The Mayor of MacDougal Street (24 page)

Like most geniuses, Gary had his eccentricities, and one that sometimes drove me crazy was that he had his own sense of pitch. We were playing once at a concert in Canada, and he did his whole first set with the low E string about a quarter tone flat. It was driving me crazy, because every time he hit that note it was booming off-key, so on the break I borrowed his guitar on some excuse and surreptitiously tuned that string. He came back for the second set, started into a song, and just stopped dead, looked a little perplexed, and tuned that string right back down to where it had been. He also could have the weirdest taste in guitars. At one point I had busted my main guitar and it needed to be repaired, and Mattie Umanov, who was doing the repair, loaned me a Martin. It was the worst goddamn Martin I have
ever picked up; the strings were a half-inch off the fingerboard, so it was excruciating to play, and it was almost purposeless because you could not hear it five feet away. Fortunately, after a few days Mattie called me, and I went over to pick up my Guild, and Gary was in the shop. I had brought back the Martin, and Gary said, “Let me see that guitar,” and he started to play it, and he thought it was the greatest guitar he had ever played. He bought it on the spot, and he would play it out of tune just so, accurate to within a microtone, exactly the way he wanted it.

There are so many Gary Davis stories. He was given to cracking very bad jokes, and the worse the joke, the more he loved it. He was his own best audience. He could hardly get through one of his godawful wisecracks without breaking up. He was also quite suspicious because of all those years on the streets. Being blind, he was a target for people who would grab his guitar and run off, so as a result he never let it out of his hands. He used to take it with him into the bathroom—and he would play there. He also had concluded that he needed to be able to defend himself, so he used to carry this big .38 that he called “Miss Ready.” He would pull out this gun and show it to me, and one time, as diffidently as I could, I said, “You know, Gary, you
are
blind. Don’t you think maybe it’s not such a good idea . . . ”

He said, “If I can hear it, I can shoot it.”

Over the years, we worked together as often as I could arrange it, and since we were both on the same circuit, we ran into each other a good deal outside New York, as well. One time around 1962, I was working up in Boston or Cambridge, and Rev. Davis was working there too, in another club. An old friend of mine named Pete Friedberger was handling the driving for him, and Pete asked me if I would like to ride back to New York with them. That sounded great to me, especially since otherwise I was likely to end up sleeping on somebody’s kitchen floor, the usual accommodations for a traveling folksinger—we used to call it the “At Your Mercy Circuit.” So after the show, we all piled into this big old Chevy, with me sitting in front with Pete, and Gary sprawled out in the back with “Miss Gibson.”

Pete and I were yakking about this, that, and the other thing, and Gary as always was playing, and as we were leaving Boston, he started playing “Candyman.” That was fine with me, of course; it was one of my favorite songs, and he had all sorts of variations he would play on it. By somewhere
around Providence, though, it was beginning to wear a little thin, variations or not. By New Haven it was really beginning to bug me, but what could I say? This was the Reverend Gary Davis playing “Candyman.” Bridgeport . . . somewhere around Stamford, something inside me snapped. I growled, “For Christ’s sake, Gary, can’t you play anything else?” And I turned around, and he was asleep.

Maybe the best Gary Davis story, and one of the truly great moments in American music, happened when I was unfortunately not present, but a friend told me the whole thing in detail. It was after Peter, Paul, and Mary had recorded Gary’s version of “Samson and Delilah” on their first album—which turned out to be a godsend for Gary and gave him the money to buy his house. In order to get all of his rights in order, Gary had to sign a contract with the publisher, Harms-Whitmark, which was associated with Warner Brothers, the label that Peter, Paul, and Mary were on. As I heard the story, the people in publicity at Harms-Whitmark decided that they were going to turn this into a media event, and they had reporters from all the trade papers there, and all the old-timers with Harms-Whitmark—the guy who had been Victor Herbert’s publisher, the guy who had been Irving Berlin’s partner, all these
alter kocker
s.

They were all seated around this long table, and Rev. Davis was seated in the center, and the ceremonial signing was about to happen. The flash-bulbs were popping, and my friend, a junior executive appropriately named Artie Mogull, told me that just as they were about to hand Gary the golden pen to sign the contract, someone asked the formal question “Reverend Davis, are you the author of this song?”

Gary paused a dramatic pause, and in his preacher’s voice announced: “No, I did not write that song!” No one knew what to do. The reporters were scribbling madly; elderly executives were popping nitro pills all around the table. And then Gary spoke again: “It was revealed to me in a dream!”

I always thought that was one of the funniest stories I ever heard, but I have kind of an interesting postscript to it. As I have said, I never actually took lessons from Gary, but I would sometimes ask him to show me things, and at the tag end of “Candyman” there is a little trick that he used to throw in, where he has the basses reversed and he comes out of the reversed bass into normal, forward picking, and just where he makes the
changeover, there is this little three-note bass figure. Time and time again, Gary tried to show me that thing, and I always got my fingers all tied up in knots. He would slow it down and play it one note at a time, but I just had some kind of a block. I could not get it.

Well, Gary died in 1972, and a year or two later I had a dream. In the dream, Gary was onstage in a club, and I was sitting ringside. Gary was playing “Candyman,” and when he got to that part in the thing, he leaned forward so I could see his hands very clearly, and played it very slowly. I woke up with a start, and I was in a motel room somewhere and my guitar was sitting right by the bed, and I just picked up the guitar and I could play it. That is the closest thing to a supernatural experience I have ever had in my life, and I generally don’t put much stock in such things, but that man was so frustrated by my clumsiness that I would not put it past him to have come back and taken one more crack at it.

A
s Wavy Gravy says, if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there. We were young guys, full of piss and vinegar—not to mention bourbon—and at times in those early years it felt like one long party. There are a few dates that can be fixed from newspaper clippings, but for a lot of events even pinning down the year is impossible, and if my chronology seems confusing at times, that is at least in part because I am confused.

My base of operations for most of the next few years was the Gaslight Café, but before I get into that story I need to pick up a loose end: the appearance of the first honest-to-god folk club in the Village. That was what would become known as Folk City, but it started out as the Fifth Peg, and it was the brainchild of Izzy Young and a friend of his named Alan Pepper. They started by approaching a bar owner named Mike Porco, who had a place called Gerde’s over on 3rd and Mercer, across the street from what became the Bottom Line. Mike had been running that room for years, but he was basically just surviving on lunch business. That was the factory loft area, and by seven at night the place was completely empty; there must have been enough business for Mike to figure he might as well stay open, but just barely. So Izzy and Alan went to him and said, “Look, put in a stage and a PA system and we’ll book acts. We’ll charge at the door and pay
the performers out of that, and the money from the bar is yours.” It was pure gravy, so Mike went for it.

That was in January of 1960, and the Fifth Peg ran for the next five months. I may have worked there at least once, and I was down to see other people all the time. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry were regular performers, and there was also a double bill of Gary Davis and Cisco Houston. Cisco was dying of cancer, and that may actually have been his last show. I had never much liked his records—I thought he sounded fulsome and kind of slick—but he turned me into a believer. There was an honesty to his performance, underlined by the courage it took for him just to get up onstage; he was already in a lot of pain, but none of that was allowed to come through.

The club was packed most of the time, and before long, Mike realized that there was no need for him to keep sharing the take with Izzy and Alan. So about month six, he gave them the boot and took over the operation for himself, calling it Gerde’s Folk City. We were all outraged, of course. Izzy was one of ours; he had kept the Folklore Center afloat in the dark days of the 1950s, and here he had finally opened a place for people like us to work and this capitalist was giving him the shaft. Out of loyalty, I more or less disassociated myself from Gerde’s for a time, but the offer of hard cash was difficult to turn down, and it soon became obvious that you could have your cake and eat it, too: you could work at Folk City and still walk into the Folklore Center without violence being done to you. Actually, though he probably would disagree, I suspect that Izzy was a little relieved that the Fifth Peg ended; it was a lot of extra work, and the Folklore Center was getting busier all the time. So it was probably just as well that Mike took over, though he could have waited a few more months and been more diplomatic about it.

Mike was a nice guy and he seemed genuinely to enjoy the music, but he was very cheap and evasive about business matters. Every once in a while someone would put pressure on him to do something that would cost money, and he would immediately conjure up these mysterious partners whom no one had ever seen who would quash the suggestion. He was an Italian immigrant, and it was delightful to watch his English deteriorate when the bargaining got hot—when things were going well, that man could speak English like Churchill. It was due to Mike’s parsimoniousness
that Folk City was one of the only union houses on the folk circuit. The AF of M had essentially no interest in folksingers, but Mike made his room into a proper union house because the union pay scale was nice and low. By their standards Gerde’s was a class B room, so he did not have to pay the full class A rate, with the result that you worked there for five nights a week and would not bring home more than $200. If you were doing really well, you could extract a few more bucks, but not many, and by 1963 I was making more money at the Gaslight, which didn’t even have a liquor license.

All the while, though, I never stopped liking Mike. I used to go over a couple of times a week on a quiet night and shoot the shit with him and his brother John, talking above whoever the poor act onstage was. Musicians are a lousy audience, especially if they are your friends, because they all come down to see you but they wind up seeing each other, and it turns into a party. Folk City was not a bad room to sing in on a quiet night, but it had a problem I have found in a lot of bars, which is that the people seated in front of the stage knew that they were watching a show, but the people at the bar would act like they were in another room. When that place was crowded, it was one of the toughest rooms I have ever seen; I had a pretty devoted following by then, but I had a rough time. The people who did best in there were acts like Brother John Sellers, who gave a really rousing, crowd-pleasing show, or the Clancy Brothers.

When Mike took over, he had no idea of what folk music was or who the hot acts on the scene might have been, so for a year or two he had to book the place on the basis of an informal brain trust. The main advisers included Robert Shelton—who was the reviewer for the
New York Times
, which had some obvious advantages—Logan English, Terri, and myself. After a while Mike got to be fairly knowledgeable, but he was still feeling his way until about the time Phil Ochs showed up in 1962. At that point he discarded his training wheels and went his own way.

I played Folk City quite a few times, but my main base of operations was MacDougal Street. After a year or so at the Commons, I moved across the street and started working regularly at the Gaslight, which at that point was still owned by John Mitchell. I had actually been working for Mitchell already, since in June of 1960 the Gaslight was shut down by the Fire Department and Mitchell took over the Commons for the next three months, until he could get the Gaslight open again.

Mitchell was the world’s foremost maniac, and he was like a magnet for trouble. Over the space of a few years, he had three successful coffeehouses—the Figaro, the Gaslight, and the Commons—and in one way or another he blew every one of them. He started out with the Figaro, and what apparently happened there was that he put the place in his wife’s name to evade the IRS and whatnot, and then she left him and got involved with Tommy Ziegler, and the Figaro went with her. During that period we all used to go to the Figaro and drink coffee in the afternoon, but we had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. We would just sit around and shoot the bull, and sometimes we would take out our guitars and Al, the manager, would threaten to throw us out, and we would put our guitars back in the case and order some more coffee, if we could afford it.

When Mitchell lost the Figaro, he went down the street and opened the Gaslight, which was dogged by problems almost from the outset. As I mentioned earlier, this was an old-line Italian neighborhood, and all the clubs that served liquor had traditionally needed mob connections to get a license. The only bar that wasn’t mobbed up was the Kettle of Fish, and that was because the owner, Guido, was highly respected by the entire Italian community, the mob included. The first coffeehouses had not really been an issue, since they were not taking any business away from the bars, but when they started having entertainment, they became competition. They also were drawing a new crowd, including beatniks and Negroes, and a lot of people in the neighborhood were not happy about that. Between the mob and the concerned citizens, there was a lot of pressure to close these places, and since Mitchell was one of the least diplomatic men on earth, he became the main focus of this hostility. The Fire Department would shut him down for some violation, and he would respond by putting signs all over the doorway attacking the fire chief for turning the Village into a police state, and the fire chief would try to tear the signs down, and Mitchell would blow his top and the cops would show up and book him for assault.