The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  He had the same kind of unique timing when he sang, though in that context you would call it phrasing. It was quite different from what anyone else was doing, even before he started to write much of his own material. He was singing Woody Guthrie songs and things like “Pretty Polly,” but no one else did those songs that way. And his repertoire changed all the time; he’d find something he loved and sing it to death and drop it and go on to something else. Basically, he was in search of his own musical style, and it was developing very rapidly. So there was a freshness about him that was very exciting, very effective, and he acquired some very devoted fans among the other musicians before he had written his first song, or at least before we were aware that he was writing.

  Another thing that worked very much to Bobby’s advantage was his populism, the romantic hobo thing. He had that Guthriesque persona, both on and off stage, and we all bought it. Not that we necessarily believed he was really a Sioux Indian from New Mexico or whatever cockamamy variation he was peddling that day, but we believed the gist of his story, and even what we didn’t believe was often entertaining. I mean, one night he spent something like an hour showing a bunch of us how to talk in Indian sign language, which I’m pretty sure he was making up as he went along, but he did it marvelously. And when we found out that a lot of his stories were bullshit, that didn’t really lower his stock all that much. It was an old showbiz tradition—everybody changed their names and invented stories about themselves. So we kidded him some, but nobody held it against him. I don’t think Bobby ever understood that. He never really got the fact that nobody cared who you had been before you hit town. We were all inventing characters for ourselves. Look at Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who had grown up as a Jewish doctor’s son in Brooklyn and then gone out west and become a cowboy and Woody’s hoboing buddy.

  Jack was obviously a very important model for Bobby—both in terms of his music and because he had really lived the life and done all the things Bobby wanted to do—and at first Bobby had no idea that he was anything but a good-coin goyish cowboy. The revelation that Jack was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro. We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people, and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Park-way and was named Elliott Adnopoz. Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again. Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word “Adnopoz,” and back he went under the table. A lot of us had suspected that Bobby was Jewish, and after that we had no doubts.

  That kind of thing was happening all the time, and we tended to just take it in stride. I remember when Jack first blew back into town, which was right around the time Bobby arrived. That was a big deal, so of course I was at Gerde’s for his New York debut. Now, Jack’s mother and father were very prominent people in Brooklyn; I understand that his father was chief of surgery in a hospital, and the family had been in medicine for several generations. So the fact that Jack had turned into a bum was a great source of grief. However, he had been away for a long time, and now he was home, and they were making some attempt at a reconciliation, so Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz came down to see the kid. I was sitting at a front table with them and the cowboy artist Harry Jackson, and Jack was onstage, and he was having some trouble tuning his guitar. The audience was utterly hushed—a very rare occurrence in that room—and Mrs. Adnopoz was staring at Jack raptly, and then she lets out with a stage whisper: “Look at those fingers . . . Such a surgeon he could have been!”

  All in all, personal reinvention was the order of the day, and I still do not know—I do not think anybody really knows—how much of what Bobby was telling us was bullshit and how much actually had some basis in fact. Once everyone found out that he was a nice middle-class Jewish boy named Zimmerman, it was easy to assume that he had made up all the other stories as well—but then there was the time when Big Joe Williams came to town. Big Joe was one of the legendary Mississippi blues men, and Bobby had been telling stories for months about how the first time he ran away from home, he hopped a boxcar and who did he meet but Big Joe Williams, who began to teach him old blues. Bobby said that he was thirteen or something like that, and that they went all the way down to Mexico together. We listened to this more or less politely, but nobody believed him, and when we heard that Big Joe was coming to New York, a bunch of us arranged to go down with Bobby and see Joe—that was a meeting that nobody wanted to miss. We walked into the club, and Joe spotted us, and he came right over and said, “Hey, Bobby! I haven’t seen you since that boxcar down to Mexico!” I will always wonder whether Bobby somehow got to Joe and set the whole thing up, but it certainly blew us away.

  For a while there, Terri and I were probably Bobby’s biggest boosters, at least when it came to actually getting him jobs. Terri was taking care of my business, such as it was, and also handling some booking and paperwork for people like Paxton, Chandler, Mark Spoelstra, and a couple of others, and she became Bobby’s manager, as well—not that there was any competition for that job. No other manager would have touched him with a ten-foot pole. In the professional folk music world, most people were still into Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio, and Bobby was too weird, too scruffy, and he sang funny. But there was a sort of Village cabal that had a certain amount of influence within our small world, and among other things, we pushed Mike Porco to book Bobby. Terri had been helping Mike by doing this, that, and the other thing, but she really had to call in every favor to get Bobby that gig. In the end, Mike put him on opening for John Lee Hooker, and it went OK. Then a few months later he opened for the Greenbriar Boys, and Bob Shelton wrote him up in the Times, and that was really what got Bobby started.

  After that, Bobby’s career kind of took off, but it was by no means an overnight thing. In November of 1961, a couple of months after the Times piece, Izzy Young booked him into Carnegie Recital Hall for his first solo concert, and only 53 people showed up. Still, there was a definite groundswell of interest, and he soon had a small but fanatical claque of fans who would show up anywhere he was playing; if he dropped by to do a guest set at the Gaslight or one of the other clubs, they would appear by the second song. Then John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, and that really got people’s attention—though many of them thought Columbia was making the biggest mistake in history and I have been told that within the company Dylan was referred to as “Hammond’s Folly.” Still, that made a big difference, and within a very short time he was doing concerts rather than working on MacDougal. In fact, he boasted to me once that he had played only two club gigs in his life, and although he was wrong about that—he had, to my personal knowledge, played at least five—in essence it was true.25

  In a way, what was happening in that period was that the folk music wave that had already hit the rest of the country was beginning to overlap with what had been going on in the Village. Until then, we had managed to ignore the pop folk scene. Of course we knew about the Kingston Trio and Belafonte and their hordes of squeaky-clean imitators, but we felt like that was a different world that had nothing to do with us. For one thing, most of those people were simply bad musicians, and that continued to hold true for a lot of the popular groups right through the 1960s. They couldn’t play worth a damn and were indifferent singers, and as far as material was concerned, they were scraping the top of the barrel, singing songs that we had known and dropped ten years earlier. It was a 100 percent rip-off: they were ripping off the material; they were ripping off the authors, composers, collectors, and sources; and they were ripping off the public. Some of them developed a decent stage presence and managed to put on good shows from time to time, but musically the stuff was bad, and we had heard it all before. It was Mitch Miller sing-alongs and the Fireside Book of Folk Songs performed by sophomores in paisley shirts who couldn’t play their instruments.26

  Of course, there
were some exceptions, but even those were not really to our taste. For example, when I first saw Bob Gibson, he had this almost Vegas-Tahoe approach and it drove me nuts because I was a folk purist and it was the antithesis of everything I held dear. He was also in a whole different league from me and my friends; he played at the Gate of Horn and places like that, and we thought of him as part of the older generation. But in the early 1960s he was working pretty often in the Village, and after I had seen him a few times, I began to have to admit to myself how good he was. The first thing that tipped me off was when I saw him at the Gaslight, working to this audience of fanatical neo-ethnics, and they loved him. There was obviously something going on that I was not getting, and I really had to listen and to think about it, and what I figured out was that he just had this marvelous touch and a marvelous ease on stage. Bob looked people right in the eye, and he attempted to communicate with them, and he had a way of dramatizing a song that was very striking. Sometimes he would get carried away and overdramatize, but in general what he did was very effective, and while it was never something I wanted to do myself, I had to appreciate it because it worked. Besides that, he was a good musician. I sometimes think that he and Paxton were my favorite melodists in the folk songwriter field, Paxton for his incredible simplicity and Gibson for his ability to come up with unusual modulations and chord progressions.

  I also found that I really liked some of those people personally. Gibson, like Cynthia Gooding, was very polished onstage, but offstage they were both wonderfully cynical and funny. I remember years later seeing Bob at Newport with a group of people singing “Kumbaya,” and it was turning into one of those really tacky group-gropes, with everybody joining hands and taking turns leading verses—“Someone’s crying, Lord, kumbaya,” “Someone’s dying, Lord, kumbaya,”—and it gets around to Gibson’s turn, and he sings, “Someone’s kidding, Lord . . . ”

  In any case, the scene was changing at a very rapid clip. There was more money around, and that in itself made a difference. There were more clubs and bigger audiences, and it was no longer just our small band of folk devotees. What is more, that small band had never been very unified even before the money hit. People like Len Chandler and Tom Paxton loved traditional folk songs, but they were not hard-core neo-ethnics painstakingly learning licks off 78s. The purist faction had always been balanced by people who were a good deal less orthodox and whose voices were a lot easier on mainstream ears. There was also an interesting split along gender lines, which is obvious if you look at Dylan and then at Joan Baez. Whatever he may have done as a writer, Dylan was solidly in the neo-ethnic camp. He did not have a pretty voice, and he did his best to sing like Woody, or at least like somebody from Oklahoma or the rural South, and was always very rough and authentic sounding, to the best of his ability.

  Baez was a completely different kind of artist. With her, it was all about the beauty of her voice. That voice really was astonishing—the first time I heard her she electrified me, just as she electrified everybody else. She was not a great performer, and she was not a great singer, but God she had an instrument. And she had that vibrato, which added a remarkable amount of tone color. I think that I was a technically better singer than she was even then, but she had a couple of tricks that were damn useful, and I learned a few things from her.

  The thing about Baez, though, was that like almost all the women on that scene, she was still singing in the style of the generation before us. It was a cultural lag: the boys had discovered Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, and the girls were still listening to Cynthia and Susan Reed. It was not just Joan. There was Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, and people like Molly Scott and Ellen Adler, who for a while were also contenders. All of them were essentially singing bel canto—bad bel canto, by classical standards, but still bel canto. So whereas the boys were intentionally roughing up their voices, the girls were trying to sound prettier and prettier and more and more virginal. To a great extent, I think that had to do with wanting to make themselves desirable to the boys, and certainly the boys could not have been more encouraging—we were all entranced by that virginal warble. But the result is that the women were still singing in the styles of the 1940s or 1950s, and that gave them a kind of crossover appeal to the people who were listening to Belafonte and the older singers, and to the clean-cut college groups.

  At the time, I was not thinking all of this through in the same way I do now, but in hindsight you can see pretty easily what happened. And there were a few people around even then who seemed to have a sense of where things were going—or who at least were quick to seize the brass ring when it came their way. Chief among these was Albert Grossman, my old nemesis from Chicago. Albert had put together the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and in 1960 he moved to New York and began hanging around on MacDougal Street. He was an interesting and amusing man, and I got to know him fairly well, but there was always a distance there. He was very cold and calculating, and you couldn’t trust him for a minute. When Dylan met Grossman, it was truly a match made in heaven, because those were two extraordinarily secretive people who loved to mystify and conspire and who played their cards extremely close to their vests. You never knew what scheme Albert was cooking up behind that blank stare, and he actually took a sort of perverse pleasure in being utterly unscrupulous. He could be a wonderful companion, though—it wouldn’t be until two days after you saw him that you would realize that your underwear had been stolen. There you would be: “Shit, man, my shoes are on—what happened to my socks?”

  Albert was very smart, with a good eye for talent, and he really knew the business. When he was in the mood—or saw a way to turn it to his advantage—he could be extremely helpful, and I learned a good deal from him. I have mentioned his suggestion that I should stand up when I played, which was not a success, but some of his advice was indispensable. During the brief period when he was managing me, he persuaded me that, along with working on the music, I needed to work at making contact with my audience. For example, he had me sit in front of a three-paneled, wraparound mirror with my guitar and watch myself while I performed, which finally broke me of the habit of looking at my shoes while I was playing. So I owe him at least a few votes of thanks.

  Albert had taken a good, long look at all the Weavers clones in their preppy outfits, and he decided that there was an opening for a group that was hipper than that—more musically sophisticated, with a contemporary feel—so he was scouting the local talent with this in mind. One day we ran into each other on MacDougal, and he said that he had a proposition for me: he was putting together a trio, and he had two people already, and he needed a third. I said, “Who are the two people?” and he said Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers.

  I thought about it for a day or so and talked it over with Terri, but by this time I was doing pretty well as a solo performer, and I really had no interest in being part of a group. Besides, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, my God, we’re gonna have a village-spawned Kingston Trio here,” and I wanted no part of it. As it turned out, what Albert had in mind was something quite different, but as usual he was being cagey and short on specifics, and that sounded like exactly what he was proposing. So I turned him down and they got Noel Stookey, and Noel added precisely the ingredient that they needed. Peter, Dave, and Mary would have died the death of a thousand cuts—I would have stood out like a sore thumb, vocally, visually, you name it. And I suppose I would have had to change my name as well. Still, every time I look at my bank balance . . .

  In any case, Peter, Paul, and Mary provided me with one of the best paychecks I ever cashed. They had their debut right around the same time Dylan got the Times review, at a new club called the Bitter End, which became New York’s closest thing to a mainstream folk showcase—it had people like Bob Gibson and Judy Collins, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and even the New Christy Minstrels.27A few months later they released their first record, and it included a song that I had put together and recorded on my second Folkways album. I had called it �
��River Come Down,” but they renamed it “Bamboo.” It had originally just been a guitar exercise, but my students demanded that I give them some lyrics to go with it, so I threw together some doggerel based on a song I vaguely remembered hearing Dick Weissman do on the banjo, and used Dick’s chorus, “River, oh river, she come down.” I recorded it more or less as filler and assumed it would go no further, but that Peter, Paul, and Mary album promptly sold seven trillion copies, and it is probably still my best-known composition. Not only that, but some of the pop music critics homed in on the lyrics, describing them as “surrealist”—one erudite soul even compared them to Garcia Lorca. The end of that story is that I recently read an interview with Noel in which he singles out “Bamboo” for special mention as one of the few pieces in their repertoire that has not stood the test of time. I heartily agree with him. It is the only song I wrote that ever made me any money, and I hate it.

  The fact that they did that song, though, was indicative of something that was different about Peter, Paul, and Mary: they were not simply reworking traditional folk songs and doing Weavers covers and that sort of thing. Their material was very carefully chosen, and most of it was quite new, and they had some smart, original arrangements. Of course, we regarded them as “slick,” but they were interesting, and in retrospect I think their popularity was deserved. I can’t say that I ever spent much time listening to their records, but I was not the sort of listener they were aiming at.