The Mayor of MacDougal Street (19 page)

Compared to my situation in New York, I was performing quite a bit. I met and heard Mimi Baez for the first time at a late-night show at KPFA (one of the first “highbrow” FM radio stations), and sang there a few times myself.
¹⁶
I also seized the opportunity to consort with Jesse Fuller, “The Lone Cat,” twelve-string guitarist extraordinaire, one-man band, and composer of
“San Francisco Bay Blues.” Jesse, like most of the rest of us, could not make a living from his music, so he was running a shoe-shine parlor on Telegraph Avenue, just over the city line in Oakland. (I think he might have been doing a little policy action on the side, as well.) In full musical harness, he provided quite a visual: along with his big twelve-string guitar, he wore a double rack around his neck with a kazoo on the upper tier and a harmonica below it. With his left foot, he operated a high-hat cymbal, and with his right he deftly tapped out a bass line on five treadles that he had hooked up to one of the damnedest musical contraptions I have ever seen. It was a piano box with five strings on it, and each treadle activated a felt-tipped piano hammer that struck one of the strings with a satisfying boom. This was his own invention, which he called a “footdella,” and it was amazing how much bass he could play with just those five notes. To manage this intricate task, however, he had to remove his right shoe and sock. As I say, quite a visual.

Jesse did not keep the whole rig around the shop, but the guitar was always there, and when I stopped by, we would pick and sing a few songs, mostly blues. He taught me “San Francisco Bay,” which I love but have never performed (both Jesse and Jack Elliott did it better than I ever could), and for a while I did his versions of “Linin’ Track” and “Hanging Around a Skin Game.” Business was pretty slow, and Jesse seemed happy for some company. He was a relentless self-promoter, and he loved to talk almost as much as he liked to perform. He especially enjoyed reminiscing about his days in Hollywood back in the 1920s, where he worked as a film extra and was taken up by Doug Fairbanks Sr. He used to perform at the monumental bashes Fairbanks and Mary Pickford threw at Pickfair, their Xanadu in the Hollywood Hills. It all sounded marvelously corrupt.

Jesse had gained a measure of local renown back in 1948, when Leadbelly appeared on a San Francisco radio program and proclaimed himself, as he was wont to do, “the king of the twelve-string guitarists of the world.” Jesse picked up the telephone, called the station, and let out a squawk of rage: “Who is this bum?
I’m
the king of the twelve-string guitar, and if you put me on the air, I’ll prove it.” They did, and he did. Ten years later the memory still rankled. When I told a friend of his that I was going over to Oakland to visit with him, she warned me: “Don’t mention Leadbelly.”

Jesse was a gold mine of songs, and he painstakingly wrote down all the lyrics he knew in a series of school composition books. He let me look
through one of them, and if I asked about a tune, he would pick up the guitar and run through it for me. Not a bad way to learn. He also kept a stock of the ten-inch LPs he had made for a local label called World Song, and he happily sold me one for five bucks.

Another person I was seeing pretty regularly was my old friend (personal) and nemesis (political) Bogdan Denitch, “the mad Montenegrin.” Like his sidekick Mike Harrington, he had become mesmerized by the utopian notion that if enough socialists joined the Democratic Party, they could use their influence to move it to the left—a textbook example of what the sociologist C. Wright Mills used to call “crackpot realism.” I held, and still do, that the only way you can influence such gentry is with the backing of a mob of screaming peasants brandishing pruning hooks. Sure enough, the Socialist Party followed Bogdan’s logic, merged into the “Democracy,” and vanished from the face of the earth—while my cothinkers and I went on to become the mighty political force we are today . . .

Although their supporters in YPSL were a sorry assortment of junior bureaucrats and ward-heelers manqué, Bogdan and Mike were born bohemians. Temperamentally we had all belonged to the hell-raising faction that convened regularly at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in the Village, and since Bogdan had recently relocated to Berkeley, he took some time off from his job as a tool-and-die maker to show me a bit of the locale. Wonder of wonders, he actually owned a car, so we could motor down the coast to Moro Bay or over the bridge to Sausalito, where I would drink in the scenery, among other things. I am pretty sure it was Bogdan who introduced me to the No Name bar, later the scene of many fondly remembered debaucheries.

Despite all this fossicking around the periphery, my main focus was San Francisco itself. I loved its pastel-painted, bay-windowed wooden houses, the hills, the wet-wool fogs, the whole romantic concatenation—hell, I even loved those Mickey Mouse cable cars. Moreover, and a big plus for me, Frisco was a place where lefties could really feel at home. In those days, it was still a working-class town and, since the general strike of 1934 (which I heard a lot about), a union town to boot. The joint was fully outfitted with hot and cold running Reds of every imaginable persuasion.

Along with the more organized and solemn factions, anarchists and Wobblies were thick on the ground. The house where I crashed in the Mission
District was a veritable hotbed of anarchism and free love—or anyway of anarchism.
¹⁷
Al Graham, our boniface, was a deep-dyed Wobbly with a penchant for direct action and an exuberant passion for organizing absolutely everybody and everything—he had recently been popped on Cape Cod for trying to organize the lobstermen, or maybe it was the lobsters. Tom Condit, ex-marine, libertarian socialist, and that rara-est of avises, a native Californian, was a walking encyclopedia of arcane social history, obscure political facts (I remember with special joy his disquisition on the Somali Youth League and its struggle for “Somalia irredenta”), and good, cheap restaurants in the Bay Area. Tom and I also haunted every low-stakes poker game we could find, and we made out pretty good sometimes.

Phil Melman, who lived elsewhere but always seemed to be around, was the real article: an
old
old Wobbly. Phil was sixty-five, and the terror and delight of the hip community, careening around the city on a big old Harley, scattering pedestrians like startled chickens and playing roller coaster on the steepest hills he could find. I used to go out with him, riding pillion—some people never learn—and I remember shouting in his ear: “Phil! Phil! Take it easy! You’re going to get us killed!” He did neither.

With this cast of characters, one would think the action would be thick and fast, but as it happened, life was pretty tranquil. Al did keep a gun under his pillow, and Tom and I kept hiding it for fear that a postman or meter reader’s early morning knock would set him off—in his A.M. daze, Al might see the uniform, mistake the guy for a cop, and start blazing away, thinking it was the Paris Commune or something. Admittedly, this was pretty far-fetched, but we enjoyed getting his goat. It never took him more than a minute or two to find it anyway.

At some point, Al received a notice that his phone was being shut off—for nonpayment, what else?—and he noticed that the disconnect date was the day before, and reasoned that since his service had officially been terminated, Ma Bell could not legally charge for any calls we made on it, despite
the fact that it was still working. He promptly invited us to call anybody we wanted for free. I called Terri in New York, Tom spoke to someone in Northern Ireland, and as a collective enterprise, we decided to call the Dalai Lama in Tibet. (If this sounds like the sort of thing only a bunch of zonked-out kids would do, you’re right on the money.) We actually got through to Katmandu, where an operator informed us that the phone in Lhasa was at the Summer Palace, and His Holiness was at the Winter Palace (or vice versa), but they would be happy to send a runner out with a telephone and a line and call us back tomorrow. “Nah, it wasn’t important. We just wanted to chat.” (Incidentally, the phone company did not appreciate Al’s logic, and hounded him mercilessly until, a year or so later, we all sent him a bunch of money to cover our share of the day’s entertainment.)

I was persisting in my quest for gainful employment, but was turned down at the Hungry i, which was the main folk room in SF. I was too scruffy and did not even get as far as an audition. The only gig I managed to scare up, aside from the Bread and Wine Mission concerts, was at a “poetry and jazz” evening in some dump on Grant Avenue. I sat onstage and tinkled “Freight Train,” while some turkey explained to us all, at 120 decibels, the reasons for his alienation. I assume I was supposed to be the “jazz.” Another ten bucks.

All in all, as far as venues for my sort of music went, it was not really all that different from New York. The Kingston Trio had first hit it big in Frisco, at a joint called the Purple Onion, but their version of the folk crowd consisted of boys in neat little three-button suits with narrow little lapels and skinny little ties, and girls in evening gowns. Crew-cuts! Crew-cuts up the wazoo. And most of the music was so precious, and so corny, you could lose your lunch. My big problem, as I was informed by several club managers, was that I didn’t
look
like a folksinger. That was phase one of the great folk revival. As for phase two, I had no way of knowing this was only phase one. Who knew? Next year they might try stuffing everybody into silken doublets and hose. Then they’d
really
look like folksingers. (That ain’t no joke. Twenty years later a friend of mine was picking up extra money at one of those hilariously awful “Renaissance Fairs,” dressed exactly so, playing “Hell Hound on My Trail” on a lute.)

There was an obvious subtext to what these Babbitt balladeers were doing, and it was: “Of course, we’re really superior to all this hayseed
crap—but isn’t it
cute
?” This attitude threw me into an absolute ecstasy of rage. These were no true disciples or even honest money changers—they were a bunch of slick hustlers selling Mickey Mouse dolls in the temple. Join their ranks? I would sooner have been boiled in skunk piss.

To put it somewhat less hysterically, the folk music revival that was going on west of the Hudson was pitched toward college students with pocket money from their folks, and young urban professionals just hip enough to gasp delightedly when Lenny Bruce said “shit” on stage. The popular headliners were the sort of clean-cut college types with which such an audience could identify, all singing exactly the same songs in exactly the same way. This movement was phenomenally popular and made some big record company honchos oodles of money. It had its own dress code and musical standards (basically, a diluted rehash of the old Weavers), its own circuit of clubs, and it sure as hell wasn’t about to revive
me
.

The local folk establishment and I were thus locked in a circle of mutual distaste, which left me with three options: I could slink back to New York, as after the Gate of Horn fiasco; head south to Hermosa Beach, where a gig was still waiting for me; or set up shop in Frisco and try to carve out a viable niche as the vanguard of the second wave of folk revivaldom.

Going back to New York under these circumstances was out of the question. Staying in San Francisco was much more tempting, despite the fact that my only potential constituency was a bunch of penniless bums like myself—but the temptation was part of the problem. There was a “Lotus Land” quality about the place, and I had a sense that if I stuck around much longer, I would keep amiably drifting from scene to scene and lose my edge. Furthermore, how the hell would I ever convince Terri, who was as much a hard-shell New York chauvinist as I had ever been, to pick up stakes and remove herself three thousand miles from civilization? Then came a phone call from Terri. Knowing about the free spaghetti dinners at the Bread and Wine Mission, she caught me there one Friday evening and read me the riot act: No, she wouldn’t move to goddamn San Francisco, and what the hell was I doing goofing off around the Bay Area when there was a stage being held for me, lo this past month, down south?

“Get your ass in gear,” she told me, and her tone brooked no argument.

Besides, she had a point. I got my ass in gear.

After my Bay Area experience, LA was like going from zero to sixty in 0.1 seconds. Phil’s advance report had not been an exaggeration, and within a week of arriving I had more work than I could handle. Weekdays I was playing at the Insomniac on Hermosa Beach, and on the weekends I was at the Unicorn, Herbie Cohn’s place on Sunset Strip. The Unicorn had a garden around the back, and I used to have to stand out there under some kind of fucking tree, which I hated, but the bread was good. As for the Insomniac, it was right across the street from Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse, so as a side benefit I had the opportunity to catch some great jazz between sets.

To be working seven nights a week was incredible to me. In a sense it was the first real test of my career plans, of whether I truly wanted to be a professional, full-time musician. And the answer was yes, without question or reservation. It also provided a lot of incentive to develop my music, build up my repertoire, all that kind of thing. It was an absolutely essential education, because you can practice playing guitar in your living room, and you can practice singing in your living room, but the only place you can practice performing is in front of an audience. Those old coffeehouses did not have to shut down early like the bars did, so they would stay open as long as there were paying customers, and you would wind up working four or five sets a night. I think that is one of the things that set the folksingers of my generation apart from the performers coming up today. There are some very good young musicians on the folk scene, but they will get to be fifty years old without having as much stage experience as I had by the time I was twenty-five. As a result, they will naturally mature much more slowly than the Dylans and Joni Mitchells and I did. We had so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong, and go back and try it again. It was brutally hard work, but that was how I learned my trade: by working in front of an audience hour after hour, night after night. You can hear the difference immediately if you listen to my two Folkways albums.