The Mayor of MacDougal Street (35 page)

In fact, looking back on that period, very little of what got put down had much permanent value. There was a genuine artistic impulse, but the paradigms were flawed, and if you compare it to what was happening on Broadway in the 1930s, that scene was infinitely more creative and important than ours. The forms that were accepted as part of the folk matrix were too limited, both technically and in terms of staying power, and the ideology of the scene allowed for a great degree of sloppiness, which meant that nobody had to push themselves. Most of the songwriters were writing well below their abilities, and people who were capable of learning and employing more complicated harmonies and chord structures confined themselves to 1-4-5 changes. Some of them were enormously talented, but they were like an enormously talented boxer who insists on fighting with one hand behind his back.

The result was that we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell—but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington. Some very good songs came out of that period and some very good entertainers, but there has been no period in human history when there have not been good songs and good entertainers.

I do not believe that there is such a thing as progress in the arts. They peak, they decline, they hit a plateau, and it is often impossible to say why a certain period produces great work and another does not. I am a Marxist and a materialist, but I have never been able to convince myself that there is an economic interpretation that would explain Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson all being on the set at the same time. In retrospect, one can formulate theories about that, or the confluence of American writers in Paris in the 1910s, or the period in Chicago in the twenties when you could go into one club and hear Jimmy Noone, another and hear Benny Goodman, or King Oliver, or Louis Armstrong, or Jelly Roll Morton. The Village in the early 1960s was like that, and I could argue that at the same time the economic situation in this country was probably the best it has ever been in history, but I cannot show a connection. Maybe it was just sunspots. In any case, we were lucky, and we knew it.

Most of the books that have been written about this period do not really capture the feel of it, at least in part because so many of the people who were involved are not able to talk about it honestly. A lot of them are bitter because they have not done as well as they hoped to do, for one reason or another, and they look back at the people who did better and think: “That should have been my success. I was robbed, I was cheated.” So they talk about how much was stolen from them, how they were screwed, how all their friends fucked them and turned their backs on them. But all of that is after the fact. Nobody except a handful of real paranoids felt that way at the time.

Back then, we weren’t all clawing over each other’s bodies, trying to fight our way to the top. Mostly we were having the time of our lives. We were hanging out with our friends, playing music, and sitting around at all-night poker sessions in the room upstairs from the Gaslight. Win, lose, or draw, there was always something absolutely ridiculous happening, and we were laughing all the time—when we weren’t fighting or brooding drunkenly. It was very mercurial.

For me, one of the great things about that period was that I could make a living without leaving the Village. I was working weeks and weeks on end in clubs that I could walk to, so my living room was my dressing room, and I could even go home between sets. I was listening to music that interested me, and making music that interested my friends, and I felt that I belonged to a community of singers, songwriters, performers who were really cooking. It was very exciting, and yeah, we had our jealousies—when somebody got too big a piece of the action, all of us felt, “How dare that son of a bitch . . . ”—but that was not the dominant mood of the period. There was a lot of money around, and we all wanted a taste, but for a few years the trickle-down theory was actually working—the only time that has ever happened, in my experience—and it did not get particularly mean or petty except in the case of people who had not liked each other to begin with.

Personally, I was doing very well, thank you. I wasn’t making Dylan’s kind of money—that’s corporate wealth, the gross national product of El Salvador, and very few of us made anything like that. But I must have spent three or four years without ever being in a subway, which for a New Yorker pretty much sums it up. It was the kind of situation where if there was something I wanted and I didn’t have the money, I could just make another record or do an extra gig. That was when I acquired my collection of primitive art, as well as books, records, not to mention enjoying a lot of fabulous meals and parties. We were all living
wie Gott in Frankreich
, indulging our various whims. Some people bought houses in the country, some built recording studios, some developed expensive drug habits. Almost none of us bothered to hoard any money; it was all too unreal. Every time you went out for a couple of drinks, you would hear that someone had just signed a contract with Columbia or Warner Brothers for mucho buckos, and suddenly another town house was being renovated on Commerce Street. It was like a rolling bonanza.

Dylan’s success sparked the real explosion, but he was part of a broader phenomenon. In terms of the mass audience, Peter, Paul, and Mary had two hits with Bobby’s songs before he even got on the charts. Dylan made it as a popular music figure on the coattails of Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Byrds, and other people who were doing covers of his songs, and as late as 1964 it was still pretty hard to sell him to anyone but the cognoscenti. He
was a difficult artist, from the mainstream point of view, so when he took off, it was really a case of overdue recognition.

As for the charge that Bobby was “selling out” when he stopped writing protest music, or when he went electric, it makes no sense in the context of that moment, because there was no reason to think that there would be any buyers. It never occurred to me that he was scuttling his artistic vision in a cynical grab at fame and fortune, and if he had been, I would have been very dubious about it working. I was at Newport in 1965, when he plugged in for the first time onstage, although I missed the famous incident and did not hear about it until the next morning, by which time there were already 212 different versions of what had happened. It was certainly the big news of the moment, but I had no sense that the musicians felt that Dylan was betraying us or betraying folk music. Some of us liked what he was doing and some of us didn’t, but our judgment was a musical judgment, not a political or a sociological judgment. The question was, Does it work musically?
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Myself, I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. And I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them. It is like the old socialist I knew who was an editor of a newspaper in the early 1960s: A bunch of New Leftists marched into his office and presented him with a set of nonnegotiable demands, insisting that he change this, that, and the other thing about what he was printing. He listened to them as long as he could stand it and then just said, “I’ve been a socialist for fifty years. Do you know what you’re going to be ten years from now? You’re going to be dentists.” It was the same with the fans who got bent out of shape about Bobby’s
going electric. They were all very pure and self-righteous, but forty years later Bobby is still out there making music, and they’re all dentists.

The point is that categories such as “folk” and “blues” are inherently limiting, and any serious musician tries to steer clear of them as much as possible. Listeners and record companies want to fit you into these neat little boxes, but as a performer you need to be open to all the possibilities around you and to use whatever tools are appropriate for the job at hand. In my own case, I was typed as a blues singer back in the 1950s and have had to come to terms with the fact that no matter what I sing, most people will continue to think of me in those terms. But I concluded quite early on that I was essentially a saloon or cabaret performer. A lot of my material comes out of the blues tradition, but overall I have more in common with someone like Peggy Lee or Blossom Dearie than I do with Mississippi John Hurt or the Reverend Gary Davis. So when Dylan became a rock star, it was not really a shock to me—or more precisely, the shock was not musical. The shock was how it changed the scene.

We had all been hanging out on MacDougal Street, singing for one another and for a small group of devoted fans, and suddenly one of us had hit the mass market. The result was that a lot of people who had never been greedy in their lives began having visions of El Dorado. Dylan was one of ours and he had struck gold, and everybody thought that they could get rich, too. There were essentially two reactions. The first was jealousy, variations on “Why him?” and “He copped this from me; he stole that from so-and-so.” Of course, we had all been stealing from each other all along, but it had never mattered, because we were all in the same situation. We had been playing for tips and sleeping on floors, and when one of us suddenly could get a suite at the top of the Plaza, naturally that hurt.

The other reaction, which was even more damaging, was “I’m gonna be next. All I have to do is find the right agent, the right record company, the right connections, and I can be another Bob Dylan!” Yeah, sure you could. All you had to do was write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—for the first time. That was what Bobby had done, and none of the rest of us did that. Bobby is not the greatest songwriter in history, but he was far and away the best on our scene, and whether we admitted it or not, we all knew that. Still, there were a lot of poor slobs who were working very hard and in some cases producing very good music, and who were getting nowhere at
all. So it is not surprising that some of them got awfully bitter—I cannot deny that at times I felt a pang myself.

Meanwhile, the sycophants appeared, crowding around and telling us how wonderful we were. I don’t think that even the most vain among us really liked them, but when someone comes up and says, “Boy, you’re so great,” it is certainly better than the alternative and has an obvious seductive quality. Dylan drew more than his share of this attention, and after a while a sort of hierarchy was established of knights of the round table, princes of the blood, all paying court to the emperor with the long, bushy hair. And because of who he was, that became a pretty nasty scene. Bobby had always been kind of paranoid, and now he felt that he had to surround himself with people he could trust. But it was not reciprocal; he never felt that he had to be trustworthy himself. He was always testing the loyalty of the people who were near him, and it could really get vicious at times. There was this group around him—David Blue, Victor Maimudes, Bobby Neuwirth, and various others—and they would back up whatever he said, including when he chose to turn on one or another of them.

For myself, I consider it fortunate that Bobby and I reached our parting of the ways fairly early. Shortly after his third or fourth record had come out and gone diamond or whatever, he was holding court in the Kettle of Fish, and he got on my case and started giving me all of this advice about how to manage my career, how to go about becoming a star. It was complete garbage, but by that point he had gotten used to everybody hanging on his every word and applauding any idea that came into his head. So I sat and listened for a while, and I was polite and even asked him a couple of questions, but it became obvious that he was simply prodding and testing me. He was saying things like “Why don’t you give up blues? You do that, and I’ll produce an album on you; you can make a fortune.” He wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I finally pushed back my chair and said, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?” And I walked out.

That was that, thank God, and while I have seen Bobby off and on over the years, and we are always perfectly cordial, we were never close again. I decided just to go about my business, and to let him and his spear-carriers do whatever they wanted to do. Because I could see what was happening to people who let themselves get caught up in that scene.

As for the star-making rap, I had already heard versions of that from Albert Grossman, but Albert was a good deal funnier about it and he had the track record to back it up. Still, in essence it was the same routine, and the point was to prove that everybody has a price. Albert was a great fan of
The Magic Christian
, Terry Southern’s novel about a man who does things like filling a swimming pool full of sewage and offal with some $100 bills mixed in, just to prove that people will dive in. So he came up to me one night and said, “Look, I have a proposal for you: I’ll arrange all your bookings, and I’ll guarantee you $100,000 a year. You can pick your own material, sing anything you want. You just have to make one change in your act: I want you to wear a helmet with horns on it, and change your name to Olaf the Blues Singer.” He was completely serious, and I think if I had gone along, he would very likely have done it—not because he believed it was a good idea, but just to prove that I had my price. He died without ever knowing that it was $120,000 . . .

The truth is that I was by no means immune to the lure of money, and I say that without any shame. I deeply mistrust the notion that musicians or other artists are “selling out” when they make a sound commercial choice. A lot of people who have grown up to be stockbrokers or dentists feel that they have abandoned their youthful ideals, and it is very important to them that their idols remain pure, as proof that there is purity somewhere out there in the world. Apparently, musicians don’t have to make a living; only dentists and stockbrokers have to do that. So when someone comes up to me and says, “I admire you because you stuck to your guns, you never sold out,” my temptation is to say, “Listen: I’ve been standing on 42nd Street, bent over with my pants around my ankles for thirty years.” Obviously, there are things I am willing to do and things I am not willing to do, but the bottom line is that I have a certain set of skills and I have done the best I can with them, and if the cards had come up differently and I had had more mainstream success, that would have been very nice.