The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  Dylan’s Guthrie by way of Ramblin’ Jack sound didn’t appeal to everyone. Some of the older hands on the scene openly mocked him for it. When he auditioned for Art D’Lugoff at the Village Gate, D’Lugoff turned him down, commenting that if he wanted to hear Woody Guthrie he’d listen to Woody Guthrie. Vanguard producers were making a series of compilation albums of young folksingers they thought had promise but weren’t yet ready to record whole solo albums. They declined to record Dylan. So did Jac Holzman’s Elektra.

  Dylan didn’t gravitate to Van Ronk and Elliott purely out of ambition. He was on their side of the great divide in the way folksingers approached and performed the music, separating the ones who prettified and cleaned it up for broad popular appeal from those who tried for an authentically raw and rough sound. The first group could sound studied and clinical—the squeaky-clean Pete Seeger, the operatic Joan Baez—or fluffy and pop like the Kingston Trio and the Village’s folk super group Peter, Paul and Mary. They were the ones the college kids preferred and the record labels wanted. The more raw-sounding folkies included Van Ronk, Elliott, and Mike Seeger, Pete’s half brother, a supple multi-instrumentalist whose banjo playing and smoky voice sounded convincingly southern and downhome. Ultimately their interpretations were just as much northern, urban re-creations as those of the more pop performers. All three were born in New York City, after all. Ramblin’ Jack was in fact Elliot Adnopoz, son of Dr. Abe and Flossie Adnopoz of Brooklyn, who saw his first cowboys at a touring rodeo show in Madison Square Garden. But they tried to get to the marrow and mystery and strange humor of folk music, instead of just singing the pretty melodies and harmonies, an approach Elliott derided as “sissy.” Van Ronk sneered at the Kingston Trio as “Babbitt balladeers” who “threw me into an absolute ecstasy of rage.”

  With the backing of local legends, married to his own single-minded drive and focus, Dylan conquered the Village scene with startling speed. He’d been there only two months when Porco booked him to play a short set, second on the bill to blues legend John Lee Hooker, a prestigious booking in what turned out to be a very successful extended engagement, April 11 to April 25.

  Joan Baez first heard him the night before that gig, April 10. She’d headed to New York to be part of the Sunday-afternoon Washington Square rally but arrived too late. Sticking around the city, she went to Gerde’s that Monday night for the hootenanny, where many of the local folk acts, Dylan among them, took turns performing in a post-rally celebration. Dylan made sure he met her. He didn’t care for her music but he liked what she could do for his career. Just a few months older than Dylan, she was already folk music’s reigning queen. As ambitious and focused as he was, she’d conquered Boston’s Harvard Square coffeehouse scene as quickly as he was rising in the Village, wowed the crowd at the first Newport Folk Festival, and put out her first album on Vanguard, the 1960 Joan Baez, which went gold. Most everybody on the folk scene wanted some of that gold to rub off on them. Dylan had the chutzpah to make it happen. By summer he was in negotiations with the man who got Baez her record deal, Albert Grossman.

  Grossman was the sharpest businessman in a field admittedly not crowded with them. He was one of the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. Originally operating from Chicago, he relocated to New York to get involved in the burgeoning Village scene. It was Grossman who put together three Village folk veterans to create Peter, Paul and Mary. Peter was Peter Yarrow; Mary was Mary Travers, a Village native; and Paul was Noel Stookey, whose name Grossman changed. In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu reports that although Grossman was not yet representing Dylan he greased the wheels of a triumphal, career-making return to Gerde’s that September. He threw some money at Porco and, according to rumors that quickly spread among the other folkies, threw some more at the New York Times folk reviewer Robert Shelton. Shelton, whose real name was Shapiro, was a proofreader who got to cover the folk music scene because no one else on staff cared about it. He rarely wrote a negative review and moonlighted writing pseudonymous liner notes for albums. If Grossman did pay him to write something positive about Dylan—it’s possible, given that payola in many forms was standard practice in the music business—it was money very well spent. When Dylan returned to Gerde’s for a two-week run that September, second on the bill to the Greenbriar Boys this time, Shelton raved about the unknown twenty-year-old, “a bright new face in folk music,” “one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months.” Dylan and Shelton went on to have a long and mutually profitable friendship until the latter’s death in 1995.

  The day Shelton’s article appeared Dylan was playing harmonica at a Columbia recording session behind folksinger Carolyn Hester, produced by John Hammond Sr. At the end of the session, Hammond—who, to his chagrin, had passed on recording Baez—took Dylan into his office and signed him to a five-year contract. Nine months after the whey-faced nineteen-year-old Woody imitator arrived in the Village he was a Columbia Records recording artist. The whole Village scene buzzed with excitement, and also jealousy. Hammond had Dylan in a recording studio by November. That month, responding both to the buzz and to Grossman’s behind-the-scenes urging, Izzy Young booked one of Carnegie Hall’s small spaces, Chapter Hall, and promoted it as “The Folklore Center Presents Bob Dylan in His First New York Concert.” Despite a two-dollar ticket price it was too much too soon. Dylan’s Village friends, gnashing their teeth, stayed away. Only fifty-three people showed up. A few nights later, Baez gave her first big New York concert nearby at Town Hall for a sold-out audience of seventeen hundred adoring fans. Shelton raved. Vanguard released Joan Baez, Volume 2 that month. It went gold, almost cracked the Billboard Top 10, and stayed on the charts for two years.

  Dylan and Rotolo had met that July, when she attended a hootenanny at the Riverside Church on the Upper West Side. She was seventeen, he was twenty. “She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen,” he writes in Chronicles. “We started talking and my head started to spin . . . I felt like I was in love for the first time in my life.” They were soon an item, hanging out together in all the clubs, hiding from Suze’s mom in her bedroom with its separate entrance. With some money in his pocket that fall from the Columbia signing, Dylan rented his first New York City apartment, a top-floor walk-up at 161 West Fourth Street, a nondescript brick building around the corner from 1 Sheridan Square. Rotolo waited for her eighteenth birthday before moving in with him. Her mother was not at all pleased and never took to Dylan, whom she called a “scruffy beatnik.” Carla didn’t approve either, considering him an ambitious schemer who would leave her sister behind as he scrambled up the ladder of success. He didn’t much like Carla in return. “For her parasite sister, I had no respect,” he snarls in “Ballad in Plain D,” in which he recalls “the screaming battleground” of his and Carla’s arguments over Suze.

  Dylan writes in Chronicles that Rotolo was his muse as well as his girlfriend. Her work for CORE and SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) educated him about social issues he hadn’t been much interested in previously. She took him to see Picasso’s Guernica for the first time and the work of East Village artists such as Red Grooms. She introduced him to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and shared her interest in theater with him, bringing him to the Caffe Cino, the Living Theatre on Fourteenth Street, and to the Theater de Lys. Suze was also working backstage at the Sheridan Square Playhouse, which was producing the musical revue Brecht on Brecht. Dylan writes that he was thunderstruck by Brecht and Weill’s songs. He got the genius of what they had done, the elemental rattle and bang of Weill’s tunes, so simple yet so sophisticated, flawlessly suited to Brecht’s characters and their tough views of the world. It wasn’t anything like American folk music yet it had a similarly raw and chthonic feel, as if it were coming from the roots of the world. It protested everything but it wasn’t protest music.

  A young folksinger who came to the Village at this point acted as Dylan’s foil, his greatest fan, and his friendly competitor. W
hen Phil Ochs quit college and came to the Village in 1962 he quickly emerged as one of the most earnest and personally committed of protest singers. He wrote and sang the timeliest and most topical songs of the day—his first Elektra LP was titled All the News That’s Fit to Sing—a handful of which rank among the best ever recorded, including the anthems “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” and “The War Is Over” and the satirical “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Songs like the latter, an attack on limousine liberals, helped to ensure that he never quite won over the Peter, Paul and Mary audience, despite his clean-cut tenor. He would stick with his uncompromising political views well into the 1970s, long after many of the others drifted away. He was associated with the Youth International Party, aka the Yippies, the political pranksters who proposed running a pig for president at the 1968 Democratic Convention and tried to levitate the Pentagon.

  Ochs idolized Dylan in 1962, suppressed his own vaulting ego when in Dylan’s presence, and called him “the man I most respect in the world.” As can happen in that kind of relationship, Dylan was far less respectful of Ochs, treating him like a groupie. They often tried out new songs on each other. When Dylan harshly critiqued Ochs’s music, Ochs would go into a period of deep self-examination and self-criticism. The one time Ochs is known to have criticized Dylan, they were together in Dylan’s limousine in 1965. Dylan played him a new song, “One of Us Must Know,” which would appear on Blonde on Blonde. Ochs expressed his regret that Dylan was no longer writing the kind of topical songs he had when they first met. Dylan flew into a defensive rage and threw Ochs out of the limo. “He was such a prick,” the late Sam Hood says in the 2010 documentary film Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune.

  Bob Dylan came out in March 1962. It did poorly on the charts—around Columbia it was known as Hammond’s Folly—but by the time it was released Dylan had already moved well past the young Woody wannabe it documents to the songwriter of genius who appeared on his next LP.

  Rotolo’s mother, anxious to break the two of them up, convinced Suze to go along with her on an extended European trip that June. Suze didn’t return to the Village until December. Dylan seems to have been genuinely lovelorn during her absence, writing her many love letters and some songs that would appear on his next album. For her part, she was considering her own art career and having second thoughts about being a celebrity’s “old lady.” Still, they happily reunited on West Fourth Street, and that winter the two of them strolled arm in arm up nearby Jones Street for the Freewheelin’ cover photo. Released in May 1963, Freewheelin’ was Dylan’s breakthrough LP, revealing him as an extraordinary writer with the songs “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” But it didn’t catch on right away. The month it was released he performed at the Monterey Folk Festival. The crowd, used to the more prettified type of folk, appeared bored and restless. Then their queen strode onto the stage, gave them a stern talking-to, and Baez and Dylan sang their first public duet. That summer Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover of his “Blowin’ in the Wind” rose to number two on the charts and Baez brought him out for some more duets at the Newport Folk Festival. He had arrived.

  Rotolo was in the Newport audience. “Their convergence was predictable; for folk music, it was a mandate,” she writes. She didn’t know yet that Dylan and Baez were becoming a romantic duo as well, but not long after Newport she moved out of Dylan’s apartment “because I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth, and lies that living with Bob Dylan entailed.” They continued to see each other, but it was unraveling, and by 1964 his skyrocketing fame, her knowledge of his affair with Baez, and her own determination to craft a life for herself ended it. She moved to Italy to study and make art, and in 1967 she married an Italian film editor. She moved back to the Village with her husband in the 1970s and was still living there when interviewed in January 2011, just short of fifty years after she first saw Dylan perform. She had kept silent about her time with Dylan, pursuing her own artistic and family life, into the 2000s, when she finally assented to some interviews and then wrote her memoir. She said she was suffering “a miserable cold” when the interview took place. A month later she died of lung cancer. She was sixty-seven.

  26

  From Folk to Rock

  FOLK MUSIC GOT ITS OWN TV SHOW, ABC’S HOOTENANNY, IN the spring of 1963, around the time of the release of Dylan’s Freewheelin’. Jean Shepherd hosted the pilot but was replaced by the time the show aired. Because ABC continued to blacklist Seeger—who, ironically, had originally popularized the term “hootenanny” with Guthrie and the Almanac crowd in the 1940s—a number of folk music’s stars, including Baez and Ramblin’ Jack, boycotted the show. Folksingers in the Village held a meeting at the Village Gate and organized a telegram protest campaign. Many of the acts who did appear on the show were of the squeaky-clean pop folk sort: the Chad Mitchell Trio, the Limeliters, the Brothers Four, Judy Collins, and the Smothers Brothers. Hootenanny represented folk music’s peak as a popular music fad. When the Beatlemania tsunami hit American shores at the end of 1963 Hootenanny’s ratings immediately plummeted. It was canceled in the summer of 1964 and replaced with a new rock show, Shindig!

  In the fall of 1963 Dylan had recorded his last album of protest songs, presciently titled The Times They Are a-Changin’, released early in 1964. By the time the recording was done he was already starting to disavow his role as protest singer, much to the consternation of Baez, Seeger, and the whole folk scene. He later confessed to never being comfortable in the role, and to feeling especially out of place singing with Baez, Seeger, and other earnest white northerners at civil rights rallies in the Deep South. Brilliant as the songs were, it’s hard not to see his protest period as another canny career move, one calculated to ingratiate him with the most powerful figures in folk music and their large reservoir of fans. As soon as he felt powerful enough on his own, Dylan moved on to his next phase, the visionary poet-singer.

  In December 1963 he met someone in the Village who’d help steer him down that path: Allen Ginsberg. It happened at a party in the apartment of Ted Wilentz, proprietor with his brother Eli of the celebrated Eighth Street Bookshop, in the antique-looking storefront on the corner of MacDougal and West Eighth Streets. A Chinese restaurant called Bamboo Forest had previously occupied the space, then a Womrath’s, a store featuring calendars, greeting cards, and a book rental club. The Wilentzes, brothers from the Bronx and World War II vets, bought the Womrath’s in 1947, changed the name, and threw out the calendars and frippery. In one of their first canny moves they latched on to the still new format of the paperback, which had been introduced in the United States by Simon and Schuster’s Pocket Books in 1939 but was still looked down on by the “finer” bookstores in the city. (When Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, in some ways the Left Coast cousin of the Wilentzes’ shop, opened a few years later it also specialized in paperbacks.) Ted, an erudite bibliophile who was dubbed “the bourgeois bohemian,” filled the shop with an eclectic, with-it selection of books, so that in the 1950s it became well known as a hip, arty literary mecca—and, as Jean Shepherd sarcastically noted, a sometimes snooty one.

  Wilentz also started his own Totem Press/Corinth Books, which published Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror, Frank O’Hara’s Second Avenue with cover art by Larry Rivers, Kerouac’s The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and books by Michael McClure, LeRoi Jones, Diane Wakowski, Rochelle Owens, Gary Snyder, and the undersung Gilbert Sorrentino and Paul Blackburn.

  Over the years, employees included Peter Orlovsky and the Fugs’ Ken Weaver, both as janitors, LeRoi Jones, Andrei Codrescu, and the poet A. B. Spellman. The North Carolina poet Jonathan Williams, founder of the wonderfully iconoclastic small press the Jargon Society, worked there for a while in 1959–60. Alger Hiss sold the store its stationery. Regular customers included a Greenwich Village who’s who for the period. In his memoir Early Plas
tic, Bill Reed, who worked there in the 1960s, recalled being awkwardly shy meeting Neal Cassady in the store, and a late night when actress Shelley Winters called from her Upper West Side apartment asking him to ship her some books on “this Emma Goldman dame” she’d been asked to play in a movie.

  Another time an old and frail Djuna Barnes stopped in, to everyone’s amazement. She’d been living in the Village, not quite a total recluse but certainly an elusive and often hostile figure, since her return to the United States in 1940, when she moved into a tiny one-room apartment at 5 Patchin Place, with E. E. Cummings across the way in number 4. She stayed there for the next forty-two years. For a brief time she read manuscripts for Henry Holt and Company, but her notes were so viciously negative they fired her. By 1950, after a mighty struggle, she had conquered the alcoholism, but she never regained her health and was still so accident prone that Cummings would periodically throw open his window and yell across to her, “Are you still alive, Djuna?” She worked on a biography of the Baroness Elsa that she never finished and a number of poems she endlessly drafted and redrafted. A couple were published in The New Yorker, and others became the illustrated bestiary Creatures in an Alphabet, published in 1982, the year she died. She did manage to complete one last extremely difficult and obscure work, The Antiphon, a verse play that’s like the bastard offspring of a Jacobean tragedy (“Would you propose a beggared silk-worm draw / From out her haggard poke so brave a silk / Could card a paragon?”) and one of O’Neill’s bleak family dramas. Like most of her work, it’s a bitter rebuke of her family, thinly disguised.