The Mayor of MacDougal Street (40 page)

I actually studied drums for a while, but that went nowhere. It was all discipline and no kicks. On uke or guitar, there was discipline but also kicks: once you learn how to finger a C chord, you strum the strings and, by god, it sounds like a C chord. On drums, if you’re working on a nine-stroke roll, it takes days, weeks, months before it sounds like anything other than six men chopping wood in an echo chamber. There’s no immediate gratification, and I’ve always insisted on immediate gratification.

Albeit sometimes wittily. Eddie Condon on bebop: “In my day we didn’t flat our fifths, we drank ’em.” Or Miles Davis on hearing a Bunk Johnson record: “They sound like a prison band, and they should be kept there until they stop playing like that.”

Of course, Hawkins was a bit modern for my taste at that point—my idea of a really good saxophone player was one of the guys who played with King Oliver—but I was willing to put up with Coleman Hawkins. As for what he thought of me, all I can say is, he was always very polite . . .

The term “viper” for marijuana smoker, which has sadly fallen into disuse, was derived from the sound made while inhaling.

I ran into Tom at the Vancouver Folk Festival about forty years later, and went out of my way to thank him for that afternoon, but he did not remember a bit of it. Some people don’t have any sense of history.

I still go back and forth on this issue: sometimes I think we were right to distance ourselves from the CP when and wherever possible, and sometimes I think we were a bunch of McCarthyite leftists and, given the situation, we should have been supporting those Stalinist swine right up and down the pike.

Have another nagilah. Have two nagilahs, they’re small.

There were also some serious academic folklorists on that scene, people like Roger Abrahams and Ellen Steckert who were en route to their doctorates, and that created yet another sort of cross-fertilization: the folklorists would also perform, and for a while it was de rigueur for everyone to present their material with long, scholarly introductions. You had to explain the song before you could sing it—the song itself was an anticlimax. Some of the Cambridge crowd were still doing that in the 1960s, but after a while even they realized how deadly it was.

In this context I must also mention John Jacob Niles, one of the key people in the American folk revival going back to the 1920s, a marvelous singer, and a truly memorable character. There are a few things that make me glad I’m old, and one of them is that I saw John Jacob Niles perform “Hangman, Slack Your Rope,” running around the stage with his dulcimer and playing all the roles. It was gorgeously awful.

I must note that my pleasure was somewhat soured by the fact that the bridge is painted with industrial red lead rust-proofing paint. Sailors, for reasons of excessive familiarity, loathe red lead. I have never understood why they don’t gild the damn thing.

I have never understood why the rubes insist on equating the Village with
Tales from the Crypt
. Maybe they figure, “Bela Lugosi is weird, Greenwich Village is weird, therefore . . . ”—a neat suburban syllogism. But the phenomenon persists to this day. I have for years lived less than a block from the Jack the Ripper Pub and the Slaughtered Lamb, which has a werewolf motif. I guess burbies are just weird.

Yes, I know San Franciscans hate it when people say “Frisco.” I don’t care.

I have seen far too much of this: sharks note a couple of artists renovating a loft, smell blood in the water, and immediately rename the neighborhood SoHo or NoHo or HoBo and go into a real-estate feeding frenzy. It is destroying all that makes urban living a pleasure. The sad saga of my favorite restaurant in SF is a case in point: the Tortola was a neighborhood institution in the old Tenderloin. It featured the cuisine of Alta California—the
comidas
of the missions and ranches before the Anglo ascendancy. How authentic it was I can’t say—I have found nothing to compare it with. God, I loved that place! Anyway, it held out through the sixties and early seventies, and then it was gone. The neighborhood had become “too dangerous” I was told, and if by “dangerous” they meant seedy and ungentrified, they had a case—but winos and panhandlers are
not
especially dangerous; they merely offended the sensibilities of the “New San Franciscans,” i.e., the yuppies. Later on I heard that the Tortola had reopened somewhere out in the Western Addition, and I hastened to check it out. It was a spacious, well-lit, and comfortable vacuum. The food was OK, the sort of raspberry vinaigrette type of chow you find wherever the upwardly mobile congregate, but of the old menu, nothing remained. I never went back.

These days, Mimi tends to be identified as Joan’s younger sister, but in the Bay Area of that time she was regarded as the talent in the family.

Anyone who has read this far is probably wondering, “All this nattering on about Bohemia and beatnikery—Where’s the
sex
?” Believe me, the same question occurred to us at the time. But bear in mind, I am writing about the
fifties
. The buttoned-down, up-tight, witch-hunting, God-fearing Age of Eisenhower. They still tossed doctors into the slammer for fitting women with diaphragms in some states, and for performing abortions in all of them. Women were understandably very cautious about dispensing their favors under those circumstances, and the fact that we were a pretty scuzzy bunch might also have had something to do with it.

Sam Dolgoff once said that if you shaved the top floor off all the walk-ups in New York City, you’d completely destroy the radical movement. I said, “Nah, what about the basements?”

Actually, it might have been a bit cleaner than the East River.

It wasn’t just me; Mitchell loved to fire people. Once or twice I even saw him fire audiences.

Pogo is Tom Paxton, but don’t try calling him that.

This incident had its roots in an attempt by the city to drive a roadway through Washington Square, thereby giving Washington Square Village a 5th Avenue address—that development will never be anything but “Tammany Towers” to anyone who was around then. To make this palatable, they had to create a situation where the park was less used, and step one was to drive out the folksingers. So they banned the singing, and when people did not comply, the park commissioner called out the riot squad—and of course the riot squad’s raison d’être is to have riots. The headlines screamed, “3,000 Beatniks Riot in Greenwich Village!” I was playing in Oklahoma City that week and missed the whole thing. It was the only time I was ever glad to be in Oklahoma City.

The Café Wha? was a tourist trap, but it had some very good acts. For example, Richie Havens got to be a regular there fairly early. It was the best deal a clyde just off the bus from Kansas City was likely to find, because you had to know about the other rooms, but the Wha? had drags out on the street, pulling customers inside.

Bobby later described that Café Wha? gig in “Talking New York,” a song that included a singularly apt description of his harp work: “I blowed inside out and upside down.” Bobby’s playing always reminded me of an anarchist May Day rally I attended in the 1950s: Holly Cantine, “the Hermit of Woodstock,” showed up with a trombone and asked if he could lead the assembled masses in “The International.” He proceeded to produce a series of farts and howls that almost emptied the hall. He had just bought the thing, and had never tried to play it before. When I asked him whatever possessed him to do that, he replied, “Hey, I’m an anarchist.”

Bobby shared the common preference for concert halls over clubs, which I have never really understood. Admittedly, there is nothing worse than a bad club, but there is nothing better than a good one. It is just the right mixture of formality and informality. I don’t like to see audiences sitting in serried rows in front of me like a Macedonian phalanx. I like to see people relaxing with a drink in their hands and enjoying themselves. But I am aware that, at least among folk performers, I am in the minority.

Some of the musicians from the commercial groups used to defend their maiming of the music by telling me that they were opening up a new audience and, if it weren’t for them, no one would know about people like me. To some extent they were probably right about that, but I suspect that they also drove a lot of people away by making the word “folk” synonymous with the insipid, cutesy crap they were peddling.

Also the New Prince Spaghetti Minstrels. I think I owe it to posterity to preserve that name.

The Cambridge drug scene was actually a lot like the Cambridge folk scene, in that everything was overintellectualized. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert had created this enormous theoretical structure based on “expanding your mind,” and it was all a crock of pseudomystical horseshit and petit bourgeois rationalization to justify getting stoned. The people I hung out with were drinkers who also smoked, and a better bunch of fucked-up boyos you never did meet. The people on the self-awareness trip were silly and boring. They would sit around going, “Boy, am I stoned. Boy! Am I stoned . . .” And the next day it was like the old Jewish joke: “Boy, was I stoned . . . ”

Incidentally, the new song movement has so completely taken over the remains of the folk scene that I recently heard a friend say of someone who, like myself, is best known for interpreting material written by others, “Oh, she only does ‘covers’!” I had a sudden vision of a CD titled
Pavarotti Covers Puccini
. Suffice it to say, Louis Armstrong did not do “covers” nor did Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, or Aretha Franklin. While none of these people were primarily songwriters, their interpretations were a hell of a lot more original than a lot of the “original” songs being written on the current scene. Any music worth its salt depends as much on great interpreters as on great composers. What is more, in the absence of interpreters, songs will never be sung by anyone other than their composers, and I cannot imagine why anyone would wish that kind of planned obsolescence on their work.

Personally, I did not have to worry about this. I showed my draft card to a guy I knew over at the War Resisters League, to find out what my classification meant in terms of getting hauled off by the Feds, and he glanced at it and drawled: “Well, what it means is that when the Red Army is marching down 5th Avenue, you’ll be told, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’”

This victory was by no means instant or complete. Pete did not get on a major network program until 1967, when he appeared on the Smothers Brothers variety show, and even then, the CBS brass censored his performance of an anti-Vietnam War song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

I never understood how anyone could sing while wearing a tie. I wore a suit for concerts a few times in the 1950s because that was considered the appropriate attire, but I always felt as if my tie was strangling me. Save the noose till after the show . . .

I never understood why everybody wanted to move out to Woodstock. I liked the Village, and I still like it, and I would not like to live anywhere else. The country is a city for birds.

There’s a story that Pete Seeger got all bent out of shape and actually tried to cut the cables with an ax, but as I understand it, what was bothering him wasn’t the fact of Dylan going electric; it was the sound system. The mix was dreadful, and you couldn’t hear Dylan’s voice, all you could hear was the band. Paul Butterfield’s outfit had problems with that, too, during their set.

There are also some minor inaccuracies that Dave might have cleared up if we had finished this together. For example, he recalled learning “St. James Infirmary” from
The Fireside Book of Folksongs
, but the song is not in that book. Or when he says Mitch Mitchell helped him get his seaman’s papers; I found another interview in which he credits another friend with the same favor. Had he stuck around, we would have done our best to sort those things out, but in his absence I decided that it was better to preserve some of Dave’s mistakes than for me to introduce new ones. When an error was minor and easily corrected, I did so, but when I had any doubt about how he would have resolved the problem, I let it be.