Folkways (P-403, P-407). After fifteen minutes with these field recordings turn again to Destiné. Pretty pallid? Sounds like a chic niteclub act? Exactly. The guts have been deftly extracted and the corpse neatly stuffed, tied with a pink ribbon and placed on exhibit in Elektra’s marvelous museum.
The article continued for a couple more paragraphs, ladling out similar encomiums to the Cooper album and to Josh White, “who should know better.” Then it concluded:As I said before, I have chosen these records as examples. I honestly believe that they represent the overall approach of the record company in question—at least in those areas of folk music that I know well enough to judge. Moreover, I think that this approach is very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of the so-called “Folkmusic Revival” in America.
Even at my angriest, I cannot truthfully say that many of Elektra’s records are actually “bad.” They lack even that much character. The aim of the A and R [Artists and Repertory] men seems to be to avoid frightening or offending anyone. Whether or not this is literally true, I am amazed at Elektra’s ability to turn out one innocuous little album right after another—genteel, sophisticated, and utterly false.
—Blind Rafferty
Rafferty was me. The pseudonym was both a holdover of my occasional writing for radical newsletters—we all assumed colorful noms de guerre to avoid unnecessary hassles from the official snoops—and a sensible precaution for an ambitious young folksinger attacking what was, from our perspective, one of the giants of the industry. At last, the young Turks had a platform from which we could lob fiery invective at the battlements of the folk establishment, and a number of us proceeded to vent several years of pent-up frustration. Looking back, I am amused at the undergraduate snottiness of our prose, but I still agree with many of our basic arguments: we threw some babies out with the bathwater, but bathwater—comfortably warm and bubbly—was exactly what a lot of our targets were purveying.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 8