The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  At some point, Al received a notice that his phone was being shut off—for nonpayment, what else?—and he noticed that the disconnect date was the day before, and reasoned that since his service had officially been terminated, Ma Bell could not legally charge for any calls we made on it, despite the fact that it was still working. He promptly invited us to call anybody we wanted for free. I called Terri in New York, Tom spoke to someone in Northern Ireland, and as a collective enterprise, we decided to call the Dalai Lama in Tibet. (If this sounds like the sort of thing only a bunch of zonked-out kids would do, you’re right on the money.) We actually got through to Katmandu, where an operator informed us that the phone in Lhasa was at the Summer Palace, and His Holiness was at the Winter Palace (or vice versa), but they would be happy to send a runner out with a telephone and a line and call us back tomorrow. “Nah, it wasn’t important. We just wanted to chat.” (Incidentally, the phone company did not appreciate Al’s logic, and hounded him mercilessly until, a year or so later, we all sent him a bunch of money to cover our share of the day’s entertainment.)

  I was persisting in my quest for gainful employment, but was turned down at the Hungry i, which was the main folk room in SF. I was too scruffy and did not even get as far as an audition. The only gig I managed to scare up, aside from the Bread and Wine Mission concerts, was at a “poetry and jazz” evening in some dump on Grant Avenue. I sat onstage and tinkled “Freight Train,” while some turkey explained to us all, at 120 decibels, the reasons for his alienation. I assume I was supposed to be the “jazz.” Another ten bucks.

  All in all, as far as venues for my sort of music went, it was not really all that different from New York. The Kingston Trio had first hit it big in Frisco, at a joint called the Purple Onion, but their version of the folk crowd consisted of boys in neat little three-button suits with narrow little lapels and skinny little ties, and girls in evening gowns. Crew-cuts! Crew-cuts up the wazoo. And most of the music was so precious, and so corny, you could lose your lunch. My big problem, as I was informed by several club managers, was that I didn’t look like a folksinger. That was phase one of the great folk revival. As for phase two, I had no way of knowing this was only phase one. Who knew? Next year they might try stuffing everybody into silken doublets and hose. Then they’d really look like folksingers. (That ain’t no joke. Twenty years later a friend of mine was picking up extra money at one of those hilariously awful “Renaissance Fairs,” dressed exactly so, playing “Hell Hound on My Trail” on a lute.)

  There was an obvious subtext to what these Babbitt balladeers were doing, and it was: “Of course, we’re really superior to all this hayseed crap—but isn’t it cute?” This attitude threw me into an absolute ecstasy of rage. These were no true disciples or even honest money changers—they were a bunch of slick hustlers selling Mickey Mouse dolls in the temple. Join their ranks? I would sooner have been boiled in skunk piss.

  To put it somewhat less hysterically, the folk music revival that was going on west of the Hudson was pitched toward college students with pocket money from their folks, and young urban professionals just hip enough to gasp delightedly when Lenny Bruce said “shit” on stage. The popular headliners were the sort of clean-cut college types with which such an audience could identify, all singing exactly the same songs in exactly the same way. This movement was phenomenally popular and made some big record company honchos oodles of money. It had its own dress code and musical standards (basically, a diluted rehash of the old Weavers), its own circuit of clubs, and it sure as hell wasn’t about to revive me.

  The local folk establishment and I were thus locked in a circle of mutual distaste, which left me with three options: I could slink back to New York, as after the Gate of Horn fiasco; head south to Hermosa Beach, where a gig was still waiting for me; or set up shop in Frisco and try to carve out a viable niche as the vanguard of the second wave of folk revivaldom.

  Going back to New York under these circumstances was out of the question. Staying in San Francisco was much more tempting, despite the fact that my only potential constituency was a bunch of penniless bums like myself—but the temptation was part of the problem. There was a “Lotus Land” quality about the place, and I had a sense that if I stuck around much longer, I would keep amiably drifting from scene to scene and lose my edge. Furthermore, how the hell would I ever convince Terri, who was as much a hard-shell New York chauvinist as I had ever been, to pick up stakes and remove herself three thousand miles from civilization? Then came a phone call from Terri. Knowing about the free spaghetti dinners at the Bread and Wine Mission, she caught me there one Friday evening and read me the riot act: No, she wouldn’t move to goddamn San Francisco, and what the hell was I doing goofing off around the Bay Area when there was a stage being held for me, lo this past month, down south?

  “Get your ass in gear,” she told me, and her tone brooked no argument.

  Besides, she had a point. I got my ass in gear.

  After my Bay Area experience, LA was like going from zero to sixty in 0.1 seconds. Phil’s advance report had not been an exaggeration, and within a week of arriving I had more work than I could handle. Weekdays I was playing at the Insomniac on Hermosa Beach, and on the weekends I was at the Unicorn, Herbie Cohn’s place on Sunset Strip. The Unicorn had a garden around the back, and I used to have to stand out there under some kind of fucking tree, which I hated, but the bread was good. As for the Insomniac, it was right across the street from Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse, so as a side benefit I had the opportunity to catch some great jazz between sets.

  To be working seven nights a week was incredible to me. In a sense it was the first real test of my career plans, of whether I truly wanted to be a professional, full-time musician. And the answer was yes, without question or reservation. It also provided a lot of incentive to develop my music, build up my repertoire, all that kind of thing. It was an absolutely essential education, because you can practice playing guitar in your living room, and you can practice singing in your living room, but the only place you can practice performing is in front of an audience. Those old coffeehouses did not have to shut down early like the bars did, so they would stay open as long as there were paying customers, and you would wind up working four or five sets a night. I think that is one of the things that set the folksingers of my generation apart from the performers coming up today. There are some very good young musicians on the folk scene, but they will get to be fifty years old without having as much stage experience as I had by the time I was twenty-five. As a result, they will naturally mature much more slowly than the Dylans and Joni Mitchells and I did. We had so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong, and go back and try it again. It was brutally hard work, but that was how I learned my trade: by working in front of an audience hour after hour, night after night. You can hear the difference immediately if you listen to my two Folkways albums.

  The only drawback, from my point of view, was the fear that people back in New York might hear that I was playing in coffeehouses. My compatriots and I had always believed that there was no life form more protozoan than a coffeehouse folksinger. Coffeehouse folksingers were squeaky-clean optimists who brushed their teeth eighty-seven times a day, wore drip-dry seersucker suits, and sang “La Bamba.” So back home, if you got known as a coffeehouse folksinger, you lost many, many points. It was an embarrassment, but I tried to shrug it off: I was singing in a coffeehouse (or two), but that didn’t necessarily make me a coffeehouse folksinger, did it? Besides, I took consolation in the knowledge that New York was three thousand miles away.

  Then the great day arrived when I received a record-album-shaped package with the return address marked as Folkways Records. My hours in Kenny Goldstein’s basement had finally born fruit, and I ecstatically tore open the wrapping, ready to gaze for the first time on an LP of my very own. The cover puzzled me for a moment: it was one of those great old Folkways covers, a two-tone print full of tubes and vesse
ls resembling the boiler room of the Robert E. Lee. It took a few seconds for the image to sort itself out, but then there was no mistaking it for anything but what it was: an espresso machine.

  I went nuts, and if I had had the money to get back to New York right at that moment, I would have dropped everything and made the trip just to break a couple of copies of that record over Moe Asch’s head. I was so enraged that it took several days before I calmed down sufficiently to notice that my name on the label was spelled V-O-N Ronk. By that time I had become philosophical about the whole business, as I have remained ever since.

  As in San Francisco, I spent most of my free time in LA hanging out with New York expats. Along with Phil, there was Jimmy Gavin, whom I knew from Washington Square. He had come out a while earlier and was working at a club on the strip called the Renaissance. I went in there one night because I had heard that Jack Elliott was going to be playing, and ran into Jimmy, which was always a pleasure. Even more than the music, though, I remember being struck by the Renaissance itself. It was a real nightclub featuring folk music, and I had never seen anything like that; I had been to the Gate of Horn in Chicago, but only in the afternoon and I had never seen it function. The Renaissance made an incredible impression on me, because there was nothing comparable in New York at that point.

  I should mention in this context that it has always amazed me how New York and Greenwich Village hog the credit (such as it is) for the folk music revival. In the 1950s, as far as public performance spaces were concerned, New York might as well have been Tegucigalpa. Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago were all years ahead of us, each having at least one folk club up and running by 1957 or so. In New York, there was no room dedicated to anything resembling folk music, and no possibility that anyone like me could have any hopes of working more than a few nights a month. It is true that we had some good musicians, but in terms of performance spaces we really got a slow start.

  As a result, there was very little reason why a folk performer would have chosen to spend time in New York at that point, which may have been why I had never met Ramblin’ Jack. Of course I knew who he was; he was already a legend to us because we had heard the stories about him going out west and becoming a cowboy, then hoboing around the country with Woody Guthrie. A lot of people idolized him, some of them with what I can only describe as a sort of wistful envy, because they were into the music and the mystique but didn’t have whatever it took to pick up stakes and do that. By the time I came on the scene, though, he was long gone from the Village. For most of the 1950s he was either on the West Coast or wandering around Europe with a banjo player named Derroll Adams, and all we heard of him was some recordings for the Topic label in England. He did occasionally pass through New York—sightings were reported from time to time—but for most of us he was more a myth than a person. So meeting him was another pleasure of that LA period.

  On the whole, though, I did not like Los Angeles. It was nice to be working regularly and to find some people who were interested in what I did, but there were a lot fewer weirdos than in New York or San Francisco, and I always preferred the weirdos. The kind of people who came out to the folk clubs in LA were more like regular Americans. I could go on about this, but basically the difference between New York and LA is that they are on different planets and are quite happy to be on different planets. So I hated it, mostly because I knew that I was supposed to hate it—when I went back a few years later, I got to like the place very much. Back in 1959, though, I had a chip on my shoulder like a redwood, I was an incredible intellectual snob, and I very rapidly reached the point that I could not wait to get back to New York. Terri was graduating from college in June, and I had promised to be there for that, so after a couple of months I gathered my meager savings and headed back east.

  10

  The Commons and Gary Davis

  When I got back to New York in the summer of 1958, the work situation was about the same, but a lot else had changed. Lee Shaw had passed Caravan over to Billy Faier, who had turned it into a serious, scholarly periodical, and she had started Gardyloo. (The July issue’s “Anti-Social Notes from All Over” reported that I had shaved off my beard and was “once again a bare-faced boy.”) Meanwhile, the Folksingers Guild was on its last legs. It was still producing occasional concerts for a small pool of Washington Square devotees, but no great revival had yet happened, and the performers were beginning to feel as if all we were doing was taking in each other’s washing. Then our newly appointed treasurer absconded with our small treasury, nobody had the heart to start again from scratch, and the outfit folded with hardly a whimper.

  At the same time, it was clear that interest in folk music was spreading beyond our esoteric coterie, and not just into the crew-cut hinterlands of the Kingston Trio. About a month after I got back, we all trooped down to Newport to attend the first annual folk festival. None of the Village crowd had been invited to play, except for the New Lost City Ramblers, but nothing would have kept us away. The lineup included all the warhorses of the professional folk world, but also Memphis Slim, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Earl Scruggs. Altogether, it was an absolutely magical event, and oddly enough, what I especially remember was Cynthia Gooding’s performance the first evening. Cynthia was six feet tall, with flaming red hair, and she was wearing a diaphanous green gown. As she was singing, a fog came in off the water, and the wind was blowing, and the way the lights were set up, Cynthia and her gown were reflected on the clouds. It was the most ethereal visual I have ever seen in my life. The whole weekend was like that. The next evening Bob Gibson, who was riding very high in those days, gave half of his stage time to an unknown young singer named Joan Baez. That was Joanie’s big break, and anyone who was there could tell that it was the beginning of something big for all of us.

  Meanwhile, Terri’s graduation went off as planned, and within a couple of weeks we had settled into a fifth-floor walk-up on 15th Street.18 I did not like that much—as Max Bodenheim used to say, I get nosebleeds when I get above 14th Street—but at least it was big enough for two people. Terri had a job as a substitute teacher, and I hung out my shingle as a guitar instructor, attracting maybe ten students a week, and gave occasional concerts. By and large, though, I was still out on the street in search of work. A couple of new coffeehouses had opened while I was out of town, but they were of little interest to me. This was the heyday of the beatnik craze, and what folk music was played in those places was at best a minor adjunct to the poetry. I also had a personal grudge against the main room, the Gaslight Café, because of the hassle it had made for Liz at the Caricature. It was in the basement of the same building, which had been the coal cellar, and the owner, a guy named John Mitchell, fixed it up himself. Mitchell was an incredibly abrasive man, and his construction work—converting the room from a coal bin into an armpit—played hob with Liz’s plumbing and wiring, and he was not gracious about it. Liz was very upset, and she had been our patroness, so I was firmly in her camp. Plus, the place irritated me. It had started hosting poetry readings just after I left for California, with people like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, but by the time I got back, there was no one of that stature around. I checked it out because Roy Berkeley had a regular gig there, but after hearing these poets bawling and howling, I quickly concluded that it was sheer bullshit.

  Early Days in Queens:

  My mother and me, the Harmonotes’ business card, and portrait of an incipient juvenile delinquent with guitar. (All photos not otherwise credited are from the collection of Andrea Vuocolo Van Ronk.)

  The 1950s: (Clockwise from bottom left) Jamming with Bob Yellin and Roy Berkeley in the Folklore Center; with Lee Hoffman in Washington Square (note the banjo); a Folksingers’ Guild ad; and the Bosses Songbook; Paul Clayton in his pith helmet; my card; warring personae: the hipster bluesman and the academic folksinger. (All photos: Photosound Associates: J. Katz, A. Rennert, and R. Sullivan.)

  The Folk Scare Begins: (Clockwise from bottom left) Th
e Reverend Gary Davis, with fans including Happy and Jane Traum (behind unknown bass), Dick Weissman, unknown, and John Gibbon with guitar (photo: Photosound Associates); me and Tom Paxton onstage at the Commons; a typical college concert poster; the blues workshop at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, with John Hammond Jr., Mississippi John Hurt, Clarence Cooper, me, Sonny Terry, and John Lee Hooker (photo: Dustin S. Pease); the cover of the Folksinger album, in front of the Folklore Center on MacDougal Street.

  Glory Days: (From lower left) The Gaslight Café (photo: Don Paulsen); John Hurt and Patrick Sky in the Kettle of Fish (photo: Bob Campbell, courtesy of Patrick Sky); a Gaslight ad and the program for a Civil Rights concert; The Ragtime Jug Stompers at Newport, with Bob Brill, Barry Kornfeld, me, Artie Rose, and Sam Charters (photo: Ann Charters); a classic example of sixties psychedelia; with Joni Mitchell.

  Times A-Changing: On the street with Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal/Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan (photo: Jim Marshall); going electric with The Hudson Dusters: Phil Namanworth, Dave Woods, Rick Henderson, and Ed Gregory.

  I have already mentioned the degree to which we wanted to distance ourselves from the whole beatnik craze, but people who were not around at that time may have a hard time understanding what it was like. There were some smart, talented people who are, in retrospect, considered “beats,” and they shared a lot of the same tastes as my friends and I: they were well-read, knew a lot about jazz, and some of them were pretty deeply into politics, at least on the arguing level. On the other hand, there were the beatniks, who were much the same sort of self-conscious young bores who twenty years later were dying their hair green and putting safety pins in their cheeks. We despised them, and even more than that we despised all the tourists who were coming down to the Village because they had heard about them. The whole beatnik thing had become a mass-media preoccupation: there were articles like “Life Goes to a Pot Party” and even a “Rent-a-Beatnik” service that advertised in the Village Voice for years. For a nominal fee, you could hire some clown to come to one of your parties in East Hampton or where have you, and this citizen would show up complete with beard, bongos, and beret—the three Bs—for the low, low price of twenty-five bucks for the evening, and wander around the party saying “Wow” and “Far out” and occasionally taking a feckless thwack at his bongo. It was a thriving little cottage industry, and a huge proportion of the audience in those coffeehouses was suburban tourists checking out the freaks.