The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Weberman, Abbie Hoffman, and the street singer David Peel formed the Dylan Liberation Front to free Dylan from his decadent stardom so he could return to “the movement.” For Dylan’s thirtieth birthday on May 24, 1971, they gathered a crowd the Voice estimated at around three hundred in front of the town house, chanting “Free Bob Dylan! Free Bob Dylan!” Dylan was in Israel that day. By the time Weberman produced a birthday cake with candles painted to look like syringes, Dylan fans on the scene tried to break things up. Among them was Al Aronowitz, who despised Weberman despite having concluded that Dylan was, in his words, “a prick.” The pro- and anti-Dylan factions scuffled; someone smashed the cake and knocked Weberman’s glasses off. Cops showed up and arrested a guy as the crowd now chanted “Pigs! Pigs!” The birthday party was the last straw for Dylan. Weberman claims that sometime after that Dylan rode up to him on a bicycle on Elizabeth Street, tore his “Free Bob Dylan” button off his jacket, and knocked him to the sidewalk. Weberman admits he had it coming.

  It didn’t knock the obsession out of him. As late as 2009 Weberman was still hounding Dylan with books like RightWing Bob, in which he accuses Dylan of being anti-Semitic, a Holocaust denier, and racist. As a cofounder of an entity called the Jewish Defense Organization, he lobbed similar accusations at other Jews. He also cowrote Coup D’Etat in America, a Kennedy conspiracy book, and wrote a diatribe against former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani with the entertaining title Homothug, accusing him of being a closeted homosexual whose longtime lover was “a defrocked Catholic cleric and child rapist.”

  In the early 1970s Lucian Truscott was renting a second-floor loft at Houston and Sullivan Streets for two hundred dollars a month. “When I got this place people said to me, ‘God, how are you going to make the rent?’ That was considered outrageous. Most of my friends lived in forty-and fifty-dollar-a-month rent-controlled apartments on the Lower East Side. Or there were people who had been in New York longer who were in rent-controlled Village apartments, and they’re paying less than a hundred dollars. And I went, ‘Yeah I know, two hundred dollars is a lot. I’m gonna have to hustle.’ ”

  Dylan’s practice studio was on the ground floor next door. “There was this uninsulated Sheetrock wall between the first-floor lobby of my building and his studio, and he had his piano right up against that wall. He used to sit down at that piano and write. I’d get up at around eleven in the morning and go across the street to the newsstand, which was next to Joe’s Dairy, and get the Times, and I’d come back and hear him tinkling away on the piano. You could hear every word. I kept a folding chair down there and I would go back under the stairs, pull that chair up, and have my cup of coffee and read the Times and listen to him write. I heard him write songs for like three or four albums.”

  Dylan gave up on trying to live in the Village in 1973. He leased a secluded and secure complex in Malibu, where he could hide from his public in style among the movie stars and other celebrities. So he generated quite a buzz in the Village when he showed up again in June 1975, being driven around in a limo. Word spread that he was seeking musicians for a new touring ensemble. That June he caught his old pal Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at the Other End on Bleecker Street. Originally the Bitter End, a no-alcohol coffeehouse, it had recently gotten new management, a liquor license, and a new name. (It would later switch back to its old moniker.) Truscott wrote a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” about it. The first night Dylan sat quietly through Elliott’s set, then the two of them hung around together reminiscing until closing time. The second night was a nostalgic hootenanny. Dave Van Ronk, Bobby Neuwirth, and Dylan himself shared the stage with Elliott.

  Dylan also caught a performance by a newcomer, Patti Smith, at the Other End that month. They met backstage and he invited her to go on his planned tour with him. She had just put her band together and was planning to record her first LP in a couple of months, so she turned him down. In her 2010 memoir Just Kids, Smith recalls the first time she saw Jim Morrison and the Doors at the new Fillmore East, formerly the Village Theater, when it opened in 1968. Of Morrison she writes that she “observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness . . . I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.” Smith was twenty that year when she stepped off a bus in New York with a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her suitcase. She’d grown up working class outside of Philadelphia—her mom a waitress, her dad a factory worker, both Jehovah’s Witnesses—and came to New York to find the bohemian dream. She stayed at first with friends in Brooklyn, where she met Robert Mapplethorpe, a boy from Queens who was trying to make it as an artist. They were lovers until he realized he was gay, and they remained friends until he died. Together they prowled Greenwich Village, the East Village, the Chelsea Hotel, CBGB, and Max’s Kansas City. Smith met Ginsberg when he tried to pick her up at a Horn & Hardart automat, thinking she was a skinny boy. She met Harry Smith in the Chelsea and Bobby Neuwirth; Neuwirth suggested turning her poems into songs over a drink at El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant and bar next door. She met Jimi Hendrix at the opening of Electric Lady and the Warhol crowd at Max’s. She and Sam Shepard became lovers, cowriting and performing the play Cowboy Mouth together. She met the guitarist Lenny Kaye when he worked behind the counter at Village Oldies, the record store on Bleecker Street (later Bleecker Bob’s). He began backing her up at poetry readings and the band evolved from there.

  In September 1975 Smith and her band went into the studio to record their first LP with Smith’s producer of choice, another hero, John Cale. As it turned out they didn’t get along well. Cale’s heroin use was out of control at the time. He nodded out early into one of their gigs and spent the remainder of it throwing up. Another time, when Smith explained to him her lofty vision for the album, he reportedly replied, “Patti, you’re full of shit.”

  Dylan, meanwhile, had used the Other End as an informal after-hours spot to put together some of the caravan-load of musicians he’d gathered for what became the Rolling Thunder Revue. (Operation Rolling Thunder had been the official name of the sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the war.) Truscott, who was friendly with the Other End’s house band Jake and the Family Jewels, has fond memories of hanging out there after closing time and listening as Dylan, the Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, T-Bone Burnett, and others jammed and rehearsed.

  IN 1971 JOHN LENNON AND YOKO OKO MOVED TO THE VILLAGE too. They took a small basement apartment at 105 Bank Street, a nondescript cube of a house near the corner of Greenwich Street. Yoko had come to New York after World War II, attending Sarah Lawrence College, then becoming part of the downtown arts scene, participating in Happenings, working with John Cage and La Monte Young. In 1965 she and Lion’s Head regular Val Avery starred in a no-budget B movie called Satan’s Bed about an innocent Japanese woman who comes to New York and gets caught in a drug war. She met Lennon in London and they married in 1969. When the Beatles broke up she took an awful beating from the British fans and press and longed to return to New York, which she referred to as “the motherland.” Evidently the change of scenery suited Lennon as well. The whole neighborhood buzzed about the ex-Beatle moving in, and at first no one intruded. “I’m just known enough to keep me ego floating, but unknown enough to get around, which is nice,” Lennon said of his life in New York.

  Photographer Bob Gruen lived a two-minute stroll away. After being kicked out of his Sullivan Street apartment in 1965 he’d bounced around various parts of the city, then moved back to the Village with his wife in 1970. He was still living in the same building in the 2010s. He’d stayed all those years because it was the Westbeth Center for the Arts and, as the saying in the Village goes, once you get an apartment in Westbeth the only way you leave is feet first.

  Westbeth is a giant compound of five former industrial buildings, thirteen stories high in places, taking up a square block from West to Washington Streets between Bethune and Bank. It was Western Electric/Bell Laboratories’ headquarters from the 1920s into the ’60s. When Bell
left the Village as part of the general exodus of industries from Manhattan in the 1960s, the newly created National Endowment for the Arts and a private foundation acquired the site. Rents were subsidized at below-market rates. The original plan was for Westbeth to give struggling artists a foothold in the city; tenants would cycle out of the complex as their careers developed and they could afford other, nonsubsidized housing. But as real estate prices in the Village soared in subsequent years, Westbeth tenants held on to their spaces for dear life, while a long and fabled waiting list formed, with applicants waiting ten or fifteen years to get in. Westbeth has become what’s known in the elder care industry as a NORC—a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community—with an estimated 50 percent of the original tenants, now in their seventies and eighties, still in their spaces in 2011.

  On December 17, 1971, Gruen was at the Apollo Theater in Harlem to shoot a benefit concert for the families of the thirty-nine inmates and hostages killed in the Attica Correctional Facility riots of the previous September. John and Yoko made a surprise appearance; Gruen photographed while Lennon sang “Imagine” and “Attica State,” written not long after the riots. Lennon asked to see Gruen’s photos, so a few days later Gruen walked some of them over to 105 Bank Street and knocked on the door. He was surprised when Jerry Rubin answered and took the photos. Not a security guard, not a staff assistant, but the famed revolutionary. Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were acting, in effect, as the Lennons’ political advisers at the time, pushing them into radical and revolutionary causes and taking advantage of their celebrity status to give those causes more presence in the media. A week before their Apollo appearance, at Rubin’s urging, the Lennons had gone to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to headline a benefit concert for John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther Party and manager of the rock and revolution band MC5. Sinclair had gotten a ten-year jail sentence for carrying two sticks of marijuana. The Lennons’ very visible and vocal involvement in these events had the ill effect of making them targets of the FBI, as Gruen later experienced firsthand.

  David Peel, A. J. Weberman’s friend, was also an influence on the Lennons’ politics at the time. He and his generally out-of-tune acoustic guitar had been ubiquitous on the streets and in the parks of Greenwich Village and the East Village for a few years by the time the Lennons moved in. More a roving jester than a troubadour, he’d recorded a couple of albums with Jac Holzman’s Elektra Records, featuring rangy, goofy songs such as his paean to the Village, “I Do My Bawling in the Bathroom.” The Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg later suggested an alternate version, “I Do My Bathing in the Ballroom.”

  The Lennons became enamored of Peel the first time they heard him singing in Washington Square Park in 1971. He, John, and Yoko remained close friends for the rest of Lennon’s life. He appeared onstage with them at the John Sinclair benefit, and Lennon references him in the song “New York City.” Peel’s exuberantly loose-limbed approach to writing and playing music was a clear influence on the raw, very un-Beatles sound of Lennon’s early New York recordings. Lennon signed Peel to an Apple Records contract and produced his LP The Pope Smokes Dope, banned around the world on its release in 1972.

  In February 1972 Gruen photographed Lennon’s recording sessions with a Greenwich Village band, Elephant’s Memory, for what became the album Some Time in New York City. The sessions were at the midtown Record Plant, where Hendrix had labored over Electric Ladyland. He was soon hanging out at 105 Bank Street and became John and Yoko’s friend and in-house photographer through the 1970s, taking roll after roll of candid shots. The front room at Bank Street was an office but the Lennons spent most of their time in the back bedroom, taken up by a giant bed where they held court and a large television Lennon watched nonstop.

  The far west Village was still remote and quiet in the early 1970s. “When I moved here it was west of nowhere,” Gruen says. “I remember the first time I came trying to find the place, you go over to Sheridan Square and you start walking west, and you get to Eighth Avenue and there’s nothing except a couple of empty blocks, a few town houses or something. I couldn’t believe it was even farther, because the waterfront in those days was pretty deserted.” Tourists rarely ventured west of Seventh Avenue. For their first year or so in the Village, the Lennons luxuriated in the casual atmosphere and their semireclusive status. “What he liked about New York was people didn’t bother him as much as they did in other places,” Gruen recalls. “Like in England, with Beatlemania and the intense crush of press. Living in New York gave him a little break from that. If you live in New York you’re going to see a lot of celebrities, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to let them take your taxi. You’re busy too. You get where you’re going and say, ‘Hey, guess who I saw today.’ You don’t waste your afternoon trying to chase the guy. I think he really enjoyed the fact that he could rent a bicycle and go for a ride down Bleecker Street, walk over to Washington Square Park.” There were some restrictions on Lennon’s freedom. He’d draw a crowd if he went to a movie or grocery shopping, “but he thought that was okay. He could afford a servant to do his shopping for him.” Like Hendrix before him, Lennon built himself a recording studio in the Village, Butterfly Studios, on West Tenth Street near West Street, a quick four-block stroll south of Bank Street.

  As 1972 progressed, the Lennons’ address on Bank Street became more widely known and less viable as a home. “It was a nice apartment, but after they’d been here about a year it was way too public. People would just come up and ring the bell. I was visiting one time when an assistant came in and said, ‘There’s somebody at the door.’ They said, ‘Who is it?’ The assistant goes, ‘Well, it’s Jesus.’ And then he clarified, ‘Jesus from Toronto.’ John said, ‘We don’t know that one.’ ”

  And then there was the FBI. In 1972 the Nixon administration sought cause to revoke Lennon’s visa and deport him. Eighteen-year-olds had gotten the vote and Nixon, up for reelection, didn’t relish facing millions of radicalized Lennon fans that fall. Gruen remembers unmarked cars tailing him and Lennon all over Manhattan, and guys in fedoras and trench coats standing across the narrow Bank Street watching who went in and out. “They looked like G-men. It’s really kind of corny how typical it was and how easy to spot.” Still, Gruen says, “The fact the government would be looking at him just didn’t seem plausible. John and Yoko said, ‘We’re hearing clicks on the phone, we think the phone line is being tapped.’ People said, ‘Yeah, yeah, sure. What did you smoke?’ But in the ’60s we used to say that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.”

  By 1973, the same year Dylan left, life was no longer tenable for the Lennons in the Village. They moved up to the Dakota, the massive Victorian apartment building on the Upper West Side, with security, doormen, and a drive-in courtyard. Even there, Lennon couldn’t resist going for walks in Central Park, being polite to the gaggles of autograph hounds at the building’s entrance. That’s what he was doing on the night of December 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman, for whom he’d autographed a copy of his new album Double Fantasy, shot and killed him.

  David Peel’s LP John Lennon for President had come out earlier that year. Thirty years later he and his battered guitar could still be found on the streets of the unimaginably upscaled East Village, where he served, not unlike David Amram in Greenwich Village, as a living link to the neighborhood’s rowdier, more rambunctious past.

  ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER MOVED INTO WESTBETH AT THE SAME time Gruen did but she wasn’t there nearly as long. When she moved into Westbeth in 1970, Diane Arbus (pronounced Dee-ann) was the toast and the scourge of American photography. Her portraits of midgets, giants, fat ladies, tattooed ladies, transvestites, winos, nudists, corpses, identical triplets, bottled fetuses, and other “freaks” (her term) polarize viewers and reviewers to this day, some seeing them as compassionate and revelatory, others as exploitive and ghoulish.

  Her roots in the Village went back to her mother’s father, Frank Russek, a penniless Polish Jewish imm
igrant who sold peanuts on trains, ran a bookmaking operation, and then in 1897 opened a tiny fur shop at Fourteenth Street and University Place. By the 1910s Russeks Furs had grown to a posh shop on Fifth Avenue and made the family millionaires. Diane’s father, David Nemerov, married into the family business. Born in 1923, Diane grew up on the Upper West Side surrounded by maids, nannies, and chauffeurs. She went to the finest schools and most exclusive summer camps wealthy Jews could get their daughters into at the time. From early on she was aware that she lived in a bubble of privilege, “immune and exempt from circumstance,” isolated from the world where most other people lived and struggled. She took to wandering around the city, staring at people, especially those who were somehow impaired or crippled or in other ways marked by life. Later she’d use the camera “as a kind of license” to stare, she said. From early on she was also prone to bouts of deep melancholy that in adulthood manifested as manic-depressive mood swings.