The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Ted Wilentz lived with his family in an apartment above the bookshop, where his parties “were the closest thing to a literary salon in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s,” according to the longtime Voice photographer Fred McDarrah. In December 1963, when Ginsberg and Orlovsky returned to the Village from extensive world travels, Wilentz put them up. The day after Christmas Al Aronowitz, a journalist who was obsessed first with the Beats and then with Dylan, brought Dylan to a party at Wilentz’s to meet Ginsberg. He later recalled that the two giants talked poetry and Ginsberg made an unsuccessful pass. Dylan and Ginsberg went on to have a long and complex friendship with, as the historian and Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz (Eli’s son) describes it in Bob Dylan in America, “mutually exploitive elements.” Just as Dylan was the Village folksinger most driven to fame and success, Ginsberg had always been the most fame-hungry of the Beats. Neither was above using the other to boost his image. Ginsberg was Dylan’s conduit to the Beats, a cool association for him to make at a time when he was starting to distance himself from the folk crowd. The Beat poetry influences are evident in the more personal and nonpolitical turn his lyrics took on his next LP, the pointedly titled Another Side of Bob Dylan. (The album did contain one leftover protest song, the beautiful, Van Ronk–inspired “Chimes of Freedom.”) Like the Beats a decade earlier he now wrote his lyrics as spontaneous riffs, free form, increasingly drug inspired. By Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, both released in 1965, there’s more than a hint of Ginsberg, Ginsberg’s visionary hero poets, and Ginsberg’s psychedelic drugs in Dylan’s lyrics, along with general observations and evocations of a Beat-ish bohemian life in songs such as “On the Road Again.”

  In 1965 the Wilentzes moved their bookstore across the street to number 17. It gave them even more space to fill with an estimated sixty thousand titles, though old-timers missed the atmosphere of the original, funkier location. Ted sold out his interest in the store to Eli in 1967 but continued a long career in selling and publishing books almost up to his death in 2001. In the 1970s escalating rents forced out many older establishments on and around Eighth Street, often to be supplanted by chain stores of one sort or another, from Blimpie to B. Dalton Bookseller. Eli Wilentz hung on despite pressures to move and to unionize his staff; when a fire gutted the store in 1976, rumors of arson circulated. He reopened it that year, then closed it for good in 1979.

  A CENTRAL TENET OF DYLAN LORE FOR YEARS WAS THAT HE single-handedly rang the death knell for acoustic folk music with his electrified set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. It’s true that Newport was the debut of yet another new phase, Dylan the folk rocker (a term he hated but it fits), and that he did shock and dismay the folk purists in the audience, including Pete Seeger. But he’d been upsetting the purists for over a year by then with his turn away from protest songs. And it was 1965. The ascendancy of rock was a given everywhere in the Western world except, perhaps, at the Newport Folk Festival. And even there, two of the acts that preceded Dylan’s set that summer were the Chambers Brothers and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, both of whom went over very well with the younger people in the audience. Young listeners had been rocking to the electrified “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm” since Bringing It All Back Home came out that spring. “Like a Rolling Stone,” which had been released as a single a few days before the festival, would soon be a huge hit. Despite its then outrageous six-minute length it would be ubiquitous on pop radio for the rest of the summer and reach number two on the charts (just behind the Beatles’ ”Help!”).

  It was another smart career move for Dylan, and again Grossman had a behind-the-scenes hand in it. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band hadn’t shown up at the festival uninvited: their manager, like Dylan’s, was festival honcho Grossman. Alan Lomax, who was on the festival’s organizing committee, had preceded them with an introduction so patronizing and insulting that he and Grossman came to blows backstage. When it was his turn to go on, Dylan appeared with members of Butterfield’s band—but not, tellingly, the star Butterfield himself—to play ragged, effectively unrehearsed renditions of some of his new electrified songs, including the interminable-seeming “Rolling Stone.” The purists in the audience booed the songs, but it’s said that many of the younger people in the crowd were in fact booing the sound system, which wasn’t set up to handle rock, and the loosey-goosey performance. Still, Seeger, Lomax, and the other, older purists had good reason to be upset. Dylan was making it very clear that he was done with the whole folk scene. Their golden boy was thumbing his nose at them at their most hallowed event.

  Dylan was far from the only former Village folksinger who went electric in 1965. At the same time that Bringing It All Back Home was released, the Byrds released an electrified version of his “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which became a chart-topping hit, as did their debut album that summer. Members Jim McGuinn and David Crosby had been Village folkies. The Lovin’ Spoonful also emerged from the Village. The quartet was two guys from Long Island, Steve Boone and Joe Butler, and two Village folkies, Zal Yanovsky and John Sebastian. Sebastian had grown up in the Village, with Woody Guthrie and others dropping in on his parents. They honed their act playing regularly at the Night Owl on Bleecker Street, a narrow space with a stage so tiny Butler had to set up his drums on the floor. In August 1965 the Spoonful released its first Top 10 hit, “Do You Believe in Magic?” Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, boyhood friends from Queens, had been on the Village folk scene since 1963. In the fall of 1965 a mildly rockish rerecording of their Dylanesque folk song “Sounds of Silence”—which had flopped when released in a straight acoustic version the previous year—became a smash hit. The Mamas and the Papas released their first records in 1965 as well. Three of the four—John Phillips, Cass Elliot, and Denny Doherty—originally met while living and making folk music in the Village.

  This helps explain why Dylan exasperatedly threw Ochs out of his limo that year. By 1965 it was a little late to expect Bob Dylan to go back to singing one of his Baez-era civil rights songs like “The Death of Emmett Till.” Ochs himself would soon change his style anyway, recording lush folk pop with orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks and others. They were some of his best studio recordings, but the folk purists, still reeling from Dylan’s defection, were disappointed in him. In 1970 Ochs bizarrely appeared to embrace rock and roll, wearing an Elvis-tribute gold lamé suit onstage before hostile audiences who missed the irony. By then he was in serious personal crisis, an alcoholic caroming through the wild mood swings of a manic depression he inherited from his father. He was disillusioned with the country and disappointed that he never achieved the stardom he felt he deserved. In the end he sank into madness and black depression and hanged himself in 1976 at the age of thirty-five.

  The photographer Bob Gruen (no relation to John Gruen) took his first official concert photos at Newport in July 1965. He’d grown up on Long Island and had just made his first move into the Village that June at the age of nineteen. Despite having no professional credentials, he talked the festival into a press pass and had worked his way to the front of the crowd when Dylan came on stage for his electric set. Looking back, Gruen has said that this was one of the days that changed not only his own life but all of pop culture.

  Gruen and a friend shared an apartment in the Italian South Village, on Sullivan Street just down the block from the Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua. Their first night in the apartment was the start of the annual St. Anthony’s festival, then a rollicking ten-day street party and carnival that ended with the procession. “I thought it was a great way to welcome the new neighbors,” Gruen recalled. “The next ten days we just ran outside with plates and got clams and sausages and sat on the fire escape and watched the bands playing across the street.”

  Gruen remembers that there was still a lot of folk music in the Village that summer of 1965. His favorite acoustic group at the time was the Holy Modal Rounders, the duo Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, who made a raucous
brand of folk and jug band music with humorous lyrics. “They played the Gaslight all the time. They were outrageous.” Once he was walking down MacDougal Street, having just bought the latest Dylan album on Eighth Street, when he bumped into Dylan himself, who was getting into a waiting limo outside the Kettle of Fish. Gruen was excited; Dylan “looked perturbed.”

  Robert Heide witnessed a tense scene inside the Kettle of Fish that year, a confrontation between a characteristically grumbly Dylan and a characteristically passive Andy Warhol over the poor little rich girl Edie Sedgwick. She came from New England aristocracy that went back to the Revolution but had grown up on a vast ranch in California where her father psychologically brutalized his offspring; she went through a couple of mental institutions, and a brother, also institutionalized, hanged himself. She’d come to New York in ’64 with a huge inheritance to burn and an inchoate notion of becoming a fashion model. Pretty in a perfectly sixties pixie way, broken and born to be wild, she captivated Andy at a party. She was soon appearing in Andy’s films and on his arm constantly in public, his beard against the homophobia that was still rife in the media. It didn’t last long. The more bored and frustrated she got with Andy’s filmmaking style and Factory life in general, the more of an irritating and emotionally explosive handful she became.

  Then Bobby Neuwirth, Dylan’s right-hand man, arranged for him to meet Edie one night at the Kettle of Fish. For a short time they were an item, though evidently more a business union than a romantic one. From “Just Like a Woman,” thought to be about her, it’s not clear he ever even liked her. Dylan and Warhol used Edie as a fragile bridge between their giant egos, while she had an agenda of her own. Dylan mulled over borrowing some of Andy’s art world cachet; Andy thought it would be great for his film business to put Dylan in a movie; and Edie wanted Albert Grossman to manage her. None of them got what they wanted, although Dylan, typically, got more out of it all than the other two.

  Heide was at the Factory the day Dylan showed up for a screen test. After three minutes of fidgeting and glaring peevishly into the camera he got up, walked over to one of Warhol’s Double Elvis silkscreens, and said he’d take it as payment. As the infamously stingy Warhol cringed and blushed, Dylan and Neuwirth hauled the large work into the Factory’s elevator and vanished with it. He later traded it to Grossman for a sofa.

  Andy had asked Heide to write a screenplay for Edie, The Death of Lupe Velez. One night Heide went to meet Andy at the Kettle of Fish to talk about it. Edie was there alone when he arrived. Then Andy showed up, acting shy and nervous as always. It seemed that Andy was hoping for a rapprochement with Edie, using Heide as a buffer. But when Dylan appeared, looking sullen and unhappily surprised to see Warhol in “his” bar, a tense and almost silent contest of wills ensued. Dylan and Warhol were crossing swords over Edie. Dylan as usual played the aggressor; Warhol was his usual public self, passive and wilting. After a short while Dylan stood up and growled to Edie, “Let’s split.” She left with him. She’d made her choice, though it wouldn’t do her much good. Dylan soon dropped her, Grossman never picked her up, and she and Andy drifted apart as well.

  Heide walked out with Andy, and at Andy’s request they strolled over to Cornelia Street to look up at the window where Freddie Herko, who’d appeared in some of Andy’s early films, had done his swan dive. Standing on that corner more than forty-five years later Heide, imitating Warhol’s breathy vocal flutter, recalled that Andy said, “Gee, I wonder if Edie will commit suicide. I hope she lets us film it.” She didn’t. She died of an accidental overdose in 1971, at the age of twenty-eight.

  By 1966 Bob Dylan had left Greenwich Village, and left as well a lot of grumbling former friends and colleagues behind. They felt that he’d used them as stepping-stones on his scramble to the top and dropped them as soon as he’d gotten what he needed from them. He retorted with the put-down of “Positively 4th Street.” By then he’d been distancing himself, physically and psychologically, for a couple years at least, on the road, out in California with Baez, and up the Hudson in and around Woodstock, a country outpost for Villagers since the golden age. Grossman had introduced him to it, and in 1966 he found a home there for his family. For the next few years he’d hole up in Woodstock with his wife, Sara Lownds, whom he’d met while breaking away from Baez. But he’d be back.

  ROCK WAS THE REASON GRUEN’S TIME ON SULLIVAN STREET LASTED only a few months. “We met a couple of guys on the street who started rehearsing with my roommate and formed a band called the Justice League. They used to rehearse in the apartment during the day. The Italian neighbors greatly resented that we weren’t working and were making noise day and night. We had a big party on our last night—we were moving out in September because we hadn’t paid the rent since moving in. Unfortunately the party was the last straw for the neighbors. They burned down my car. I remember the firemen and the landlord coming up to my door at two in the morning.”

  As the 1960s progressed, music in the Village was less and less folk, more and more rock. Sometimes it was a unique hybrid. The Village Fugs, soon known simply as the Fugs, were not quite folk, not quite rock, not quite even a band, more an anarchic hippie-Yippie-beatnik-peacenik jug band carnival and Happening. In a sense they were a bridge, albeit a crooked one, linking the folk 1950s to the rock 1960s. The poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg began forming the group in the East Village late in 1964. Kupferberg was forty-one and already a Beat hero, publisher of the poetry magazine Yeah and a figure in Ginsberg’s “Howl”—the one who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten.” In truth it was actually the Manhattan Bridge Tuli jumped off in a failed suicide attempt in 1945, and it left him severely injured and hospitalized. Sanders was twenty-five and publisher of his own magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, for which he was unsuccessfully tried on obscenity charges. Kupferberg borrowed the group’s name from the euphemism Norman Mailer had been forced to invent in The Naked and the Dead, which struck him as funny in a mordant way. A lot of things struck Kupferberg funny that way, as was evident in his songs, his poetry, his cartoons, and his deadpan wisecracks in person. Where the younger Sanders was the quintessential East Village hippie peacenik, Kupferberg was a Greenwich Village bohemian and closer to Brother Theodore in his deeply Jewish, balefully humorous nihilism; two of his best songs were titled “Nothing” and “Defeated.”

  The two Holy Modal Rounders joined them, along with Ken Weaver, who, according to legend, had been the first bearded, long-haired proto-hippie in the East Village, before the word “hippie” had any currency on the East Coast. Weaver had previously been kicked out of the army for writing a poem about wanting to have sex with Jackie Kennedy.

  The Fugs played their first gig at Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher meat shop on East Tenth Street, in 1965. When they recorded their first album that year it was, fittingly, with Moe Asch and Harry Smith. Asch, by then sixty years old and broke as always, had just signed a licensing agreement with MGM’s Verve label to form Verve/Folkways. For MGM it was an entrée to the exploding folk-rock scene and for Asch a way to release potentially commercial records that might not have fit in the Folkways roster. Smith brought the Fugs to him. They recorded The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction in two long, anarchic sessions, with Smith as producer. Kupferberg would later remember Smith going into drunken rages as the sessions rambled on and smashing liquor bottles against the studio walls. Kupferberg dedicated “Nothing” to him.

  As the counterculture and antiwar movements spread through the rest of the decade, the Fugs served, as Kupferberg later put it, as “the USO for the left. We played more benefits than any band I know.” When the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967 the Fugs were there to provide the soundtrack. Surprising even them, their records became hits. When they toured Europe, Fleetwood Mac opened for them. Ed Sanders graced the cover of Life in 1967 and was invited to be a
guest on Johnny Carson’s show, but he turned it down when the network wouldn’t allow the Fugs to perform “Kill for Peace” on the air. Like so many bohemian heroes before them, the Fugs experienced the downsides of their brief fame and success. Sanders received death threats and was once mailed a fake homemade bomb because he had sold out “The Revolution.” The FBI investigated them. Atlantic Records, which had signed them in a heady fit of experimentation that included releasing an LP of Ginsberg reading “Kaddish,” abruptly dropped them and shelved an album they’d recorded. Feeling that their cultural moment was passing, Sanders broke up the band at the end of the 1960s.

  Through it all the Fugs had remained hometown heroes in the East Village and in Greenwich Village, where they played the short-lived Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street and the opening of Izzy Young’s newly relocated Folklore Center on Sixth Avenue; most notably, the group enjoyed a long and very successful run, more than seven hundred performances, at the Players Theatre on MacDougal Street beginning in the summer of 1966. Jimi Hendrix was playing downstairs at the Cafe Wha?, the Mothers of Invention were up on Bleecker Street, and the Fugs’ audiences were peppered with theater and film stars such as Peter O’Toole, Kim Novak, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Burton.