The Mayor of MacDougal Street (11 page)

There I stood, half loaded and half hungover, coming down off speed in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with my thumb stuck out like a gooney bird’s beak. I stuck my other hand in my pocket—it was chilly—and, sure enough, my wallet was gone. It was a perfect moment.

Now this is the hook: it wasn’t the thirty or so bucks—those would have gone anyway in another few days—but my seaman’s papers were in that wallet. The Coast Guard issues those papers and waxes very suspicious when someone reports them missing. It seems they fetch a good price on the black market, and sailors are not always immune to temptation. I would have to testify before some kind of board, and there would have to be an investigation before I could get those papers replaced. It might take six months or a year before I could get a new set and ship out again, or so I had been told when I first got them. Furthermore, with my politics and all my Commie friends, it had been a small miracle that I was given them at all. Hearings and investigations were simply asking for trouble: the powers that be would probably assume I had handed my papers over to some filthy Red who was on the lam from the forces of freedom and righteousness. A big mess all around. I was on the beach permanently.

So that’s how I became a folksinger. Like most great career choices, it was a decision by default.

F
or better or worse, I was going to have to make a living in folk music. The problem was, how? Most of the other musicians on the scene had jobs or were students getting money from their parents. I had never had any regular work aside from my stint in the merchant marine, my family had no money, and I hadn’t even finished high school. I had nothing to live on except what I could beg, borrow, steal, or—less frequently—earn as a singer. There were no clubs that would hire me or anyone like me, and no one insane enough to sponsor me for a concert.

For a while, I took to busking, playing for tips in bars. That was something that most of the people I knew refused to get into, but I ran into a guy in Washington Square Park who had a voice that was even louder than mine, a tall black man from Maryland named Andrew. He sounded a lot like Vaughn Monroe, and his specialty was things like “Mule Train” and “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” He and I would hit the bars up on 8th Avenue in the 40s, and on a good night we might pick up as much as seventy-five or a hundred bucks each, which was incredible for that time. Unfortunately, after a month or two the city started one of its periodic cleanups, and since the bars had no license for live entertainment, the cops started to descend on them. The bartenders would see us coming in, and they would take us aside and say, “If you even take that guitar out of the case, we’re
gonna have to throw you out.” We tried to sing in the streets, but that was no better—the cops moved us along immediately. So that was that. Andrew hopped a freight and I never saw him again.

There were, however, some rays of light on the horizon. As I was walking down MacDougal during those first days back from the sea, I noticed a tiny storefront with a new sign saying “Folklore Center.” I thought, “What the hell?” and went right in, and that was when I met Izzy Young, who would be a key figure in the Village scene for the next decade or so. I guess Izzy was in his mid-twenties at that point, and the first thing I remember noticing about him was his ears, which stuck out like mug handles. He had rented this place on the block between Bleecker and 3rd, and it was exactly what the name said: the folklore center. It was a place where you could buy folk music records, books, and accessories. People would leave guitars or banjos to be sold on consignment, and he had strings, picks, capos, odds and ends. But more than anything else, what it almost immediately became was a sort of clubhouse for the folk scene. Izzy was the switchboard: if anything was happening to anyone on the scene, Izzy would find out about it and broadcast it to the world—whether you wanted him to or not. If you came into New York and needed to know how to get in touch with somebody or to leave a message, you would go into the Folklore Center and ask Izzy, and he would probably know all about it, or failing that, he would let you leave a note on his bulletin board. If you had no fixed address, you would have your mail sent care of the Folklore Center. So everybody on the scene was coming by on a regular basis to get mail or check the notes on the bulletin board, and that made it even more of a central meeting place.

There had been places where musicians met before that, like 190 Spring Street, but different crowds went to different places. When Izzy opened that little hole, there was suddenly a place where everyone went, and it became a catalyst for all sorts of things. There were picking sessions, and Izzy even held a few concerts there to help out singers who needed a gig and couldn’t find one elsewhere. I did two or three of those, and a review of one in
Caravan
says the crowd was so big that “the back room was well-filled with standees who, from there, could only listen”—which, if memory serves, would not have required a very big crowd. I first ran into Moe Asch of Folkways Records at the Center. In fact, by the next year, I was living on
MacDougal Street and I must have met hundreds of people there. It became so much like a club that there was a sort of running joke that Izzy never actually sold anything. A few years later, Dylan wrote “Talking Folklore Center Blues,” and the tag line to one of the verses was “You don’t have to buy anything. Do what everybody else does. Walk in, walk around, walk out.”

Izzy was not a musician himself; the closest thing he did to performing was English harness dancing. Every once in a while, he would put on his harness and bells and take off down MacDougal Street. It was a wonderful sight, and he was actually pretty good at it. He was extraordinarily energetic, and constantly organizing—concerts, get-togethers, projects of one sort and another—and he was a real asset not only to the New York scene but to the whole folk music world. By the mid- to late 1960s, there were folklore centers all over America, and every single one was inspired by Izzy Young. At the same time, he was constantly scuffling to make ends meet. I think it was because, although he had incredible enthusiasm and a lot of good ideas, he was too diffuse. He was the kind of person who was great for a one-shot deal but had trouble sustaining anything. So no matter how popular the Center got, it was always in trouble financially. Still, he kept it going for years and even made a living out of it. Not a great living, but those were easier times—otherwise, none of us would have made it through. I knew people who were paying $25 or $30 a month for a two-person apartment. Not a good apartment, but it could be done.

Another ray on the horizon was the beginning of
Caravan
magazine. In a way, it was not really a magazine—it was a mimeographed fanzine, run off on 8½-by-11-inch paper stapled together at the edges. That was the brainchild of Lee Shaw, formerly and currently Lee Hoffman but then married to Larry Shaw. Lee and Larry had been editing a sci-fi ’zine, and Lee had dedicated a couple of issues to her favorite folksingers. At that point, there was a great deal of overlap between folk fans, the fringe left, and the sci-fi crowd—all three offered new, interesting ways of looking at the world and a chance to mingle with like-minded souls who were equally frustrated with the monochrome oppressiveness of Eisenhower America. Of course, not all of us became fans; Roy Berkeley says that he avoided ever picking up a sci-fi book, because he was sure that he would become so
addicted that he would never leave his room. Nevertheless, sci-fi provided us with another kind of common language, and the attraction worked both ways: for a while, Harlan Ellison was one of
Caravan
’s record reviewers.

The first issue of
Caravan
appeared in August of 1957 and opened with a diatribe by one “Blind Rafferty” titled, “The Elektra Catalog—A Sarcophagus.” This was an all-out attack on the old-guard folk scene as represented by the label that was home to Bikel, Brand, White, Gooding, and so forth, and it read as follows:

The article continued for a couple more paragraphs, ladling out similar encomiums to the Cooper album and to Josh White, “who should know better.” Then it concluded:

Rafferty was me. The pseudonym was both a holdover of my occasional writing for radical newsletters—we all assumed colorful noms de guerre to avoid unnecessary hassles from the official snoops—and a sensible precaution for an ambitious young folksinger attacking what was, from our perspective, one of the giants of the industry. At last, the young Turks had a platform from which we could lob fiery invective at the battlements of the folk establishment, and a number of us proceeded to vent several years of pent-up frustration. Looking back, I am amused at the undergraduate snottiness of our prose, but I still agree with many of our basic arguments: we threw some babies out with the bathwater, but bathwater—comfortably warm and bubbly—was exactly what a lot of our targets were purveying.

Caravan
became our forum, with page upon page of theoretical argument about the correct stance of the modern urban folk musician or listener. Barry Kornfeld was a regular and frequently vituperative columnist, writing under the pen name “Kafka” and calling his column “From the Dead.” Roger Lass, a quite good musician and one of the sharpest tongues
in the east, wrote some very controversial pieces, and Roger Abrahams violently disagreed with him, and all the cats jumped in on one side or the other. Lionel Coots, a possibly pseudonymous wag from Richmond Hill, wrote in to inquire whether Rafferty’s appellation “Blind” was based not on a physical disability but on his critical acumen. Altogether, it was a tremendous foofaraw, and looked at one way, a lot of it was pretty silly. But we were defining ourselves. The identity of the folk revival was being established at that time, and
Caravan
was a critical nexus.

It also served as a sort of club newsletter, with gossip, in-jokes, and commentary about whatever was happening on the Village scene—the March 1958 issue, for example, notes that “Dave Van Ronk, like so many other Village characters, has affected a beard.” There were concert announcements and advertisements for guitar and banjo lessons, which Lee printed free of charge. (The magazine’s cover boasted that it was a “nonprofit, great-cost amateur publication,” and the first half-dozen issues were free. After that, the circulation had grown too large to be paid for out of Lee’s pocket, and she was forced to start charging ten cents per.) Lee was an impressive figure and had a great influence on the scene. She could walk up to Roger Abrahams or Aaron Rennert or me, or even Paul Clayton, that incredibly pigheaded man, and say something and we would listen. She was the pope, the final authority. Izzy thought he was the pope, but in fact his opinions were often not taken very seriously, while Lee’s were. Izzy would say whatever came into his head, but Lee thought everything through very carefully before she said it, and we listened to her in a way we did not listen to anyone else, because what she said made sense. She was a writer, not a musician, so she was capable of a kind of detachment that we were not. (Lee also did me another service: for several months after I got back from my hitch in the merchant marine, she and Larry let me sleep on their couch.)