The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  The Fugs periodically regrouped from the mid-1980s on and performed up until Kupferberg suffered two strokes in 2009 that laid him up in his Sixth Avenue apartment. He died, at age eighty-six, in 2010.

  ANOTHER NEW BAND IN 1965 WAS FUSING GENRES, CREATING A sound like no other band playing in the Village or anywhere else at the time. The Velvet Underground, named for the 1963 book about wife-swapping, key clubs, and other underground sex practices in America, was a jarring mash of screeching rock, highbrow avant-garde drone music, S&M references, and heroin chic. At the end of 1965 they were about to add Pop art to the mix. Lead singer and songwriter Lou Reed was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and grew up on Long Island loving rock and roll and R&B and hating the suburbs. As a teenager he was such a malcontent and misfit his parents tried electroconvulsive shock therapy to straighten him out. He spent his college years at Syracuse University, where Delmore Schwartz took him under his wing, and then moved to a tiny apartment on Ludlow Street and got a job writing and recording novelty songs for the budget record label Pickwick, fronting knockoff bands with names like the Roughnecks and the Beachnuts.

  When Pickwick threw together a band called the Primitives, John Cale was recruited mainly on the basis of his long hair. He was a Welsh musician who’d come to New York to study minimalism with downtown composers John Cage and La Monte Young. Reed’s songs were minimalist ditties in their own way, and since he and Cale were both twenty-two, living on the Lower East Side, and into heroin, they bonded. Inspired by Bob Dylan’s new mix of poetry and rock, Reed started writing dark, serious songs about street life and junk. With the rhythm guitarist Sterling Morrison and the resolutely deadpan Maureen “Moe” Tucker on drums they became the Velvet Underground. In December 1965 they started what was supposed to be a two-week run at the Cafe Bizarre. The harsh wall of noise they generated drove most customers out and got them fired, but not before Andy Warhol’s friend Gerard Malanga caught their act and was moved to jump up and do an impromptu “whip dance” that became a regular feature of their shows.

  Malanga and Andy’s filmmaking partner Paul Morrissey brought Andy to the Cafe Bizarre. Having struck out with Dylan, Andy was convinced to invite the Velvets up to the Factory, where he could film them rehearsing. In 1966 he added the statuesque German goddess Nico for visual appeal and a hint of Weimar decadence and installed them at his Exploding Plastic Inevitable on St. Marks Place. They went on to be one of the most influential bands in rock history.

  PERHAPS THE GREATEST ROCK GUITARIST OF ALL TIME WAS DISCOVERED at Cafe Wha? in 1966. Named Johnny Allen Hendrix by his mother at birth in 1942—his father legally changed it to James Marshall later on—Jimi Hendrix grew up in Seattle, learning to play guitar left-handed, before enlisting in the 101st Airborne. Discharged in 1962, he went straight into music, touring the chitlin’ circuit with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, learning stage gimmicks from other guitarists, playing with his teeth or behind his back. He settled in New York in late 1964, living in fleabag Times Square hotels, working odd jobs, selling drugs, hocking his Stratocaster and amp when he couldn’t pay his bills, and haunting clubs from Harlem to midtown to the Village. He was impressed with the way Dylan had risen from the Village folk clubs to international stardom and encouraged by the fact that Dylan was, like he felt himself to be, a “sloppy” singer.

  In 1966 Hendrix wandered into a club near his Times Square hotel called the African Room, on West Forty-fourth Street. On stage he saw a tall, muscular black man in a black leotard, boots with eight-inch heels, and a spider monkey on his shoulder, doing a voodoo-inspired dance in front of a rock band. Mike Quashie had come to New York from Trinidad in 1959, earning brief but heady fame as the Limbo King. He performed at parties for Jackie Kennedy and appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show. Life ran a photo of him limboing under a pole held just seven inches above the floor. But by ’66 limbo was long dead and he was now blending exotic dancing, voodoo, and fire eating as the Spider King. He was also a fixture in Greenwich Village, where he would occupy a one-bedroom apartment on Bedford Street from 1966 until 2009, when he moved to an assisted living facility in the Bronx. As an idol and mentor to young rockers, he’s been credited with influencing the stage acts of KISS, Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, and David Bowie and opened for Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden in 1970.

  When they met, Jimi was still going as Jimmy James. “I teased him about his vaselined hair,” Quashie told the Hendrix biographer Jerry Hopkins in the 1980s. Hendrix was wearing it long, straightened and conked in an old-fashioned Little Richard pompadour. “Sometimes I’d call him J.C., for Jimmy Coon.” Under Quashie’s tutelage, Hendrix let his hair grow out in an afro, started wearing big jewelry and Gypsy scarves, and incorporated voodoo and fire in his act. Hendrix would often sleep on Quashie’s couch, using his apartment as a Village anchor and, later, as a place to hide from groupies and hangers-on.

  In the summer of 1966 Jimmy James and the Blue Flames played an afternoon audition at Cafe Wha?, the same basement where Dylan had first played five years earlier. His band wasn’t much but Jimmy’s playing impressed the owners, and he was soon gigging there five nights a week. Chas Chandler, the Animals bassist who was quitting the band to become a producer, caught Jimmy’s act on a visit to New York. He was so impressed that he whisked Hendrix to London almost overnight. In a whirlwind few months Chandler and his partner Mike Jeffery introduced Jimmy to all the British rock royalty, changed his name to Jimi, put together his new band the Experience, and had his first single, “Hey Joe,” on the British charts by January 1967. Are You Experienced was released in May, and Hendrix wowed the Monterey Pop Festival that June, less than a year after the afternoon audition at Cafe Wha? Following a disastrous but at least brief tour opening for the Monkees, Jimi released his second album, Axis: Bold As Love, toward the end of 1967, toured England and Europe, and headlined his first U.S. tour in 1968.

  New York became his home base again that spring. He drifted like a Gypsy from his suites in midtown hotels to Quashie’s couch to various girls’ apartments. Meanwhile, he began the laborious process of piecing together his third album in the brand-new Record Plant recording studio on West Forty-fourth Street. In his mid-twenties, Hendrix was living his rock godhood to the hilt, indulging in innumerable girls and massive quantities of drugs and alcohol. But he was already bored with performing his hits and stage gimmicks of the previous year, and the demands of superstardom depressed him. At Record Plant he noodled for weeks and weeks, with many guest musicians, gradually creating the sprawling, messy double album Electric Ladyland, released in the fall. The album was a musical and commercial triumph, greeted with a level of fanfare usually accorded only new albums by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan. Ladyland included his cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” which as a single became his only Top 20 hit in the United States.

  As brilliant as much of it was, Ladyland is also the sound of a young man lost in a fog of drugs. Hendrix drove both Chandler and his bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell away in the process of making that album and ran up a crushing bill besides. Mike Jeffery suggested that in the future it might be cheaper for Hendrix to record in a studio of his own. They chose a spot in the Village, in the basement at 52 West Eighth Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street. Upstairs was the Eighth Street Playhouse. The Village Barn, with its square dances and hoedowns, had been in the basement from the 1920s through the ’50s; in the 1960s a rock club Jimi liked, the Generation Club, replaced it. Generation had just closed when Jimi and Jeffery took the spot for his new studio. Flooding from the Minetta Brook and the vibrations from the subway station just half a block away slowed the construction, which took thirteen months and cost a million dollars.

  Without doubt the strangest story told about Jimi and the Village starts a few blocks away, in the legendary 1 Sheridan Square building. In 1967 the club impresario Bradley Pierce opened a disco there, Salvation. Pierce had previously run several very hip clubs around Manhatta
n, including the midtown spot Ondine, at the foot of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, where Jimi had briefly worked as a busboy when he first moved to the city. Like Ondine, Salvation attracted the crème of hip café society, including the Beatles and the Stones, and swinging foreign royalty such as King Hussein of Jordan. Richard Roundtree, aka John Shaft, was a doorman there. So was Mike Quashie. By the time Jimi started hanging out in Salvation in 1969 Pierce had sold the club to a wealthy but inexperienced new owner from Queens, Robert “Bobby” Woods. Woods floundered. He somehow lost his liquor license, the celebrities moved on, and drug dealers moved in. As happened in so many Village clubs, the mob came calling, forcing Woods to hire a couple of their boys. They showed up at the club only to collect their paychecks, so Woods had to hire other help to cover for them.

  Hemorrhaging cash to the mob, Woods decided a switch from disco to live music might save the club. With the help of Mike Jeffery, he convinced Jimi to play a gig there one night in September 1969 with his new post-Experience trio. Though the 250-seat crowd responded lukewarmly to Jimi’s set of all new material—no pyrotechnics or flash, just the more serious jazz-funk vein he was then exploring—Jimi enjoyed himself. He also, according to Hopkins, enjoyed all the free-flowing cocaine Woods made available to him.

  Different versions of what happened that night after the gig have circulated over the decades since. In Hopkins’s telling, Jimi left Salvation with a couple of guys looking to score some coke, which makes little sense since apparently it was very easy to get inside the club. His companions were reputedly unconnected young wannabe gangsters out to prove themselves to the mob, which they tried to do by kidnapping Hendrix. They held him first in a Little Italy apartment and then moved him to the country house he’d rented upstate—near Woodstock, as it happens. They demanded that Jeffery and his new partner Jerry Morrison sign over management of Jimi to them or they’d kill him. Several days passed before Jeffery and Morrison, with the backing of the Mafia, secured Jimi’s release. He was unharmed. No report was ever filed with the NYPD or the FBI. A rumor spread that the weird affair was a hoax staged by Jeffery and Morrison to appear as heroes in Jimi’s eyes.

  Whether or not it’s true, the story has a sad factual coda: Bobby Woods closed the club that November. The following February he was found in a street in Queens, with two bullets in his head, two in his chest, and one in his jaw.

  Electric Lady Studios was completed in the summer of 1970. Mike Quashie played host at the opening press party in August while Hendrix, increasingly drug-addled and depressed, mostly hid in an office. Hendrix flew the next morning to England to play the Isle of Wight rock festival and some dates in Europe. Before he went, he left a couple of trunks of his things and a bathrobe at Quashie’s apartment.

  He never came back for them. He died of an apparent drug overdose in London on September 18. Electric Lady is still in operation on Eighth Street as of this writing.

  27

  Lenny Bruce and Valerie Solanas

  LENNY BRUCE IS A DISEASE OF AMERICA . . . A PEARL MISCAST BEFORE SWINE.

  —Kenneth Tynan

  IN APRIL 1964, LENNY BRUCE MANAGED TO GET HIMSELF BUSTED for obscenity twice in one week, and in one location: the Café Au Go Go, Howard and Ella Solomon’s new coffeehouse in the basement at 152 Bleecker Street, across from the Bitter End. He got the Solomons busted as well. Getting arrested was almost routine for Bruce by 1964. He’d been doing it regularly since 1961. His comedy had made him, effectively, an enemy of the state.

  Born Leonard Alfred Schneider on Long Island in 1925, he was raised by his divorced mom, a dance instructor and performer, and by various relatives. He ran away from home at sixteen and volunteered for the navy at seventeen, in 1942. After three years of action in the Atlantic he’d had enough war; he dressed up in a female officer’s uniform to get a psychiatric discharge. He got his start in showbiz in 1947, emceeing for his mother and appearing in rigged amateur-hour shows at clubs like George’s Corner in the Village, earning two dollars a night plus carfare. In 1951 he married Honey Harlow, a redheaded stripper he met in Baltimore. While they were both performing in Miami he came up with a scheme to earn enough cash so that she might quit the business. He created a legal foundation and, dressed as a priest, went door to door in Palm Beach soliciting donations for a leper colony in British Guiana. He later joked that he first considered bronchitis, cholera, and the clap before reading an article about lepers. After a week he had raised eight thousand dollars. He was arrested but since the foundation existed on paper, and he had in fact sent twenty-five hundred dollars to Guiana—pocketing the rest as administration fees—he was found not guilty.

  After a terrible car accident that nearly killed them both, he gave up the priest gag and they headed for Los Angeles. Honey went back to stripping while he worked as a comic and emcee in what he called “burlesque shithouses” and “toilets.” It was in these joints that he started going to any excess to get a rise out of his audience, “working blue,” as comedians said back then, adding sex jokes and profanities to his routines, once throwing a whipped cream pie in the face of a heckler, on another occasion strolling out on stage dressed only in socks and shoes. Meanwhile his behavior offstage got out of hand. Bruce loved partying with the guys in the band, he loved his hookers and strippers, he loved his drugs, and he indulged himself fully. A bit like Elvis, he found doctor fans who willingly gave him prescriptions for uppers and painkillers and his jazz musician pals hooked him up with junk.

  Bruce and Honey’s tumultuous, drug-impaired marriage split up shortly after the birth of their daughter, Kitty, in 1955. In 1957 he moved up the coast to North Beach, the Left Coast’s Left Bank, and graduated from burlesque to legitimate nightclubs. He debuted a new act at Ann’s 440, a cabaret popular with gays and lesbians, where Johnny Mathis got his start. It happened to be just around the corner from City Lights. The same year that Ferlinghetti was winning his Howl trial Bruce began pushing his own free speech rights, becoming the man Time dubbed “the high priest of the sick comedians.” Other satirists of the late 1950s—Mort Sahl, Jean Shepherd, Tom Lehrer, Nichols and May—teased Americans about their shortcomings and foibles. They kept their patter light and their jokes clean. Bruce not only used forbidden language, he pushed America’s buttons about sex, race, religion, violence. He tipped sacred cows all over the cultural landscape. He made fun of the pope and Oral Roberts, observed that Eleanor Roosevelt had nice tits, depicted the Lone Ranger wanting to schtup Tonto and Silver, conjugated the verb “to come” to a jazz beat, and interrupted his routine to ask the audience “Are there any niggers here tonight?” He declared that two people having sex was never obscene; Hiroshima was obscene. He poked liberals and conservatives, squares and hipsters. He made some people laugh but he made a lot of others uncomfortable and angry. “Constant, abrasive irritation produces the pearl: it is a disease of the oyster,” the theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in his foreword to Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, published by Playboy Press in 1965. “Lenny Bruce is a disease of America . . . a pearl miscast before swine.” It’s no coincidence that Bruce emerged at around the same time as Elvis, the Beats, and Sputnik. Like Elvis, he represented a rebellion against sexual repression and was seen as dangerous and “dirty.” Like the Beats, he loved jazz, spontaneous riffing, and lots of drugs. And like Sputnik he startled the government into hostile reaction.

  In 1961 police working a tip entered his hotel room in Philadelphia, saw a fair amount of drugs and syringes lying around, and arrested him. A week later, out on bail, he was back in San Francisco, at a club called the Jazz Workshop, where he was arrested for using the word “cocksucker.” He was hauled to jail, saw the night judge, the club owner posted his bail, and he was back onstage in time for his one a.m. show. A jury later found him not guilty but it was just the beginning. Between then and his Cafe Au Go Go gig in 1964 he was arrested four times on obscenity charges in Los Angeles, where one of his lawyers was Melvin Be
lli and one of his prosecutors was Johnnie Cochran; once for possession of narcotics in LA; and once for obscenity in Chicago. He was also refused permission to perform in Canada and in Detroit, banned from Australia (after he walked on stage in Sydney, declared, “What a fucking wonderful audience,” and was instantly arrested), and turned away from England. With a few exceptions—Ralph Gleason in San Francisco, Nat Hentoff in New York—the media portrayed him as a dirty-mouthed drug addict. Club gigs began to dry up, his record sales slumped, and his bills escalated, as did his drug use. By the time he opened at the Café Au Go Go at the end of March 1964 he was broke, paranoid, exhausted, strung out, and his health was failing.

  The Solomons had only just opened their Parisian-themed coffeehouse that February. He was a stockbroker and she was a fashion designer. Booking Bruce was a bold act. In advance of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, New York City had launched extensive campaigns to clean itself up for the tourists. The NYPD executed Operation Pornography and arrested more than one hundred and fifty sellers of pornographic materials, mostly in and around Times Square. The city’s clergy pitched in; Operation Yorkville, a movement founded by a priest, a rabbi, and a minister (which sounds like the start of a Lenny Bruce routine), organized sting operations against sellers of lewd reading materials to minors, which included sending a sixteen-year-old girl into a bookstore, where she was allowed to buy a copy of Fanny Hill, classed as obscene at the time. Her mother filed a complaint and the bookstore was prosecuted. At one point the founding priest went on a fast to pressure Mayor Wagner to pursue obscenity violations more vigorously. Cardinal Spellman got into the act. The mayor appointed an antipornography commission. The city bore down on strip clubs, nightclubs, cabarets, and bars, with a special emphasis on those believed to cater to gay or lesbian clientele or featuring drag shows. There was even a new coffeehouse law enacted with the specific purpose of reining in those scruffy bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village and the East Village. Under this law, poetry readings were defined as entertainment, which required the hated cabaret license. While the Solomons were opening their coffeehouse in February, the Cafe Le Metro over in the East Village was being issued a summons for hosting unlicensed literary events. Allen Ginsberg led a protest and in March a judge overturned the law.