A Freewheelin' Time (19 page)

Art
and
Music

ART

One evening Peter Yarrow came over to eat with us on West Fourth Street. I was grilling steaks—nothing special—and Peter offered to bring a bottle of wine.

Great, I said.

In those days, it was possible to find a decent enough bottle for a buck, and a few of us became connoisseurs of one-dollar wines. Peter knew something about wine, and he was a generous man. He awakened my taste buds to the glory of wines from France when he ceremoniously un-corked the bottle of Médoc he brought with him. It was exquisite, and it changed our whole perspective. No longer would that dollar Chianti or Rioja satisfy. It was uphill from there.

As the times changed economically for Bob, he was wide open to partaking of the finer things of life, and so was I. With Peter and Albert Grossman we went to several uptown restaurants. They had special knowledge to pass on, and we wined and dined really well. Not long after I returned from Italy—where my own knowledge of the good things in life had flourished—and Bob from England, we had flown to Toronto with Albert. Ian and Sylvia, whom Albert also managed, were there and it was great to be reunited with them. All of us had such a fine time wining and dining around the city that I have no recollection of any daytime hours, and even my recollections of nighttime are foggy.

Whenever we spent time in Woodstock, New York, where Peter’s mother owned a cabin, we drank Médoc, Saint-Émilion, and good-quality Italian wines. Peter and I did most of the cooking.

I came from economically working-class but culturally sophisticated people. Without money, however, there was more talk of fine wines than actual buying and drinking of them. I don’t think Bob thought about it much, but he certainly recognized good quality when it came his way. In all things, he was a fast learner.

M
y grandfather on my mother’s side of the family, Pop Rossi, made his own wine from the vines he grew on his farm in northwestern Connecticut, near Torrington. There were several Italians who settled in the area because of the good farmland and the beauty of the landscape.

Everyone in the area envied Pop’s wine. They planted the same vines that produced the same grapes and tended them with the same methods he used, but their wine was never as good as his, they said, and they wanted to know his secret. Why was his wine exceptional and theirs merely good? When Pop pointed to the sky and said,
la luna,
the moon, they would laugh him off: Yes, yes, loony. C’mon, tell us the truth.

Pop Rossi’s secret was that he would look at the moon every night during the harvest season and when he saw that the moon was in the right phase he would harvest his grapes the following day.

Sometimes science can explain why peasant knowledge makes sense. In the case of Pop Rossi’s harvesting theories, it’s not difficult. The moon affects tides and also the water content in grapes. Pop knew when his grapes were plump enough with water and ready for harvesting by watching the cycle of the moon. But the other vintners refused to believe that this was how he did it. And although I grew up revering his wine because the grown-ups said it was so, I have no real memory of how it tasted since we kids drank it in a glass that had mostly water in it.

Pop stopped making wine at ninety. At ninety-two, he had an operation on one of his toes, and although he recovered quickly for a man his age, I remember him saying to me, I can’t dance anymore and I can’t make wine anymore. What is the point of living?

And then he laughed.

There were no bottles of Pop Rossi’s vino left for me to try when I was old enough to comprehend the glory of good wine, so the nature of his bounty remains a family myth.

I did have a working knowledge of Italian wines by the time I was living in the Village, however, and it was sufficient for my economic reality. In those days the neighborhood wine stores imported basic table wines from Europe. There was no fuss—restaurants would put a candle in empty straw-encased Chianti bottles and place them on the red-and-white-checked tablecloths that dressed the tables.

P
eter invited us to stay with him in the cabin in Woodstock sometime in late May, before the Newport Folk Festival. Peter and I went to the Art Students League to draw from a live model (he was an artist as well as a musician) while Bobby stayed at the cabin to write.

I loved to draw with pen and ink. There was nothing more satisfying than making a drawing with one flowing continuous line—like peeling an apple with a knife and removing the skin in one long, unbroken slice. I brought watercolors with me to Woodstock to wean myself from my preoccupation with the line, but I hated everything I did.

There was an upright piano in the cabin and Bobby spent most of the time playing it even when he wasn’t working on songs. I had no idea he could play the piano so well and I was truly impressed by his ability. At Gerde’s he would play now and then, but otherwise he didn’t have everyday access to one.

At the cabin he kept a notebook beside him on the piano bench as he worked on songs, which were coming out of him rapid fire, his focus and skill almost making the work seem effortless. The music flowed from him like the pen line in my drawing books. My appreciation of his extraordinary musicianship deepened.

Peter was very pleased to give Bobby the chance to get away from the pressures that were building around him as a result of the success of
Freewheelin’.
Peter also needed a break from his hectic life as part of the very popular Peter, Paul, and Mary. He was recognized everywhere he went. A woman stopped him in Woodstock to say that she couldn’t help noticing how close he and Mary were when she’d seen them walking around town the day before. She had in fact seen me and assumed I was Mary.

At times Peter and Bob would horse around, playing and singing anything that came into their heads, while I read or drew. Times were good and it was refreshing to be away from the Village scene for a while. I was very fond of Peter; we had been friends before Albert Grossman created Peter, Paul, and Mary, when Peter was a performer playing solo in clubs and coffeehouses and crashing at Micki Isaacson’s apartment at 1 Sheridan Square. We had a lot of fun together.

MUSIC

From midnight to 5:00 a.m. Mondays to Fridays, an actor by the name of Bob Fass hosted a radio show called
Radio Unnameable
on WBAI, a listener-supported alternative station in New York City. It was a free-form collage of music and talk. Fass chatted, played records, welcomed visitors to the studio; if listeners called in with interesting or apt comments, he would deliver those opinions on the air.

A reaction from a guest or a caller to something Fass played or said might tilt him in still another direction and spur more discourse or discord until the approach of dawn and the end of his program.

The eclectic records Fass played and the stories he told made it difficult to leave the radio or shut it off. I would fall asleep, only to be jolted awake at the dusty, scratchy hour of 5:00 a.m. by the program’s signature signoff of a baby girl yelling into the microphone, “Bye bye, bye BYE!!”

Right after the first pressing of
Freewheelin’
on acetate in March 1963, Bobby, Johnny Herald of the Greenbriar Boys, and I went up to the WBAI studios to play it.

After announcing the arrival of Bob Dylan and friends, Fass encouraged us to talk. What ensued was spontaneous silliness, very much in tune with the time of night that leans toward morning. Making up names, Bobby said we were the Naked Theater looking for a performance space, and later we were proprietors and designers of Authentic Folk Music Suits, the only acceptable attire for concert arenas, clubs, and out along the highway. Johnny Herald recited poetry as a “genius poet of the folk.” In between the banter, Fass played a few cuts from the record interspersed with his usual cornucopia. The title and the release date of the
Freewheelin’
album were never even mentioned.

In August I went to the March on Washington on the same Actors Equity bus as Bob Fass.

S
ometime in late spring or early summer, before the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, someone came back to the Village from out West with a bullwhip as a present for Bob; I don’t remember who it was for sure: it may have been Jack Elliott, Harry Jackson, Ian Tyson, or Peter La Farge, since they were the cowboys of the Village at that time.

Even though Jack, né Elliott Adnopoz, was a cowboy from Brooklyn, a bullwhip was not his style, nor was it Ian’s. I will hazard a guess that La Farge, a folksinger with more of a tough-guy presence than the others, gave Bobby the bullwhip and instructed him in how to snap and crack it properly.

Harry Jackson had real cowboy credentials. He was a painter and sculptor from Cody, Wyoming, who sang cowboy songs and painted large epic cowboy paintings. A thickset man in his late thirties, Harry was full of the energy of life.

He took a liking to Bob, said he was the real thing, and wanted to paint his portrait. Harry’s studio was on Broome Street, an industrial area below Houston Street where artists could rent large lofts for next to nothing. By the mid-1970s the area had been given the name SoHo (for South of Houston), and eventually the artists got priced out by upscale stores and galleries. Back in the 1960s, there was nothing trendy about the area, which was barely a neighborhood; there were warehouses and small manufacturing and artists’ lofts. Harry had a big, dark live-in studio space with a round table in the center he’d made out of a large electrical company cable spool found on the street. It was wood, maybe ten feet in diameter, and perfect table height. Many afternoons and evenings were spent around that table in Harry’s studio listening to his stories and songs as he worked on Bob’s portrait. I recall the painting as dark with light from above hitting the figure of Bob sitting in a chair playing his guitar. The painting had a lonely look to it. Harry was a cowboy Titian.

B
obby practiced cracking that bullwhip whenever he found the space. He took the whip with him to the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and cracked it for hours backstage or around the pool, cigarette dangling from his mouth, kicking up dust. He got real good at it. During the day we spent a lot of time at the pool. Bob liked using the diving board in addition to thwacking the bullwhip.

[
Newport 1963
]

There was a mix of musicians at the Folk Festival that year: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Jack Elliott, Ian and Sylvia, Mississippi John Hurt, and many others. People in the music business—managers, record company executives and scouts—were also in attendance.

The sense of business hovering—the sound of money, mixed with the prospect of record deals and fame—was exciting for the up-and-coming folk musicians hoping for a break. There was a lot going on. Photographers David Gahr and Jim Marshall were everywhere at once, snapping away. Bob was all business and all fun at the same time. Cracking that bullwhip. Shaking up the ground.

W
e had flown from New York to Providence, Rhode Island, with Albert Grossman and Peter, Paul, and Mary. From Providence we flew to Newport in a small private plane. When we arrived in Newport I went off with Mary to a hair salon to get our hair washed and fussed over. I was a bit intimidated because I had never been to a fancy hair salon before and wasn’t sure what to do, so I kept an eye on what Mary did and let them fuss.

There were gatherings in the various hotel rooms, and musicians sang and played music together informally. Joan Baez came to Newport with the person she was involved with, who, like me, was not a musician, so the two of us hung out together at some of those jam sessions. Joan was a big star in the folk music world and the center of attention. Bob was the new, fast-rising star and after his performance at the festival it was clear that the folk world was his oyster. Bob’s songs were in the folk idiom yet they were definitely and undeniably written in the present. The writing was timeless and timely—explosively so—and the audience gasped in recognition. It was inevitable that he and Baez would create electricity. I got a few sidelong glances whenever they sang together.