White Bicycles (4 page)
After the examination, I stood in my underwear in front of a sergeant who looked at me as if I were an insect as he shot off a list of questions. I had longish hair and a bad attitude. When I said I was a ‘writer’, he repeated the word contemptuously as if it were a synonym for ‘pimp’ or ‘bank robber’. He scribbled something on my form and told me to get dressed. A few weeks later, my 1Y classification arrived. It wasn’t quite a 4F, but it put me at the end of the queue and freed me to pursue my life without worrying about the growing war in Vietnam. Within six months, so many freaks had shown up for their physicals tripping, claiming to be homosexual, with Dexedrine-fuelled heart rates, or applying for conscientious objector status that the army realized its aversion to ‘bad apples’ would leave them short of cannon fodder. Had it been the autumn rather than the spring of 1964, I would have had my head shaved and been sent straight to boot camp.
With a month and a half to kill before the start of the tour, I decided to pay my first visit to the South. Like Andalusia for Spain or Transylvania for Hungary, the American South is the source of almost all the nation’s traditional musical forms. The year 1964 marked a climax of dramatic change in the region: black voters were being registered, lunch counters and buses integrated and schools forced to admit black students. The resistance by Southern whites was at its most intense. Overdue as these revolutionary changes were, I wanted to catch a glimpse of the old South before it disappeared.
The first leg of the journey involved driving Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and some friends of mine to Eric Von Schmidt’s winter quarters in Sarasota, Florida. Despite knowing, as all Northerners did in those days, that certain counties in Carolina and Georgia paid no property taxes thanks to the money gouged from sun-seeking Yankees, we were caught in a speed trap and needed a $75 whip-round to avoid a night in jail. We bemoan the homogenization of American culture and accents, but generations of Northern drivers would be happy to have been spared the sight of a drawling, racist, sunglass-wearing, pistol-packing Southern cop pulling them over on a lonely stretch of Georgia highway.
After some R&R on a Gulf Coast beach, I headed for Johns Island, South Carolina, where Guy Carawan was hosting a festival of local music. He took me to an Easter night ‘watch service’ at Moving Star Hall, a flimsy wooden box set on cement blocks. The congregation were mostly domestics who worked for white families in Charleston. They shivered in their thin clothes as the preacher opened the service in the Gullah accent unique to these islands: ‘This
morning
… at
five
o’clock… the
Lord
… blessed
me
…
once
again…with
SIGHT!
Praise the Lord!’
They sang hymns in their own style. The clapping is slow for the first few verses then doubles in tempo while the singing maintains the original tempo. The intensity grows and the clapping becomes faster and more syncopated until the song ends with a wild flourish – at exactly the same tempo in which it began. The Top Forty at the time was full of Motown, whose churning beat under ballad melodies was inspired by bass player James Jamerson, a Gullah who learned his music in a church not far from Moving Star Hall.
I spent the following afternoon at Guy’s house with Bessie Jones, John Davis and the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Bessie was a fount of folklore, a key figure in Alan Lomax’s documentation of the region’s music five years earlier. The Rolling Stones learned ‘This May Be The Last Time’, originally a children’s ring dance, from Lomax’s recordings there. Carawan encouraged the preservation of local dialects and traditions, helped to register voters and organize against the developers pushing aside residents lacking deeds to their homes. There were already golf courses on nearby Hilton Island and the big money boys were eyeing Johns. By bringing attention to the music, Guy hoped to build local pride and an organization to halt the destruction of this unique culture. Many of the fishermen and farmers on these islands were descendants of runaway slaves from the Bahamas and other West Indian islands. Their ebony skins and sharp features told of African lineages undiluted by the rapacious practices of American slave owners. Guy’s festival was sparsely attended but full of great singing and warm feelings from an audience of determined Southern liberals and brave local blacks.
My next stop was Albany, Georgia, where Peter deLissovoy, a friend from Harvard, was working for SNCC (the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee). At nineteen, Pete had been kicked out of South Africa for paying an illegal visit to Albert Luthuli, the pre-Mandela anti-apartheid leader. Rather than fly back, he hitch-hiked from Johannesburg to Cairo, getting arrested as a spy in Tanganyika, becoming infected with bilharzia on the Nile and spending months in hospital after his return. He took me to a chicken dinner at a nearby church and I was struck by the gentle courage of the local people and the Northern volunteers. For two nights I slept in the bunk below Pete’s in a wooden house on one of the many unpaved roads in the black district. When I asked him about the marks on the wall above my bed, he said they were bullet holes from a nocturnal drive-by a few weeks earlier.
When I was ready to leave, some of the local activists were worried that my New Jersey number plates had been visible in town for a couple of days. The implications of my meeting a cop on the highway out of town might be more unpleasant than just a speeding ticket, so they led me down dirt back roads through the red-earthed pine forests of south-western Georgia. I rejoined the highway across the state line in Alabama. (Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were doing work similar to Pete’s not far away in Mississippi; they were murdered three months later.)
New Orleans, my next stop, was – and has remained – a law unto itself: in the South but not really of it. The struggles of my friends in Carolina and Georgia seemed far away once I hit the French Quarter. I located Preservation Hall and spent the next seven evenings there.
Twenty-five years before the blues and folk booms of the sixties, there had been a Dixieland revival. As jazz moved from swing towards bebop in the late ’30s, a group of white fanatics set about rescuing traditional New Orleans jazz from obscurity, much as we were trying to do for blues. There are generally two strands to white fascination with African-rooted music. First, dance floors fill with people excited by a new way to shake their behinds. Then, as the fashion shifts and the beat changes, the intellectuals and wallflowers who have admired the music’s vitality and originality move in to preserve or resurrect the form. Preservation Hall was run by Alan and Sandy Jaffe, New Yorkers who had fallen in love with New Orleans music and set up a tiny showcase for the musicians who still played in uptown funerals and parades. The Jaffes provided them with a regular payday in the French Quarter, where devotees, mainly European or Japanese, would pay homage. I stayed until the last note every night as George Lewis, Kid Howard, Kid Thomas, Percy Humphries, Billie & Dede Pierce, Alcide ‘Slow Drag’ Pavageau and Joe Robichaux improvised elegantly in a long-ago style.
There were some surprisingly young players in the Preservation Hall bands. New Orleans is unusual for an American city in its ability to embrace the old and new simultaneously. As in Brazil or Cuba, musicians and dancers there follow the latest fashions yet can still demonstrate skills in fifty-year-old forms, a phenomenon seldom encountered in Brixton or South Los Angeles.
I walked around the corner one evening into Bourbon Street, then not quite the drink-sodden playpen of Texas frat-boys and conventioneers it is today. Cousin Joe Pleasant, the member of the upcoming Blues and Gospel Caravan about whom I knew the least, had a regular gig there singing vaudevillian blues and telling tall stories. His signature tune was ‘I Wouldn’t Give A Blind Sow An Acorn, Wouldn’t Give A Crippled Crab A Crutch’, a wry send-up of the bragging blues form. We hit it off immediately; his help would prove invaluable in the difficult early days of the tour. After a week, I headed north to Chicago.
On the South Side I toured the declining blues clubs, most of whose customers were old and poor. The area was poised between its golden age, when it vied with Harlem for the role of capital of Black America, and the dismal last decades of the twentieth century when it spiralled down into violence and destitution. I introduced myself to Muddy Waters at Pepper’s Lounge, his home base. His band included stars in their own right, such as James Cotton on harmonica and pianist Otis Spann. During the late set, a young white guitarist named Mike Bloomfield sat in and played some enthusiastic lead.
Leaving Pepper’s around 2.30, I stopped to give some change to a panhandler and found myself being pushed at knife-point towards a dark doorway. My friends shouted and people came out of a fried chicken joint to chase the muggers away. A crowd gathered round to make sure I was OK and someone bought us drinks in a nearby bar. Like a down-at-the-heel unofficial chamber of commerce, they wanted our assurance that the experience wouldn’t put us off coming back. The next day I headed east to pack for the start of my European adventures.
I PASSED THROUGH CAMBRIDGE a few days before my departure. As I was standing by a phone booth in Harvard Square with a handful of nickels in search of a bed for the night, a girl I had always fancied (a concise British term that would not enter my vocabulary until I got to London) walked by. She told me she had a new boyfriend-free apartment and I was welcome to stay. Another English verb I would soon learn was ‘to pull’: I thought I had just pulled Mary Vangi.
She gave me a key and a kiss and put my bag in her bedroom as I set off to hear legendary blues master Skip James at a Boston coffee house while she got ready for her waitressing job. Later, she and a friend planned to crash a post-Joan-Baez-concert party; she’d be home about one. After an exhilarating evening of music, I strode eagerly up her front steps at the appointed hour to find the sofa made up in the front room, my bag beside it and a note reading: ‘Dear Joe. Sorry, change of plans. Will explain in morning. Sleep well. Love, Mary.’
When I woke to the smells of coffee and bacon, I threw on my clothes and peered into the kitchen. Mary was standing by the stove in a dressing gown looking extremely pleased with herself. The bathroom door was closed and I could hear water running. She grinned at me conspiratorially. ‘Guess who’s in the shower! Dylan!!’ What, in the spring of 1964, when His Bobness was king of the folk world, could I say? I joined the happy one-night couple for a monosyllabic breakfast and hit the road.
By the spring of 1964, Dylan and Baez had become folk’s royal couple, uniting the rival New York and Boston camps with their musical energy while becoming sexually potent icons of popular culture. Folk music had come a long way from its origin as an offshoot of left-wing politics. When Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie arrived in the ’40s to lend authenticity to the ‘people’s music’, its popularity surged. It got a bit
too
popular for the McCarthy-ites in the early ’50s after Pete Seeger’s Weavers got to number one with ‘Goodnight Irene’. Subpoenas were issued and warnings whispered to radio and TV networks about communist influences. Folk music went into a long Eisenhower-era decline.
In 1957 the Kingston Trio found a song about a hanged killer named Tom Dula on an Appalachian field recording and their slick version topped the charts and brought folk music back from the wilderness. In the early sixties, the civil rights activism of the Kennedy era needed a better soundtrack than corporate pop; protest songs, mostly by New York-based singer-songwriters, provided it.
In Boston, things evolved differently. The spark that lit up the local scene was Joan Baez’s barefoot appearance at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Singing a duet with the hokey Bob Gibson, she brought the house down, triggering a boom in guitars, long hair and black turtlenecks back in Massachusetts. In my first year at Harvard, I saw her riding a Vespa with her boyfriend through the slush of the Cambridge winter, grinning wickedly with that beautiful dark mane trailing behind. She radiated sex and humour, not earnest politics. The pleasure she took in her own voice was sensual, her choice of songs based on the beauty of the melodies and the way they told of a world of wild (but often doomed) women and free-spirited, dangerous men.
The scene that flourished in the ripples of her success was full of eccentrics, visionaries and travellers. Around Harvard Square, people were always going off to or coming back from India, Mexico, North Africa, Paris, London or Japan. They soaked up Zen, flamenco guitar, Rimbaud’s poetry and new ways of getting high. Everyone bought the blues and country music reissue LPs emerging in the wake of Harry Smith’s masterful
Anthology of American Folk
Music
compilation. In cheap apartments in old wooden houses they taught themselves a particular Appalachian banjo or fiddle style, or figured out how Bukka White tuned his National steel-bodied guitar. New Yorkers like Seeger and the Weavers gave music from all over the world – often learned from Alan Lomax’s field recordings – the same chirpy strum and hearty harmonies, as if that proved all men were brothers. The Cambridge scene was drawn more to differences than to similarities.
The wildly divergent personalities and tastes of Smith and Lomax were central to the two approaches that would clash so memorably at Newport in 1965. Lomax was a bear of a man, a skirt-chaser, completely sure of himself and his theories about the inter-connectedness of music across cultures and continents. Travelling from Mississippi prison chain gang to Italian tobacco fields with his tape recorder, he had developed a thick hide and a bullying manner. Smith, on the other hand, had become a collector of recordings of traditional music almost by accident. He was a homosexual who made experimental films, spoke several Native American languages and smoked frequent joints. His vast record collection almost buckled the floor of his apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, a few express stops downtown from Lomax’s sprawling West Side apartment. New York folk singers were more comfortable with the earnestness of Lomax’s field recordings, while the Cambridge musicians were drawn in a context-free, almost postmodern way to the vivid personalities that shone through the commercial 78s Smith and later compilers made available. Big Bill Broonzy, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and Blind Lemon Jefferson had been stars in the 1920s and early 1930s for good reason: the artistry of their music far surpassed that of Lomax’s amateurs.