The Mayor of MacDougal Street

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Escaping the Delta:
Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

 

Narcocorrido:
A Journey into the
Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas

 

Josh White: Society Blues

D
ave died before this book could be completed, and it would have been impossible to finish it without all of the people who made their interviews with him available. Whenever possible, I contacted interviewers and got their permission, and I am grateful and pleased that not one of them refused the request. However, I was not able to reach everyone whose interviews I found, and hope that if I have used anyone’s material without permission, they will understand the special circumstances.

In the course of this project the material was worked and reworked so many times that I am not sure what ended up being used, and therefore I give equal thanks to all the people who did interviews that were consulted: Jim Allen, Scott Barretta, Ronald Cohen, Art D’Lugoff, Aiyanna Elliott, Bob Fass, Beth C. Fishkind, Pete Fornatale, Emily Friedman, Cary Ginell, Cynthia Gooding, Mark Greenberg, Stefan Grossman, Bill Hahn, David Hajdu, Mike Joyce, Roy Kasten, Peter Keane, Jeff Kenney, Marty Kohn, Jody Kolodzey, Joe LaMay, Christine Lavin, Doreen Lorenzo and Michael Scully, Kip Lornell, Rod MacDonald, Sonny Ochs, John Platt, Bruce Pollock, Mike Regenstreif, Ralph Rush, Anthony Scaduto, Vin Scelsa, Michael Schumacher, Richard Skelly, Michael Stock, David Walsh, and Robbie
Wolliver. (And if I’ve missed anyone, please forgive me . . . ) I also must thank George Auerbach, Suze Rotolo, and David Massengill, who among other things steered me to material I otherwise would have missed.

Both Dave and I conducted some further interviews to fill out missing details. For their time and insight, many thanks to Roy Berkeley, Oscar Brand, Lenni Brenner, Tom Condit, Gina Glaser, Al Graham, Lee Hoffman, Sam Hood, Barry Kornfeld, Tom and Midge Paxton, Aaron Rennert, Irwin Silber, Patrick Sky, Terri Thal, Wavy Gravy, and Izzy Young.

For various and sundry sorts of assistance along the way, thanks first of all to Andrea Vuocolo Van Ronk, without whom none of this would have been possible, and further to Mary Katherine Aldin, John Cohen, Ron Cohen, Charles Freudenthal, Mitch Greenhill, Martin Jukovsky, Don Paulsen, Eve Silber, Happy Traum, Richard Weissman, Stefan Wirz, and undoubtedly a number of other people whose names would be here if I were better organized.

A thousand thanks to Lawrence Block for his introduction. For editorial comments, thanks to Jeff McLaughlin. Thanks to my agent, Richard P. Mc-Donough, for finding this book a home, and to Ben Schafer at Da Capo, who has been itching to be its editor for more years than any of us cares to remember.

E
arly in August 1956 I boarded a train in Buffalo and got off seven or eight hours later at Grand Central Terminal. I found the clock under which I was supposed to meet Paul Grillo, and remarkably, he was there. I’d recently completed my freshman year at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Paul had been one of my hall advisers. (In this capacity he and his roommate had mentored me and the other fifteen or twenty residents of my freshman dormitory.) Now, during a three-month work period, Paul and I were going to room together, along with a third fellow, Fred Anliot.

Paul had already found a place for us to live, and furnished me with the address—147 West 14th Street. He pointed me toward the subway and sent me on my way. I took the shuttle to Times Square, the IRT to 14th Street. I got a key from the landlady—Mrs. Moderno, if memory serves—and climbed three flights of stairs to a very large room with bright yellow walls.

We lived there for two or three weeks. Then we decided the place was too expensive—it was $24 a week, split three ways—and someone, probably
Paul, found us a cheaper place at 108 West 12th Street. The rent there was $12 a week, but that didn’t make it a bargain, and we were just about bright enough to realize we couldn’t live like that. Within two weeks we were out of there and installed in a one-bedroom apartment on the first floor at 54 Barrow Street, where the rent was $90 a month. It must be a co-op by now, and it’s probably worth half a million dollars. Back then it was a terrific place to live, and I was there until the end of October, when it was time to go back to school.

So I was in the Village for only three months that year, and that’s awfully difficult to believe. Because I met so many people and did so many things. I was working five days a week from nine to five in the mailroom at Pines Publications, on East 40th Street. I spent nights and weekends hanging out, and where I mostly hung out was MacDougal Street.

That very first night in New York, I had two addresses to check out, and managed to get to both of them. One was a jazz club called Café Bohemia, at 15 Barrow Street, where I nursed a drink at the bar and listened to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. The other was the Caricature, a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street, where a fellow I’d met a year earlier at Camp Lakeland—we were both counselors there that summer—was a regular player in Liz’s nightly bridge game.

I could have met Dave Van Ronk there that first night—at Liz’s, not at the Bohemia—because, as he mentions, it was a regular place of his. But I met him instead at one of the Sunday sessions in Washington Square Park, which is where I quickly learned to spend my Sunday afternoons. The circle was always overflowing with people playing instruments and singing folk songs, and there was something very special about the energy there. This was, you should understand,
before
the folk music renaissance, and before the curious synthesis of drugs and politics made college kids a breed apart. The great majority of collegians were still gray-flannel members of the Silent Generation, ready to sign on for a corporate job with a good pension plan. Those of us who didn’t fit that mold, those of us who’d always sort of figured there was something wrong with us, sat around the fountain in Washington Square singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” and feeling very proud of ourselves for being there.

The only thing wrong with Sunday afternoons was that they ended at six o’clock and some of us figured that there ought to be a way to keep the
party going. For a while, 54 Barrow Street was our after-hours. Our apartment—living room, bedroom, kitchen—filled up with people with guitars and banjos and voices, and the party went on for four or five hours. I’m not sure how long we hosted it. We passed 54 Barrow to other Antiochians when we had to go back to Ohio, and they may have kept the party going for a while, but eventually it moved to larger quarters on Spring Street.

By then I was a lifer. I’d visited New York twice with my parents—my father had grown up in Manhattan and the Bronx—and I’d always assumed somehow that I’d wind up living there, but it was during those three months that I became a New Yorker and, more to the point, a Villager. I’ve lived in other places—Wisconsin, Florida—and in other parts of New York City, but Greenwich Village has always drawn me home, and has indeed been my residence for most of the past thirty years. I started out, you’ll recall, on 14th Street a few doors from 7th Avenue. Since then I’ve lived on 12th Street, on Barrow Street, on Bleecker and Greenwich and Jane, on Charles, on Horatio, on West 13th. Now, for about a dozen years, I’ve been on West 12th a few doors from 8th Avenue.

“Why should I go anywhere?” Dave said of the Village. “I’m already here.”

Whenever you got here, it was better ten years earlier.

That’s what people say now, complaining about gentrification. It’s what they said twenty years ago, complaining about tourists. It’s what they said forty years ago, complaining about hippie kids.

I suspect they’ve always said it. I suspect they said it to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Floyd Dell.

It seems to me—because I was around then, because I remember it fondly, because it was gone alas like my youth, too soon—that Greenwich Village was a very special place during my first years in it. And the people who just moved here yesterday will probably think the same themselves, when their youth is as remote and as inaccurately recalled as is mine.

Once, back in the early sixties, I decided to leave New York. I told Dave I was going to return to Buffalo. He was incredulous and asked why, a question I was somehow unable to answer. “Well,” I managed, “that’s my hometown. That’s where I’m from.”

He thought about it, then looked off into the middle distance. “I know a woman,” he said, “who was born in Buchenwald.”

Dave Van Ronk and I became friends during my first three-month stint in New York. The friendship lasted for forty-five years.

I couldn’t begin to guess how many times I heard him sing. I caught him at no end of venues in New York, but I also managed to catch up with him in Los Angeles and Chicago and Albuquerque and New Hope, Pennsylvania, and somewhere in Westchester County. There was never a time when I didn’t want to listen to that voice.