Grossman had his eye on a national audience, but for me the scene was still centered on New York, and I was getting all the work I could handle. In 1962 I signed a two-album contract with Prestige Records, which was not a major label but was considered a definite step up from Folkways. (I was so proud, until I told one of my friends, “I’m recording for Prestige!” He said, “Well, keep it up and sooner or later you might be recording for money.”) The guy who ran the label, Bob Weinstock, had excellent taste in jazz, and he was beginning to record a lot of folk and blues as well. After we did the first album, he called me up and said, “I’m going to title this album something I really believe is true: I’m going to call it Dave Van Ronk: New York’s Finest.”
I said, “Bob, for Christ’s sake, you’re calling me a cop!”
There was a long pause, and he said, “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”
I said, “You can call it anything you want, but for crying out loud, don’t call it that.” So he released it as Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger, whereupon I subsided, muttering, “Better a dork than a narc.”
That was the first album of mine that I consider relatively satisfactory in musical terms. I had shaken off a lot of the mannerisms of my earlier records, partly through a natural process of evolution, and partly because I was working so much and getting so much opportunity to test and reshape my material. It also introduced the piece that some people continue to regard as my signature song, “Cocaine Blues.” That song became so associated with me that a lot of people assumed I had written it, which caused occasional embarrassment. Sometime in the mid-seventies, I ran into Jackson Browne on the street, and he said, “Hey, Dave, I just recorded one of your songs.” At that point things were pretty slow and the royalties from a Jackson Browne record would have made a big difference, so I was very happy, and I said, “Man, that’s nice. Which one?” And he said, “Cocaine Blues.” I said, “Jackson, that’s a Gary Davis song, and here’s who you contact to send the royalties to his estate. Now get away from me before you see a grown man cry.”
Frankly, that song had some other disappointing aspects as well: When I first learned it from Gary, one of my jazz musician buddies said, “Yeah, that’s a good one for you to do, because, you know, when you get finished with your show, there’ll be people lined up back in your dressing room to give you toot.” That sounded kind of interesting, but as it turned out, he was entirely mistaken. Instead, for a while there I would finish up and go back to my dressing room, and there would be people lined up asking me to give them some. It was very disillusioning.
The Folksinger album came out just as the folk wave was beginning to crest, and for the next few years I had more work than I have ever had before or since. I was hosting the Tuesday night hoots at the Gaslight, as well as sometimes doing a week as a headliner there or at Folk City, and for variety I was making occasional forays into the hinterlands. I got to Tulsa and Oklahoma City for a couple of weeks, and I was going to the West Coast, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Canada. Some of those were one-shot deals, but there were also rooms that I could count on working fairly regularly—the Caffé Lena in Saratoga Springs probably paid my rent for 1960. And then, of course, there was Cambridge. That was the other East Coast hub, and it had a scene that was quite different from anywhere else. Baez had come out of there, and I probably went up to check it out for the first time in 1960. I got a kind of strange reception there, because the Cantabrigians had set up this dichotomy between me and Eric Von Schmidt. In their eyes Eric was the greatest white blues singer around, and I was the New York contender. Personally, I had nothing but admiration for Eric’s work. He had gotten into the blues thing a year or two ahead of me, and he may have been the first of us to develop his own approach to the music. His singing was excellent, and his guitar playing was powerful and quite unique, but what really made him stand out was that his style was intensely personal. He was never Robert Johnson or Furry Lewis or Leadbelly, or anyone but Eric Von Schmidt, and that made him one of the very few white people around at that time who could sing blues with conviction and make you feel that he was singing about his own life and his own feelings rather than pretending to be someone else.
The Cambridge crowd wanted Eric and me to hate each other, which shocked me and gave me a kind of sour view of the place. The fact is that we hit it off famously, got stinking drunk, got up on stage together, just disported ourselves and had a marvelous time. He had a studio on Brattle Street, and we would go up there and drink and play cards, and when we were thoroughly loaded, we would go downstairs to the Brattle Theatre and watch Casablanca, which always seemed to be playing.
I think the Cambridge people in general had a complex about New York. We were Gomorrah, whereas they were the pure guardians of the sacred flame. In a lot of ways the difference was economic. By that time, the scene in New York was relatively professional, made up of all these people who were coming into town and needed to make a living from their music just to pay the rent. We were playing five sets a night in rooms full of drunken tourists, and even if we didn’t necessarily think of ourselves that way, we were professional entertainers. Cambridge was a college town, and the scene—not necessarily the performers but the fans and the hangers-on— was a bunch of middle- and upper-middle-class kids cutting a dash on papa’s cash. They did not feel the economic pressures that we did, so their frame of reference was completely different. To be fair, in some ways that made the Cambridge scene much healthier, because without that economic pressure, they could put all their focus on the music. We were constantly being sucked into commercial culture, and they weren’t. And sure, they could afford their purity, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t pure, and that purist approach produced some very good work. I had great respect for some of the performers up there, and learned a lot from them.
As a scene, though, Cambridge always annoyed me because they were such snobs. It was class snobbery, the whole Harvard mystique, even if they were not actually connected with Harvard. It was like the story about the little Jew from the garment district who makes his pile, goes to England, and wants to get a real English gentleman’s suit from a real London tailor. He goes to Saville Row and he’s informed that they require four fittings. The guy says, “That’s okay, I’ve got time.” So he goes in for the first fitting, the second fitting, the third fitting. Finally, everything is ready except the final touches: getting the shoulders adjusted, dotting the is, crossing the ts. He is standing there in this beautiful suit, and he looks like Anthony Eden, but as he is looking at himself in the mirror, he bursts into tears.
One of the tailors says, “Oh sir, is there something wrong?”
He says, “No, everything’s perfect . . . but vy did ve hef to lose India?”
That was what that Cambridge scene was like a lot of the time: there were kids from all over the country, and by no means all of them were especially wealthy or cultured, but they all adopted that Harvard attitude. Though I must say that it was the fans who set that tone more than the musicians. People like Von Schmidt, Jim Kweskin, Geoff Muldaur, Joan Baez—if you knew what you were about, they respected you, because we were all working the same side of the street.
Still, for quite a while I was playing more in Boston than I was in Cambridge. The Cambridge people looked down on the Bostonians as well; they didn’t have that je ne sais quoi. So I would hang out in Cambridge, but I was not playing there, and it got pretty annoying. I mean, the Club 47 was the hip room, but it was Von Schmidt territory and I had the impression that they felt that if they hired me, they would be letting down the side. However, I was very close with Jim Kweskin, and I used to go over to his place and play music with him and Muldaur and whoever else was around. Kweskin in those days was running a hootenanny at the Club 47, so one night I was over there at Jim’s place and the reefer was going around—there was always an enormous amount of dope up there—and I said, “Nope, I’ll pass. Because if I get stoned, then we’ll all go down to the 47, and you’ll get u
p on stage and say, ‘Here in the audience we have Dave Van Ronk. Let’s give him a big hand and ask him to come up and do a couple of numbers,’ and there I’ll be, bombed out of my skull. So I’m not going to smoke any of your dope, because I don’t trust you, you bastard.”
Jim said, “Come on, Dave, I would never do that to you. Have a toke.”
So, with some misgivings, I had a toke, and another, and another, and another. Two hours later, I’m sitting in the Club 47, boxed out of my bird, and Jim is onstage, and he says, “Here in the audience we have Dave Van Ronk. Let’s give him a big hand and ask him to come up and do a couple of numbers.”
What could I do? The audience was applauding wildly. I got up onstage and started into a song, and it was just like that first time back in my jazz days: I was absolutely catatonic, entranced by all the strange and interesting things my fingers were doing. Somehow, though, I managed to get through three songs, and I walked off, and Byron Linardos, the manager, comes over and says, “That was great! When do you want to work here?” Go figure.28
I eventually became a fixture up there—though I still didn’t work at the 47 all that often—and I even ran across an old issue of The Broadside of Boston, the local folk mag, with their readers’ poll for 1964, and I was listed as the Favorite Visiting Performer, followed by Dylan, Jean Redpath, and Phil Ochs, with honorable mention to Jose Feliciano, Jack Elliott, and Doc Watson. It was good company in those days.
Oddly enough, the best friend I met in Boston was Patrick Sky, though neither of us ever lived there. Patrick was from Georgia, but he had crawled out a window to escape a failed marriage, changed his name, and gone to Florida. He was down there hacking away on a guitar and bumped into Buffy St. Marie, and she dragged him up north with her. One weekend I was working at the Café Yana, near Fenway Park, and Buffy, who was working someplace else, came by and said, “I’ve got somebody you have to meet—this is something I absolutely have to see,” and it was Patrick. She knew we would either kill each other or become fast friends, and as it turned out, we hit it off immediately. We settled in with a jug and had a gorgeous gabfest, and after a while I think poor Buffy got bored and wandered away.
Patrick was, and remains, a deeply pessimistic man, and very funny—his mind-set reminds me of W. C. Fields. When it came to songwriting, he had a very direct style, but with the most sardonic point of view, and he also had a love of whimsy that was very rare. For example, he called his second album A Harvest of Gentle Clang. I do not think anybody but Patrick could have thought of that title. (There is a wonderful piece of folk ephemera on that album: in a pause between songs, Patrick announces, “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Mississippi John Hurt sings Gilbert and Sullivan!” Then the unmistakable tones of John Hurt waft forth: “Gilbert and Sulliva-an!”)
My favorite Patrick Sky story happened right around the time he recorded that album. It was 1965, and we had been invited to appear on a Canadian television show called Let’s Sing Out, which was their version of Hootenanny. They were filming at a college in Winnipeg, and Patrick and I happened to be on the same plane out of Buffalo. Patrick had been up for something like seventy-two hours, and so had I, working and drinking and working and drinking, and we had drunk ourselves sober and drunk and sober again—we were seemingly quite coherent, but the only thing that was keeping us going was the steady consumption of bourbon. We arrived at this college auditorium where they were doing the shoot, and they had converted it into a sort of huge dressing room area. All the tech people were running around, setting up lights and patting us down with powder puffs and that sort of thing, and over in a corner, sitting by herself on a folding chair, was this lovely blond lady. She was playing guitar and singing to herself, just warming up, and I don’t know how it happened, but after a few minutes everything was completely quiet and everybody had just formed a semicircle around her. It was Joni Mitchell, and she was singing “Urge for Going,” and that was the first time I ever heard it or her. It was simply magical, and by the middle of the second verse, you could hear a pin drop. She finished, and there was just this silence, utter silence.
Then Patrick turns to me, and loudly says, “That sucks!”
As it happened, that was the highest compliment Patrick was capable of bestowing, but of course Joni had no way of knowing that. She later told me that she went back to Detroit in tears and told Chuck, her partner and husband, that the great folksingers from New York didn’t like her music, and she briefly considered quitting the business. Fortunately, she thought better of it, sensibly concluding that we could go fuck ourselves.
After that first time, Joni and I met up pretty often, and I actually saw her and Chuck perform together a couple times while they were still living in Detroit. They worked as a split bill, with Chuck doing the first part of the show, Chuck and Joni doing some songs together, and then Joni finishing up on her own. It was very interesting to watch, because they had sharply contrasting musical styles: Chuck was of the older, theatrical school and would do marvelous arrangements of Kurt Weill numbers, singing in a fine, trained voice, while Joni was already in the process of developing her completely distinctive approach. Later on, when Joni moved to New York, we got to be very good friends and she taught me an awful lot about songwriting. I thought she was the best writer of the 1960s, a very playful lyricist in the same way that John Donne was a playful lyricist.
There is a lot more to be said about that whole crop of 1960s-era songwriters, but first I suppose I should clear up the famous story about Dylan and “House of the Rising Sun,” which has haunted me for the last thirty years. And when I say haunted . . .
Sometime in the early 1990s, I was doing a tour of France and I made a stop at the Hippopotamus Club in Saint-Étienne, which is as la France profonde as you can get outside of the Lascaux Caverns. I was standing at the bar between sets when a very drunk customer lurched up to me and said, in barely decipherable English, “Please, to sing ‘Rising Sun.’” Bad as her English was, it was better than my French, but I explained as best as I could that I had not sung that song in twenty years and did not even remember my guitar chart for it.
She wasn’t having any of that. She opened her mouth and bawled in my face, “There is a house from New Orleans . . . ”—to help me get started, I suppose. Apparently that was the only line she knew, but she liked it just fine, so she sang it again, louder and with feeling. And again. And again. Clearly, the woman had found her métier. She kept howling that line at me, her face not ten inches from mine. And her breath—Quel bouquet!
I felt a panic attack coming on. There was no escape route—my back was to the bar and she was standing toe to toe with me, howling that line over and over again. Fortunately, before I was forced to kill her in self-defense, a couple of her friends led her away, still bellowing, “There is a house from New Orleans . . . ”
But I had not heard the last of her. When I mounted the stage for my second set, there she was, ringside table, stage right. Like the Bourbon kings of old, she had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Every pause in a song, every comma in an introduction was her cue. I had a microphone and she didn’t, but she was matching me decibel for decibel. I have never been driven from a stage in my life, and I have been heckled by experts, but this was beginning to look like a historic first. Finally, her friends came to my rescue once again. They half dragged, half carried her out the door and off into the night. We could still hear her a block away: “There is a house from New Orleans . . .” Did I mention that she was tone-deaf?
When my shattered nerves had mended somewhat, I got to thinking: what I had told our diva of the detox ward was true. I had dropped that tune from my repertory around 1963, although I loved it dearly. I had learned it sometime in the 1950s, from a recording by Hally Wood, the Texas singer and collector, who had got it from an Alan Lomax field recording by a Kentucky woman named Georgia Turner. I put a different spin on it by altering the chords and using a bass line that descended in half steps—
a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers. By the early 1960s, the song had become one of my signature pieces, and I could hardly get off the stage without doing it.
Then, one evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’”
Oh, shit. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?”
A long pause. “Uh-oh.”
I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?”
“Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.”
“You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea. The feud was on, at least as far as I was concerned, and the MacDougal Street gossips were all atwitter with the news. I played the part of the righteously aggrieved artiste with relish, though after a couple of weeks the sheer pettiness of the whole thing began to dawn on me. Terri was no longer Bobby’s manager, but the split had been amicable, and she and Suze were still very close. They were lobbying for a reconciliation, but I didn’t see how I could back down without admitting that I was being a schmuck.
That was when Dave Cohen—later known as Dave Blue—stepped into the breach. He was the last person I would have thought of as a peace-maker, being by temperament something of a barroom brawler, so when he tore into me for being a nitpicker and taking up time that would be better spent on juicier scandals, I allowed myself to be mollified. Bob and I shook hands, with Cohen looking on like the adult conciliator of a schoolyard punch-up, and that was that. Or so I thought.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 21