The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  Man! To an over-the-road musician, that is sheer poetry.

  14

  The New Song Revolution

  Blues and traditional material were integral to the Folk Scare, but what defined the period in most people’s minds were protest songs and the appearance of what has since become known as “singer-songwriter” music. This was in many ways a quite new style, but it tended to be generically lumped in the folk category and praised or damned as such, at least until Dylan plugged in his guitar in 1965. I can’t blame the average consumer for failing to note the change—crowds are never long on analytical thought—but excusing the music critics is quite another matter, and even today many of them continue to refer to this music as “folk.” This is both silly and an abdication of responsibility. Although some of the new songwriters—Dylan and Paxton, for example—had a deep grounding in traditional styles, even in those cases calling their music “folk” is like calling the music of Duke Ellington or Lester Young “ragtime.” As for Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, they have as much to do with folk music as Schubert or Baudelaire.

  In an attempt to avoid the migraines brought on by serious thought, most of the critics and music marketers have relied on a simple formula: if the accompaniment to this music is acoustic, it’s folk music. With amplified backup, it’s rock ’n’ roll, except in those instances where a pedal steel guitar is added, in which case it’s country. To be fair to the critics—which is no fun at all—the performers themselves have rarely been more perceptive when it comes to labeling their work. I have heard everyone from Paxton to Suzanne Vega refer to themselves as folksingers, though the last time Tom sang a folk song was roughly 1962, and I doubt that Suzanne has ever sung one in her life. The problem is that, in order to eat, people have to sell records, and to sell records, there has to be a way of marketing them. I once heard a record producer remark about Janis Ian, “Her music isn’t folk, it isn’t rock, it isn’t country—who the hell am I supposed to sell it to?” Janis got lucky, but a lot of talented writers have died on the vine simply because there was no convenient pigeonhole for them. Calling such people “singersongwriters” avoids that particular pitfall, but I have never liked the label because it defines the performer rather than the music. Also, if followed to its logical conclusion, it puts Joni Mitchell and Hoagy Carmichael in the same closet (interesting thought, that), which leaves something to be desired, to say the least. The best idea would be to classify all of this music as “new song,” which is what Latin American musicians call their own version of the style, and while I have little hope of anyone following my advice on this point, that is how I think of it.29

  In any case, that period spawned a new style of songwriting that was quite different from what had come before it. Any music is the music of its time, of course—you can’t avoid that—but a great deal of the music written in the 1960s was also about its time. It dealt directly, almost on a one-to-one basis, with the experiences that people were going through at that moment. Pop lyrics have tended to be of the most vague and general nature: “I love my baby,” “Get down and boogie.” Generally it’s pretty mindless, and mindlessness has a certain eternal quality. But the songwriting in the sixties was often very specific, whether it was about politics or about what people were going through in their personal lives. Of course, a lot of that material suffered from its specificity—if you weren’t the person who had written it, you couldn’t get next to it. I am reminded of an anecdote about Lenin: The Soviet state publishing house had brought out a book of love poems written by a poet to his wife. When it was presented to Lenin, he said, “Don’t you know there’s a paper shortage on? We should have printed two copies: one for him and one for his wife.”

  Dylan is usually cited as the founder of the new song movement, and he certainly became its most visible standard-bearer, but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton. When Tom came to New York, around 1961, he had precisely one song of his own in his repertory, “The Marvelous Toy,” but over the next six or eight months he wrote some more, and as he tested his songs in the crucible of live performance, he found that his own stuff was getting more attention than when he was singing traditional songs or stuff by other people. It gradually dawned on him that his vocation in life was to be a songwriter, and at that point he decided, “OK, if I’m gonna be a songwriter, I’d better be serious about it.” So he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day, and he kept that up for about a year. The songs could be good, bad, or indifferent; the important thing was that it forced him to get into the discipline of sitting down and writing. In the course of that year he wrote some of the most dreadful things I have heard in my life—I still treasure “The New York Mets Victory and Commiseration Song”—but he also wrote “Ramblin’ Boy” and “The Last Thing on My Mind.” Dylan had not yet showed up when this was happening, and by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material.

  That said, it was Bobby’s success that really got the ball rolling. Prior to that, the folk community was very much tied to traditional songs, so much so that songwriters would sometimes palm their own stuff off as traditional. So in some ways the most important thing that Bobby did was not to write the songs but to show that the songs could be written. I think people like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen felt toward Dylan sort of the way Ezra Pound felt toward Walt Whitman: “You cut the wood; now it’s time for carving.” From a stylistic perspective, I was always rather dubious of Bobby’s contrived primitivism, and his later obscurantism reached a point where he wasn’t even trying to make sense anymore. But if Bobby had not succeeded in breaking out with what he was writing, almost all of the original material to come out of the folk boom would have been protest songs, because up to that point those were the only things you were allowed by consensus to write.

  As in the days of the Almanac and People’s Songs, the Folk Scare of the 1960s rode in on a wave of social protest, and neo-ethnics like myself were simply carried along on its coattails. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War profoundly changed the political atmosphere, and pulled a lot of people to the left. The hipsters of the 1950s had tried to divorce themselves from all things political, but in the sixties that was no longer an acceptable option. With the Civil Rights Movement, any kind of identification with black culture took on a whole new meaning, and a lot of people who a decade earlier would have been apolitical beatniks no longer felt comfortable simply standing on the sidelines. Meanwhile the war was affecting the folk audience even more directly, because most of us were of draft age and the government was threatening to ship us overseas to get killed.30

  This was the height of the culture wars, and while the McCarthy era was dying, it had a hydralike ability to keep regenerating heads as fast as you chopped one off. The blacklist, for example, resurfaced with some regularity throughout the early 1960s. By 1963 Joan Baez had been on the cover of Time magazine; Peter, Paul, and Mary were in the Top 10; and ABC television jumped on the bandwagon with a show called Hootenanny. About a month before Hootenanny was supposed to go on the air, Broadside magazine broke the story that Pete Seeger was not going to be allowed to appear. This was particularly outrageous because Pete had been the person responsible for giving the word “hootenanny” any currency, and ABC made its position even worse by saying it was not blacklisting Pete, but had simply decided he was not up to their artistic standards. At that the entire entertainment business, left, right, and center, broke into howls of laughter—I mean, you should have seen some of the crap they had on that show. A bunch of us promptly got together and formed an organization called Artists against the Blacklist, and a lot of the top names on the scene, including Baez, Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, announced that they would not appear on Hootenanny or any other show that did not let Pete appear.

  Pete himself was kind of embarrassed by the whole business. He had always felt that the music was the imp
ortant thing—the man is nothing; the work is everything—and he thought that a lot of performers who deserved a national hearing were depriving themselves of an opportunity. His basic attitude was “For God’s sake boys, leave me behind; just leave me one bullet.” Of course, we paid absolutely no attention to him. Our position was, “Sorry, Pete, old man, but you’re a symbol.” And although that organization did not stay together, and in any case Hootenanny was so laughably awful that it barely lasted a season, that flap really did help put an end to the blacklist.31

  My politics had never been a secret, and I continued to show up and play for benefits whenever asked and to work with various radical organizations. As in the past, I rarely sang political songs, but there were exceptions even to that rule. The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was working down at the Gaslight, and I opened my set with “This Land Is Your Land” and closed it with “The International,” including the verse that goes, “We want no condescending saviors.” I cannot remember any incident in history that made me feel more lefty than that business. I thought Khrushchev was being an opportunist and an asshole, but he had every right to make a deal with another country to put missiles on their turf—the United States had made a deal with Turkey to do exactly the same thing and nobody made any big issue of it. So at that point, to all intents and purposes, I was a better Stalinist than most of the Stalinists. They were all running around trying to find some kind of a deal, while we Trotskyists went down to the UN to demonstrate in support of Cuba and their damn missiles. Truth to tell, I did not want the missiles there; they made me nervous. Nonetheless, fair is fair.

  I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their stances—I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar—but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood—and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power—if the working class folds its arms, the machinery stops—and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.

  When it came to political music, I looked on most of what was being written around me with a similarly jaundiced eye. My feeling was that nobody has ever been convinced that they were wrong about anything by listening to a song, so when you are writing a political song, you are preaching to the choir. Of course, the choir needs songs, and when a group sings together, that builds solidarity. When the cops were coming down on them with the dogs, the clubs, and the cattle prods, the civil rights workers would be standing there singing “We are not afraid”—and you better believe they were afraid, but the singing helped. It had a real function, and in that situation it was very important. But when it came to singing these things in a coffeehouse or at a concert, I always felt that politics is politics and music is music. Brecht was a Stalinist, but his best songs are not Stalinist songs. Brecht’s work expressed a weltanschauung, a worldview, and that view was often consonant with radical politics, but as a poet and a songwriter, Brecht was more of a philosopher than a politician. And when it came to Paxton, or Ochs, or Dylan, I liked their songs when they were well written, regardless of what they were about, and when they were not well written, I had no interest.

  My attitude is essentially that of a craftsman, and I thought a lot of times the politics got in the way of the craft. Also, there is a built-in flaw to topical songs, which is that if you live by the newspaper, you die by the newspaper. You may expend your greatest efforts and do some of your best writing about an incident that will be forgotten in six weeks. I mean, Phil Ochs was one of my best friends and I love a good many of his songs, but it always struck me as a tragedy that so much of Phil’s material became dated so quickly. I remember when I heard him sing his song about William Worthy, I thought, “That’s not one of Phil’s best, but it doesn’t matter, because two years down the line he won’t be able to sing it anymore.” And sure enough, he couldn’t, because nobody remembered who William Worthy was. But unfortunately that was also true of some of his other material that I liked a lot more. Paxton dealt with that kind of planned obsolescence by disciplining himself to the point that if you give him a topic, he can give you a song, just like that. Len Chandler did the same thing; for a while he had a radio show in LA where he would improvise songs over the air from the daily newspaper. And if you have that kind of skill, I suppose you can keep going indefinitely as a topical songwriter. But nothing less than that will do, and very few people can do that or would want to, year in and year out. I think that was one of the things that destroyed Phil, in the end: he had painted himself into a corner, and he tried to work his way out of it by doing things like “Pleasures of the Harbor,” but they never had the immediacy of his topical material, and he knew it.

  When I first met Phil, he was working at a place on 3rd Street called the Third Side. It was the same story as with Dylan: Somebody was making the rounds of the clubs, happened to hear him, and came barging into the Kettle of Fish and said, “There’s a guy over at the Third Side who’s really fantastic. You’ve gotta check him out.” I don’t think he had been in town for more than a week or so, and as I remember, the owner of the club was letting him crash there as well, sleeping on the pool table.

  Phil was very much his own man, right from the beginning. For one thing, although he was never going to be nominated to any best-dressed lists, he was one of the last of the jacket-and-tie holdouts. He used to wear this thing that had once been a blue suit, but he had worn it so long that, if you had got him to stand still, you could have shaved in your reflection in the back of the jacket. He had a way with neckties, though. I remember one that looked like it was made out of crepe paper, which he carried around in his back pocket to use for formal occasions.32

  Musically, what struck me first about Phil’s work was that he was a very interesting extension of Bob Gibson. He had Bob’s approach to chords and melodic lines, and also a lot of Bob’s guitar style, but he had harnessed all of this for political commentary, which Bob was not all that interested in doing. Later on, when he and Bob were collaborating on some songs, it was perfect, because it was like Bob collaborating with his political self and Phil collaborating with his nonpolitical self.

  Phil’s chord sense was quite advanced, and he was the only person around aside from Gibson who used the relative minor and secondary keys. He was also one of the few songwriters on that scene who knew how to write a bridge. He was no Jerome Kern, but considering the limitations almost everybody else was struggling with, his work stood out. That may in part explain why he was not a very influential songwriter. There were a few Ochs clones, but not many, and that was probably because most of the people who wanted to sound like him couldn’t do it. He was also a surprisingly effective guitarist—not a virtuoso by any means, but he filled in all the spaces and never lost the impetus. And man, he pounded the shit out of his instruments. He borrowed a guitar from me once at a festival, and you can still see where his flat-pick gouged into the top.

  As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since. That is not to say that I liked everything he wrote, but he had a touch that was so distinctive that it just could not be anybody else. He had been a journalism student before he became a singer, and he would never sacrifice what he felt to be the truth for a good line. In a way that was a shame, because he would have come up with more good lines if he had been wil
ling to compromise now and then. But at its best, there was a deftness to his writing that went beyond straight journalism. He wrote a song about the conservatism of big labor in that period called “Links on the Chain,” and its last line was, “It’s only fair to ask you boys, now which side are you on?” That is goddamn good. There is a dialectic to that line; it has a history, and all of that is right there. A lot of people I knew on the working-class left were upset by that song—they felt he was using “Which Side Are You On?” to attack the people it was written for—but as far as I was concerned, he was laying it on the line to those guys, and that was just what the situation called for. And he not only called ’em the way he saw ’em but made the call a work of art. Phil was very prolific for a while, and he committed as much hackwork as almost any other songwriter of the period, but when that boy cooked, he really cooked.

  Phil and I fought like cats and dogs, about politics and everything else. I was a socialist; he was a left liberal. I was a materialist and he was a mystic. So we could argue about everything from the meaning of life to yesterday’s headlines. I thought a lot of his stances were too simplistic, which was typical of that whole crowd. His positions would make sense in a limited way, but he had not really thought them through. Like when he wrote “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” I understood that he had just been down there and had been horrified by what he was seeing, but I thought that singling out Mississippi as a racist hellhole was unfair to the other forty-nine states. As Malcolm X used to say, “There’s down south, and there’s up south.” Without all the activists who were from there, none of that movement would have happened, and having some northerner come down and shit all over Mississippi was unfair to the people who were living there and trying to fix up their state. And it was also too damn easy.