White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  Lomax viewed commercial recordings as tainted by Mammon. At a dinner party in London in the late ’80s, I suggested to him that folklorists and record producers were both just professionals making a living by recording music for a targeted audience. His response was to invite me outside for a fist sandwich.

  I had arrived at Harvard with the same prejudices against folk music that I had against white blues singers. I bought tickets to a Joan Baez concert that first autumn only to please a girl I had just met. But the opening act was Eric Von Schmidt, and his astonishing renditions of Blind Willie Johnson songs lured me down to Club 47 on Mount Auburn Street to hear more. I liked the raffish atmosphere of the place, the eccentric musicians and the enigmatic girls who sat along the window ledge. Despite my best intentions, I became a folkie.

  The bearded Von Schmidt was a hero to the younger singers, a skilled painter of historical murals, world traveller and psychotropic adventurer. Living around Harvard Square were bluegrass virtuosi, balladeers, blues guitarists and ragtime experts. Returning after my semester working in California, I was assigned – by chance – the lower bunk in a dorm room with Tom Rush, a Von Schmidt- influenced singer who was fast becoming the pin-up boy of the local coffee-house circuit.

  Von Schmidt’s New York counterpart, by dint of Germanic surname and gruff-voiced blues style, was Dave Van Ronk. For me, Van Ronk had none of the lyricism of Von Schmidt and lacked his generosity of spirit. He was a hardcore communist who seemed drawn to the blues for its value as a political stance rather than the beauty of the form. Perhaps I am biased: Dave and his wife were sleeping on my sofa after an all-night poker game on 22 November, 1963. Woken by news of Kennedy’s assassination, he gloated about ‘chickens coming home to roost’ and went back to sleep.

  As the Boston scene grew and coffee houses and concerts proliferated, the business world made its presence felt. For regulars at Club 47, ‘music business’ meant Paul Rothchild. Rothchild had been a salesman for an independent record distributor, working the New England territory since the late 1950s. He wore a suit, carried a briefcase, and lit the odd joint while listening to jazz at home with his wife. In 1961, he made his first visit to Club 47 and soon became a regular.

  Paul had receding wavy blond hair and intelligent blue eyes. He ditched the suits in favour of fringed leather jackets and jeans and was among the first in Harvard Square to sport ‘fruit boots’ – ankle-high numbers with a zip on the side and a rakish heel. At first he looked like the out-of-place salesman he was, but the Harvard Square aesthetic was cool, never hyper, and he soon absorbed the elite aura of many of the musicians and their friends.

  Rothchild moved into a vacuum by recording Harvard Square favourites Bill Keith & Jim Rooney and the Charles River Valley Boys, pressing 500 copies of each LP and selling them to his local clients. He was out of stock within weeks and Prestige Records, a jazz outfit from New Jersey that had strayed into blues and folk, offered to buy the masters and make Paul head of their folk department. By 1963, he had moved to New York and was signing the best Cambridge talent for his new employers: Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt and Geoff Muldaur. Cool Cambridge wasn’t sure what to make of this. There was the excitement of seeing local boys making good, but was there a hint of anti-Semitism in the froideur towards this spurt of ambition and acumen? Many said they didn’t trust him and others openly resented his success.

  By 1963 I was sharing an off-campus apartment with Geoff, now lead singer with Boston’s most popular group, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, suddenly the object of a bidding war between labels. Their New York debut was jealously scouted by Greenwich Village rivals, the Even Dozen Jug Band, whose lead singer was the mysterious beauty from the Cornell Festival, Maria D’Amato. She heard Geoff sing one verse, turned to a friend and said, ‘I’m going to marry that guy.’ The fact that she threw up in his lap on their first date didn’t stop him swiping her from the Even Dozens and moving her into the Kweskin band as co-lead singer and into our apartment as his girlfriend. The Even Dozen broke up soon after, but its alumni went on to illustrious careers: John Sebastian with the Lovin’ Spoonful, Steve Katz with Blood, Sweat & Tears, Joshua Rifkin as a classical music scholar and producer and interpreter of Scott Joplin, Stefan Grossman as a blues guitarist and teacher, David Grisman as virtuoso mandolinist and collaborator with Jerry Garcia, and Peter Siegel as a recorder of ethnic music.

  The inter-city rivalry was rarely that overt. Pete Seeger’s first campus concert after his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, for example, was at Harvard, and I remember it as one of the greatest I’ve seen. But the fact that the Dylan phenomenon began in New York made us doubtful about him. Just another political songwriter, we thought. His first LP confirmed our suspicions: the original songs were of no great interest and his versions of traditional material derivative. If this was the best New York could come up with, our smug superiority was secure.

  On the night of the spring blizzard of 1963 there was a big party in Cambridge. Harvard Square was abuzz with visitors that week: the big folk labels – Vanguard, Elektra and Prestige – were all in town competing for local artists. I arrived late and remember seeing Joan Baez and Manny Greenhill in close conversation with Maynard Solomon from Vanguard in one corner, while Jac Holzman of Elektra plotted with Rothchild in another. The apartment was packed with guys in work shirts and jeans and girls in corduroy skirts and peasant blouses drinking jug wine from paper cups.

  Looking for a place to throw my coat before heading in search of a drink, I entered one of the tiny bedrooms. I could see two girls seated on the floor and heard a guitar being strummed behind the door. As I tossed my coat in a corner, a voice began singing:

  Oh where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

  Oh where have you been, my darling young one?

  I collapsed on to the floor as if I had been bludgeoned. For the length of the song I remained motionless, astonished, moved almost to tears. (This was a few months after the Cuban missile crisis.) No sooner had he finished ‘Hard Rain’ than he went straight into ‘Masters Of War’. In the tiny room, Dylan’s brittle strum and nasal voice enveloped you, you couldn’t think of anything else. He finished the song, asked one of the girls to keep an eye on his guitar and went off to look for the bathroom. My regional scepticism about Dylan was over.

  By the time he passed the toast across Mary Vangi’s kitchen table a year later, Dylan had transformed folk music. It was far more now than just a soundtrack for students and liberals, it was affecting national politics and creating huge cultural waves. But while we were preoccupied with the conflict between the various ‘schools’, he was way ahead of us, plotting a frontal assault on the fortress of American popular music. The next time our paths crossed, at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival, I would help him storm the citadel.

  Chapter 5

  IN APRIL 1964, I MET MUDDY, Otis and Cousin Joe again in a rehearsal room in London. The line-up of the Blues and Gospel Caravan also included Chicago bass player Ransom Knowling, Muddy’s drummer Willie Smith, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, the Reverend Gary Davis and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I had called the run-through to explain and rehearse my ideas for the tour. I wanted Ransom to play bass with most of them, Otis and Willie to play with Rosetta, Brownie to play guitar with Joe, Sonny to play harmonica with the Reverend Gary and so on. When I finished my speech, they looked at me blankly. Resentments and objections came at me from all sides. Muddy was upset that we hadn’t brought his whole band. Rosetta didn’t want a blues player like Otis backing her up. What emerged, to my naive surprise, was that they were almost complete strangers to one another.

  The world of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry and the Reverend Gary Davis – of coffee houses, college concerts and ‘folk blues’ – was unknown to the Chicagoans. Brownie and Sonny had played together as a duo since leaving South Carolina and following Leadbelly on to the 1940s folk circuit. Brownie was a deft finger-picking guitarist and a warm singer with a limp, a cane an
d a huge girth. Underneath the practised politeness was a bitter man: years of conforming to the expectations of white audiences had taken their toll. Sonny was the genius of the rural blues harmonica and had been blind from birth. He was so gentle and deferential behind his dark glasses that it was difficult to determine what he felt about anything. Brownie and Sonny, I discovered, cordially loathed each other offstage. The one thing they agreed on was that, owing to some ancient feud, they wanted nothing to do with the Reverend Gary.

  Also blind and from South Carolina, Gary’s harsh persona had been formed on the back roads of the rural South as an itinerant preacher between the wars. A nephew brought him to the Bronx in the ’50s, where a small band of devotees discovered his monumental skills in a long-forgotten ragtime picking style. A generation of white guitarists took lessons, often earning their schooling by arranging gigs for him. They would lead him from his Bronx tenement to the stage, making sure he ate and dressed himself properly along the way.

  Gary was an alarming-looking man who took some getting used to. His chin was covered in grey stubble and he wore a battered hat and a rumpled black suit. His dark glasses slid down his nose to reveal milky sightless eyes. He horrified Rosetta and her husband/manager Russell the first morning at breakfast when, with shaking hand, he seized the sunny-side-up fried egg, lofted it over his upturned mouth (yolk all the while dribbling down the front of his shirt) and dropped it into his mouth. The edges of the white, trailing grease, protruded from his jaws as he chewed.

  Tom Hoskins was delegated the task of swabbing down the front of Gary’s shirt. Tom was a twenty-five-year-old Southern charmer, responsible for the detective work that had tracked down Mississippi John Hurt in the town of Avalon the previous year. He had listened over and over to the 78s until he decoded lyrics alluding to the South Delta hamlet where he found Hurt sitting on a front stoop, exactly where the scout from Paramount Records had discovered him thirty-five years earlier. With Hurt bowing out of the tour due to illness, Tom came along to help me with the other musicians. Looking after Gary proved to be a full-time job.

  Tom had none of the awkward deference of Northern blues acolytes. He quickly discovered that Gary loved a bit of marijuana in his corncob pipe along with the rough tobacco. Gary and Tom became the party animals of the tour, ready to hang out with fans, preferably female, long past the time everyone else had gone to bed. With young admirers at his feet, Gary would get out his guitar and Tom would load up the pipe and score a bottle of Scotch. The music would continue until the noise drew complaints from next door or until Tom had made sufficient eye contact with one of the girls to bring proceedings to a close.

  There were no finer exponents of Gospel guitar than Sister Rosetta and Gary, but the resemblance stopped there. Born in back-country Arkansas, Rosetta toured the rural revival circuit with her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, from the time she was old enough to carry a tune. About those days, Rosetta once told me: ‘By the time I was eighteen, I had my boots laced on up to my hips!’ In the late ’30s she started performing as a featured attraction with swing bands. Her jazzy electric guitar style brought her some hits in the ’40s, allowing her and Russell to buy a house in Philadelphia. She wore an expensive red wig, a fur coat and high heels and had toured Europe many times. To find herself seated at breakfast next to Gary, the kind of man she had last seen thirty-five years before on the dirt roads of East Texas, was not what she had in mind when she signed on for the Blues and Gospel Caravan.

  Ransom Knowling and Cousin Joe were the sophisticates of the group. Natty dressers in a tweedy style, they eyed the eccentricities of the rest with amused condescension. Willie Smith, Muddy’s young drummer, was thrilled to be travelling outside the blues circuit and couldn’t get enough of sightseeing and meeting fans.

  The heart of the tour was Muddy, a man of gravitas and dignity. He stood tall and dressed sharp – always a snap-brim fedora, a little grey tie and a clean white shirt. His eyes were kind but they regarded me warily. Otis, Muddy’s cousin, was an ageing boy. He drank and smoked heavily and wore the expression of a kid looking for ways to get up to mischief, his sad-eyed softness the opposite of Muddy’s granite masculinity.

  One appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival was the only time Muddy had played for white audiences in America; touring as a guest with Chris Barber and his English rhythm section in the late ’50s had been his only previous European experience. Now at least he had Otis and his drummer, but Ransom, great as he was, played acoustic bass and it wasn’t the same as having his own powerful modern band. Like everyone else, Muddy had cut down his set list to fit the crowded programme. The last thing anyone wanted was to spend a day off working out deviations from tried and true arrangements. We cut the rehearsal short and went back to the hotel. I was off to a bad start.

  Things improved once we opened in Bristol. They needed introducing, so I provided the hyperbole in American MC-style tones. Otis tried playing a song with Rosetta at the sound check and it worked so well they added it to the show. The hall was full, the crowd queued for autographs afterwards and all my preconceptions about British enthusiasm for the blues were confirmed.

  The next day on the bus, Cousin Joe read out highlights from the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune and tried to stimulate a current-affairs discussion. At first, the others thought he was crazy, but he eventually won them over. Joe’s morning news ritual became the catalyst for a growing warmth among performers who had been strangers a few days earlier.

  Most halls were sold out, and little by little my notions were added to the show. Ransom played a number with Brownie and Sonny and accompanied Cousin Joe and Sister Rosetta for their entire sets. Willie started joining Otis for his song with Rosetta, then Brownie was persuaded to play some guitar behind Cousin Joe. The atmosphere began to feel like a friendly get-together rather than a formal concert.

  They were listening as well, often standing in the wings during each other’s sets: I spotted Rosetta there during Reverend Gary’s rendition of ‘Precious Lord’. Sonny and Gary were heard working something out one evening in a dressing room and the next night Sonny joined him on ‘The Sun Is Going Down’. The cry of the harmonica added even more intensity to what was already a chilling and emotional song and brought tears to a few eyes in the audience.

  In Manchester, producer Johnny Hamp – inventor of Ready Steady Go! and 6.5 Special – set us up at a disused railway station with fake bales of cotton for Brownie and Sonny and a dolly to film Muddy walking down ‘that lonesome railroad track’. The National Film Theatre periodically dredges up programmes from the archives of British television and screened the show a few years ago. I had never seen it and it was very affecting to watch all those great – and, by 1999, late – singers and musicians. Towards the end, when Rosetta gets the audience clapping along (mostly on the wrong, or white person’s, beat), I glimpsed my twenty-one-year-old self in the background, clapping! I never clap along. It has always been against my principles of éminence grise-ness, but the camera doesn’t lie. On the right beat, mind you.

  In Liverpool Tom and I met a West Indian blues fan who gave us a matchbox filled with marijuana he said had been cured for two years with rum and molasses by Rastafarians in a cane stalk buried in the hills above Kingston, Jamaica. After the Leicester concert the following night, Tom, Gary, Otis and I smoked some in the back of the bus and every time we went over a bump or around a bend we got higher and higher. When we arrived in Sheffield, Cousin Joe had to take over the hotel check-in and guide us to our rooms.

  We swung back through London for dates at Hammersmith and Croydon, then headed for the home stretch: an evening in the Brighton Dome followed by a show in Paris for French television. By this time, wary rivals had become ardent fans of each other’s music. Rosetta told me that Gary was ‘the deepest man I have ever met’ while even the dour Russell was seen joking with Cousin Joe and Muddy.

  As Paris would be an abbreviated show in front of a small studio audience, Brighton, we all
felt, was the finale. There was an electric atmosphere that evening, beginning at the sound check. After each introduction, I would run to the back of the hall to listen. Otis’s solo spot that night gave the audience a capsule history of boogie-woogie and barrelhouse piano. Cousin Joe’s anecdotes and songs were hilarious while Rosetta tore into her guitar solos and extended them for chorus after chorus, lifting the audience out of their seats with ‘Didn’t It Rain?’

  During the intermission she asked me for an offstage microphone when Gary sang ‘Precious Lord’. ‘I don’t want to take anything away from him,’ she said. I coiled the mic cable and left it beside her in the wings as Gary came out to start the second half. When he picked out the opening chords of ‘Precious Lord’, Rosetta began to moan. She was back in that little country church in Arkansas with her mother, singing in a primitive style I had never heard from her. Gary lifted his head and murmured, ‘Oh Lord, sing it, girl!’ Her interjections seemed to transport him to another time and place, re-creating music that few white people had ever been privileged to hear.

  By the time Muddy hit the stage, the Dome was levitating. When he got out his slide and started caressing the strings under ‘another mule kicking in my stall’ he appeared possessed, evoking the ghosts of Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton. Then he attacked ‘Mojo Working’, got the audience dancing in the aisles and propelled them out into the night. (In those days, theatres didn’t destroy the music lingering in people’s heads by playing records as soon as the show ends.)