The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  In the end, I was in and out of there pretty regularly for about four years, and it served as my office and my second home. There were a bunch of us who tended to show up there at some point in the course of an evening, whether we were working or not, and that was where I met a lot of the people who became my closest friends and musical associates. I eventually summed up my feelings in a song I titled the “Gaslight Rag”:Another damn day, aw, take it away,

  I gotta make my gig on time.

  Flailing guitar, being a star,

  Scuffling for nickels and dimes.

  Silly damn grind, out of my mind,

  I’m crazy if I stay.

  Leave your wife and bring your knife

  If you’re working at Mitchell’s Café.

  I had a dream that the Gaslight was clean

  And the rats were all scrubbed down.

  The coffee was great and the waitresses straight,

  And Patrick Sky left town.

  No one was swocked and Dylan played Bach,

  And Ochs’s songs all scanned.

  I got out of bed and I straightened my head,

  And started a rock ’n’ roll band.

  Honey babe, honey babe, let me carry you down.

  Pimps and whores and grunge on the floors,

  And the finest show in town.

  Hot dog stands and skiffle bands,

  And Pogo’s buying this round.21

  There’s not much light, but there’s plenty of fights

  When you’re singing in a hole in the ground.

  There are some anachronisms in that lyric, because by the time Ochs and Sky showed up, Mitchell had jumped ship. That was in the spring of 1961, shortly after the famed “Beatnik Riot” in Washington Square Park.22 He was sick of all the fights with the cops and the Fire Department, so as I understood it, he sold the place to Bob Milos, who had been working there, and went back across the street to the Commons, which he remodeled and named the Fat Black Pussycat—for the time being without any entertainment, folk or otherwise.

  During Milos’s tenure I started running the Tuesday night hootenannies (what would now be called “open mikes”), which I continued through the early 1960s. I got into that because Milos was all at sixes and sevens and somebody had to run the fucking entertainment, so for a brief period I was actually booking the club. That didn’t last long, but I hung onto the Tuesday night thing, figuring that an extra hundred a week never hurt anybody. It was an open stage with no auditions—there was no way I was going to come in at four o’clock in the afternoon and listen to all those bums—so anybody who wanted could get up onstage, and if they weren’t good enough, they found that out pretty fast.

  Once I had the hootenannies running relatively smoothly, I spent much of those nights next door at the Kettle of Fish. The atmosphere was a good deal more convivial there, so I would hang out with my buddies and just stagger downstairs every now and again and stick my head in the Gaslight to make sure that nobody needed to be thrown out. If everything was going OK, I would do a couple of tunes, then head back to the Kettle and have another drink. It was during this period that Babe, the bartender, dubbed me “the Mayor of MacDougal Street.”

  That bar was our regular meeting place, and it was a nice place to hang out on weeknights. Weekends could get a little rough. They had a bouncer named Ski, who was possibly the meanest man in Manhattan, and they needed him. I remember walking in there one Sunday afternoon, and Babe was behind the bar, and I said, “Jeez, Babe, you finally got some fresh sawdust on the floor!”

  He said, “Nah, that’s last night’s furniture.”

  As for Bob Milos, I never figured out his exact relationship to the Gaslight. He was in and out for years, and it was often unclear in what capacity, but his tenure was certainly amusing. He was making most of his money by dealing, so he always had bales of incredibly powerful marijuana, and not only was he completely boxed all the time, but he wasn’t happy unless all the people around him were completely boxed. There were two or three years in there when everybody around the place was so stoned from the time we got up in the morning till the time we crashed at night that between that and the drinking, it is a miracle that any of us can even manage a rough chronology of the period.

  Even had we been fully compos mentis, it would have been pretty hard to sort out all the wheeling and dealing around that club. Milos definitely had some papers, but it was never clear to me whether Mitchell had really turned the place over to him or they were just throwing up some sort of smokescreen for the cops. Meanwhile, Milos wanted to avoid tax problems, so I gather that he put the place in the name of his wife, Juanita, but she was not hip to all the legal hocus-pocus, so once Milos was out of the picture, she concluded that she owned the Gaslight, and every once in a while she would come stomping in and try to fire everybody.

  In any case, that was how I understood the situation. Sam Hood, who ended up running the Gaslight with his father, Clarence, says that Mitchell sold it to Sam’s brother-in-law, John Wynn, and a guy named Harry Fry, and that Milos was just working in the kitchen and never really owned the place. Sam was a college football star down in Florida and came up to help out in the summer of 1960, and when he went back to school that fall, he could not stand it, so he moved back and took over the day-to-day management. Noel Stookey was doing most of the booking, and Sam handled all the other stuff, the kitchen and wait staff and so forth. The cops were still a constant annoyance, so after a couple of years Wynn and Fry decided they wanted out, and at that point Clarence came up from Mississippi and he and Sam became the owners from then until the late 1960s.

  Clarence was one of the most extraordinary figures to come onto that scene. He had been quite prominent in the Truman administration, as well as becoming a self-made millionaire three times and each time losing it all. He was a gambler and knew how to take his losses with a smile. God, that man was a great poker player! There were regular games all the time, and one night I was bumped out early on—I was clearly in a different league from the guys he liked to play with—and Clarence let me kibitz his hand. I sat there and watched him fold hands that I would have held onto for dear life. Once he threw away a straight! And he was right every goddamn time. He had come from a completely different world, and suddenly was just picked up and dumped on MacDougal Street, in the middle of this kind of nonstop carnival, and he dealt with that situation as though he had created it. That man had more capacity for enjoyment than anyone I have ever known; he could have found something amusing about Hell.

  There must have been moments, though, when even Clarence’s patience was stretched to the breaking point. The battles between the city and the coffeehouses were absolutely constant, and even after Mitchell left, the Gaslight continued to be singled out. It was as if the cops had decided that if they could nail the Gaslight, the other clubs would fall like a row of dominoes. According to Sam, it reached the point that Clarence had to go into court for over a hundred consecutive days. The cop on the beat was Jimmy Burns, who was actually a very decent guy; he knew how to deal with people and handled that neighborhood very well. Jimmy was under a lot of pressure from his sergeant, though, so every night he would give Clarence a summons for running a cabaret without a license. Then every morning they would troop down to court, and Jimmy would say that he had written the summons because the Gaslight had a certain number of performers onstage at one time, which was a violation of the law. The judge would listen to this testimony, and at a certain point would ask the key question: “Did you see these performers onstage?” Jimmy, right on cue, for those hundred-plus consecutive days, would pause for a moment, give great thought to the question, and then allow as to how, no, the curtain was closed at the time he was writing, so he could only hear the performers. That was insufficient evidence, so the case would be thrown out, and the whole charade would be repeated the following day.

  On one level, I could see why so many people were annoyed about the coffeehouses. MacDougal Street really did becom
e a madhouse, and it could not have been any pleasure to try and live a normal life there. I mean, Coney Island is very nice if you come in from somewhere else, enjoy yourself for a while, and then can go home—but when you just want to go across the street for a cup of coffee, you don’t want to find yourself on the Boardwalk. We used to call that block between Bleecker and 3rd Street the Elephant Walk, and it was more like a slow elephant stampede. Eventually they put sawhorses up at either end of the block because the crowds were so heavy that cars could not get through. We used to sit out on the steps in front of the Gaslight and pick out particular people, and just count how many times they went past. A lot of them never went in anywhere, they just wandered back and forth between Bleecker and 3rd Street. That was a couple of years later, though, after Peter, Paul, and Mary had hit and the Great Folk Scare was upon us.

  12

  Changing of the Guard

  The winter of 1960-61 was a real momzer—snow up to your ear-balls and colder than a grave digger’s butt. Terri and I were living in Chelsea, and it seemed to take forever to slog through the drifts down to MacDougal. But there was something very cozy about it. Partly because of the weather, it was to be the last time from that day to this that we had the neighborhood to ourselves. The tourist avalanche of the next summer was undreamed of, and on the street or in the joints, you hardly saw a soul you didn’t know.

  The afternoons were best. Sitting at a window table at the Figaro, playing chess, gossiping with friends, or just watching the snow, one felt an almost rural sense of peace. But in the circles I was running in, there was an undercurrent of electricity. We knew we were right on the edge of something, even if we were uncertain exactly what it was. Clubs and rumors of clubs were popping up everywhere, and it seemed as if every basement and derelict coal bin in the Village was about to become yet another coffeehouse equipped with a stage, all for the greater glory of us. New singers were drifting in almost daily, and the cadre was growing, as my friend Russ Blackwell put it, “by creeps and bounders.”

  It became a regular thing: a bunch of us would be sitting in the Figaro or the Kettle, and a colleague would come rushing in to tell us, “Hey, there’s a new guy over at”—he would name one of the four or five rooms already functioning. “You’ve gotta hear him, he’s really something else.” And we would all troop off to check out the new phee-nom.

  This particular afternoon, the venue was the Café Wha? on the corner of MacDougal and Minetta.23 Manny Roth, the manager, had recently instituted a policy of daytime hootenannies, with Fred Neil presiding. When we arrived, Fred was on stage with his guitar and up there with him, playing harmonica, was the scruffiest-looking fugitive from a cornfield I do believe I had ever seen.

  “Where did he pick up that style of harp blowing? Mars?” I said to my companions. But I liked it. There was a gung ho, Dada quality to it that cracked me up. Then Fred relinquished the stage and the kid did a couple of numbers on his own. As I remember, they were Woody Guthrie songs, and his singing had the same take-no-prisoners delivery as his harmonica playing. We were impressed.

  After the set, Fred introduced us. Bob Dylan, spelled D-Y-L-A-N. “As in Thomas?” I asked, innocently. Right. I may have rolled my eyes heavenward. On the other hand, all of us were reinventing ourselves to some extent, and if this guy wanted to carry it a step or two further, who were we to quibble? I made my first acquaintance with his famous dead-fish handshake, and we all trooped back to the Kettle for another drink. The Coffeehouse Mafia had a new recruit.24

  The first thing you noticed about Bobby in those days was that he was full of nervous energy. We played quite a bit of chess, and his knees would always be bouncing against the table so much that it was like being at a séance. He was herky-jerky, jiggling, sitting on the edge of his chair. And you never could pin him down on anything. He had a lot of stories about who he was and where he came from, and he never seemed to be able to keep them straight. I think that’s one reason Bobby never gave good interviews: his thinking is so convoluted that he simply does not know how to level, because he’s always thinking of the effect that he’s having on whoever he’s talking to. But there was also something underlying all of that. For example, there was his genuine love for Woody Guthrie. I have heard him say, in retrospect, that he came to New York to “make it,” but that’s bullshit. When he came to New York, there was no great folk music scene, no chance of making a career out of the sort of music we were doing. What he said at the time, and what I believe, is that he came because he had to meet Woody. Woody was already in very bad shape with Huntington’s chorea, and Bobby went out to the hospital and, by dint of some jiving and tap dancing, managed to get himself into his presence, and he sang for Woody, and he really did manage to develop a rapport with him. For a while, he was going out to the hospital quite often, and he would take his guitar and sit there and play for Woody.

  I think that was a big part of what got him into writing songs. He wrote “Song for Woody” specifically to sing in the hospital. He was writing for Woody, to amuse him, to entertain him. Of course it was also a personal thing, he wanted Woody’s approval, but it was more than that. We all admired Woody and considered him a legend, but none of us was trucking out to see him and play for him. In that regard, Dylan was as stand-up a cat as I have ever known, and it was a very decent and impressive beginning for anybody’s career.

  Looking back, what a lot of people don’t understand is that it was tough for Bobby at first. He was a new kid in town, and he had an especially abrasive voice, and no one had any way of knowing that he would eventually become BOB DYLAN—he was just a kid with an abrasive voice. Sam Hood, who took over the Gaslight around that time, insists that he would use Bobby only on crowded nights when he wanted to clear the house. So Bobby’s experience and his memories of that time would be quite different from mine, because I was at least making a living. Bobby was doing guest sets wherever he could and backing people up on harmonica and suchlike, but there was no real work for him. He was cadging meals and sleeping on couches, pretty frequently mine.

  At that point Terri and I were still living over on 15th Street, but very shortly thereafter we moved down to Waverly Place. That was an interesting building, because over the next few years it became kind of a folksingers’ commune. The agent who ran the place was a music fan and he got an apartment for Barry Kornfeld, then Barry got an apartment for me on the third floor, and then when I moved to a larger place on the second floor, Patrick Sky was installed in my old apartment. Alix Dobkin was living on the fourth floor, and Billy Faier and John Winn moved in as well at some point. John was a classical tenor, a marvelously good musician who did a lot of John Dowland, and he, Ed McCurdy, Bob Dylan, and I used to do madrigals together, which had to be heard to be believed. There was an endless succession of parties, and a constant stream of people wandering in and out. We eventually had to lay down rules so that we could screw without having to worry about people barging in, which shows how much barging in was going on.

  The crowd was a mix of old friends and newcomers, musicians, writers, and acquaintances of all varieties and inclinations: Clayton came around a lot, as did Paul Simon. There were different cliques that developed: Patrick had sort of a swing role, because he was close to the crowd around Eric Anderson, Dave Cohen, and Phil Ochs and also with the crowd of Paxton, Noel Stookey, and me. Then there was the crowd around Fred Neil, which included Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, and Peter Stampfel, who became the guiding light of the Holy Modal Rounders and later one of the Fugs. We didn’t socialize as much with them, except for Peter, who has always been one of my favorite people and is undoubtedly some kind of genius—though so far, no one has ever figured out what kind.

  If I went through the basement of Waverly Place and checked out the lower strata, I would probably still find memorabilia of that period, including a whole bunch of early drafts of songs by various people, not to mention all the coloring books. We used to get stoned out of our minds and do coloring books, and D
ylan never colored anything but what he would sign it. So somewhere I probably have a shitload of awesomely bad coloring jobs signed by Dylan.

  At least in the early years, I think Terri and I were the only legally married couple in that particular crowd, and in our way we were a good deal more settled than the other people we knew. That was something that set me apart from the other performers on the scene, though I did not think about it that way at the time: I was married and had sort of made a nest, and I was trying to establish a secure place for myself. Most of the people I knew were trying to get away from a secure place, which was what had brought them to the Village. That was why everybody used to come over and hang out at my house: I was the only one who had a house. I had a bed, a couch, a coffee table. Everybody else was sleeping on floors and proclaiming their holy poverty, and I hated poverty.

  In any case, within a very short time after hitting the city, Bobby became a regular visitor and part of the gang. And the more I heard him perform, the more impressed I was with what he was doing. Later, when he became more popular, it was completely different. By 1964 his shows were not even generically similar to what he had been doing at the beginning. Back then, he always seemed to be winging it, free-associating, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever seen onstage—although offstage no one ever thought of him as a great wit. He had a stage persona that I can only compare to Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Fellow.” He was a very kinetic performer, he never stood still, and he had all these nervous mannerisms and gestures. He was obviously quaking in his boots a lot of the time, but he made that part of the show. There would be a one-liner, a mutter, a mumble, another one-liner, a slam at the guitar. Above all, his sense of timing was uncanny: he would get all of these pseudoclumsy bits of business going, fiddling with his harmonica rack and things like that, and he could put an audience in stitches without saying a word. I saw him one time onstage, with just his guitar and harmonica, and he was playing a harmonica chorus that consisted of one note. He kept strumming the guitar, and every now and again he would blow this one note, and after a few measures you were completely caught up in trying to figure out where the next note was coming. And you were always wrong. By the end of two choruses, he had all of us doubled over laughing, with one note on the harmonica.