The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  In 1961 the parks commissioner responded to the complaints by refusing to issue any permits at all. Young and others organized a peaceful protest demonstration. On Sunday, April 9, 1961, a few hundred young people, few of them actual Village residents, gathered, attracting a few hundred more spectators. Among them was eighteen-year-old Dan Drasin, a mild-mannered kid who liked to hang out in the park. He brought one of the big, boxy film cameras of the era and documented the afternoon in a short black-and-white film, Sunday. The film shows clean-cut college and high school kids, many of the girls in Jackie O hairdos and heels, many of the boys looking like young Allen Ginsbergs with serious, sensitive, owlish faces behind heavy black-framed glasses. They carry handwritten placards and cardboard guitars and argue with the dozens of beefy, florid-faced cops who’ve shown up. Izzy Young, also bespectacled and in jacket and tie, lectures the cops about the constitutional right to make music as the kids sit in a circle in the dry fountain and sing “This Land Is Your Land” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” So does Art D’Lugoff, telling them they ought to be out “chasing criminals” instead of “stopping free speech.” As protests go it all looks low-key and polite. Then paddy wagons arrive and the cops haul off one nebbishy young man cradling an autoharp, pushing him into a prowl car. According to Drasin, most of the singers and musicians had left the park, leaving the few hundred spectators loitering around the fountain, when the cops’ tempers finally boiled over. They waded into the crowd, shoving boys and girls to the ground, mauling them, dragging a handful into the paddy wagons. Reportedly they knocked some heads with their clubs, although it’s not shown in the film. The whole event, Drasin says, lasted maybe two hours. (Jonas Mekas was also there that day, filming from up in a tree until cops pulled him down out of it.)

  The next day, the New York Daily Mirror, the conservative Hearst tabloid, ran a giant war-is-over front-page headline, “3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE.” That week’s Voice scoffed at the Mirror’s “hysterical” coverage, wondering if there were three thousand beatniks in the entire country that Sunday, let alone in Washington Square Park. By May the outrage caused by the cops’ overreaction forced the city to back down and issue permits, a practice that continues to this day.

  Among the protesters hauled off that afternoon was the Village character H. L. “Doc” Humes, identified in the Mirror as a “scofflaw” and the “mob leader.” Humes was a gregarious polymath, a novelist and raconteur, cofounder of the Paris Review, designer of cheap housing made from old newspapers, director of a lost film updating the Don Quixote story as Don Peyote, LSD pioneer with Timothy Leary, later helper to Norman Mailer when he ran for mayor in 1969, and later still a paranoid drug casualty who believed UFOs, the CIA, and the pope in Rome were out to get him. He would not have been a stranger to the cops in the park that day. Just a few months earlier he’d had a very public spat with the police commissioner Stephen Kennedy. In October 1960 cops had shut down a performance by Lord Buckley at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village. Lord Buckley was a stately man with sleek gray hair and a pointy Dalí-esque mustache, who often performed in a tux and orated in a plummy, faux-British voice, seeming every bit the vaudeville and burlesque master of ceremonies he once was. But what came out of his mouth was pure hepcat jive he’d learned from the jazz musicians and pot smokers with whom he’d associated since the 1930s. In the 1950s he started to recast biblical stories, historical texts like the Gettysburg Address, and Shakespeare in White Negro proto-rap: “Hipsters, flipsters, and finger-poppin’ daddies, knock me your lobes. I came here to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him.” It sounds like novelty schtick today but in Eisenhower’s America there was something inherently subversive about a man who looked like the maître d’ at a fancy restaurant jiving like a viper. “His Royal Hipness” had a lot of fans and friends downtown, where he performed and hung out whenever he was in New York. David Amram remembers jamming with him many times at Village parties or after-hours in some club.

  The cops halted Buckley’s gig because of a problem with his cabaret card. He’d failed to report a pot bust that went back to the 1940s. Without the card he couldn’t perform in New York City, including a scheduled appearance on his old friend Ed Sullivan’s show (they’d toured together with the USO during the war). Despondent, Buckley called his friend Humes. In news reports about the Buckley affair Humes was often referred to as Buckley’s manager, but Amram says, “To the best of my knowledge, Doc was not ever Lord Buckley’s manager per se. Doc was one of Buckley’s admirers and always a supporter of free speech. And Doc was openhearted and exceedingly generous. But Doc was not noted for his business acumen, and most of us who were Village denizens weren’t either. We were barely able to manage our own daily lives. Like myself and so many others, Doc needed a manager himself.”

  Humes talked his Paris Review friend George Plimpton into letting Buckley give a little performance at a party in his Upper East Side apartment, with the idea that Plimpton’s influential crowd might help get Buckley’s card reinstated. With Amram at the piano, Buckley went into his schtick. The response was cool. Plimpton’s literary swells had come to sip cocktails and talk about themselves, not listen to Village-y jazzbo jive. Buckley the old vaudevillian worked hard to win them over, pulling out bit after bit, overstaying his unwelcome. As the crowd grew increasingly bored and angry, Norman Mailer started heckling. Amram remembers that Buckley finally gave up, then “came over to the piano and whispered in my ear, ‘Let’s split and get out of here, man.’ ”

  It turned out to be Lord Buckley’s farewell performance. He died of a stroke shortly afterward, age fifty-four. Art D’Lugoff offered the use of the Village Gate for a memorial service, at which Ornette Coleman and Dizzy Gillespie played for a large crowd of Buckley’s friends and admirers. He was laid out at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, New York’s funeral home to the stars. Humes, Mailer, Amram, and others then started a public campaign to end the cabaret card system. Humes charged that police harassment had killed Buckley and claimed that if Buckley had only slipped the right cop a hundred bucks the whole thing would have been settled under the table. That enraged Commissioner Kennedy, who retaliated by tossing Humes in jail for unpaid parking tickets and ordering up the biggest crackdown on cabarets and nightclubs in years, sending cops to more than twelve hundred venues looking for non–card carrying workers. But this protest worked as well. Kennedy was sacked for his overreaction, and though it took another seven years the cabaret card system was eventually abolished.

  TWO RECORD LABELS WITH VILLAGE CONNECTIONS WERE IMMENSELY influential to the folk music revival. Vanguard Records was an independent label with tiny, cluttered offices at Fourteenth Street near Eighth Avenue. The brothers Seymour and Maynard Solomon started it in 1950 with ten thousand dollars borrowed from their father. They put out classical recordings at first, then John Hammond brought them jazz, including recordings of his historic “Spirituals to Swing” concerts. Next they branched out to albums by the blacklisted Weavers and Paul Robeson. In 1960 they hit pay dirt with Joan Baez’s first LP. She’d record with them into the 1970s.

  The other was Moses “Moe” Asch’s Folkways Records. Folkways’ extraordinarily broad catalogue reflected Asch’s international upbringing. He was born in Poland in 1905, eldest son of the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch. From there the family moved to Berlin, France, and New York, where they bounced around from Greenwich Village to the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Then he spent a couple of years in Weimar, Germany, studying radio electronics, returning to Brooklyn in the mid-1920s to begin a career in radio and sound engineering. Along the way he pieced together an idiosyncratic self-education in a variety of international folk music. He first saw John Lomax’s landmark anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, for example, in a book stall on a street in Paris.

  During the Depression his company Radio Laboratories installed speaker systems for ILGWU rallies and for Yiddish theaters on the Lower East Side, equipped sound
trucks for Franklin Roosevelt’s electioneering in New York, and built a transmitter for the Forward’s Yiddish radio station WEVD. The call letters of the unabashedly Socialist station stood for Eugene V. Debs. In the mid-1930s he worked with a guitarist on developing electric guitars and amplifiers; that guitarist, who originally performed “hillbilly” music as Rhubarb Red, later became famous as Les Paul. Asch helped the ILGWU produce Pins and Needles. One member of the cast had recently arrived from Louisiana: Huddie Ledbetter.

  Asch began making records as the Asch Recording Studios in 1939; he followed that with Disc Records and, in 1948, with his famous Folkways label. His first recording was of Yiddish singers too aptly named the Bagelman Sisters. He also trucked a mountain of field equipment out to Princeton to record his father interviewing Albert Einstein. His biggest early success was an album of children’s songs performed by Leadbelly. Woody Guthrie first recorded with him in 1944; it’s said that 80 percent of Guthrie’s recordings were with Asch. In 1952 Folkways issued a six-disc collection that changed the course of American popular culture: The Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by a bona fide crazed American genius, Harry Smith. Ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, filmmaker, record producer, alchemist, drunk, mooch, psychedelic adventurer, speed freak, and self-defeating crank, Smith died, poor and obscure, in the Chelsea Hotel in 1991. Since then a boatload of books and conferences have been devoted to analyzing the fractal web of ideas and influences connecting him to the entirety of downtown and underground culture in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century. As a musicologist he made field recordings of everything from Kiowa peyote songs to the street sounds outside Allen Ginsberg’s window to his friend Lionel Ziprin’s grandfather Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia lying in his bed on the Lower East Side singing ancient Hebrew songs he’d learned growing up in Galilee. The melody of one, startlingly, is recognizable, note for note, as Dick Dale’s 1962 surf guitar classic “Misirlou.” Dale had heard it played on an oud by his Lebanese uncle, who knew it as a popular Greek song about a beautiful Egyptian girl (misir lou) from the 1920s.

  Those kinds of elaborately, mystically improbable linkages abound in Smith’s work. It was only natural that he should meet Moe Asch shortly after moving to New York from San Francisco. Always broke, Smith offered to sell Asch his large collection of old, obscure 78s. Asch had the idea for the Anthology, for which Smith selected eighty-four tracks of blues, Cajun, jug band, bluegrass, gospel, and “race” records released in the 1920s and ’30s and little heard since. Because these musical styles are so well known now it’s almost impossible to imagine what a treasure trove of shattering revelations the Anthology was for the young listeners of Bob Dylan’s generation. Dylan memorized every song on the six records and continues to perform them today. Van Ronk and all the other Village folkies were just as steeped in it.

  Because of the Guthrie records, the Anthology, and other recordings, Folkways had colossal prestige in the Village, and just about every folk performer on the scene wanted to record his or her own record with Asch. Through the ’50s and into the ’60s Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Cisco Houston, Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Mike Seeger’s New Lost City Ramblers, Janis Ian, Richie Havens, and others would do so, some of them many times. But marketing and sales were never Asch’s strong suits. Some Folkways albums sold well but most did not, and very many sold fewer than two hundred copies. What little artists got paid for recording with Folkways they had to pry out of the notoriously tightfisted Asch who, to be fair, was perpetually strapped for cash.

  In addition to American folk, jazz, and blues Asch released an enormous catalogue of world music brought to him by the ethnomusicologist Harold Courlander; classical and avant-garde music; poetry and other spoken word recordings, from Langston Hughes and Eleanor Roosevelt to Timothy Leary and Ho Chi Minh; plays and musicals, holiday records, humor records, educational and instructional records, natural sound and sound effects records. When he died in 1986 the Folkways catalogue was up to 2,186 albums. The Smithsonian bought the label and kept every single Folkways album, including the Anthology, in print, even Speech After the Removal of the Larynx, Sounds of the Junkyard, The International Morse Code: A Teaching Record Using the Audio-Vis-Tac Method, and Corliss Lamont Sings for His Family and Friends a Medley of Favorite Hit Songs from American Musicals. Lamont, a well-known Marxist professor who taught at Harvard, Columbia, and the New School, was seventy-five when he sat down at the piano and belted out an LP of songs including “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” and “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”

  SUZE ROTOLO (PRONOUNCED SU-ZEE ROE-TOLO) WAS AN INTIMATE of the scene as all this was going on, though she was not a performer and never famous. For decades, outside her circle of friends and some cognoscenti, she was the anonymous yet universally recognized “chick on the Dylan cover.” Just that pretty girl trudging up a slushy Village street with him on the cover of his landmark second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. For all most people knew, she might have been a model hired for the shoot.

  She was in fact Dylan’s girlfriend at the time, his first love in New York. It wasn’t until the 2000s that her significant role in his life and career was made general knowledge, in his 2004 memoir Chronicles and in her own A Freewheelin’ Time, published in 2008. Her anonymity was largely her own doing. She had never wanted to ride his coattails, neither during nor after their relationship, and rejected on principle the empty fame that accrues to people simply for having known some celebrity back when.

  “It’s kind of amusing to realize it was history,” she said in 2011. “I was just living my life.”

  Rotolo was a red-diaper baby, born in 1943 into an artistic, progressive, working-class family in Queens. Both her Sicilian immigrant father and her Boston-born mother were members of the Communist Party; he was a union organizer and an artist, she edited and wrote for the Communist newspaper L’Unità del Popolo. They named her sister Carla Maria in honor of Karl Marx. They’d lived in the Village before moving out to Sunnyside.

  “I was lucky,” Rotolo recalled. “Some people have to find their way and rebel and all that. I was brought up with books and music and all sorts of stuff at my fingertips, so it was always a lot easier for me than other kids who had to really fight tooth and nail to get away from their parents’ ideology.”

  Suze and Carla, who would become an assistant to Alan Lomax, naturally gravitated to the Village as teenagers in the late 1950s. “The path that drew me here was my crush on Edna St. Vincent Millay and the earlier things that I read about the salons and all these people who put on plays, all these writers,” she said. “That was the old attraction to this place—the Village as a place for artists. There was the folk music in Washington Square Park. The Beats were close. We were reading and discovering their poetry.”

  After Suze’s father died, her mother moved back to the Village, renting the small penthouse at the top of 1 Sheridan Square, the building with the basement space that had been Cafe Society and was now Circle in the Square. The penthouse had a separate bedroom with its own entrance, and Suze, who’d been subletting and staying with friends, moved in. She got a job working the concession stand in the theater and Carla ran the lights.

  She first saw Dylan performing in April 1961, though it would be months before they actually met. He had arrived in the Village on January 24 and had instantly begun to burrow his way up the folk scene’s food chain. No one becomes a major celebrity by accident. Like Baez, who’d eventually be sharing her spotlight with him, he was a driven, ambitious young comer with his eyes on the prize from the minute he set foot in Greenwich Village. In a BBC Radio interview that aired in 2011, Chip Monck, a lighting designer at the Village Gate in the early 1960s, recalled his impression that Dylan “knew exactly what he was going to do from, obviously, the moment of birth.”

  Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, Dylan grew up in the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota. He played rock and roll, like many teenage boys in the 1950s, bef
ore discovering Woody Guthrie. He switched to folk music, closely patterning his style on Guthrie’s, and chose his stage name after Dylan Thomas. When he arrived in New York in January 1961, having hitched a ride with another folk hopeful from Madison, Wisconsin, he told fanciful tales about himself to sound more like Guthrie than a nineteen-year-old Jewish kid from the upper Midwest. He told Nat Hentoff in The New Yorker, for instance, that he’d run away from home as an adolescent to join a traveling band. Hentoff was not pleased when he later learned it was a lie. He told different stories whenever asked, covering up his past by mythologizing it. Rotolo learned his real name only when his draft card fell out of his wallet after they’d been living together for months.

  The day he arrived in the Village he went to the Cafe Wha? and played a little harmonica for Fred Neil at the afternoon session. Neil invited him to play with him that evening. He hadn’t been in the Village twenty-four hours before his first gig. The next day he went out to Queens to visit with Woody Guthrie’s family. Guthrie himself was in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey, wasting away from the Huntington’s disease that would finally end his life in 1967. But Dylan did meet the thirteen-year-old Arlo, who’d grow up to perform in a style very reminiscent of both his father’s and Dylan’s. A few days later Dylan went to New Jersey to meet Guthrie himself.

  Dylan quickly put himself next to all the most influential figures on the Village folk scene. John Hammond Jr. heard him play and told his father about him. Hammond Jr. had grown up in the Village and was a regular performer there, one of the most credible white bluesmen of the 1960s. Dylan met Hammond Sr. not long after that, at a party on West Tenth Street. He made a point of sitting next to the Columbia Records producer and playing him a few songs. He met Van Ronk at the Folklore Center, and Van Ronk took him under wing, squiring him into the Gaslight, where he was performing within a couple of weeks of arriving. Around the same time he started playing at the Monday-night open-stage hootenannies at Gerde’s. He also met Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who had just returned to a hero’s welcome in the Village that year after several years of touring Europe and being a huge star on the folk-revival scene in England, where it was called skiffle music. Elliott had been Guthrie’s sidekick and protégé in the early 1950s after meeting him at a house party on University Place, where Guthrie was playing songs for a nickel a pop. He’d lived with him for a year in Coney Island and was considered the world’s leading interpreter—some said imitator—of Guthrie’s songs. Elliott and Dylan crossed the Hudson to visit Woody. Dylan even took the room next to Elliott’s at the Hotel Earle. He added to his instant cachet in the Village by palling around with Elliott and imitating his style. Elliott later said he didn’t mind the imitating at the time, but a couple of years later, when Dylan was a huge international star, he would chafe when young people called him a Dylan imitator.