The Mayor of MacDougal Street (15 page)

We held our rehearsals at the Village Gate in the afternoons. Art D’Lugoff had just opened the club and was having trouble obtaining the
necessary license to hire entertainment. He was a Jew in an Italian neighborhood where liquor licenses had traditionally been acquired only by becoming somebody’s son-in-law, so everything he did in that place had to be done two or three times, because the other bar owners had the inspectors coming back again and again. D’Lugoff is a very ballsy man, and he stuck to his guns, but they harassed the shit out of him.

It being a brand new place, Art was more than happy to have some people in there, so he invited us to do our singing in his downstairs room and even supplied pitchers of beer to fend off dehydration. The only problem was that after a few pitchers, we were so well fended that our attention was apt to wander, and after a diligent hour or so of “Haul on the Bowline” and “Santa Anna,” we would find ourselves harmonizing to “Friggin’ in the Riggin’” or “D’Lugoff Fill the Flowing Bowl.” Then other singers would drift in, and shortly the whole thing would devolve into impromptu barbershop octets or dodecatets, and on to the usual arguments about politics and the future of folk music. Finally, it was time to make the record, and we had only eight songs worked out. We went into the studio and, aided by a goodly supply of Demerara rum—very appropriate to the material—somehow improvised our way through enough songs to fill out the album. We traded off leading the chanteys, with everybody joining in on the choruses, and I suspect we sounded more genuine, and certainly more enthusiastic, than we might have with more practice. The LP was issued as
Fo’c’sle Songs and Chanties
, by Paul Clayton and the Fo’c’sle Singers, and has remained in the Folkways catalog. I still think it is one of the best records I have ever been involved in making, though it attracted very little attention then or since.

My next recording venture was less satisfactory. By that time, I was living in Gina Glaser’s old apartment on MacDougal Street, a sixth-story railroad flat that she had left to me when she went off to Europe. It consisted of three tiny rooms, and I was sharing it for much of the time with Sam Charters, a friend of Bob Brill’s who had recently come up from New Orleans. Sam would shortly emerge as one of the most important figures in the blues revival, because he was the first person to take the trouble to really research blues history. Before that, blues had been treated pretty cursorily, either as a primitive form of jazz or as a corner of the folk tradition. Sam wrote a book called
The Country Blues
, which had an effect that still
resonates today. To begin with, he actually went to the libraries and pulled out copies of newspapers from various black communities in the 1920s, so he had some idea of how that music had been treated at the time. Who would have thought that there would be big advertisements for records by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton in the
Chicago Defender
? But there they were. So Sam put blues research on a serious basis, and as a result of his work and the work of other people standing on his shoulders, we now know more about that music than any of us would have dreamt possible before he wrote that book. Also, he was the first person to stop assuming that the people who had made those records were dead. If he had not found an obituary of, say, Blind Willie Johnson, he saw no need to assume that Blind Willie Johnson was dead—and when he went to see if he could find Blind Willie, he missed him by only a year or so. A lot of other people were still alive, and he found some of the old jug band players in Memphis and recorded an album of them for Folkways, then tracked down Lightnin’ Hopkins, still going strong in Texas. Sam hunted these guys up and wrote about it, and that started everybody else off on the trail of older, vanished singers. He is a marvelously prescient man and has one of the best sets of ears of any critic or music producer I know.

Sam also fooled around with music himself. He sang, played some guitar, some trumpet; he had been involved in the trad jazz scene out on the West Coast and had spent time in New Orleans interviewing the older jazz musicians there. We used to play together at parties, messing around with jazz stuff, which I was not getting much chance to do on the folk scene, and some jug band songs. Right around that time, an English singer named Lonnie Donegan got a hit playing a jug band version of Leadbelly’s “Rock Island Line,” so there was a brief flutter of interest in the style, which the English called “skiffle.” As a result, we ended up with a deal to make a skiffle record for a label called Lyrichord. We put together a group that included Sam’s future wife, Ann, on washboard and one of our trad buddies, Len Kunstadt, on kazoo, and rehearsed a bunch of tunes—I recall a truly unique version of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I still maintain that we were a pretty good band, but no one would ever know it from that record. Those were the days when stereo recording was still a neat new gimmick, and Lyrichord decided to wrap up two hot trends in one package by making an album called
Skiffle in Stereo
. The problem was that back in the mono days,
there had been no need to separate musicians onto different recording tracks, and hence microphones were designed to capture the full range of sound in their area. We were still using this old microphone technology, so to get separation, they had to put all of us in different rooms, and for the same reason that there were no directional mikes, there was no such thing as recording with headphones. The upshot was that each of us could just barely hear the two nearest players, but none of us could hear the whole band. We were constantly getting away from each other, and the result included some of the most appalling moments I have ever heard on record. To crown the whole debacle, I pulled rank on my lesser-known associates, and the band was billed on the album cover as The Orange Blossom Jug Five with Dave Van Ronk. Talk about the punishment fitting the crime . . .

Far from teaching me a lesson, this experience just whetted my appetite. I wanted my own record, and I decided that the key was Kenny Goldstein. Kenneth S. Goldstein was a serious folklorist, then working toward his Ph.D., but he was also a freelance producer. He had produced records by Pat Foster, the Kossoy Sisters, and all sorts of other people, along with a bunch of Clayton’s albums, for Folkways, Riverside, and Tradition, which aside from Elektra were about the only labels on the scene at that point. I figured if he could record them, he could damn well record me, so I got on his case and pestered him mercilessly. He kept telling me, “You’re not ready,” and I kept thinking, “Ready, schmeady—I need that LP so I can get some work, or I won’t live long enough to get ready.” I bugged him and bugged him, until eventually he must have concluded that a Van Ronk record would be a lesser evil than Van Ronk. The poor man caved completely and brought me out to his place on Long Island, where he had a little recording studio in the basement. I think we did the whole record in one session, though it might have taken two. Basically he just sat me in front of a microphone, and I sang a couple dozen of the things I was performing at that point, and that was that.

Hindsight being what it is, I have to say that Kenny was right and I was not ready to make that record. I have always referred to it as “Archie Andrews Sings the Blues,” which about sums up my feelings. I was still essentially a living room or Washington Square singer. I did not know the first thing about using a microphone, and my singing sounds high and forced. I continued to play some of those songs, and to play them in the same key, so
I was not really singing higher than I did later, but it does not sound like the same voice. I developed more control and I learned a lot more about phrasing, how to come in ahead of or behind the beat. As for the guitar playing, it makes me want to crawl under a rug. I have often thought how nice it would be if I could buy the master of that record and use it for skeet shooting. (There were also other problems: When the album came out, someone at the
San Francisco Chronicle
gave it a nice review in which he described me as “a very promising young black singer.” Kenny immediately wrote a letter to the paper, giving him the horselaugh, with the result that when I played San Francisco a few years later, the guy came down and gave me one of the nastiest reviews I have ever received in my life.)

All of which said, I was right as well: having a record out made an immediate difference in terms of getting jobs, and the fact that it appeared on the Folkways label gave me the equivalent of the Good Folksinging Seal of Approval. This was the label that Woody Guthrie was on, that Leadbelly was on, that Pete Seeger was on. Moe Asch could be an exasperating man, and he would never pay you ten cents if he could get away with five, but he really loved the music. That was the most important thing to him, and we all knew that, and we loved him for it. In all the years he kept that record company going, he did not cut anything out of the catalog. Every album that he made was like one of his kids, and he loved all of them, including some of the most cockamamy things you ever heard. There was one,
Sounds of a South American Rain Forest
, and it turned out that this was a complete put-on, that it was Frederic Ramsey and a friend standing in the shower and making bird noises—but Moe kept it in the catalog. So that was the label I wanted, even though I was well aware that I would not make a lot of money from it.

As it happened, Moe paid me a couple hundred bucks, which was very welcome, and over the years I managed to hit him up for handouts from time to time, but on the whole I always found his accounting mysterious, to say the least. It must have taken a fair amount of financial wizardry to keep that operation afloat for all those years, and I am convinced that, rather than chain himself to the legal niceties of his contractual agreements, he was cooking his books with the élan of an Escoffier.

It actually got to be kind of entertaining, because when I really needed some money, I would head up to Folkways, and I worked out a whole
routine for dealing with Moe. I had a special outfit that I used to put on, which I called my “Folkways suit.” It consisted of a jacket that I had worn when I was shipping out on a chemical tanker, which was incredibly filthy and smelled of acetone, and these old, worn jeans—no holes in them, but they were transparent. I would go up to his office in the West 40s and give him a whole spiel about how I was broke and I needed money, and blah blah blah, and he would come up with something like fifty bucks or maybe even a hundred. First, though, he would always go through the ritual of checking his ledger books, and one time he got called out of the room for some reason and I took the opportunity to glance over what he was checking. I could not make head or tail of it, but am quite certain that nothing I was seeing had anything to do with any record of mine.

This was a regular routine, and there was one time when it was a particularly cold day and I thought I would use that to improve my rap, so I said, “Moe, you gotta lay some bread on me; I don’t even have a winter coat.” Moe got up from behind his desk, walked out to the reception room, came back with this beautiful camel-hair overcoat, and said: “Here, Dave, take this.” He called my bluff, absolutely—it was a gorgeous coat, but not something I would have been caught dead in even if it had fit me, and I’m quite sure he was aware of the fact. So I mumbled some excuse, and he gave me the usual fifty bucks.

Jumping ahead a few years, there came a time when I was doing pretty well. I was on another label by then, but my Folkways records were still around and Moe had even reissued them with new covers, so he was clearly doing all right with them. Presumably my royalty payments should have been growing along with this situation, but when I would occasionally get a statement from him, the sums were tiny. Finally, around 1964, the day came when I got a check from Folkways for something like $3.98, and I flew off the handle. I thought, “Goddamnit, if this guy’s going to steal, that’s one thing. But to steal and insult my intelligence—there, I draw the line!” At that time I was doing some business with Bill Krasilowski, the music industry lawyer par excellence, and I was in his office one day, ranting about this letter from Moe. Bill said, “Let’s shake the tree a little bit.” He wrote off this really nasty letter on his legal stationery, chuckling all the while, in which he
threatened to sue Folkways for every penny it had. Lo and behold, three or four weeks later I got a check from Moe for several hundred dollars. I could not believe my eyes, but I must admit that I felt a little sorry to have sicced the big dogs on good old Moe. No more than two days after that I happened to wander into the Village Gate, and I was sitting at the bar, and I suddenly realized that there on the adjacent stool, buried in a large camel-hair coat, was Moe Asch. I thought, “Oh, shit. Now he’s really going to take my head off.” Moe had spotted me at the same moment, and he slowly turned to me and said, “I got your letter, Dave . . .” Then he smiled, slapped me on the back, and said, “So, you’re finally getting smart.”

To return to 1958, a few other stories come to mind. Before I moved to the MacDougal apartment, I had been living in a loft on Monroe Street with Richie Fox, one of the old Richmond Hill jazz crowd, and Chuck Freudenthal, who I knew from the Fanarchists and the Riverside Dive. I was going with Terri by that time, and she remembers that we had this big Christmas tree that we set out on the fire escape, and all through the spring she could see it as she came in over the bridge. During that period I was hanging out quite a lot with Roland Dumontet and his motorcycle crowd, and thanks to them I had one of the closest calls of my life. One night we were lounging around, just shooting the breeze, and a couple of them decided that they would go racing on the West Side Highway. A guy named Johnny Mocklin invited me to ride along as his passenger, which normally would have sounded exciting, but I was having a deep conversation with Jennifer, Roland’s girl, and did not want to be bothered. As a result, I sat up all night talking with Jennifer, and someone else went as Johnny’s passenger instead of me, and he never came back. They were racing right down the middle of the West Side Highway, which was completely empty at that hour of the morning, and a cop came after them. To throw the cop off, they split up, and Johnny took an exit ramp at top speed and collided with a taxi, and his passenger went flying off the back and was killed.