The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  In the early 1950s, when Norman Mailer and Vance Bourjaily organized Sunday-afternoon writers’ get-togethers at the White Horse, Drexler was the only woman they invited. “I went there really happy, and looking forward to a literary salon with beer,” Drexler recalled. “Norman as usual challenged people to arm wrestle, or was it thumb wrestling? I placed my crumpled handwritten stories on the table, ready to read and hoping to receive the benefit of what these brilliant men would say. Turned out I was disappointed. All they wanted to hear was what my experiences had been like as a professional wrestler.” Warhol would do a series of Rosa silkscreens, and Drexler later wrote a novel about her, To Smithereens.

  Drexler wrote Home Movies to amuse herself when she was home with her children. “I didn’t even know it was a play!” she told Bottoms. “Like an amusement.” Her friend Richard Gilman, a Newsweek theater critic, took it to the Judson, where Kornfeld and Carmines reworked it into a hilariously bizarre musical. In this and her subsequent early plays Drexler created an alternate, purely invented lampoon universe somewhere east of Alfred Jarry, south of Koutoukas, north of Krazy Kat, and west of the Marx Brothers. (As it happens, she was related to Chico.) In Movies, characters like the homosexual Peter Peterouter (played by Freddie Herko), the lascivious priest Father Shenanigan (played by Carmines), and “the colored maid” Violet speak and sing total nonsense to one another while working themselves up into high dudgeons of lust, outrage, and other cartoonish emotions. It was hard to say exactly what Drexler’s preposterous characters were getting so worked up about. Nothing they said or did made much conventional sense. Yet on some intuitive level audiences and critics got it. Gilman called Movies “the first musical of the absurd.” Writing in the Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt later dubbed Drexler “the first Marx sister.” Movies won an Obie and went on from the Judson to seventy-two performances at the Provincetown Playhouse. Drexler wrote more plays, including the also magnificently wacky The Line of Least Existence; earned more Obies; and wrote novels (including a novelization of Rocky) and material for an Emmy-winning Lily Tomlin special. At the same time, her paintings and collages, appropriating pop culture and commercial imagery, made her one of the very few females in the first generation of Pop artists.

  Sam Shepard’s Red Cross was produced at the Judson, as was Koutoukas’s Pomegranada, Maria Irene Fornés’s Promenade, Rochelle Owens’s Instanboul, and some of Carmines’s own works, such as The Sayings of Mao Tse-tung, a cantata that put Mao to music a couple decades before Nixon in China. In what surely rates as an only-in-Greenwich-Village event, Reverend Carmines’s gay musical revue The Faggot opened at the Judson in 1973, got rave reviews even in the mainstream press, and continued Off-Broadway. Matching The Faggot for provocative bravado, Carmines and Kornfeld staged Dracula: Sabbat, in effect a satanic Black Mass, on the altar. Carmines suffered an aneurysm in 1977 and had to quit his post in 1981, ending the era of the Poets Theater, though the church continues to host performances to this day, well after his death in 2005.

  Judson Dance Theater, which operated from 1962 to 1964, has been cited as the birthplace of postmodern dance. The work tended to be highly experimental and Cage-inspired, redefining dance, movement, gesture, and ritual. Freddie Herko, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Carolee Schneemann were among the performers and choreographers. Drexler told Bottoms about one performance where dancers threw sticks at the audience from the balcony, “and somebody in the audience took one of the sticks and tied a handkerchief on and said I surrender because it was so awful, but it was like, avant-garde dance!”

  Photo Section 3

  The Village’s long reputation as a sexual playground continued after World War II.

  Maya Deren, 1959. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  John Cage, 1957. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  Delmore Schwartz at the White Horse Tavern, 1959. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  A poetry reading at the Cafe Bizarre. (New York Times)

  Jack Kerouac, maybe listening to Symphony Sid. (Photograph by John Cohen. Getty Images)

  Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg in Pull My Daisy. (Courtesy of Alfred Leslie)

  Jane Jacobs at the Lion’s Den in 1961. (Photograph by Phil Stanziola. Library of Congress)

  Doc Humes arrested at the “3000 Beatnik Riot.” A still from Dan Drasin’s documentary film Sunday. (Courtesy of Dan Drasin)

  Bob Dylan with Karen Dalton and Fred Neil performing at Cafe Wha? in February 1961, shortly after Dylan’s arrival in the Village. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  The Gaslight Cafe, 1960. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  Edward Albee. (Corbis Images)

  Rosalyn Drexler as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.

  LeRoi Jones at the premiere of his play The Toilet in 1964. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  The Mattachine Society “Sip-In” at Julius’ on West Tenth Street, April 21, 1966. Randy Wicker is at the far right of the group. (Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah. Getty Images)

  25

  The Folk Music Scene

  3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE

  —New York Daily Mirror

  IT’S KIND OF AMUSING TO REALIZE IT WAS HISTORY. I WAS JUST LIVING MY LIFE.

  —Suze Rotolo

  IN 1950 IT SEEMED FOR A MOMENT THAT FOLK MUSIC WAS ACHIEVING the mass appeal of pop music. The group that made that happen was from Greenwich Village: a folk act called the Weavers, which Pete Seeger and others had spun out of the Almanac House. They made a number one hit record out of “Goodnight, Irene,” a waltz that the Lomaxes had first heard Huddie Ledbetter sing in prison. The moment was brief. Red Channels, a pamphlet listing a hundred and fifty-one writers, directors, and actors who had been CPUSA members or fellow travelers back in the 1930s, came out that summer with Seeger and other folksingers on its list of reds, and the Weavers were blackballed from radio and the big concert halls. Folk music all but vanished from mainstream entertainment for most of the 1950s, unless you count folkish pop like Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” (which she followed up with “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window”) or Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” But it didn’t go away. It spread through a growing national network of coffeehouses, college campuses, and church halls. In 1954, when a thirteen-year-old Joan Baez first heard Seeger, it was in a California high school auditorium. An older kid named Dave Guard who was also in the auditorium that night would later be a founding member of the Kingston Trio, who brought folk back to the top of the charts in 1958. By 1959 folk was once again the next big thing in popular music. When the Newport Jazz Festival spun off the Newport Folk Festival that summer, it was a big enough deal to make a star of Baez, an unscheduled performer who mooched her way onto the stage. Her debut album, released just one year later, would go gold.

  In Greenwich Village, folk music had continued to thrive, if not prosper, through the Eisenhower years. Earnest, well-scrubbed college kids with guitars singing plaintive English ballads and old Wobbly songs could be found in Washington Square Park any weekend, weather permitting. In the mid-1950s, when coffeehouses began to spread around the Bleecker-MacDougal axis, folk music spread with them. One of the first coffeehouses to host folk music was the Caricature, a tiny place on MacDougal Street where folkies were allowed to play quietly in a back room as long as they didn’t disturb the bridge players in the front. That’s where Dave Van Ronk, later dubbed “the mayor of MacDougal Street,” got his start. Van Ronk was a big, bearded bear whose voice was gruff, his delivery full of heart. He was a soulful singer of sea shanties and old English ballads who could also rock and swing and sing credible blues and pluck a ukulele Arthur Godfrey–style. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in the “paralyzing boredom” of Queens. He got his first guitar in a school yard swap for a stack of Captain Marvel comics. His Irish grandmother belted out old tunes like “The Chimes of Trinity,” which
he later played for Bob Dylan. Dylan adapted it into “Chimes of Freedom.” “Her version was better,” Van Ronk observes wryly in his posthumously published memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

  He took his first subway ride to the Village as a teen. He expected to see an old-fashioned village “inhabited by bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters, and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the left of ‘whoopee!’ ” He was disappointed to find it looked “just like fucking Brooklyn.” By the mid-1950s he’d learned fingerpicking from a guy in Washington Square and was playing folk music in venues including the Caricature. He was among the artists who played the opening night at the Cafe Bizarre in 1957, with Odetta headlining.

  As folk spread to more coffeehouses, clubs, bars, and restaurants in the second half of the 1950s, they arranged themselves in a food chain from the less prestigious venues to the most. Manny Roth’s Cafe Wha?, the liquorless club in the basement at the corner of MacDougal Street and Minetta Lane, was an entry-level spot. In the afternoons a parade of wannabe folksingers, amateur comics, weekend poets, drag queens, magicians, show-tune belters, and sadsack troupers of all sorts performed short sets there. Like many places in the Village it was a “basket house”: there was no cover charge to get in but on your way out someone at the door, often a pretty and persuasive young woman, shoved a basket at you and asked for a buck or two donation for the performers. On a Saturday night in one of the more popular basket houses a performer could actually make decent money, but not on weekday afternoons. In the evenings more polished acts took over at the Wha?—Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and folksingers such as the deep-voiced Fred Neil, who also served as the emcee. Neil was a MacDougal Street legend, a musician’s musician who never chased a larger spotlight but influenced a lot of sixties folk rockers and wrote songs for Roy Orbison (“Candy Man”), Jefferson Airplane (“Other Side of This Life”), and Harry Nilsson (“Everybody’s Talkin’,” a Top 10 hit). Shackled with a heroin addiction, he would leave the Village for Woodstock and then Coconut Grove, Florida, spend decades in semiretirement, and die quietly in 2001 at the age of sixty-five.

  Across the street and down a few doors from Cafe Wha?, the Gaslight Cafe was in the basement of the Italian tenement at 116 MacDougal Street. John Mitchell had already opened and lost Le Figaro Cafe when he started the Gaslight in 1958 as a basket house where Beat poets, including Ginsberg and Corso, read. It had once been a speakeasy and, after that, the tenement’s coal cellar, leaving it with a sooty patina that couldn’t be scrubbed out. Small, dark, and funky it was also afflicted with cockroaches and the occasional rat. The ceiling pipes leaked. On crowded summer nights it could get so hot that the fire sprinklers went off, drenching the audience and performers. The upstairs neighbors didn’t much care for the beatniks, folksingers, and blacks the Gaslight attracted. When they complained about the noise coming up the airshaft, Mitchell asked audiences not to applaud the acts but to snap their fingers instead, helping to promote the enduring cliché of the finger-popping beatnik.

  Mitchell warred with the fire department over what he felt were nuisance code citations and balked at paying off the cops and local mobsters. With no liquor license, he overcharged for bad coffee and food few dared to eat in the grungy space. But despite all that the Gaslight became one of the premiere folk venues in the Village. It featured up-and-coming and established professionals who made sixty dollars a week there, a decent wage when even in the pricey Village your rent was likely a hundred dollars or less a month, and a couple of bucks bought you a mediocre but filling meal in one of the diners or spaghetti houses. Among the folk, blues, and comedy acts who crossed its stage were Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Tom Paxton, Carolyn Hester, Bill Cosby, Lord Buckley, Artie and Happy Traum, Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy), John Sebastian, Flip Wilson, and Fred Willard. Van Ronk emceed Tuesday-night hootenannies. Between sets they all went upstairs for drinks at the Kettle of Fish, another tough Village bar the poets and folkies colonized at some peril. Mitchell would sell out in the early 1960s and leave town—according to rumor, one step ahead of unhappy creditors and wiseguys. The Gaslight fell into the hands of Clarence “Papa” Hood, an irascible, bourbon-drinking southerner who dropped his whole family into a Village they knew nothing about. His son Sam managed the day-by-day chores, while Papa, unlike his predecessor, wisely paid off the protection rackets and city inspectors.

  Art D’Lugoff, who’d been producing concerts around the Village for a few years by then, opened his club, the Village Gate, in 1958. It went on to be a Village flagship, home to folk, blues, jazz, rock, experimental music, cabaret, musicals, poetry readings, and anything else D’Lugoff felt like booking. National Lampoon Lemmings ran there for two years and graduated its star performers John Belushi and Chevy Chase to Saturday Night Live. Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris debuted there, as did the political satire MacBird, the jazz revue One Mo’ Time, and the sex musical Let My People Come. (The SLA revoked his liquor license for that; he took the agency to court and won it back.) The Gate was in the former Mills House No. 1, the big workingmen’s residence on the south side of Bleecker Street between Thompson and Sullivan. By the time D’Lugoff looked at the building it had deteriorated into the Greenwich Hotel, a flophouse. D’Lugoff’s daughter Sharon Blythe remembers him telling her of residents peeing out the windows and throwing bottles at the street. In her own memories, “There were still a lot of bums. It was scary. Bleecker Street wasn’t as gentrified then. There’d be people passed out with their heads in the gutter, smelly bums, and then the Gate right there.” Before D’Lugoff created the Gate, the building briefly housed a coffeehouse, Jazz on the Wagon. The Beats took it over as a place for readings. The hotel’s echoing, paint-shagging atrium was sometimes used for larger events, such as a 1962 symposium on sex.

  The Allan Block Sandal Shop at West Fourth and Jones Streets was an early magnet for folkies. Block’s sandals, handmade right there in his small shop, were de rigueur Village footwear from the 1950s into the ’60s. But he was just as well known as a folk music fanatic—his daughter Rory became a well-respected folk blues performer—and his shop was often so crowded with people jamming and gabbing that no sandals got made that day. Then twenty-nine-year-old Izzy Young started his Folklore Center in 1957, and in no time it was a mecca for folkies from around the country. The Folklore Center was up a flight of stairs in the tenement at 110 MacDougal Street, a few doors down from the Gaslight. For folkies it was “like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute,” Dylan writes in his memoir. It was packed with musical instruments, antique sheet music, hard-to-find 78s, old Wobbly song pamphlets, and out-of-print music books. Fans and musicians went there to meet, gab, thumb the books, even pick up their mail.

  More than a shopkeeper, Young was a godfather to the scene. It was Young who in 1960 brought folk music to Gerde’s, an Italian restaurant on the northeast corner of West Fourth and Mercer Streets, in a building later torn down and replaced by the Hebrew Union College. It was just another red-sauce spaghetti house that catered to a lunch crowd of workers from the nearby Broadway loft factories. With those businesses dwindling, it was easy enough for Young to talk owner Mike Porco into trying folk music at night to draw a new crowd. Young called it the Fifth Peg (standard banjos have five tuning pegs). It was the first regular, non-coffeehouse folk club in the Village. After a few months of good business Porco cut out Young and renamed it Gerde’s Folk City. Playing there meant you’d made it.

  Half a century before Occupy Wall Street, Young helped gather a few hundred young protesters to occupy the fountain in Washington Square Park. Like OWS they ended up clashing with the police. It started in the spring of 1961, when the Washington Square Association, made up of home owners around the park, appealed to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation to do something about the hundreds of “roving troubadours and their followers” playing music around the park
’s turned-off fountain on Sunday afternoons. The practice had started in the postwar years and grown through the 1950s until both the police and the neighbors found the “troubadours”—mostly college kids—a nuisance. Van Ronk recalled that there were various cliques in the park: a Zionist group singing and dancing “Hava Nagila,” the Stalinists, the bluegrass fans, the folk traditionalists. The journalist John A. Williams reported that the locals’ complaints were not really musical but social: “In the ensuing meetings with city officials, it became apparent that what was opposed was not so much folk singing as the increasing presence of mixed couples in the area, mostly Negro men and white women.” The parks commission began issuing permits to limit the number of musicians, allowing them to “sing and play from two until five as long as they had no drums,” Van Ronk writes. This “kept out the bongo players. The Village had bongo players up the wazoo . . . and we hated them. So that was some consolation.” According to Hettie Jones, those bongo players were often black; in Stewart Wilensky’s Village Sunday short, the bongo players in the park are indeed all young black men. (This racial aspect actually had an old historical precedent in the Village. In 1819, white residents of the area complained “of being much annoyed by certain persons of color practising as Musician with Drums and other instruments through the Village.”)