The Mayor of MacDougal Street (28 page)

I also found that I really liked some of those people personally. Gibson, like Cynthia Gooding, was very polished onstage, but offstage they were both wonderfully cynical and funny. I remember years later seeing Bob at Newport with a group of people singing “Kumbaya,” and it was turning into one of those really tacky group-gropes, with everybody joining hands and taking turns leading verses—“Someone’s crying, Lord, kumbaya,” “Someone’s dying, Lord, kumbaya,”—and it gets around to Gibson’s turn, and he sings, “Someone’s kidding, Lord . . . ”

In any case, the scene was changing at a very rapid clip. There was more money around, and that in itself made a difference. There were more clubs and bigger audiences, and it was no longer just our small band of folk devotees. What is more, that small band had never been very unified even before the money hit. People like Len Chandler and Tom Paxton loved traditional folk songs, but they were not hard-core neo-ethnics painstakingly learning licks off 78s. The purist faction had always been balanced by people who were a good deal less orthodox and whose voices were a lot easier on mainstream ears. There was also an interesting split along gender lines, which is obvious if you look at Dylan and then at Joan Baez. Whatever he may have done as a writer, Dylan was solidly in the neo-ethnic camp. He did not have a pretty voice, and he did his best to sing like Woody, or at least like somebody from Oklahoma or the rural South, and was always very rough and authentic sounding, to the best of his ability.

Baez was a completely different kind of artist. With her, it was all about the beauty of her voice. That voice really was astonishing—the first time I heard her she electrified me, just as she electrified everybody else. She was not a great performer, and she was not a great singer, but God she had an instrument. And she had that vibrato, which added a remarkable amount of tone color. I think that I was a technically better singer than she was even
then, but she had a couple of tricks that were damn useful, and I learned a few things from her.

The thing about Baez, though, was that like almost all the women on that scene, she was still singing in the style of the generation before us. It was a cultural lag: the boys had discovered Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, and the girls were still listening to Cynthia and Susan Reed. It was not just Joan. There was Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, and people like Molly Scott and Ellen Adler, who for a while were also contenders. All of them were essentially singing bel canto—bad bel canto, by classical standards, but still bel canto. So whereas the boys were intentionally roughing up their voices, the girls were trying to sound prettier and prettier and more and more virginal. To a great extent, I think that had to do with wanting to make themselves desirable to the boys, and certainly the boys could not have been more encouraging—we were all entranced by that virginal warble. But the result is that the women were still singing in the styles of the 1940s or 1950s, and that gave them a kind of crossover appeal to the people who were listening to Belafonte and the older singers, and to the clean-cut college groups.

At the time, I was not thinking all of this through in the same way I do now, but in hindsight you can see pretty easily what happened. And there were a few people around even then who seemed to have a sense of where things were going—or who at least were quick to seize the brass ring when it came their way. Chief among these was Albert Grossman, my old nemesis from Chicago. Albert had put together the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and in 1960 he moved to New York and began hanging around on MacDougal Street. He was an interesting and amusing man, and I got to know him fairly well, but there was always a distance there. He was very cold and calculating, and you couldn’t trust him for a minute. When Dylan met Grossman, it was truly a match made in heaven, because those were two extraordinarily secretive people who loved to mystify and conspire and who played their cards extremely close to their vests. You never knew what scheme Albert was cooking up behind that blank stare, and he actually took a sort of perverse pleasure in being utterly unscrupulous. He could be a wonderful companion, though—it wouldn’t be until two days after you saw him that you would realize that your underwear had been stolen.
There you would be: “Shit, man, my shoes are on—what happened to my socks?”

Albert was very smart, with a good eye for talent, and he really knew the business. When he was in the mood—or saw a way to turn it to his advantage—he could be extremely helpful, and I learned a good deal from him. I have mentioned his suggestion that I should stand up when I played, which was not a success, but some of his advice was indispensable. During the brief period when he was managing me, he persuaded me that, along with working on the music, I needed to work at making contact with my audience. For example, he had me sit in front of a three-paneled, wraparound mirror with my guitar and watch myself while I performed, which finally broke me of the habit of looking at my shoes while I was playing. So I owe him at least a few votes of thanks.

Albert had taken a good, long look at all the Weavers clones in their preppy outfits, and he decided that there was an opening for a group that was hipper than that—more musically sophisticated, with a contemporary feel—so he was scouting the local talent with this in mind. One day we ran into each other on MacDougal, and he said that he had a proposition for me: he was putting together a trio, and he had two people already, and he needed a third. I said, “Who are the two people?” and he said Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers.

I thought about it for a day or so and talked it over with Terri, but by this time I was doing pretty well as a solo performer, and I really had no interest in being part of a group. Besides, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, my God, we’re gonna have a village-spawned Kingston Trio here,” and I wanted no part of it. As it turned out, what Albert had in mind was something quite different, but as usual he was being cagey and short on specifics, and that sounded like exactly what he was proposing. So I turned him down and they got Noel Stookey, and Noel added precisely the ingredient that they needed. Peter, Dave, and Mary would have died the death of a thousand cuts—I would have stood out like a sore thumb, vocally, visually, you name it. And I suppose I would have had to change my name as well. Still, every time I look at my bank balance . . .

In any case, Peter, Paul, and Mary provided me with one of the best paychecks I ever cashed. They had their debut right around the same time Dylan got the
Times
review, at a new club called the Bitter End, which became
New York’s closest thing to a mainstream folk showcase—it had people like Bob Gibson and Judy Collins, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and even the New Christy Minstrels.
²⁷
A few months later they released their first record, and it included a song that I had put together and recorded on my second Folkways album. I had called it “River Come Down,” but they renamed it “Bamboo.” It had originally just been a guitar exercise, but my students demanded that I give them some lyrics to go with it, so I threw together some doggerel based on a song I vaguely remembered hearing Dick Weissman do on the banjo, and used Dick’s chorus, “River, oh river, she come down.” I recorded it more or less as filler and assumed it would go no further, but that Peter, Paul, and Mary album promptly sold seven trillion copies, and it is probably still my best-known composition. Not only that, but some of the pop music critics homed in on the lyrics, describing them as “surrealist”—one erudite soul even compared them to Garcia Lorca. The end of that story is that I recently read an interview with Noel in which he singles out “Bamboo” for special mention as one of the few pieces in their repertoire that has not stood the test of time. I heartily agree with him. It is the only song I wrote that ever made me any money, and I hate it.

The fact that they did that song, though, was indicative of something that was different about Peter, Paul, and Mary: they were not simply reworking traditional folk songs and doing Weavers covers and that sort of thing. Their material was very carefully chosen, and most of it was quite new, and they had some smart, original arrangements. Of course, we regarded them as “slick,” but they were interesting, and in retrospect I think their popularity was deserved. I can’t say that I ever spent much time listening to their records, but I was not the sort of listener they were aiming at.

Grossman had his eye on a national audience, but for me the scene was still centered on New York, and I was getting all the work I could handle. In 1962 I signed a two-album contract with Prestige Records, which was not a major label but was considered a definite step up from Folkways. (I was so proud, until I told one of my friends, “I’m recording for Prestige!” He said, “Well, keep it up and sooner or later you might be recording for money.”) The guy who ran the label, Bob Weinstock, had excellent taste in jazz, and he was beginning to record a lot of folk and blues as well. After
we did the first album, he called me up and said, “I’m going to title this album something I really believe is true: I’m going to call it
Dave Van Ronk: New York’s Finest
.”

I said, “Bob, for Christ’s sake, you’re calling me a cop!”

There was a long pause, and he said, “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”

I said, “You can call it anything you want, but for crying out loud, don’t call it that.” So he released it as
Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger
, whereupon I subsided, muttering, “Better a dork than a narc.”

That was the first album of mine that I consider relatively satisfactory in musical terms. I had shaken off a lot of the mannerisms of my earlier records, partly through a natural process of evolution, and partly because I was working so much and getting so much opportunity to test and reshape my material. It also introduced the piece that some people continue to regard as my signature song, “Cocaine Blues.” That song became so associated with me that a lot of people assumed I had written it, which caused occasional embarrassment. Sometime in the mid-seventies, I ran into Jackson Browne on the street, and he said, “Hey, Dave, I just recorded one of your songs.” At that point things were pretty slow and the royalties from a Jackson Browne record would have made a big difference, so I was very happy, and I said, “Man, that’s nice. Which one?” And he said, “Cocaine Blues.” I said, “Jackson, that’s a Gary Davis song, and here’s who you contact to send the royalties to his estate. Now get away from me before you see a grown man cry.”

Frankly, that song had some other disappointing aspects as well: When I first learned it from Gary, one of my jazz musician buddies said, “Yeah, that’s a good one for you to do, because, you know, when you get finished with your show, there’ll be people lined up back in your dressing room to give you toot.” That sounded kind of interesting, but as it turned out, he was entirely mistaken. Instead, for a while there I would finish up and go back to my dressing room, and there would be people lined up asking me to give
them
some. It was very disillusioning.

The
Folksinger
album came out just as the folk wave was beginning to crest, and for the next few years I had more work than I have ever had before or since. I was hosting the Tuesday night hoots at the Gaslight, as well as sometimes doing a week as a headliner there or at Folk City, and for variety I was making occasional forays into the hinterlands. I got to Tulsa and
Oklahoma City for a couple of weeks, and I was going to the West Coast, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Canada. Some of those were one-shot deals, but there were also rooms that I could count on working fairly regularly—the Caffé Lena in Saratoga Springs probably paid my rent for 1960. And then, of course, there was Cambridge. That was the other East Coast hub, and it had a scene that was quite different from anywhere else. Baez had come out of there, and I probably went up to check it out for the first time in 1960. I got a kind of strange reception there, because the Cantabrigians had set up this dichotomy between me and Eric Von Schmidt. In their eyes Eric was the greatest white blues singer around, and I was the New York contender. Personally, I had nothing but admiration for Eric’s work. He had gotten into the blues thing a year or two ahead of me, and he may have been the first of us to develop his own approach to the music. His singing was excellent, and his guitar playing was powerful and quite unique, but what really made him stand out was that his style was intensely personal. He was never Robert Johnson or Furry Lewis or Leadbelly, or anyone but Eric Von Schmidt, and that made him one of the very few white people around at that time who could sing blues with conviction and make you feel that he was singing about his own life and his own feelings rather than pretending to be someone else.

The Cambridge crowd wanted Eric and me to hate each other, which shocked me and gave me a kind of sour view of the place. The fact is that we hit it off famously, got stinking drunk, got up on stage together, just disported ourselves and had a marvelous time. He had a studio on Brattle Street, and we would go up there and drink and play cards, and when we were thoroughly loaded, we would go downstairs to the Brattle Theatre and watch
Casablanca,
which always seemed to be playing.

I think the Cambridge people in general had a complex about New York. We were Gomorrah, whereas they were the pure guardians of the sacred flame. In a lot of ways the difference was economic. By that time, the scene in New York was relatively professional, made up of all these people who were coming into town and needed to make a living from their music just to pay the rent. We were playing five sets a night in rooms full of drunken tourists, and even if we didn’t necessarily think of ourselves that way, we were professional entertainers. Cambridge was a college town, and the scene—not necessarily the performers but the fans and the hangers-on—
was a bunch of middle- and upper-middle-class kids cutting a dash on papa’s cash. They did not feel the economic pressures that we did, so their frame of reference was completely different. To be fair, in some ways that made the Cambridge scene much healthier, because without that economic pressure, they could put all their focus on the music. We were constantly being sucked into commercial culture, and they weren’t. And sure, they could afford their purity, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t pure, and that purist approach produced some very good work. I had great respect for some of the performers up there, and learned a lot from them.