The Mayor of MacDougal Street (9 page)

We did not all like everything on those records; some of it was terrible. But it was all important to us, simply because it showed us what was out there and how it really sounded. For almost the first time, it gave us a sense of what traditional music in the United States was all about, from the source rather than from second- and thirdhand interpreters. The
Anthology
had eighty-two cuts on it, and after a while we all knew every word of every song, including the ones we hated. They say that in the nineteenth-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that. The
Anthology
provided us with a classical education that we all shared in common, whatever our personal differences. And it also started the whole reissue business—pretty soon Folkways had out an album of Uncle Dave Macon, one of Blind Willie Johnson, and then other labels picked up the ball.

Once again I have to stress that none of us was just listening to blues, or just listening to old-time music. Someone would go off to Mexico or Greece and come back with a few new songs, or someone would stumble across an album of African cabaret music and learn a couple of tunes—that’s where I picked up one of my favorites, a Liberian song called “Chicken Is Nice.” And all of this was going into the same meat grinder. The one limiting factor was the insistence on “authenticity,” on reproducing the traditional ethnic styles, all the way down to getting the accents right. It did not matter if you were ethnic à la Furry Lewis, or à la Jimmie Rodgers, or à la Earl Scruggs; that was a matter of personal taste. But that it should be authentically ethnic was a matter of principle.

As an erstwhile mouldy fig, I was right at home. The neo-ethnics were in exactly the same position vis-à-vis folk music that I had been in jazz—with the key difference that this was a new movement, while in jazz I had arrived too late to get in on the excitement. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that we were making a lot of the same mistakes, but we also gained some of the same benefits. When you listen to the early New Orleans revivalists, people like Lu Watters and the other West Coast players, they were trying to recreate the music of the teens and twenties, but what actually
happened was that they unwittingly created a new kind of music. It was not the music they set out to make in the first place, but it stands on its own merits, not on whether or not it is an accurate reflection of King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band. And that is a good thing, because King Oliver’s music had already been made. Now, the same thing was happening with us on the folk scene. I was taking these old records as my models, but what was really happening—though I might well have denied this at the time—was that I was developing a style and approach that was quite different from what I was hearing. Even when I tried to sound exactly like Leadbelly, I could not do it, so I ended up sounding like Dave Van Ronk. And that process was happening to a lot of us, just by playing the music, listening to each other, and finding out what worked for us and what didn’t.

Of course, all of this was not just happening at Washington Square. There was a constant round of parties, jam sessions, song swapping, and hootenannies. The interest was obsessive, to the point that for a while there, except for my political friends, I did not associate with anyone who was not involved in folk music in one way or another. That kind of passionate attention pays off, in terms of being able to learn songs, play, sing, or whatever one needs to do. I was learning more music, and learning it faster, than I have ever done before or since.

The most regular venue for our get-togethers was a coffeehouse on MacDougal Street called the Caricature. This was not like the later coffeehouses that would emerge on that block, in that it was by no means a performance space. It was a tiny place, with an even tinier back room where we were permitted—permitted, mind you—to pick and sing, as long as we did not disturb the marathon bridge games out front. It was a snug, I suppose you would call it, with just room enough for two tables and some benches. The owner was a woman named Liz, and she had the patience of a saint. She would be out there trying to play bridge, with all of us flailing and wailing in the background, and just once in a while she would come back and say, “We’ve got a very, very difficult rubber going. Could you keep it down a little bit?” She did like the music, though she rarely commented on it, and she was very good to us. If it had not been for her cheeseburgers on the cuff, I probably would have died. She made great cheeseburgers, and the free ones were the biggest and the best. She was altogether a great lady, although she also could be tough when she had to be.
She ran me out once or twice, and I remember her running other people out as well.

As best I can recall, the person who brought me down to the Caricature was Roy Berkeley, the Traveling Trotskyist Troubadour. At that time, Roy was hanging out with the Shachtmanites, another fringe-left group, and I was with the anarchists, and the Shachtmanites were among the only people who would talk to us. He was also one of the central figures over at the Caricature, and there were several people who started to hang out there because they were drawn to the Shachtmanites, for whatever reason, and then followed Roy down to the scene. As usual, it was a constantly shifting crew, but some of the regulars in that circle whom I have not mentioned up to now would have been Pete Goldsmith, Paul Schoenwetter, Perry Lederman, Curly Baird, Marty Jukovsky, Dorothy Carter, Bruce Langhorne, and Dave Woods. Dave was a big influence on me, because he was a real musician, a jazz guitarist who had studied with Lennie Tristano and did some country blues picking for his own amusement. He knew theory, knew how all the chords worked and how to build an arrangement, and he was only too happy to show me or anyone else who asked. I latched onto him, and it was like having coffee with Einstein a few times a week.

Quite a few of the regulars did not play but just enjoyed hanging out and listening to the music. There was Roland Dumontet, for example, who was something of a Mack the Knife character—God knows what all he was mixed up in. He was part of the motorcycle crowd, and always got the best-looking women. Women did not say Roland’s name, they swooned it. He was just perfectly creepy, with one drooping eyelid and an air of lurking menace. (Which is as good a moment as any to mention that one of the advantages of both anarchism and folk music was the number of young women who seemed to be attracted to the scene. Some were singers, but a lot just hung out on the fringes, and the anarchists were all deeply committed to the principle of “free love.” The Caricature drew a bunch of girls from Music and Performing Arts High, and there were pregnancy scares at least twice a month—some girl would come rushing in, grab another by the arm and drag her outside for a consultation.)

Weekends were the big party nights, especially since a lot of the musicians were still living over in Queens or Jersey. We would start partying on Friday, and it would all kind of build to Sunday. On Sunday we would
crawl out of bed sometime after noon and make our way over to Washington Square. We would play there until five o’clock, when the permit ran out, and then we would grab a bite to eat at Mother Hubbard’s or a place on 8th Avenue that we called “the secret deli” because it had a back room that could not be seen from the front room. Then we would shoulder our guitars again and head over to the American Youth Hostels building on 8th Street, where the old Whitney Museum used to be. Mike Cohen had a job with the AYH, and arranged for them to host a regular hootenanny every Sunday from seven to nine. Mike ran it some of the time, and then Barry Kornfeld took it over. So we would spend a couple of hours there, and then all of us would troop down to 190 Spring Street, in what is now SoHo, where the real party would begin. Roger Abrahams, who would later become a prominent folklorist, had an apartment there, and after a while some other people moved in and it became a sort of rat’s nest of folk singers. (I also remember a Peruvian guy named Inti, who was living there with a pet monkey. God, I hated that monkey.) On Sunday nights we would be distributed through two or three floors. One apartment would be all bluegrassers—the shit-kicker ghetto—and then there would be rooms full of blues singers and ballad people, usually taking turns and trading off with the same guitar. The rooms were small and ill lit, very crowded, and insufferably stuffy, and the music would go on until four or five o’clock in the morning.

Those Spring Street parties led directly to the opening of the first Village folk music venue, and the beginning of my professional career, but before I get to that I must make a brief digression.

Much as I loved playing music, it was not earning me a penny. The jazz gigs had dried up and no one was hiring blues howlers from Brooklyn. At this point I was mostly crashing at what we called the Diogenes Club, named for the place where Mycroft Holmes held court in the Conan Doyle stories. A bunch of us from Richmond Hill had chipped in $5 a month each to rent a loft at 350 Bowery, between 3rd and 4th, so we would have a place to hold parties, bring girls, or to crash if we got stuck in Manhattan. We had all brought our record collections and pooled them into a sort of common library; we had a rule at that time that no one was supposed to buy a record that anyone else had bought, thereby maximizing our group purchasing power. Since this was common space, nobody was supposed to actually
live there, but of course a number of us did, particularly me and one of my political buddies, Lenny Glaser. No one cared much, and people like my jazz pals Danny Frueh and Eddie Kaplan were happy that there was somebody around regularly who could keep an eye on their record collections, since after a while, there were a lot of people with keys, and stuff began to get ripped off. So I crashed there, or over at the Libertarian League hall, or with one or another girlfriend.

I was managing to keep body and soul together, but it was pretty lean pickings, and eventually I decided that I needed a real job. Since I was itching to see a little more of the world, my solution was to ship out with the merchant marine. Mitch Mitchell, whom I knew from the Libertarians, was a member of the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union, and he pulled some strings for me and got me my papers. For a week or two I had to get up at eight-thirty every goddamn morning and go down to the union hall in Brooklyn and throw in my card. Eventually I got a berth on a tanker, and over the next year or so I shipped out twice, once to New Orleans and once to Wilmington, California.

I liked that life a lot, though it had some disadvantages from a musical standpoint. I was a messman, and I had brought a guitar on board, an old Gretsch. One night I was standing my watch, and some big seas came up and I could not get down to my cabin in the fo’c’sle to close the port. When my watch finally ended, I went down and there was my guitar, gently bobbing up and down in several inches of water. I wiped it off as best I could, but as it dried out, the back just peeled up like a window shade. So I had to get another guitar, which I did in New Orleans. I was walking down the street and saw this beautiful Gibson J-45 in the window of a secondhand shop. I had planned to sign off the ship and spend a couple of months there, soaking up what was left of the jazz scene, but I had to have that guitar and it cost $150, which was more than I had saved up. So I got hold of the radio operator and borrowed a couple of hundred from him, and then I had to sign back on the ship to pay him back.

That period in the merchant marine was the most regular work I ever did, and also my first chance to do any real traveling. Except for that summer in Shaker Heights and a couple of times when a radical companion and I hitched out to Chicago for one reason or another, I had never been out of the New York area. It was all new to me, and I have believed ever
since that the best way to see a town for the first time is to come in on a ship. I will never forget my arrival in San Francisco: we came in through a huge fog bank, and suddenly there was a cutoff, just as if somebody had drawn a line in ink, and the sky was completely clear, and looming up over us was the Golden Gate Bridge. As an introduction to San Francisco, you just cannot beat that.
¹²

We docked across the bay in Richmond, but I had a little time off, so I took my duffel bag and my recently acquired Gibson and got a lift over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. Walking up the Embarcadero, I passed a saloon where a traditional jazz band was playing “Ace in the Hole,” a song I had never heard before but that became one of my favorites. I went in and introduced myself to the band. I had just picked up my pay, so I was relatively solvent. Not for long, though. In one wonderful afternoon they introduced me to the mysteries of steam beer and poker dice, and I remember very little else.

That was my second trip, and it kept me out of New York for almost six months. Now, the great advantage of seafaring as a profession is that if you steer clear of the poker tables or if you’re lucky at cards, you accumulate lots of cash. I have always had the card luck of Wild Bill Hickok, so in self-defense I started up a small blackjack game in the crew mess room—the point being that if you play by Las Vegas rules and have enough capital to ride out the occasional bad night, the dealer simply cannot lose. On the home journey, I made out like a bandit, and I paid off the S.S.
Texan
with $1,500 and a six-ounce jar of Dexedrine pills provided in lieu of a gambling debt, not to mention a half kilo of reefer scored off a Panamanian donkey-man for $20 while trundling through the Canal. In short, I was loaded for bear.

Coming back from a long stint at sea is a kind of Rip Van Winkle experience. Old friends have left town, old girlfriends have new boyfriends—it is all familiar places and strange faces. Most seamen deal with this situation by taking another ship, which only makes the problem worse the next time they come home. Before you know it, shipmates are calling you “lasttripper”
or “chicken farmer”—as in “Boys, this is my last trip; this time I’m gonna save my money and buy me a nice little chicken farm in Georgia.” It’s a trap.