A Freewheelin' Time (11 page)

Behind
the
Music

The Lomaxes and Harry Smith,
separately and in completely different ways, collected American old-time folk music. John Lomax and his son Alan did so through field recordings and Smith by obsessively collecting old commercial records wherever he found them.

The people who played and loved folk music from the 1940s on, and certainly in the 1960s, are indebted to Smith and the Lomaxes for the music they preserved and disseminated. It was through their work that this uniquely American music is available for all who love and are inspired by it.

Alan Lomax recorded folk music from around the world, also. His collection of Italian folk songs augmented what knowledge I had from the smattering of folk songs my sister and I learned hearing one of our uncles sing. My sister Carla worked for Lomax for a while and loved her job, but she noted that Alan wasn’t always generous with crediting the people who worked for him. A larger issue is the way Lomax attributed credit to the original artists. The methods the Lomaxes used to finance their projects, and pay the performers they recorded and whose music they collected, was complicated and not for me to decipher. When I first heard old-time music I didn’t think about who might have collected it or how; I just wanted to hear more. In the 1960s musicians around the Village were enthralled by the singers they heard on these records and the experience radically influenced the way they made music.

Above all, the Lomax field recordings and Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music
delivered this music from back porches and local communities out into the world at large. They gave us an invaluable legacy: a musical heritage.

A group called the Friends of Old Time Music, founded by Israel Young, John Cohen, and Ralph Rinzler, was responsible for bringing into the urban folk fold Mississippi John Hurt, Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Watson, and many others. Following in the footsteps of Alan Lomax, they searched for the men and women who played and sang on the records they were captivated by and learning from. The musicians who were still around were pleased that a new young audience revered them and their music.

Ralph Rinzler played the mandolin with the Greenbriar Boys, a bluegrass group, and John Cohen was part of the New Lost City Ramblers, together with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley. The Ramblers sang folk songs from the Depression era, 1920s and 1930s Americana. They had great energy when they performed, and although they toured quite a bit and weren’t around New York City much, their reputation was sizable.

I think I first encountered the Ramblers when I was about fifteen years old. We lived within a mile or so of LaGuardia Airport in Queens and the Ramblers had a plane to catch. Carla had been to a folk concert and had invited them to our apartment to hang out for a time before they were due at the airport. I peered in from the hallway and had a clear view of John Cohen sitting on the couch stomping his foot as he played and sang with the others, who were just out of my line of sight.

Pete Seeger, however, was the man behind the music. He was blacklisted from television and radio in the United States yet he sang everywhere and anywhere he could, from concert halls to schoolrooms to summer camps. Pete Seeger planted the seeds and taught us all to sing.

Words
and
Music

Accusations of plagiarism
would always be a ball and chain on Dylan’s career as a songwriter, but especially so in the early years, as his fame was growing. He was so openly and nakedly searching for interesting music on albums, on the radio, in performance in a club that plagiarism was an easy gibe to make about him. His imitation and emulation of Woody Guthrie was a case in point. Yet, on the other hand, his intensity in his quest made people want to help him. Everyone who knew him, whether they were musicians or not, was sucked in by his fever to learn. Friends voluntarily showed, played, or sang him something new or interesting they had or had heard about. And he’d do the same when he discovered music that intrigued him. It was a community until it wasn’t anymore, but that was inevitable. Artists grow and move on; some stabilize in place, and others fall away.

My enthusiasms and passions encompassed the theater and art in addition to all kinds of music. Gerde’s wasn’t considered an “artist’s bar”—that was an entirely different scene, as in the Cedar Tavern on University Place, where the Abstract Expressionists hung out. But if artists were into the music of the time, they hung out at Gerde’s. When Max’s Kansas City opened later, at the end of 1965, near Union Square, it attracted artists, writers, and musicians who went to listen to music and hang out despite the fact that it was north of the Fourteenth Street “border.”

I met the painter Brice Marden at Gerde’s and we’d sit and talk at the bar while watching Bob or another performer. I went to his place on Avenue C with an artist friend of his wife, Pauline Baez, the middle Baez sister. Since Brice’s studio seemed to take up most of the small railroad apartment, Pauline was confined to the kitchen with their baby son. I walked around looking at Brice’s paintings, all of them in shades of gray. The paintings seemed morose, like an overcast sky or the remains of a building wall in an empty lot, quite a distance from the layered dancing lines of color that he painted later on. What they have in common is a certain reserve.

The Limelight, a large bar and restaurant on Seventh Avenue South just north of Bleecker Street, was a hangout for writers, theater people, and musicians—a typical Village crowd. A few doors away was a bar hangout for lesbians that I seem to remember was called Pom Pom’s. Back then it was known as a bar for dykes, with no discrimination intended: the clientele defined a place. The nomenclature was casual—a biker bar, a beatnik bar, a hippie hangout, a place for dopers—and made no real difference, since most places catered to anyone who walked in the door. When two women I knew to be a couple broke up, one of them stayed with me when I lived on Avenue B. If there was any speculation about my sexuality because of this, I would have been surprised; I knew nothing of bisexuality. I learned of it only because the breakup was the result of one of the women’s falling in love with a guy.

Live and learn. Very few people knew the two women were a couple in the first place; some things were closeted even in bohemia. If two women lived together, it was assumed they were friends. But two guys? They must be gay.

I
was passionate about civil rights, banning the bomb, and any kind of injustice. Growing up in a politically conscious home during the Cold War and under McCarthyism, I had struggled through the issues of Communism, socialism, and the American way. I threw those interests out to Bob. I was exposed to a lot more than a kid from Hibbing, Minnesota, was, especially with my upbringing amid books and music and interesting, albeit difficult, people. And I was also from New York City. No contest there.

The learning process for artists of all stripes usually follows the path of imitate, assimilate, then innovate. If an artist is struck by something in his or her chosen art form, there is an all-consuming desire to absorb everything about it. During the process of assimilation the artist’s output will be an imitation of the beloved form. In the end, for the uniquely gifted, there will be innovation. Sometimes if something proves impossible to replicate for some reason, the artist pushes to find another way—innovation by default. Dave Van Ronk said about his unique guitar style: I tried my damnedest to copy those old guys, but I just couldn’t do it, so I had to come up with something.

It was obvious that Bob Dylan was an innovator. He worked hard to learn his craft, to make his art his own. And his art is entirely and originally his own, even if it is recognizable from or similar to something that was there before.

Now and then he acknowledged possible crossovers. One night he burst into the Kettle of Fish waving a piece of paper and announcing to Sylvia Tyson: Hey, you gotta listen to this song I just wrote! I just wrote it, or at least I think I wrote it, but maybe I heard it somewhere.

I
’m not sure when I met Ian and Sylvia Tyson, but I think it was before I saw them perform as the Canadian folk duo Ian and Sylvia. Ian was movie-star handsome, Sylvia was stunning, and they had voices and musicianship to match their good looks. Ian came from the west coast of Canada and, having been a rodeo rider, had true cowboy credentials. He looked terrific in his cowboy getup of jeans, cowboy boots, well-cut cowboy shirt, and ten-gallon hat. Ian was hands down the best looking of all the cowboy dudes in Greenwich Village.

Sylvia had regal looks—tall and lean with long, straight dark brown hair. Her singing voice was bell-like and strong, with a sound that seemed to come down through the ages. Though she also wrote songs, in the early years she wasn’t acknowledged for her writing abilities. Most people in and out of the music business just assumed that Ian was the writer and she was there to look lovely and sing beautifully.

Ian and Sylvia began playing music together in folk clubs around Toronto not long after they’d met. When they came to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, they were picked up by manager Albert Grossman and began recording for Vanguard Records, one of the premier folk labels. They were authentic in the way folk musicians had to be, yet it was obvious they would have commercial appeal.

The genius of Albert Grossman was to see early on that there was a growing market for folk music and know just how to fill it. At the time he signed Ian and Sylvia he had just turned Peter Yarrow, Noel “Paul” Stookey, and Mary Travers into Peter, Paul, and Mary. Bob Dylan would be a little more complicated sell, but Albert believed he had the goods. His technique was to book his better-known acts at college venues and then insist they take Bob, too. He imposed Bob on his inevitable audience and they didn’t take long to latch onto him. When Joan Baez took Dylan on tour with her, he was carried into the folk firmament.

Sylvia and Ian Tyson

I swear it was Ian Tyson who offered up the first taste of marijuana when Bob brought him to the flat one afternoon. Ian had a friend back home who had introduced him to this stuff you could smoke that would get you high. Bob didn’t think I should try any until he had tested it, but later on I did.

I met Sylvia a few days later at Mell and Lillian Bailey’s house, where our long friendship began. Once Ian and Sylvia signed with Albert Grossman, they were on tour quite a bit and I didn’t see Sylvia as often as I would have liked, but they both came around to the apartment whenever they were in town. Bob would sprawl on the bed with his guitar and play a new song. Ian would listen and then would play something he or Sylvia had written. Sylvia would sing along intermittently while we all pondered the merits of new LPs we’d recently acquired or they had brought for us to hear. The cover of a Kingston Trio album earned scorn because the trio looked so collegiate and square in the photo. Unlike Van Ronk, who seemed to already know everything, we reveled in the joy of discovering something we had never heard before. And this wasn’t just for music; it was about books and movies, too. We were a young and curious lot, but we all acted cool and hip and knowing.

B
obby was very close to Mell and Lillian Bailey, whom he’d gotten to know at Gerde’s a few months after hitting town. Shortly after Bob and I met, he began telling me about them: he said I would love Lillian, especially. They had an apartment on Avenue B and Third Street, in the East Village.

Mell and Lillian were older and married and had day jobs, but they were at Gerde’s almost every evening. Mell was a music man, immersed in everything. Traditional music and bluegrass were his latest passion, which was unusual for a black man in those times because of the music’s provenance.

Lillian Bailey (above) and Mell Bailey

The Baileys listened to classical music, jazz, blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and folk music from around the world—everything from crooners to calypso. I had grown up with all kinds of music, including opera, so sifting through albums at their apartment felt like home to me. They might have had even more LPs than Van Ronk.

Mell played the guitar and sang some but wasn’t serious about performing. Lillian was warm and outgoing and got right past my shyness. She looked a little like Sarah Vaughan if Sarah Vaughan had been a painter; Lillian had a way of putting together outfits that can only be described as elegant bohemian. We got on immediately. She was a visual artist like me and we shared the same sense of humor and the same birth date. Even though Lillian was thirty-three and I was seventeen when we met, we grew very close, and the friendship ended only with her death in 1994. When Bob and his family moved out of New York City a number of years later, he gave the Baileys his garden apartment on MacDougal Street for a very reasonable rent. Their one-bedroom on East Third Street was cramped after the birth of their son Drew in 1963.

Mell had a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, not a common piece of equipment for someone to have at home in the 1960s. Lillian and Mell had many friends who were musicians or artists of some kind. They had weekend gatherings that started in the day and would last into the evening, when Lillian would offer up delicious meals.

The musicians liked making recordings for Mell. Ian and Sylvia, Paul Clayton, and others came over to make tapes. Bob played and sang many songs into Mell’s Wollensak, and he worked over his new material with Mell. Bob sang “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love,” traditional folk songs, and calypso duets with him. Cynthia Gooding, the folksinger who specialized in songs from around the world and had her own radio show, was a good friend of the Baileys, and they discussed potential artists for her program. Cynthia lived on Bleecker Street, a few blocks down from Gerde’s, and she hosted some fine parties—living room concerts, really. Records were not played; musicians sang and played live as everyone milled about with their drinks and smokes.

T
he Bowery, the lower stretch of Third Avenue below St. Mark’s Place, ending in Chinatown, was populated in those days by drunken bums, as they were called, who lived in flophouses, frequented cheap liquor stores and soup kitchens, and spent their days on the street cadging money for a bottle of sweet and lethal Thunderbird wine. Some made out better than others, on the strength of the stories they told to anyone who stopped to listen. The really good practitioners discussed politics, recited poetry, and quoted philosophy—their own included. They engaged the listener, but not to the point of conversation, because that would undermine the setting of performer and potential paying audience.