Walter had known Darin for years; they were both New York boys, musical, intelligent, and articulate. Darin had become an overnight success after working his ass off, both personally and professionally, all his life. When he began to make records, he made intriguing choices: “The Rock Island Line,” a song performed by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly to the folk world), which indicated what my father would have called gumption; “Splish Splash,” which got the little girls screaming à la Buddy Holly and the Beatles; Brecht and Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” from The Threepenny Opera, which became number one on the Billboard charts; Charles Trenet’s “La Mer,” which Darin called “Beyond the Sea”; and a beautiful and still haunting version of Tim Hardin’s “If I Were a Carpenter.” Hearing Bobby today, I am moved and amazed at the range of his musical choices. They are brilliant, and totally Bobby Darin. Or totally Walden Robert Cassotto, which is the name he was given at birth.
Now, up there on the stage at the Flamingo, he had a young folkie in tow, the guy who had come out of the Chicago and New York folk scenes, and was accompanying Darin on banjo and twelve-string guitar.
Jim McGuinn was a dreamy guy with a lean and hungry look, almost gaunt. He wore his dark hair long. He was dressed in a sharp suit and had thick lashes and bedroom eyes. He sang occasional harmony with Darin in a sweet, twangy voice, half country and half crooner.
Walter told me over the applause that Jim was a kid from Chicago who had gone to the Old Town School of Folk Music to learn the banjo, and been a fan of Elvis Presley. He had already had success playing backup for the Chad Mitchell Trio and been a sideman with the Limelighters. Darin was supported well by McGuinn on his hits, and I was impressed with Jim’s musicality and his timing.
When McGuinn did a fifteen-minute solo turn, he was very appealing and sexy, singing songs like “John Riley” and a few sea chanties.
After the show, we met both Darin and McGuinn backstage. I liked Jim’s friendly, easy manner on and off stage, and by the time Walter and I left that night I had hired McGuinn to be part of my new album. He said he’d come east as soon as he finished his gig with Darin at the end of July. We would rehearse in Lenox, Massachusetts, where I had found a rental for a couple of weeks.
During those sessions, each of us fighting a demon (Jim with his bad teeth, always going to the dentist, and I always trying not to drink too much), we cemented a friendship that has continued since. Jim wove his shimmering twelve-string guitar into our new arrangements as if he were sewing jewels into the fabric of the music. His playing contributed a great sound to this album, and pushed it into what I now see was a more contemporary feel. “Turn! Turn! Turn!” accompanied by Jim on the twelve-string was to become one of my first songs played on the radio.
In the coming years, McGuinn would form the Byrds (along with David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman, and Michael Clarke). One of the first songs they recorded was “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and it became their first radio hit as well. Jim made a tremendous and important mark on the music industry, leading it more and more toward a synthesis of rock and folk music. He plunged that twelve-string sound into the depth of pop music, where it has lived ever since. In 1967, as a follower of the Indonesian spiritual practice Subud, Jim would change his name to Roger.
Judy Collins 3 included the great Woody Guthrie social commentary on immigration, “Deportees,” and songs about work, such as the rollicking sea chantey “Bullgine Run”; there were songs by Shel Silverstein and Freddy Hellerman of the Weavers, and songs about love. “In the Hills of Shiloh,” another song by Shel Silverstein and Jim Friedman, is a song about a woman wandering in a daze looking for her lover, who was lost in the Battle of Shiloh forty years earlier. “Farewell” typifies the sweet, uncomplicated melodies of early Dylan songs. It is simply one of the prettiest songs I know. I listen to my Travis-picking on this track with a certain amount of wistfulness, knowing my fingers aren’t quite up to it anymore. In contrast, “Masters of War,” also on the album, is Dylan at his complicated and uncompromising best.
These new songs were the product of a growing musical and social consciousness of the times. I was finding a new world, exploring the singer-songwriters of Greenwich Village. I took these songs into my heart, sang them in concert, recorded them, and made them part of my life and the lives of my audiences.
I WAS slated to play the Newport Folk Festival that year at the end of July, as was Joan Baez. Joan gave an electrifying performance that riveted the audience and the world. I can see her dark hair shining in the lights of the stage, the awed audience bending to her every note or phrase. Her voice soared over the water as if calling to ships at sea. Every girl and woman in the audience wanted to be like her, and every man wanted to be with her, yet her heart had been won by the guy she had referred to as a toad.
Dylan was there only for Joan, who shot into Bob’s life that year like a bolt of lightning. Joan’s thing with Bob seemed somehow to be about so much more than just two people in love. Joan needed to sing the songs of Dylan. She needed to introduce him to the world, onstage next to her. The thousands of fans who came to see Joan would be swept away by this paler star who suddenly shone so brilliantly in the spotlight. They were surreal together, entwined in the lights and the searing soul of the sixties. Some said they were that searing soul.
Joan and Bob had first met at Gerde’s “hoot night” on April 10, 1961, the night before Bob’s first “real” gig there. At Newport two years later, all of us were together, talking about what to sing for the encore. Mary Travers, Peter Yarrow, and Noel Stookey, and of course my friend John Cooke (Cookie), who was appearing with the Charles River Valley Boys. By then Cookie was a splendid photographer and took many pictures of Joan, her sister Mimi, and Dylan. All fell under the spell of Joan in an instant, or so it seemed.
In Murray Lerner’s film about Newport, Dylan seems an innocent child of nature in spite of the engineer boots and wild hair and eyes that darted about. Murray later told me Dylan was intrigued by Joan’s fame, how she handled the crowd, the press, and her electric connection with the audience. I think we all were. She would open her mouth and sing and people would practically faint away. Festival, the black-and-white documentary about the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963, 1964, and 1965, captures singular moments in time when we were the young and mostly (except for Joan) unknown ragtag folksingers out by the ocean, happy in our own world, yet hell-bent on changing the rest of the world.
Joan’s appearances with Dylan, the new kid on the block, her hair flying, the two of them singing together with all their fireworks and drama, startled her audience both on and off stage.
When Joan and Dylan went to London the following year with Bob Neuwirth, Al Grossman, D. A. Pennebaker, and the film crew for Don’t Look Back, Dylan had huge shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London. But not once did he invite Baez to share the stage with him. That lapse would be costly for Dylan as well as for their love affair, and it was chronicled in Joan’s beautiful 1975 song “Diamonds and Rust.”
Joan, Bob, the Preservation Hall Singers, Mississippi John Hurt, and Son House were all at Newport that weekend in 1963. So, too, were the Stanley Brothers and the Staple Singers, seasoned musicians with established audiences, the Stanley Brothers in country, the Staples for their gospel-based music. Even in 1963, Ralph Stanley was considered the true royalty of southern folk music; dressed in their best clothes for the show, Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys added a touch of class, in contrast to the kids in wrecked Levi’s wearing peace signs. But no one cared about what others wore; we could finally dress the way we wanted and not feel strange.
And when Ralph Stanley finally sang “O Death” a cappella late on Saturday night as the moon rose from behind the trees and everyone was a bit high from booze and grass, you could feel the power of the music in your bones and you knew you had heard something you would never forget.
Pops Staples, black as Ralph Stanley was white, had greatness in him, too. Under Pops’ guidance, the St
aples family and their name became synonymous with the melding of spirituals and gospel with popular music. Pops and his daughters, Cleotha, Pervis, Yvonne, and Mavis, fired up the evening concerts with rock-and-roll religion as well as Dylan songs. The girls wore silk tops, their hair done to a T with sparkle and shine to match their clothes. This was deep-dish soul served to the kids who were yearning, I thought, for something to replace the religions most of them had abandoned. The night was full of shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah,” rock and soul. Pops and his daughters won an audience new to the beat of the Christian drum, and in future years the Staples would make records that reached Top 40 eight times, including Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth.”
The integrated scenes we yearned to see, blacks and whites united in common purpose, were rare in America outside of New York in 1963, but they were part of the culture of the Newport Festival. This was still the time of segregation; the Voting Rights Act was an unrealized dream. In most parts of the country you could not register in a white hotel if you were black, or be seen comfortably with a black man if you were a white woman. In sixteen states, the law still prohibited intermarriage. The community of folk music seemed to be one of the only places it was common to be in mixed company.
George Wein, who started the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, attracted many artists, among them Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. His wife, Joyce, a beloved, vital, energetic, and attractive African American who was deeply involved in every aspect of the jazz as well as the folk festival that was launched in 1959, had a lot to do with the trust that arose at the festival among black artists. With George, a Jew from New York, Joyce presented the image of an integrated couple making a historic contribution to equality. Newport was certainly a great contributor to the civil rights legislation that was passed in 1964. Fighting racism, it turned out, like fighting for peace, was part of the musical as well as the political struggle.
Among the mansions of Newport, bastion of the old moneyed East Coast, we could be together more comfortably than in many other places we knew. It was one of the great joys of being part of the festival.
I adored Mavis Staples, a beautiful woman whose smile could light up the room and whose voice could sound like a thousand gospel choirs. I followed her around like a puppy dog in my long blue print dress. She was two months younger than me and had already had a radio hit with “Crying in the Chapel” on Stax Records.
“Bob Dylan asked me to marry him,” Mavis told me with a disbelieving smile after he had sung his set on the last night. “He is such a rogue!” Dylan didn’t look like the marrying kind to me, and Mavis knew he was having her on. He had once famously said that romance was like hitchhiking, and I had begun to agree. And anyway, Dylan’s humor always seemed to have a bite at the end of it, a bite usually taken out of whoever he was talking to or about. Everyone got to laugh with Mavis, whether it was at her own foibles, or at the twists of fate, or at pain. Dylan’s brand of funny could make you cringe even then, but Mavis’ jokes always warmed you.
At the end of August 1963, my new album, Judy Collins 3, was finished. Jim Marshall took the photograph for the cover, and then we had to sit back and wait for the release. The traditional songs I had sung on my first two albums were now gently moved aside and I switched into the gear that would become my standard mode for decades: songs by contemporary writers who were collectively sketching out a new musical landscape.
THEN, on November 22, 1963, the stars seemed to fall out of our sky with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I had been scheduled to sing at the Shadows, a popular folk music club in Georgetown, where I had often shared the bill with John Phillips and Scott McKenzie in their Journeymen days, and with Donny Hathaway before he recorded with Roberta Flack.
I heard the news about the shooting as I was boarding a flight to Washington, D.C., on that terrible Friday. My first hope was that Kennedy would live; the second was a prayer that the shooter had not been black (there had been race riots and violence in cities around the country). When I got off the plane, I learned that our president was dead.
I had just been with him, touched his hand, a few months before. His was a thrilling presence, and I could not imagine the force of his personality and charisma gone, like smoke, in an instant.
I would not be singing at the Shadows, and in the days immediately after the assassination, all performances, all shows—all joy, it seemed—were canceled.
There would be only the sound of the black carriage wheels and the trumpet playing “Taps” while JFK’s flag-draped coffin was drawn behind high-stepping horses. Among the multitudes who wept and watched, a handful of figures walked behind the coffin; in their midst was an elegant woman in a black veil. Later, as the casket was carried down the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral, a blond girl of nearly six and a boy of three stood squinting against the sunlight beside the woman in the veil, the boy’s small hand lifted in a salute to the president, his father.
Chapter Sixteen
Blacklist
Out under the winter sky
Stars come trembling to my eye
—BILLY EDD WHEELER, “Winter Sky”
BY the end of 1963, the Bitter End, a wonderful new club, had opened in Greenwich Village. I met the owner, Fred Weintraub, when I was doing one of my many gigs at Gerde’s.
“I am up to my eyeballs in folksingers,” Fred Weintraub said. “But I’d love you to come and play my club!” Of course I said yes, and the Bitter End quickly became one of my regular venues.
I always liked the good-looking Weintraub, a complicated but sweet guy who had a true passion for music and performers. Like some of the other club owners who were featuring folk music in the major cities of the country, he loved what he was doing and knew there was a huge audience for it.
Gerald Nachman referred to Weintraub as a “misfit” and a “maverick.” In San Francisco, where he had lived for a few years, Fred was in the thick of the California scene, and kept Lenny Bruce company on the way to jail when Bruce was arrested for obscenity at the Hungry i. Fred came back to the East Coast in 1961 and bought the Cock and Bull, a run-down joint with paint peeling off the walls that served shrimp cocktails and martinis and sported a rotting neon sign that hung out on Bleecker Street. Fred cleaned up the building, in the process leaving one brick wall exposed in the club, a look that would become synonymous with the Village. Then he began to hire folksingers.
Fred would always take the time to talk to me, to ask how I was doing. He was like that with everyone, and also shared freely of himself. Fred had studied business and earned his fortune, he told me, making baby carriages, but had walked away from that life.
“I threw it all over,” he told me once over drinks after my show. “The wife, the business, everything! To play piano in a whorehouse in Havana and fight Batista.” I told him it all sounded very romantic.
“Romantic, bullshit!” he said. “I nearly got myself killed!” We had been talking about Richard Fariña and Carolyn Hester’s divorce, which had happened quickly in 1962 after only a year of marriage, and whether Richard and his new girlfriend, Mimi Baez, might come to the club to play now that they were writing songs and performing together.
“That’s where I met Richard, in Cuba,” Fred told me, “in Havana on a dark night before the revolution. Richard almost got killed, too!” He would say that Cuba was their Spanish Civil War. “We had to fight somewhere, and Cuba was the only revolution that would have us!”
Fred was truly in his element and soon had the most successful club for folk music other than the Village Gate, Art D’Lugoff’s club, across the street. The Gate showcased folksingers as well as comedy, but it was fundamentally a jazz club. Every folksinger in the business worked at Fred’s club, and some of the comics, too. Arlo Guthrie, Carly Simon, Frank Zappa, Harry Chapin, Linda Ronstadt, Joni Mitchell, and Lily Tomlin all played at the brick-walled club with a hundred seats and a tiny stage.
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sp; “I love to see those babies packed in as tight as ticks!” Fred would say. Fred soon started a “hootenanny” every Tuesday, an open-mic night so that new singers and others who just wanted to try out material could come and be heard. One night I watched Bill Cosby and Alan Arkin, both at the beginning of their careers, pile all the chairs in the little room onto the stage and then take them all off again, getting the few of us who were in the room (it was about one in the morning) first to stand up and then become hysterical as the chairs proceeded to make their voyages around the room with these two very funny guys wisecracking as they slung chairs to each other. It looked to me like something out of the Second City in Chicago—impromptu and hilarious.
There was usually a sort of female cabal sitting on the church pews in the back of the club—Carly Simon, Lucy Simon, Bette Midler, and Mama Cass—dishing the talent, cadging drinks, and generally putting out the philosophy of the age: end the war, make love.
In 1963, Fred sold ABC on a concept for a new television show that he would produce. Hootenanny was a natural evolution of Weintraub’s Tuesday night showcase of singers and became an instant success—a televised version of what Freddy had been doing since the Bitter End’s opening months.
One of Fred’s goals in producing Hootenanny was to get Pete Seeger on network television. Pete was in a down period at that moment, feeling neglected by Columbia Records. He was upset, and Harold, who had managed him for years, would say Pete believed he had been used by Columbia to get some of the newer folk artists on the label—Dylan, for one.
“We’ll get you on Hootenanny!” Fred told Pete when he made the deal with ABC. He was excited and told many of his friends, including me, that the show was a go and that we would all, including Seeger, be on it. Before long, however, a rumor began to circulate around the Village that Pete’s appearance had been scratched. People in the know believed that there had been pressure from advertisers and local stations outside of New York to remove him from the hootenanny schedule because of his politics. Nat Hentoff wrote about the situation in an article titled “That Ole McCarthy Hoot” suggesting that all of us in the folk singing community follow the lead of a group of people—including the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan—and join in a reverse boycott of the program in support of Seeger. Harold, who had already begun talks with the producers about Pete’s appearance, was outraged.
Judy Collins Page 14
