Two of my biggest songs were written in Yorkville: “Spinning Wheel” and “Lucretia MacEvil.” “Spinning Wheel” was my response to the flower-power songs of the anti-war movement. My time in prison had left me with a tougher point of view than that of my love-generation colleagues. I was more pragmatic about love changing the world forever. I knew there were some really bad people out there, and all the flowers and free love in the world wouldn’t change that. It was all well and good to be against violence and to protest the war, but my experience had taught me that sometimes you just have to stand your ground and fight. The message of the song was “Don’t get too carried away with the politics of the moment—everything comes full circle in time.”
Lucretia MacEvil was a composite of every bad girl I had met in the rough-and-tumble bars on Yonge Street. She’d rather be notorious than ignored. Every funky little bar in every little Ontario town had a Lucretia, a hot little badass who desperately wanted out of her small-town existence, where girls like her were pregnant by the time they were eighteen, their dreams ending there.
I recorded “Spinning Wheel” for a record company in Toronto called Arc Records. Duff Roman’s company had gone belly-up. Even with our hit records there was just no money in Canada. There simply weren’t enough people in this vast country to support a real record industry, and Duff finally had to give up his dream of owning a record company. I’ll always be grateful to Duff Roman. Guys like him, who were willing to mortgage their houses and borrow money from friends to support artists they believed in, are hard to find in this business. At any rate, Arc Records signed me to a contract and gave me a budget of five hundred bucks. I booked a studio and recorded “Spinning Wheel.” When I brought them the finished master, they were not pleased. “What’s this?” they said. “It sounds like jazz, we can’t sell jazz. We wanted another ‘Brainwashed.’” They rejected the song, made a show of tearing up my contract and showed me the door.
Three years later, when BS&T’s version of “Spinning Wheel” had sold over ten million copies, I was summoned to Clive Davis’s office in New York. There were the guys from Arc Records. They were squirming uncomfortably in their chairs. They couldn’t look me in the eye and never even offered a handshake. They were claiming prior ownership of the song. The contract I had signed gave them publishing rights and they wanted a piece of the action. They had made a show of ripping up my contract, but of course they had another copy. A lawsuit would have been expensive and time consuming, so Clive paid them off. A deal was arranged to split the Arc payments with Columbia’s publishing company. I didn’t care—it wasn’t coming out of my pocket. But for years this crummy little company that had rejected the song received a slice of the publishing royalties from “Spinning Wheel.” Eventually, when Arc went broke, I was able to buy back the publishing rights to the song, but I had learned a couple of valuable lessons. First, have a lawyer read everything before you sign it, and second, there is no shame in the record business.
Yorkville’s days were numbered. The city fathers of “Toronto the Good” had determined that Yorkville was a den of iniquity, full of drug addicts, hippies, sex fiends and, worst of all, musicians. They decided to clean it up. The Toronto police swept through Yorkville, arresting anyone who didn’t move along fast enough. There were literally dozens of arrests every night and within a few weeks an era had ended. Yorkville today is a fashionable neighbourhood, the once-funky bohemian street now lined with expensive shops and trendy boutiques. It’s lovely and prosperous and attracts thousands of tourists, but in my mind we lost something. Maybe the Yorkville I knew could only have existed in those tumultuous, crazy sixties and would be as out of place today as bell-bottoms and tie-dye.
I had become friends with bluesman John Lee Hooker. I had scored a hit in Canada with his song “Boom Boom” years before any other white artists in North America had even thought of recording such songs. The only other people who were playing this music were in England, where the British blues of John Mayall and Long John Baldry was taking hold with British youth. Every time John Lee came to town to play the Riverboat, I would run over between sets at my gig and sit in with him. He liked the way I played his Delta-blues style. I knew all his songs and all those years of practicing with Lightnin’ Sam Hopkins and Jimmy Reed records made it easy to play with Hooker.
One night in early ’67 he told me he was going to New York to play the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. I begged him to take me with him. I was desperate to get back to New York. He agreed, with one condition. He didn’t drive. His driver had had trouble at the border and was refused entry into Canada, and his car was still in storage in Niagara Falls. If I would go down there, pick it up and drive it to New York, he would give me a gig when I got there. There were no visas or work permits involved. It wasn’t exactly legal but I didn’t care. I wanted to get to New York so bad I decided to take a chance. I took a bus to Niagara Falls, Ontario, walked across the border as a tourist, picked up John’s Cadillac in Niagara Falls and was on my way to New York City.
I dropped off John’s car with some lawyer in midtown Manhattan. I didn’t even have a guitar, as carrying a musical instrument across the border would have raised a red flag. I was, after all, only supposed to be a tourist. So I rented a Telecaster and an amp from Manny’s Music on 48th Street and took the subway downtown to Greenwich Village. I arrived at the Cafe Au Go Go to find the owner, Howie Solomon, frantic. John Lee Hooker wouldn’t be opening at the Au Go Go that night. His agent had booked him on the American Blues Festival tour in Europe and had cancelled the club date in New York. I was sitting on my amp, dejected, nearly broke, with no gig in New York, and Solomon took pity on me. He asked me to play him a couple of tunes. So I played him the John Lee Hooker tune, “Boom Boom.” He liked what he heard and asked me if I had a blues band that could fill in for Hooker for a couple of weeks. Even though I had just arrived in town that day and knew nobody I said, “No problem, I’ll be back at five,” and went looking for a band.
That afternoon I made the rounds of the pizza joints, coffee houses and restaurants around the Village looking for anyone carrying a guitar case or even looking like a musician. I rounded up a ragtag bunch of unemployed musicians and invited about twenty of them to an “audition” at 5:00 p.m. at the Cafe Au Go Go. Then I went back to the club with my rented Telecaster to await the band. Only about half of the guys I had invited showed up but I lucked out. A couple of them had been in a band from Chicago called the Butterfield Blues Band. Their club gig uptown had run out and they were looking to stay on in New York and, even better, they could really play. One of them was a guitar player named Mike Bloomfield who later would record the Super Sessions album with Al Kooper and go on to San Francisco to form the Electric Flag. We rehearsed for a couple of hours and opened that night at the Cafe Au Go Go. I was in the music capital of the world, and I was working. I thought I was on my way.
I rented a furnished flat on MacDougal Street and Nancy brought our young daughter, Christine, barely eighteen months old, down from Toronto. I’ve often wondered why we did that. It was crazy. Maybe Nancy thought she could still save our marriage. Maybe I was trying to show her that I really could make it in the big time. Maybe we were both desperately trying to hang on to something that was gone forever. In any event, it was a really bad idea. The marriage was over and my dreams of glory wouldn’t last long either. The gig at the Cafe Au Go Go lasted three weeks, the rent money ran out and I was out of work in a city that is not kind to unemployed musicians.
I was determined not to go back to Toronto with my tail between my legs. And while it was hard enough for me, for Nancy being broke and homeless in New York was impossible. She was a small-town girl from Canada with a new baby to care for and a husband who again seemed to have lost his mind. I had to make it in New York or die trying—most likely the latter. Nancy finally gave up on me, returned to Toronto and filed for divorce. I stayed on in New York. Nancy soon remarried and Christine was adopted. Her name
was changed and she was raised by her new family. She wasn’t told that I was her father until much later in her life, and that was probably for the best. I was in no shape to be a father. I was absolutely obsessed with making it in New York. I can remember standing at the foot of Fifth Avenue at four o’clock in the morning, like a madman, shaking my fist at the city like it was a living being, screaming “You son of a bitch,” at the top of my lungs. “You son of a bitch … You won’t beat me!”
Secretive Child
I’m down to nothin’ but my music
Workin’ on Bleecker Street just to survive
I play my songs and pass the basket
Playin’ these blues is bound to keep me alive
Fall down, turn around, do it again
Life ain’t easy on the mean streets
Love ain’t easy for a secretive child
Let the blues become my refuge
Let the music take me away for a while
Maybe someday I’ll be famous
Or maybe I will fly too close to the flame
But I’ll be someone you remember
For fifteen minutes you will all know my name
Fall down, turn around, do it again
Life ain’t easy on the mean streets
Love ain’t easy for a secretive child
Let the blues become my refuge
Let the music take me away for a while
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 1999.
8
GREENWICH VILLAGE
For the next two years I lived from day to day. Scuffling to survive was nothing new to me—I had been broke and hungry before—but this wasn’t Toronto. Being homeless on the streets of New York was something else entirely. I hung out in the Village. It was the centre of the music world in the sixties, with lots of loose girls and cheap gigs and other struggling musicians. I crashed with Village girls when I could and with other musicians when I couldn’t, often staying up all night in twenty-four-hour coffee shops. Sometimes a few musicians would pool their meagre resources and rent a single room, then we would use it in shifts, sleeping for a few hours before turning it over to the next guy. I worked any gig I could get. I sang and played my guitar on street corners for spare change, busking on weekends with an open guitar case, around the fountain in Washington Square with all the other out-of-work musicians. Mostly I played “basket houses” in the Village. It was a rite of passage … Everyone did the basket-house circuit.
In the eight square blocks that was Greenwich Village were several little coffee houses. Seating no more than thirty people, these grubby hole-in-the-wall joints served no liquor but you could get a drink called a piña colada, which was basically canned pineapple juice on ice with no rum, for about five bucks—a total rip-off, but that’s not why people were there. At one end of the room was a “stage,” a six-by-ten-foot plywood riser about a foot high, with a squeaky microphone and a couple of cheap speakers on the wall. Some of the more “lavish” joints actually had a battered old upright piano on the stage. Usually it was missing keys and was so out of tune that a guitar was preferable. We would stand in line along the wall, guitars in hand, waiting for a few minutes of stage time—Richie Havens, John Hammond, Tim Hardin, Dave Van Ronk—anyone trying to make a little rent money. The audiences and the club owners were merciless. If you didn’t grab their attention within the first few bars, the microphone went dead and you were hustled unceremoniously off the stage. If you were going over well, you might last as long as one or two songs but you couldn’t hog the mic. There was a lineup of other singers waiting to get on. If you stayed on too long, they would begin hooting and hollering for you to “get off the stage.” After a couple of songs you took a basket and passed it among the patrons, collecting spare change and an occasional dollar bill. It was a trial by fire and most of the young artists trying to break into the paying clubs in the Village went through it. The paying clubs were the Bottom Line, the Cafe Au Go Go, the Bitter End and the Gaslight. In those places you might actually be seen by a record company. The record execs seldom ventured into the sleazy basket houses. I guess they figured if you survived that scene, you just might be worth listening to.
The wonderful thing about that era was that the entire music industry was centred on that eight square blocks of downtown Manhattan and everybody knew everybody. You could be playing for chump change one night, get spotted by a record company and be a star within weeks. The dream was always dangling right in front of us. We all knew people who were discovered in the Village, signed to a major record deal and a year later were collecting Grammy awards and gold records. That all disappeared in the seventies, when the music industry moved to Hollywood and dissipated all over that spaced-out, soulless town. There was no sense of neighbourhood in Los Angeles. It was every man for himself out there and no one knew anyone anymore.
I got to know some really fine people in the Village. John Hammond Jr. and Richie Havens became good friends and saved my ass more than once when I had no place to live and it was getting cold out on the street. Eventually I moved into a one-room sixth-floor walk-up flat on Thompson Street, right in the middle of Greenwich Village. I was in heaven. After nearly a year in New York City I actually had an address.
Not part of the Village scene but definitely a place to be was a club uptown, on 46th Street, called Steve Paul’s Scene. All the heavy bands hung out there. Jimi Hendrix, just back from London with his new band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Clapton and his band Cream, the Rascals, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Allman Brothers—everybody hung out at the Scene. I would sit in with anyone who would let me, and eventually Steve Paul noticed me and asked me to put together a house band to back any of the rock stars who happened to drop in looking to jam and hook up with the exotic ladies who were always at the club.
This was a great gig. I got to meet and hang out with the biggest stars in the business. I led the house band in a club that had the hottest babes in town—sleek models from the fashion district, actresses and dancers from Broadway, Andy Warhol girls and movie starlets in from Hollywood. I hooked up with a Warhol girl, a European actress named Ultra Violet. She was ten years older than me, a beautiful and bizarre creature of the night and sexy as hell. I ran around with her for a while, and the Warhol crowd began to hang out at the club. They were a shallow bunch—art-world poseurs who really believed they were trendsetters. The truth is they were just followers, drugged-out sycophants waiting for Andy to tell them what was art and what wasn’t. Warhol himself showed up at the Scene one night. I was ushered over to his table and introduced to him like he was royalty. He murmured something like “very powerful” and waved me to a seat. I mumbled something about having to get ready for the next set and fled back to the safety of the dressing room. I thought he was a vampire, sucking the life out of the lost, lonely, drugged-out souls who hovered around him, convinced that he was going to make them all superstars. Creepy—definitely not my scene.
I met a guy at Steve Paul’s who would become a lifelong friend. Deering Howe was friends with Jimi Hendrix, knew the Beatles, Clapton, the Stones and nearly everyone else on the sixties music scene. Deering was good-looking and charismatic, educated at the finest schools, a product of old money, heir to the McCormick-Deering farm machinery fortune. A trust-fund kid with absolutely no interest in entering the family business, he had a lifelong love affair with rock & roll. Deering Howe was the quintessential fan, flying to London for a Stones concert, hanging out with Hendrix in New York, living with the Allmans on their commune in Georgia. He was passionate and knowledgeable about music but he never could play the blues he loved so deeply. That’s a gift given to a few and he knew it. Maybe he couldn’t play the blues but he was a good friend to those who could.
When Deering Howe went out on the town in New York, it was an event, complete with champagne, beautiful women and an entourage. Everywhere Deering went was a party. I began to cross paths with him around town. We s
eemed to like the same bands and frequent the same clubs, and I liked him. He was smart and fun to be with, and he loved music with a real passion. I remember jamming on acoustic guitars at his Fifth Avenue apartment with Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger playing drums on a cardboard box and Deering recording it all on a cassette recorder. He still has that tape.
Deering Howe was born to big money. He’d known ass-kissers all his life and he could spot a phony from a mile away. I liked this guy and I wanted to be friends, but I also wanted it understood that I was not one of his entourage. One time Deering threw a party on a sixty-foot cabin cruiser he kept moored at the 79th Street boat basin. All night long we cruised around the Statue of Liberty and under the George Washington Bridge, Sgt. Pepper’s blared from the stereo speakers—Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon, myself and Deering with a full crew and a boatload of babes and rock musicians, stoned out of our minds and having the time of our lives. In the morning the boat docked at 79th Street. I had to make my way back to the Village and I was broke. It was drizzling rain and I trudged the eighty-plus blocks back downtown carrying my guitar case, hungover and feeling like shit. Deering found out about this several weeks later and demanded to know why I had walked home. “All you had to do is ask,” he said. “I would have put you in a cab.” I told him gently, “Deering, I’m your friend, I don’t need your fuckin’ money.”
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 7