The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2 page)

One night he and I and Lee Hoffman sat drinking in her apartment—she was then married to Larry Shaw—and cowrote a batch of songs that wound up in
The Bosses’ Songbook.
(
Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent
was the subtitle, and nobody got author credit for any of the songs; a note in the introduction explained that most of the authors were on enough lists already.) Another song of mine, “Georgie and the IRT,” wound up on his second album. Some years later, I provided the liner notes for another album,
Songs for Aging Children.

When Dave died, I spent a couple of weeks playing his records. The music lasts. The song’s there, and so’s the singer, present in every note.

What fades, what’s hard to recapture, is the off-stage presence. The nights—and there weren’t enough of them, just handfuls scattered over the years—spent sitting around and talking. Dave was self-taught, and never did a better teacher meet a more receptive pupil; he knew more about more subjects than anyone I’ve ever met.

I wish to God he hadn’t left us so soon. And I wish this wonderful book he’s given us could be a little longer. But then I wished that of every set I ever heard him sing. And Dave had a long-standing policy of never doing more than a single encore. You should always leave them wanting more, he said. And he always did.

I was pleased and honored when Elijah Wald asked me to write an introduction to
The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
The task has turned out to
be far more difficult than I’d expected, and I can’t say I’m happy with the result.

Dave doesn’t really need someone to open for him. I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’ll get off the stage now, knowing at least that I’m leaving you in very good hands.

 

Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
July 2004

B
ack at Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, where I went to school, along with the rack, thumbscrew, and bastinado, they had the curious custom of announcing grades in the final exams and then making everybody hang around for an extra week before turning us loose for summer vacation. Presumably they did this to reinforce our belief in Purgatory.

Needless to say, to a bunch of twelve-year-olds this was all of a piece with the spanking machine rumored to be kept somewhere in the basement. The nuns who taught us probably shared our views in this matter, for it fell to them to keep a facsimile of order among a seething, fidgeting mass of twenty-five or so preadolescents. In retrospect, I almost sympathize with them.

Our seventh-grade teacher, whose name I recall as Sister Attila Marie, tried desperately to keep us amused. Since her usual boffo shtick—twisting a miscreant’s ear until the audience howled with glee—seemed inappropriate to the circumstances, she resorted to subtler forms of torment. She led sing-alongs: as I recall, her big number was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” She read us stories: I’ll never forget her reading of “The Lady or The Tiger”; her voice, in both timbre and accent, bore an uncanny resemblance
to that of Jimmy Durante. And once, in a dazzling display of creativity, she hit on a program guaranteed to keep the class stupefied for an entire day: she required each pupil to give a fifteen-minute talk on “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up.” We had a day to prepare.

Me, I was ready. I had given the matter careful consideration, but to be on the safe side I jotted down a few notes, and I showed up filled with the anticipatory delight of the born ham. Seating myself at my desk, I resigned myself to listening to a sorry series of future postmen, priests, abbesses, lawyers, and nurses squirmingly tout their dismal aspirations.

Fortunately, I hadn’t long to wait. I was the first kid in the second row. When my turn came, I confidently strode to the front of the class: “What I want to be when I grow up,” I began, “is a migratory worker—which isn’t just one thing. I want to travel from town to town doing odd jobs to make enough money to move on . . . ” I was just coming to the part about the boxcars, but I got no further. Sister Attila Marie was charging at me from the back of the room, her face an all-too-familiar beet red. She was screaming, “A
bum!
You want to be a
bum!
”

Needless to say, the moratorium on ear twisting was lifted there and then.

I was born in a Swedish hospital in Brooklyn, on June 30, 1936. When I started to swell up to a rather enormous size at an early age, my grandmother used to swear I’d been switched. Whenever I’d trip over something—which was frequently—she’d say, “Oh God, it’s the Swede again.”

My father and mother separated very shortly after I was born. I never met the man, and I have never felt a pang or so much as a twitch of curiosity about him. What you don’t know, you don’t miss. Until I was nine or ten years old, I was sometimes with my mother and sometimes with one or another of a succession of “aunts.” Some were better than others, and one of the better ones was Emma “Mom” Hogan. She had been a rumrunner for Legs Diamond back in Prohibition and had even managed a speakeasy, so naturally I thought she was the greatest thing since canned clams. She loved jazz, and in that house the radio was always playing: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie—I heard them all, sometimes on live broadcasts. Fats Waller had a regular show on Sunday afternoons, of which I was a devoted fan. Boy, I loved that guy! Years later I got
to know Herman Autrey, Fats’s trumpet player, and when I told him how much I had loved his playing on that show, he laughed and said, “I don’t know how you ever heard me. They wouldn’t let me face the mike, just stood me in a corner and made me play into the wall.” I remember Eddie Condon, too, and the Chamber Society of Lower Basin Street. The small combos were my favorites, because they sounded like they were having fun.

Around 1945 my mother and I moved to Richmond Hill, in Queens. At first we stayed with my grandparents and my Uncle Bill, but the place was too small for all of us, so my mother took a furnished room a few blocks away. I hated Richmond Hill. There were trees, detached houses, backyards—and paralyzing boredom. It was a neighborhood of working stiffs, all trying to be oh, so respectable. Sundays were especially excruciating. Of course everybody had to go to church, and afterward the kids weren’t allowed to change out of their Sunday best. No rough games, because you might tear something or get dirty. Mostly we would stand around on the corner, glaring down at our insistently shiny shoes. Everybody was perfectly miserable, even the grown-ups.

The move had a few compensations, though. My grandfather had been a semiprofessional pianist, playing in Catskill resorts around the turn of the century until my grandmother snagged him and put him to work. He knew all the pop songs of that time: Harry von Tilzer, Harrigan and Hart, Ben Harney, and of course Scott Joplin. “That was music,” he used to say. “This jazz stuff sounds like the tune the old cow died with” or, for variation, “like a nanny-goat pissing in a dishpan.” He was a country boy, and had a delicate way with the language.

I have only vague memories of hearing him play: I recall “The Maple Leaf Rag” and a rip-snorting version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” guaranteed to send any six-year-old into transports of martial ecstasy. Unfortunately, by the time we moved to Richmond Hill, there was no longer a piano in the house; my uncle had chopped it up and thrown it out, saying, “What do we need this for? We’ve got the radio.” He was a thoroughly modern American, with no interest in such archaic devices. He also threw out the autographed copy of Buffalo Bill’s autobiography.
¹

My grandmother was Brooklyn Irish, and time had stopped for her somewhere around 1910. She was a great storyteller, with an incredible memory for detail, and an indefatigable singer. She never stopped singing except to talk or eat—something was always either coming out or going in. And she didn’t have a great voice, but boy was she loud; she drove the neighbors nuts. Most of her repertoire had been learned from her mother in Ireland, and I picked up all sorts of songs from her: Irish music hall numbers, rebel songs, ballads, minstrel songs, tearjerkers—I can still sing “The Gypsy’s Warning” from beginning to end. I learned versions of Irish tunes with Gaelic choruses, though no one in my family had spoken Gaelic for hundreds of years; to us, they were just a succession of nonsense syllables: “Shonegga hanegga thamegga thu, baleshlecoghelee aushmedatheen.” Many years later, Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church, that went something like:

He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into “Chimes of Freedom.” Her version was better.

If you had asked anybody in my family, they would have stridently proclaimed themselves to be middle-class, but that was more a matter of aspiration than reality. My mother was a stenographer and typist. My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My grandfather was an electrician and subsequently became something of an aristocrat of labor. He was a great admirer of Eugene V. Debs. My grandmother hated Debs because she thought he was leading my grandfather off the straight and narrow and getting him drunk. She was probably right. In any event, the family was mostly Irish and thoroughly working class.

I went to Catholic school, and did pretty well for the first few years, but by high school I was thoroughly sick of it. It was not particularly interesting, and by that time I had decided I was going to be a musician or, barring that, some other sort of colorful ne’er-do-well. I was a voracious reader,
though, with extremely catholic tastes, of the small “c” variety. My family was not particularly literary, so they left me pretty much alone and I just picked up whatever looked interesting. I remember reading Grant’s memoirs, the Buffalo Bill autobiography, lots of Mark Twain, and a massive book called
Land and Sea
, which was some sort of anthropological study. I read Hemingway at thirteen,
The Sun Also Rises
, which bored me. My brain was like the attic of the Smithsonian.

My formal schooling ended when I was about fifteen. A truant officer picked me up in a pool hall—though he was actually there for the guy I was playing with—and I was hauled before the principal. That was an unprecedented occurrence: you never saw the principal, it was like being brought before Stalin. The principal looked down upon me from his authoritative height and called me “a filthy ineducable little beast”—that’s a direct quote; you don’t forget something like that. The upshot was that I was essentially told that if I didn’t show up for school, it would be all right with them, that they wouldn’t send the truant officer after me. That was fine with me.
²
The next year, I enrolled in something called “continuing education,” and for a while I would go out to Jamaica, Queens, once a month, but I didn’t take it seriously and that was the end of that.

My formal musical training was even less propitious. My mother had decided that I should learn to play the piano, so I used to have to go to the local Sisters of St. Joseph convent for my lessons, and then every afternoon I had to go to the same convent and practice for an hour after school. I leave it to the reader to imagine how much I hated that. It was the first time I learned how to read music, and I detested the whole experience with such a purple passion that until I was in my thirties, I had no desire to read standard notation or play the piano. At that point I began to notice how much better the piano would have suited my musical tastes, but by then I had been playing guitar for twenty years and had managed to make it into a serviceable substitute.

I always wanted to be a musician and performer. Looking back, the die was cast before I even realized I was in a crap game. When I was in first grade, one of the nuns discovered that I knew all three verses of the “Star Spangled Banner,” and she was so enraptured by this phenomenon that she paraded me from class to class singing, “Oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand . . .” Needless to say, this made me one of the most unpopular kids in the damn school—I was like that kid in
Tom Sawyer
who had memorized the most verses of scripture. But I loved the attention; I ate it up.