The Mayor of MacDougal Street (5 page)

Back then, I found this pretty disenchanting. I thought, “How could this band of brothers, these great pioneers, talk of one another so irreverently?” It was terrible. Now, looking back, I find it pretty damn funny. I suppose that as I get older, I get more curmudgeonly myself, and I can identify with that kind of thing.

All in all, I was learning more than I could possibly assimilate—it took me years to even begin to get a handle on everything I was seeing and hearing. Admittedly, my failures in this respect may to some extent be traceable to other aspects of the jazz life: Eddie Condon once remarked that when you are a musician, a dozen people might offer to buy you a drink in the course of an evening but nobody ever walks up and says, “Hey, let me stand you to a ham sandwich.” Between starvation and inebriation, it’s a miracle that any of us survived, much less actually learned anything.

Of course, as a dedicated apprentice hipster, my experiences in this field were not limited to alcohol. My acquaintance with the demon weed dates to around 1954, a halcyon year for vipers.
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I was working at yet another country club, somewhere on the prairies of New Jersey, with yet another pick-up trad jazz band. As we were shuffling off the stage to take our first break, the bass player, a little guy named Arnie, whispered conspiratorially, “Hey kid, you wanna try a new kind of cigarette?”

I was no square; I had read Mezz Mezzrow’s
Really the Blues
, and knew all about marijuana. To let him know how hip I was, I said, “That’s cool, Daddy”—I’m sure he was impressed—and we betook ourselves to the parking lot, where he produced a little, ratty-looking, tapered cylinder of grayish paper, stuffed, he said, with “dyno doojie.”

“Take a deep drag, and hold it in your lungs as long as you can,” he said. It was like inhaling a forest fire, but I did as I was told. “As long as I could” turned out to be about three-tenths of a second. I immediately hacked the smoke back up with a series of coughs that must have rattled every window in Monmouth County. Arnie was delighted. He laughed so hard, he almost fell down—so much for Big Dave the hipster.

After a few more tokes, I sort of got the hang of it, but where was the euphoria? Except for a slightly sore throat, I felt nothing. We smoked the joint down to a tiny butt, burning our lips in the process. The butt, he explained, was called a “roach” and could be disposed of in several ways. His preferred method was to knead some tobacco out of the end of a Chesterfield, push the roach into the vacated space, and twist the loose paper shut. “Shooting the bullet,” he called it. So we finished the whole joint, and I still didn’t feel a damn thing. I was baffled. Was the dope no good? Was Arnie putting me on? Had Mezz Mezzrow
lied?

We could hear the horns warming up, so we hurried back inside, and I took my place on the stand, just in front of the bass and drums. I picked up my banjo. It looked silly, so I giggled. The drummer called the first tune, “Royal Garden Blues” in B flat, counted it down, and we were off and running. My hands were fascinating: they just kept moving without any conscious direction, making all kinds of wonderful patterns. Then the tune was over, and everybody stopped. But not me, I was really into it. Arnie kicked me and I chugged slowly to a stop. Wow, those fingers! The next piece featured me on the vocal.

Bob, the leader, called “Frankie and Johnny,” an overdone ballad with about two hundred verses. This had never been one of my favorites, and by the time Frankie got around to shooting Johnny I was totally bored and wishing that I was singing “Cake Walking Babies from Home” instead. So I promptly switched songs, changing keys as I went along. Some of the guys tried to follow me, while the rest doggedly plodded on with “Frankie.” The result was the musical equivalent of a three-way midair collision. I was ecstatic, still grinning from ear to ear as I was led from the stand. I had never had so much fun onstage in my life, but those killjoys made me sit out the rest of the set.

The audience, of course, never noticed a thing.

As I was rapidly discovering, it is hard work surviving without a steady job. I could usually come up with a floor or a couch to crash on, but food was always a problem. We would have boosting expeditions—I never actually did this myself, but I was certainly party to the proceeds—where a group would go into a supermarket and secrete some small, high-value items such as caviar and potted shrimp about their persons. Then we would go out and shop these things off to our more affluent friends for bags of rice and bulk items that were too big to shoplift.

We would head out in the early morning on what we used to call the “dawn patrol.” We would hit people’s stoops at about four-thirty or five and get milk, eggs, sometimes even bread, and one copy each of the
New York Times.
A bunch of us were crashing more or less regularly in a loft on the Bowery, so we got a lot of tips from the local winos. There was a birdseed factory right down the block, and if you got there for shape-up, those fortunate enough to be chosen would have the opportunity of unloading fifty-pound sacks of birdseed. I did that sometimes, and as it happened, the birdseed was marijuana, and in those days they didn’t irradiate the stuff, so among other things we had a little farm going by the stove. Very nice, until one day the cat got at it. Somehow, though, heaving around fifty-pound sacks of marijuana took a lot of the romance out of dope for me.

I did all kinds of things. I was a bank messenger for a while—an insane business that is perfectly captured in Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Capricorn
—and I did a little factory work. (I used to say that I had an assembly-line job dotting the eyes on Mickey Mouse dolls, which is not quite true, but close enough.) I knew a guy who had a catering service, and sometimes he would hire me when he had a big party, which paid a few bucks and also had some side benefits: there was often food left over, and once the customers got a bit tipsy, we would ferret away a bottle of champagne for every couple we served.

If worst came to worst, there were always day jobs busing tables in an Automat. However, by the mid-1950s I was getting involved with radical politics, and being a lefty could be an occupational hazard in even the most minor occupations. My friend Lenny was working a restaurant job, and the FBI came around and started asking his boss questions about a suspicious, dangerous character who was waiting tables, and of course the guy fired him.

There was also the problem of keeping clean. We had to do things like mooch showers. Haircuts were to be had only at the barber college down on the Bowery—either that or we’d cut each other’s hair. We couldn’t afford to get our clothes cleaned. We would gradually get grungier and grungier, and eventually you would be so grungy that they wouldn’t even hire you to bus tables.

There were compensations, though. Our loft was at 15 Cooper Square, which was right across the street from the original Five Spot, and in those days Thelonious Monk was playing there as sort of a steady thing. We would go over and sit at the bar in the afternoon, and Monk would be there with his musicians, rehearsing and working out new tunes. Beer was ten or fifteen cents in the afternoon, and you could sit and listen to Monk and Coltrane and that band. As icing on the cake, off to the side there was an old-time telephone booth with accordion doors, and every now and again the band would take a break and somebody would go in there and roll a joint. Around five or six o’clock, when the prices changed, the band went home to get ready for the evening’s show, and we would go into the telephone booth, and in the cracks of the door would be roaches. Those guys did not smoke lemonade; they had really good dope, so we would collect all these roaches and make new joints out of them, and get bombed out of our birds, basically on the house.

There was actually a lot of good music around that you could hear for free. I remember hearing Alexander Schneider conducting
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
in Washington Square Park. And then, of course, there were the folksingers. Thanks to my Virgil, Rochelle, I had been introduced to the Sunday afternoon hootenannies in Washington Square at the outset of my descent into the Village. However, any interest I might have had in folk music had gone by the boards as soon as I cast my lot with the jazz fraternity, because if there was one thing that all jazz musicians could agree on, it was that folk music was irredeemably square. We thought of it as “hillbilly shit,” a bunch of guys who didn’t even know how to play their instruments and just got by with “cowboy chords.” The little I heard while passing through the Square on Sundays confirmed my newfound snobbishness. It was essentially summer camp music, songs these kids had learned at progressive camps that I came to think of generically as Camp Gulag on the Hudson. The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit bourgeois
Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster, not to mention my political sensibilities, which had become vehemently IWW-anarchist. They were childish, and nothing bothers a serious-minded eighteen-year-old as much as childishness. So for a couple of years I avoided the place like the plague, for fear of contamination. If I had to pass anywhere in the vicinity, I would walk through as quickly as possible, obviating any possibility that I might get sucked in by something like “Blue Tail Fly” and shortly find myself doing the hora around the fountain and singing “Hey Lolly, Lolly Lo.”

Eventually, though, I came to realize that there were some very good musicians operating on the fringes of the radical Rotarian sing-alongs. People like Tom Paley, Dick Rosmini, and Fred Gerlach were playing music cognate with early jazz, and doing it with a subtlety and directness that blew me away. I had heard that kind of playing before, but only on old 78s that I had picked up by chance while searching for jazz discs. At that time you couldn’t just go out and buy an LP reissue of people like Mississippi John Hurt or Robert Johnson. In fact, the LP format had been introduced only a few years earlier. (I still have RL 101, the very first Riverside ten-inch record, a thing called
Louis Armstrong Plays the Blues
. At first I was very annoyed to find that instead of Louis solo, it was him backing blues singers like Chippie Hill and Ma Rainey. Then I started to listen and liked it very much.) If I wanted to find a lot of the older jazz stuff, I had to go out and look for used 78s. There was a place on 47th Street, the Jazz Record Center, which we called “Engine Joe’s,” and it was a treasure trove of jazz and jazz-related music of all sorts; it had writing on the stairs as you went up, saying, “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” which the mouldy figs misquoted as “from Bunk to junk.” There would be these stacks of records that you could look through, and some cost as much as ten bucks, but there were also some for twenty-five cents. They would have Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and also all kinds of people that I had never heard of before, like Bumble Bee Slim and Furry Lewis. So what the hell, for two bits you could afford to indulge your curiosity.

I was never really a collector, because I was sleeping on floors and that sort of thing, and for record collecting you need a stable place to live. Still, I picked up a few 78s, and a lot of people I knew were accumulating collections—for
a while there, you did not factor into the scene at all unless you could discuss cactus needles intelligently—so I had access to a fair amount of material. Also, the reissue series were beginning, and I shortly picked up a ten-inch record called
Listen to Our Story
, which Alan Lomax had put together for Decca. It was a collection of ballads that had originally been issued on 78s, most of them by white hillbilly singers, but it included “Stackolee” by Furry Lewis and a thing called “True Religion” by Reverend Edward Clayborn, both with fingerpicked guitar.

When I heard “Stackolee,” I assumed it was two guitars, one playing the bass line and the other playing the melody. I had no idea that there was such a thing as fingerpicking. My idea of playing guitar was either chopping fours—playing rhythm chords—or something like what Charlie Christian did. Then, sometime around 1954 or 1955, I happened to be walking across Washington Square Park of a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed this guy playing an old New York Martin, a very small, very sweet guitar, and he was doing something that sounded an awful lot like “Stackolee.” It immediately grabbed my attention, because he was doing the whole thing by himself: his thumb was picking out the bass notes while he was playing the melody with his fingers. I had never seen anything like that, so I stood there and listened, and when he stopped playing, I immediately buttonholed him and asked him to show me what he was doing. That was Tom Paley, who later became a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers. He was very nice, and graciously answered all my dumb questions, slowed the whole thing down, and gave me the general gist of how it worked.
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The advantages of fingerpicking were immediately obvious to me, because what I really wanted to do was sing and that style of playing was ideal for accompanying yourself. I rushed home to my guitar and went to work. I have never applied myself to any project with such intensity before or since. Paley had provided the key, but mastering the technique took time. I did not take any lessons—there was nobody around then, as far as I knew, who was giving any—but Sunday after Sunday I hit Washington Square, watching other fingerstyle guitar players, meeting them, and picking their
brains. A few of them lived in the Village, but most were still living with their parents in the burbs. I made friends like Barry Kornfeld and Dick Rosmini, who were already picking like sonofabitches. Gradually, I improved—we all did, actually. When one of us figured something out, the knowledge would be shared, and our general level of skill rose. It was a combined process of experimentation and theft: you would come up with an idea, and the next thing you knew, all your friends would be playing it, but that was fine because when they came up with an idea, you would be playing it. As Machiavelli used to say, “Things proceed in a circle, and thus the empire is maintained.”