The Mayor of MacDougal Street (30 page)

By this time the mere mention of that song would send me into a rant against the copyright laws, Dylan, his stupid fans, and the whole dismal train of events that had landed me in the middle of this tempest in a teapot. It wasn’t until the aforementioned
tour de France
that I could bring myself to even consider singing it again. But that’s what I did. I even went back and improved the chart, and I have been singing it happily (if a bit uneasily) ever since. Too bad that wino in Saint-Étienne couldn’t hear it—and I have carefully avoided re-recording the thing. Who knows what kind of debacle
that
might trigger.

There is one final footnote to that story. Like everybody else, I had always assumed that the “house” was a brothel. But a while ago I was in New Orleans to do the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and my wife Andrea and I were having a few drinks with Odetta in a gin mill in the Vieux Carré, when up comes a guy with a sheaf of old photographs—shots of the city from the turn of the century. There, along with the French Market, Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, the Custom House, and suchlike, was a picture of a forbidding stone doorway with a carving on the lintel of a stylized rising sun.

Intrigued, I asked him, “What’s that building?”

It was the Orleans Parish women’s prison.

So, as it turned out, I had gotten the whole business wrong from the get-go. Pity I didn’t think it was a Sunday school—I might have never sung the damn thing in the first place.

W
hen the Folk Scare finally hit, it was bigger than even the most optimistic of us had imagined. All of a sudden, they were handing out major-label record contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes, and there was money all over the place. People who had been sleeping on floors and eating in cafeterias could buy a suit, a car, a house. And the flood of mainstream popularity led to some changes that were very interesting artistically as well, because it attracted a lot of talented people who otherwise would never have been connected with folk music. Jose Feliciano, for example. He played the guitar; he sang; ergo, he was a folksinger. When Jose first hit MacDougal Street, he was just playing in the basket houses, and people were telling me, “You’ve got to come down and hear this kid. He’s fantastic.” So I went down and heard him, and he was fantastic—he completely blew me away. He was very young, not even eighteen, and at first I had the impression that he was just a shy kid, a little bit withdrawn. I subsequently discovered that he has one of the most vicious wits of anyone I have ever met. He is hilariously funny, and you do not want to cross swords with that man unless you are at the top of your game. So people like that were showing up, and also Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Simon and Garfunkel. Of course, the money also attracted a lot of hokey shit, and a lot of people who were simply greedy and couldn’t have cared less about art or
music or anything else except lining their own pockets. It was a grab bag: if you wanted to make serious music, you could find a berth, and if you wanted to make a killing, you could find a berth, too.

I got to know Paul and Artie pretty well, because for a while Barry Kornfeld was Paul’s partner and publisher, so they were coming around the building on Waverly. When they first showed up, they were in a pretty tough situation, because they had already had a Top 40 hit as teenagers, and as far as the music industry was concerned, they were over the hill, but the mouldy fig wing of the folk world despised them as pop singers. I remember hearing them down at the Gaslight, and nobody would listen. I thought they were damn good, but the people who wanted to hear Mississippi John Hurt and Dock Boggs wanted no part of Simon and Garfunkel. Their mainstream connections were still strong enough to get them a contract with Columbia, but the first album went nowhere, and “Sounds of Silence” actually became a running joke: for a while there, it was only necessary to start singing “Hello darkness, my old friend . . .” and everybody would crack up. It was a complete failure, and they had gone their separate ways—Paul had fled to London and Artie was going back to grad school to become a professor of mathematics—but then someone at Columbia did some studio alchemy, overdubbed a few electric guitars and whatnot, and it became one of the seminal folk-rock hits.

I was cheerfully riding the wave, recording at least an album a year straight through the decade. The fact that money was coming in meant that I could experiment a little in the studio, and after my first Prestige album I persuaded Bob Weinstock to let me bring in a full crew of trad players for half the songs on my next one. I used the Red Onion Jazz Band, which included a number of people I had known and worked with over the years, and the album was called
In the Tradition
. We recorded over in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Prestige used to do all its jazz sessions. For a while there, Prestige had just about everybody who was worth having, and the cats used to love to record at Van Gelder’s place, because it had natural acoustics you would not believe and he was a terrific engineer. I enjoyed making that record, but the only thing anyone noticed on it was my solo guitar arrangement of “Saint Louis Tickle.” The people on the folk scene had no interest in trad jazz. They would stand for someone like me or Judy Roderick doing some of
it, but they preferred for us just to play guitar and leave the band home. And frankly, good as that music may have been, there was no question but that its time had passed. It had become archaic, and once that happens, you can do something beautifully, and people can even like it, but it is not going to make any real impression.

With that disc, I had fulfilled my contract with Prestige and was ready to move on. The major labels had come sniffing around, and I had signed with Mercury—but through a fluke, I ended up doing one more Prestige album, which remains an anomaly in my catalog. Basically, I recorded it under duress. I had put together a jug band, and we had worked out a marvelous arrangement of “Saint Louis Tickle,” which I wanted to record. However, I had just done that piece as a guitar solo for Prestige, and their contract said I could not re-record any of the songs I had done for them for at least two years. So I called up Bob Weinstock and said, “Bob, I need your permission to record ‘Saint Louis Tickle’ with my jug band.”

Naturally, he said “No way.”

Having learned that in all such situations “no” is a temporary, tactical stance, I said, “OK, what do you want?”

He said, “I’ll tell you what: you make another album for me on the same terms as your old contract, and I’ll give you permission to re-record that tune.”

I had to agree to that, but I did not want to do another selection of things I was playing in my regular shows, because I was aware that the market was limited and I did not want to slice that pie too many ways. So I pulled together a bunch of old ballads and a couple of music hall songs I had learned from my grandmother, material that I sang for my own amusement or sitting around with friends but that I rarely performed publicly, and I walked into the studio with an autoharp, a dulcimer, a banjo, a twelve-string guitar—if I’d had marimbas, I would have played marimbas. They called the album
Inside Dave Van Ronk
, and I was actually pretty happy with it, though I was never tempted to take that show on the road—just the idea of carrying all those instruments around to gigs was ridiculous.

As for the jug band, that came about more or less by accident. One weekend Max Gordon, the owner of the Village Vanguard, was in Cambridge for some reason, and he walked by the Club 47 and saw this huge line of people waiting to get in to see the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. In his
mind’s eye he transposed this queue to 7th Avenue South, where he had his room, and visions of sugarplums started dancing in his head. So when he got back to New York, he called Robert Shelton and said, “Are there any jug bands around town?”

Bob said, “Well, yeah, but what you really ought to do is get hold of Dave Van Ronk and have him put one together.” So he did, and I did. I called up a bunch of friends, and we formed the Ragtime Jug Stompers. Sam Charters was back in town, so he was our Pooh-Bah and Lord High Everything Else—he sang, arranged, and played washtub bass, washboard, jug, and occasionally would lend a hand on guitar. Barry Kornfeld played banjo and guitar. Artie Rose was on mandolin, and also played some fine Dobro. Finally, Danny Kalb, who had been a student of mine, played lead guitar and some very nice harmonica. (We also made him sing bass on “K.C. Moan,” because he was the youngest and none of us wanted to do it.) It was a very flexible band because the musicians were all good enough to double or triple on various instruments, plus it had all the possibilities offered by kazoos and that sort of thing, so it was capable of more than one kind of sound.

I put that group together for the hell of it, and because I thought it would be fun and I wanted to try my hand at doing some larger arrangements, but from a professional angle I knew that Gordon’s fantasies of cashing in on the jug band craze were a crock of shit. Along with the Kweskin band, there was also a New York outfit called the Even Dozen Jug Band, and I thought they made some good music—though they also did some things that made me want to play PLO to their Mossad—but I did not believe that any of us had a hope in hell of making serious money. In our case, at least, I was exactly right. We played for a while at the Vanguard, and I really enjoyed working with those guys, but we did not even get paid what we had originally been promised, much less go on to greater things. (The fine points of this financial fiasco are an object lesson in the inner workings of the music world: it turned out that one of the guys in the band did not have a union card, and that provided Gordon with an excuse to stiff us.)

I was very happy with the record we made, though, and still think it is one of the best things I ever did. We did not play much of the typical jug band repertoire; we were more of a string ragtime outfit with trad jazz
overtones, and actually we could sound even better than we did in the studio, because we were at our best when we were goofing around. We rehearsed a lot, we took it damn seriously, and we put together some intricate arrangements of classic rags, which we played very carefully and note for note; but the rest of our repertoire was blues and jazz, and except for Artie, who was a bluegrasser, everybody in that band knew all those tunes inside out and we were an improvising band. We would work out a rough chart, but when it was a performing situation, we tried to have fun. In the end, that whole thing lasted about six months. We made the record, we had our run at the Vanguard, and then Danny got sick with mononucleosis, and since he was a key player in all our arrangements, we had to cancel whatever other jobs were outstanding. There was only one exception: we had been invited to Newport, and I wanted to cancel that one too, but various people in the group said, “That’s all well and good for you; you have your Newport credit”—I had been there the previous year—“but what about us?” My natural inclination was to say, “Yes, I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve come to the conclusion: ‘Fuck you.’” But I did not follow it. I accepted the invitation, and we showed up and played at Newport with Bob Brill sitting in for Danny and died the death of a thousand cuts.

Newport, as it happened, was always the kiss of death for me. I have never much liked festivals, because they are like three-ring circuses, with too much going on—and in any case who wants to sing for fifteen thousand people with Frisbees? I did OK on the workshops, but what really counted at Newport were the evening concerts. The first time I got on one of those, I went out and gave what I think was one of the best shows of my life, and people went wild. I was all jazzed up, figuring that I had finally broken through to the big time and would be met backstage by a bunch of guys with big cigars and briefcases full of cash, all fighting to make me the hottest thing since Sinatra. So I walked off, and on came Jose Feliciano, playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” followed by a flamenco version of “La Bamba.” By five minutes into his set, nobody even remembered that I had been onstage.

As for the jug band’s appearance, it was a complete mess. Finally, we got to our last song, which was our version of “Mack the Knife.” We had worked out an arrangement that was very stark, a classic Brechtian reading set off by Artie’s Dobro, and it was going over perfectly. The audience
was dead quiet, and I figured I had just managed to pull our chestnuts out of the fire—and then people began to laugh. I was completely baffled; it was one of the most horribly uncomfortable moments I have ever experienced onstage. What had happened, as it turned out, was that Jack Elliott, who had been on before us, had finished his set by throwing his hat in the air, and he chose that moment to come out and retrieve it. He was goofing around behind us, waving at the crowd, and I had no idea what was going on, and was simply dying. I later learned that as Jack walked off, Terri met him at the side of the stage and coldcocked him, knocked him flat on his ass. Small consolation.

I have come to believe that, for most musicians, the pleasure of working at those huge festivals is not so much what happens onstage as the fact that they function as a sort of folksingers’ convention. You meet people you haven’t seen for a while or that you have only heard on record or know about by word of mouth, and of course after each day’s performances there is a party. At Newport we all ran around schmoozing, and a great deal of bed-hopping went on—it was essentially Shriners with guitars.

There was a special kind of magic, though, about those first two or three years after Newport got going again in 1963 (there had been a two-year hiatus after the 1960 festival), because that was when all the old blues-men were making their reappearances. John Hurt was the first, in 1963, and in 1964 they had Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Wilkins, and Fred McDowell, and the next year Son House showed up. It was incredible, because we knew these guys from hearing them on old 78s, but it had never occurred to us that they would still be alive and playing, and now they were turning up all over the place. It got to be like the Old Blues Singer of the Month Club: “This week, from sunny Tennessee, we bring you Furry Lewis!” And next week it would be Booker White, and a week after that Yank Rachell. It was like an enormous, unbelievable party that just kept going.