The Mayor of MacDougal Street (12 page)

Running
Caravan
must at times have been incredibly frustrating. We were all eager to put our opinions in print, but often a good deal less eager to show up when help was needed to collate and staple. So Lee deserves a lot of credit simply for sticking with it and keeping the magazine going. She ran it from August 1957 until the end of 1958, by which time it had become a much more professional-looking object, a small-format magazine that looked a good deal like
Sing Out!
It had ceased to be a little Village
newsletter and was taking up so much of her time that she decided to quit, handed it over to Billy Faier, and shortly started another informal, mimeographed fanzine called
Gardyloo
(named for the shout that British housewives would give before emptying chamberpots onto the street, from the French “Garde de l’eau!”).

With
Caravan
, there was finally a place where the arguments that had previously been limited to barroom colloquies could be set down in print. The first Rafferty piece drew some predictably outraged responses and led Lee to add a note to the cover of issue no. 2, to the effect that “the opinions expressed herein (especially those of Rafferty) are not necessarily those of the editor,” and also that “parcels containing small poisonous objects and/or explosives should be marked clearly ‘to Rafferty’ and ‘personal.’” That issue’s lead article was a three-page review of the Café Bizarre show, with a complimentary paragraph about my performance, and I weighed in with another Rafferty column. In good anarchist fashion, I chose a theme guaranteed to perplex those readers who assumed they had my number after the Elektra diatribe—my admiration for Pete Seeger:

Naturally, this piece did not attract as much response as my attack on Elektra, but at least one person took me to task for calling Pete a “real” folksinger. What can I say? He is the man who invented my profession. When his first solo album,
Darling Corey,
came out, it was like a clarion call: this is the real stuff, played the way it should be played. What is more, I always thought Pete was a much better musician than most people appreciated—including most of his fans. He phrases like a sonofabitch, he never overplays, and he dug up so much wonderful material. Whatever our disagreements over the years, I learned a hell of a lot from him.

In
Caravan
no. 3, Rafferty provided an article on “The Singing IWW,” a subject dear to my heart, along with a plug for the Kossoy Sisters’ album. They were a pair of identical twins with marvelous, perfectly matched voices, and I still think that was one of the most lovely albums to come out
of that period. In the same issue, under my own name, I answered a reader’s request for the lyrics to Wynonie Harris’s R&B hit “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me” and gave high marks to two albums of field recordings, Alan Lomax’s collection of
Negro Prison Songs
and a Jean Ritchie album in which she presented various traditional English ballad singers, juxtaposing their performances with her American versions of the same songs.

By contrast,
Caravan
no. 4 noted in the contents page that “Mr. Rafferty has not been heard from,” and the following issue described him as having “disappeared.” Being a regular columnist was getting to feel too much like work, and the pleasure of seeing my opinions in print was not enough to keep me in harness. However, I continued to devote myself to other literary ventures, acting as editor of a slim, mimeographed folio titled
The Bosses’ Songbook: Songs to Stifle the Flames of Discontent
.

The genesis of
The Bosses’ Songbook
began with Roy Berkeley, who had written a series of parodies of old folk chestnuts in the Almanac-People’s Artists style, but turned around to make them the targets. His masterpiece was “The Ballad of Pete Seeger,” a viciously funny reworking of “The Wreck of the Old 97” that began “They gave him his orders at Party head-quarters, / Saying, ‘Pete, you’re way behind the times. / This is not ’38, it is 1957, / There’s a change in that old Party Line.’” It had a couple more verses, ending with a quip about how the People’s Artists were going on with “their noble mission of teaching folksongs to the folk.” Among Roy’s other gems was “Way Down in Lubyanka Prison” (to the tune of “Columbus Stockade”), which he had composed for the Young Socialist League’s May Day show. He would introduce these songs by saying that they came from “The Bosses’ Songbook,” a capitalist parallel to the IWW’s “Little Red Songbook” of “Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.” (There had been a similarly satiric collection, called
Ballads for Sectarians,
recorded in 1950 by a singer named Joe Glazer, with songs like “My Darling Party Line” and a reworking of the Admiral’s song from
The H.M.S. Pinafore
that began “When I was a lad in 1906, I joined a band of Bolsheviks . . . ”)

I put Roy’s efforts together with a few additional songs by people like me and Barry Kornfeld, and Dick Ellington served as publisher—which is to say, he organized and printed the thing. Dick was a friend from the Libertarian League and a fellow sci-fi addict (he was one of a group of
sci-fi-reading lefties who called themselves the Fanarchists). He was also a professional printer and got out the League’s paper,
Views and Comments
. He was living in a big apartment called the Dive up on Riverside Drive, where I crashed on occasion and attended many memorable parties, of which I naturally remember nothing—except that it was at one of them that I first got together with Terri Thal, who shortly became my girlfriend and eventually my first wife.

The Bosses’ Songbook
was mildly popular in our circle and caused a fair amount of irritation in others. I was told on good authority that Pete was thinking of suing us, and for our second printing we changed the title of “The Ballad of Pete Seeger” to “Ballad of a Party Singer.” (Dick Ellington remembered this quite differently. He heard that Pete found the song funny and actually performed it a few times, and as proof presented Pete’s order for three songbooks.)

What with one thing and another, my corner of the folk scene was getting a lot more active, and among the new developments was the birth of our own organization, the Folksingers Guild. This was formed in the winter of 1957-58, largely as a response to the screwing we got at the Café Bizarre. After the first two or three concerts, Rick Allmen had the Bizarre up and running, so he did not need us anymore. He was quite an unprincipled man, and he did not pay the performers; he would make an exception for someone like Odetta or Josh White, but whoever else was on the bill was doing it for the “exposure” (which, as Utah Phillips points out, is something people die of ). Those of us who had developed a local reputation, if only from our Washington Square performances, would have cost him a few bucks. No more than a few bucks, but as far as he was concerned, there was no reason even to pay that.

It was cold-blooded exploitation, and that was essentially what got the Folksingers Guild started. We had been promised pay and we were not paid, and we foresaw a big folk boom coming, so we wanted to get a union started forthwith to prevent that kind of thing occurring again. As it happened, the boom would not come for another three years or so—at least to an extent that affected us—but by 1958 it was clearly on its way. The college folk clubs were starting, Harry Belafonte and the Tarriers had some hit records, Elektra was doing good business, and to our way of thinking it could not be long before discerning listeners had got their fill of slick folkfakery
and must turn to us, the true keepers of the flame. We had no doubt that we were the cutting edge of the folk revival—though bear in mind, we were in our late teens and early twenties, and if you do not feel you are the cutting edge at that age, there is something wrong with you. Of course we were the wave of the future—we were twenty-one!

As it turned out, we were premature, but we had the basic idea right, and we started the Guild to protect ourselves from the capitalist exploitation that we were sure was right around the corner. I cannot remember exactly how we first got together, but I was in on it from the outset, along with a crew of the usual suspects: Roy Berkeley, again; Roger Abrahams, again; Roger Lass, Bob and Sylvia Brill, Luke Faust, Gina Glaser, Jerry Levine, Judy Isquith, Al Foster, Dave Sternlight, Silvia Burnett, Ben Rifkin . . . We held our meetings at Dick and Kiki Greenhaus’s loft on 17th Street. Dick was a remarkably good guitar player, and Kiki was a modern dancer who also worked as a belly dancer in the clubs on 8th Avenue in the 20s, and they had this big loft where Dick taught guitar and Kiki taught modern dance.

The obvious problem with forming a protective organization for workers in the folk industry was that at that point Rick Allmen was the sole capitalist on the scene, and even he was only rather fecklessly exploiting anybody. We were basically a trade union with no bosses, and we realized pretty quickly that we would have to be our own bosses, and began putting on concerts. That was where Lee Hoffman Shaw came in again, and also Lee Haring. Roy Berkeley and a few other performers were actively involved, but in my recollection we were more in the form of window dressing as far as actually running things was concerned. We attended meetings and made a lot of noise, but the real work—renting the halls, printing up posters—could not be left to the performers. (Years later we were trying to organize a union down on MacDougal Street, and when I told John Mitchell, who was running the Gaslight Café, he said, “You?! You’re organizing a union? If you were a dog you couldn’t organize a pack of fleas.” And he was right.) There were some other people as well: Aaron Rennert was the official photographer and Ray Sullivan did the sound system.

We had a concert committee, and since the main function of the organization was to produce concerts, that became in effect the executive committee. The concert committee would decide who would be on the bill for each
concert, and there was a great deal of “Well, we can’t pick so-and-so, because he was on the show before last . . . Why don’t we give so-and-so a chance?” The weighing of the bills was a delicate matter and had to be handled with a great deal of diplomacy, because a lot of egos were involved. There were always at least three or four people on a bill. Somebody would be up there for fifteen or twenty minutes, then would get yanked off before everybody walked out, and we would hit them with the next screecher. As things went on, we occasionally added a somewhat bigger name—Paul Clayton, say—to bring in more people. With Paul you could have a whole bunch of relative unknowns, because Paul could pull. If you were going to book it strictly from within the group, then you would have performers like Roy and myself and Gina Glaser, who had some following—if we could bring down twenty or thirty people each, that was already a big deal. On a good night, the audience might have been as big as two hundred people, but it was often more like ninety, and out of that we would pay the production costs and divvy the rest up among the performers.

Roy recalls that he arranged for the YSL to let us use their hall for our first concert, and with the money from that one we rented a room in Adelphi Hall, on 5th Avenue.
Caravan
lists what may have been our first concert there, in February 1958, featuring Roy, me, and a “surprise guest,” all for the sum of fifty cents. Once we were a little bit established, we moved over to the Sullivan Street Playhouse, just south of MacDougal, renting it for midnight shows or on nights when the theater was dark. We would have three or four performers, introduced by Jock Root—John Schuyler Root—a very dignified-looking, slightly built man with a little dark mustache. Jock did not play or sing, but he was very well-spoken and traditionally acted as master of ceremonies, and he often presided over our meetings as well. There was one show, I believe at Joan of Arc High School, where Doris Stone and Pat Foster were on the bill, and while they were waiting in the dressing room, they got into some sort of argument, and Pat went one step too far over the line, so Doris picked up a jar of cold cream that caught him right between the eyes. He was knocked completely unconscious, and poor Jock Root was out on the stage and introduced them to a thundering patter of applause, and nothing happened.