The Mayor of MacDougal Street (13 page)

One way and another, the Guild was a way for us to pick up a few bucks, to establish ourselves, and to learn our craft. There were a lot of fans and
amateurs involved, but there was a core of people who really wanted to be professional folksingers, and the Guild was essentially our support group. Obviously, some of us took ourselves a good deal more seriously than others. I remember one committee meeting where Paul Clayton threw a beautiful scene. I do not remember what set him off, but he was on his feet, screaming, “I am a professional, and you have to treat me like a professional!” Paul was such a professional that he never actually joined the Guild. He would come to meetings, but he made a very sharp distinction between himself and all of us wannabes, because he had already recorded a bunch of albums. There were a few people like that, who were around and very influential, but who I do not think actually joined. John Cohen would have been one, and I think Tom Paley.

Frankly, Paul had a point. While most of the Guild performers might not have thought of themselves as amateurs, that is what they really were. A lot of them were in college or living with their folks, and their time on the Village scene was essentially their
Wanderjahr,
after which they went on to their real careers as doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. So the Guild was a professional organization of amateurs, and in retrospect, I am surprised at how much good work we got done. Not that it was all so monumentally great: I have, for historical purposes, listened to a tape of one of my shows from this period, and I can testify that this is something no one should be forced to do. Judy Isquith was pretty good, though, with a big, rich voice; Bob Brill was fine; and Roy could sing Jimmie Rodgers songs very convincingly. Mostly, though, we were trying too hard, and I sometimes think that the best of us was Luke Faust, because he was a much quieter, more subtle musician. The rest of us were huffing and puffing, trying to compensate for our inadequacies with volume and enthusiasm, while Luke was a minimalist. We all got better, though, and along the way some pretty good music got made. The Guild even assisted at the birth of the New Lost City Ramblers, who were the first of the New York neo-ethnics really to be successful, either artistically or commercially.

Those Guild concerts and the shows at the Folklore Center were not earning enough to pay anybody’s food and rent, but it made a big difference for us to be in front of a real audience and to be taken seriously. If you look through the
Caravan
event listings for that period, there are always these concerts at Carnegie or Town Hall with people like Jean Ritchie, Theo
Bikel, Pete Seeger, Cynthia Gooding, Richard Dyer-Bennett, Leon Bibb, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry, or “international” acts like Marais and Miranda; and then there will be the Folklore Center and the Folksingers Guild, with all of the Village crowd—and never the twain did meet. Over the next couple of years, the first Newport Folk Festivals were held, and the only Village musicians invited were the Ramblers. (The Clancy Brothers were at Newport as well, and we saw them around the Village a good deal, but as drinking partners, not because we were working any of the same stages.)

The only place where the two strains crossed was on Oscar Brand’s radio show. Oscar had a regular show every Sunday on WNYC, which went back to the mid-1940s and continues to the present day. He was incredibly important to the whole scene because for many years his show was the only access that folk music had to the general public. I used to listen to him when I was still back in Queens, and that was how I was first introduced to all kinds of people that I subsequently met and became friends with, like Roger Sprung, Erik Darling, Eric Weissberg. Oscar knows 575 trillion songs: if any living human being has a larger repertory than Pete Seeger, it could only be Oscar, and I would like to see them slug it out toe-to-toe on that one, only it would take at least fifteen years of straight singing. To give you an idea: I remember David Greenhill telling me one time that he got into an argument about American history with someone at a party somewhere in California. It was around midnight out there, so 3:00 A.M. in New York, and they were just loaded enough to pick up the phone and call Oscar. The question was, who had been Benjamin Harrison’s vice president, and Oscar, woken out of a sound sleep, burst straight into “Hurrah! Hurrah! The country’s risin’, for Harrison and Frelinghuesen!”

Oscar always managed to tread a middle ground, both politically and in terms of musical approach. His own work was certainly in the cabaret style, without any of the guts and rawness that we demanded, but his repertoire was so huge that we had to respect it. Besides, he was always very supportive of what we were doing, and clearly had a genuine love for the more traditional styles. He also was one of the few people to have been a steadfast member of the non-Communist left—People’s Songs used to parade him as proof that they were not a Communist organization. For a while there, with the HUAC investigations and the blacklisting, everything got polarized
to the point that the Stalinists did not really trust him, but his show remained the one place that would always put them on the air. (Years later, I was talking with him and expressed my disgust that he, or maybe someone else, had put on a show with Burl Ives, who had outraged all of us by naming a string of names in front of HUAC. Oscar just quietly said, “Dave, we on the left do not blacklist.” Put me right in my place.)

Oscar would let us sing on his show occasionally, and by the late 1950s, there were a couple of other people who would let us on the air. Billy Faier hosted a show called
Midnight Special,
from midnight to 2:00 A.M. on Saturday nights, and George Lourie had a show that parties of us used to descend on from time to time. Lourie’s engineer was this kind of strange guy named Dave, a real loser who had taken up karate. One time I was on there, and Dave had some young lady in the control room whom he was trying desperately to impress with his karate, and he gave the console a chop that knocked me right off the air—it was about fifteen minutes before they could get any signal.

All in all, things were looking up. I was still living hand to mouth, but I was at least playing fairly regularly and beginning to have some sort of reputation, and so were quite a few of my friends. The changes were small, taken one by one, but they were straws in the wind.

T
here was, of course, more to our lives than the folk scene. There is no way I can cover it all, but to broaden the palette a little I append the following vignette.

It was the summer of 1958. Big Judy was off to Provincetown for a few weeks, and her one-room apartment would be standing empty. Good Samaritan that I was, I offered to move in, keep an eye on things, and fend off the burglars. (We knew from burglars; some of them were our friends.) The place was on 12th Street between avenues A and B, in what rent-gouging real estate agents would soon rechristen the East Village, but was then still known as the East Side, except to some old-timers who called it “Mackerelville,” from the French
maquereau
, meaning pimp. I happily ensconced myself and settled into a routine of uproarious nights at Stanley’s bar down the block and days spent idling in Tompkins Square Park or watching the locals practice their quaint native crafts: there was a chop shop right out on the street in front of my building, where stolen cars were disassembled to be sold off pushcarts. Pigeon rustling was also pretty popular.

Then, early one fine day, as I was sleeping off Stanley’s rotgut, there came an insistent pounding at the door. “Nobody but a cop could do this to me at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning,” I thought. There was nothing for it, though, so fearfully I lurched to the door. “Who is it?” I croaked.

Two names, unfamiliar, but at least they didn’t sound like cops: “Judy sent us.”

“Oh, in that case . . . ”

I opened the door, and there before my wondering eyes stood two citizens whose outfits would have raised a double take in the most depraved boho saloon in the Village, or even in a frat house. Specimen A was wearing women’s pedal pushers that were so tight I wondered how he had squeezed himself into them, and filled out the ensemble with a middy blouse, short enough to expose his bare midriff, and bare feet. Specimen B wore a terry-cloth bathrobe, period. “This better be good,” I muttered, whilst fumbling through the routine of building a pot of coffee.

Fortified with their first cups, they launched into the following saga. Like Herodotus, the Father of History, I set it down without comment:

They were characters of a type that has been with us since Caesar was a pup: army hustlers. Until a few months back they had been stationed in Tokyo and Seoul, respectively, and had been running some kind of currency scam involving fluctuating exchange rates between the Japanese yen and the Korean won. I did not understand the details, but I believed them when they told me it was “beautiful.” However the grift worked, it had made them a pile, and as soon as they mustered out, they began casting about for some kind of swindle that would parlay their nest egg into a real fortune.

Now, as it happened, at just about this time the powers and principalities of Japan had decided to demonstrate to the world how progressive they were by prohibiting the manufacture and sale of “green ruin”—absinthe. In the interval between enactment and enforcement, it was possible to buy a warehouse full of the stuff at fire-sale prices, which is what our future tycoons had proceeded to do. They loaded this cargo aboard a Filipino rust bucket, booking passage for themselves on the same ship.

The voyage back to the Land of Opportunity (“where the real money is,” as they put it) was a hairy one. Somewhere in mid-Pacific they ran into a storm, and fearing for the merchandise, which was none too securely stowed, they raced down to the hold, where they spent the better part of two days running back and forth, propping up mountainous stacks of crates with their bare hands while the ship pitched and heaved. To make things merrier, they were seasick the whole time, but they lost only a few cases. What prodigies of fraud and effrontery got them and
their cargo of liquid vice past customs in San Francisco I never found out, but somehow they pulled it off and stashed the stuff in a loft somewhere near the Embarcadero.

Personally, I could not imagine a better place than San Fran to unload a cargo of absinthe. The natives there so pride themselves on their worldliness that they would probably drink it even if they hated it. But our heroes decided, inscrutably, that “Cape Cod is where the real money is.” They acquired a used pickup truck, loaded it to the gunwales with samples, and headed east.

The cross-country trip was blessedly uneventful, and once they hit Provincetown, they made the rounds of the tourist bars. Unobtrusively, they buttonholed the saloon keepers, offering them cases and cases of very illegal booze at very reasonable prices. No takers. Universally, the response was “Look—you know what the stuff is, and I know what the stuff is, but nobody else has ever heard of it. Who am I going to sell it to?” Concerned but not yet panicking, they repaired to yet another bar to take council and a few slugs of government-approved solace—which is where Big Judy came in. They got to talking with her, and upon hearing their sad tale, she suggested they try their luck in New York. Helpful soul that she was, she even gave them her address, told them I was staying there, and said I might know someone who would be interested in their wares.

“Right,” they said. “The Big A. Plenty of action. Everybody knows that’s where the real money is.”

After a few more convivial glasses, they hopped into their pickup, which was still piled high with contraband, and took off for 12th Street. They were somewhere on Route 6, outside of Wellfleet, when disaster struck. Two big black cars forced them off the road and four thugs with guns waved them out of the truck. Efficiently they were stripped to the buff and trussed up like Christmas turkeys. The four gunmen then drove off, taking the truck and its cargo with them.

Our heroes felt that this treatment added an unnecessary complement of insult to the injury: “They didn’t have to tie us up and take our clothes. I mean, what were we going to do—go to the cops and say, ‘Some meanies stole our absinthe?’” I explained that these procedures are time-honored, and that hijackers, like any other artists, set high store by tradition. They were not mollified.

It had taken them an hour or so to get un-hog-tied, and then there was the matter of clothes. These were the days before the ubiquitous washer-dryer, so there was always the clothesline option; but apparently it was not wash day on Cape Cod, and the pickings were very slim indeed. The threads in which they stood before me were the very best they could do.

“But how did you get here?” I asked.

“We hitched.”

“You hitched in those outfits?”

“It was easy. We certainly didn’t look like muggers.”

No doubt about that. “But what did you tell the people who picked you up?”

“We said we were Shriners on our way to a convention and had dressed this way on a bet. They loved us.” I had to admit it, these guys were good.

I had no trouble figuring out who Judy had in mind when she said I might know a prospective buyer for their goods. An acquaintance of ours, a low-level associate of George Lefty’s (reputedly the local capo for one of the Five Families), held court at Stanley’s most nights. A word in his ear, and who knew? As a general rule, I tried to avoid getting mixed up in this kind of convoluted skullduggery, but ever since I was a teenager, I had been reading about Lautrec and absinthe, Modigliani and absinthe, Swinburne and absinthe—naturally I was dying to find out about Van Ronk and absinthe. Also, there was the sheer joy of conspiracy for its own sake. What can I say? I have always been a hopeless romantic.

I told them I might be able to set up a meet with some wiseguys I knew. They were ecstatic. “Oh boy! The mob—that’s where the real money is!” One might have thought they had already had one too many meetings with such types, but the boys were so happy that I kept my counsel. It would take a week or two for them to get more “samples” sent from the Coast, and in the meantime I would see what I could do. I lent them some of my clothes, and they went blissfully on their way.