The Mayor of MacDougal Street (14 page)

The sit-down was easily arranged: “No harm in talking,” the guy said. “Bring them around.” A couple of days later, I brought them around to Stanley’s, made the necessary introductions, and having performed my good offices as honest broker, discreetly took my leave. For services rendered, I received five bottles of the stuff.

So, what was it like? It is simple to describe: If you subtract the wormwood from absinthe, you get Pernod. It is licorice flavored, sweet, the wormwood gives it a pleasantly bitter undertaste—a bit like quinine—and it is green in color, turning opalescent on contact with water or ice. I drank a couple of glasses, and found that it gave a strangely lucid high. I liked it a lot, though it delivered a hellish hangover. So, that was what all the fuss was about.

The next day my two smugglers dropped by Judy’s place, and over glasses of guess what, I got the discouraging word: my guy had bought a few cases for himself and his friends, but basically his position was, “Look—you know what it is and I know what it is, but nobody else ever heard of the stuff. Who are we going to sell it to?”

“Gee,” I said, “the Mafia sure is hard on honest crooks.”

By way of consolation, I took five more bottles off their hands. Hell, they were selling it cheaper than Irish whiskey. For the next few weeks, the nabe was awash in absinthe. Everybody I knew must have picked up a few jugs. Then it was gone. My dynamic duo had shifted their operation to the Village, I heard. I suppose that was where the real money was.

A couple of months later I shifted my own operation back to the Village. I got hold of a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, and took to spending my evenings in the Kettle of Fish
,
which was right downstairs, and my afternoons down the block at the Figaro.

One fall afternoon I was sitting over coffee at the Figaro when a glassy-eyed derelict who looked vaguely familiar hove into view. It was Specimen A, looking like an advance man for the bubonic plague. He was going from table to table, whispering a few urgent words to whoever was seated there, receiving an emphatic negative, and moving on. Al, the day manager, watched this action briefly and balefully before he swooped. He grabbed the guy by the collar and gave him the bum’s rush right out the door, but not before I overheard the whispered pitch to the tourist at the next table: “Would you like to buy a bottle of absinthe for a dollar?” When we had finished admiring Al’s technique, the rubberneck turned to me and said, “What’s absinthe?”

It must have been about ten years down the line that I happened to be doing a gig in Provincetown, and a publican in Wellfleet invited Paul
Geremia (the world’s best blues guitarist and singer) and me to a high-class bash at his Victorian Gothic “cottage.” Paul and I were sitting there jamming, when our host approached us with two glasses of a familiar-looking opalescent fluid. I thought “Wellfleet! Absinthe! Ah-hah!” It was, as Yogi Berra would say, “Déjà vu all over again.”

“I’ll bet you guys’ll never guess what this is,” our host said, as he handed me a glass.

I took a sip, ostentatiously rolled it around my tongue and replied, “It tastes very much like Japanese absinthe.”

“Jesus, how could you tell?”

I arched my eyebrows in my very best William F. Buckley imitation. “To the truly sophisticated palate,” I intoned, “there are no mysteries.”

T
he last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village. It was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it. Admittedly, a great deal of my concertizing was still at benefits, a clear case of the famished aiding the starving. Roy Berkeley and I were working together fairly often, and we would play for the Libertarian League, for the Shachtmanite magazine
Handbill
, for the Committee to Save the World on Friday, the Committee to Blow Up the World on Saturday, and the Locofoco Party of Baluchistan on the first Monday of each month. I enjoyed it and felt that in an atheistic sort of way I was doing the Lord’s work. And, though I have typically found that working for Reds is the pits—they all learned about labor relations from book two of
Das Kapital,
“Chain them to the factory bench!”—they were not entirely heartless and would usually slip us a few bucks. And a few bucks was really all I needed. Rent was next to nothing. I could always get a cheeseburger on the cuff down at the Caricature, and I had a humongous tab over at the Figaro as well. For extras, every now and again somebody I knew would come into some money, and we all borrowed a lot from each other and sometimes even paid it back.

Still, I had seen a vision of better things and was sure that places like the Gate of Horn would be just my meat if only they could be persuaded to put me onstage and do a little promotion. As I saw it, the problem was that I still did not have a record. I had worked out an equation that might be thought of as “
in vinyl veritas
”: no record equals no work; therefore a record would equal jobs, fame, fortune, wine, women, and song. Simplistic as this may seem, it is not just a dumb mantra from the theologically incorrect 1950s. Most unrecorded musicians continue to subscribe to something of the sort.

Throughout the previous year or so, I had been gradually edging closer to my objective. The first nibble was an offer to record two songs for an anthology called
Our Singing Heritage
, to be issued by—of all companies—Elektra Records. As I remember, this offer came by way of Paul Clayton, who was pulling together a varied crew to present a reasonably well rounded picture of traditional American song. My contributions were an old Christmas carol, “Mary Had a Baby,” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” I chose “Nobody Knows You” because, of all the songs I was doing in those days, that was my mother’s favorite—which always puzzled me, because Bessie Smith was by no means considered a respectable singer and should hardly have appealed to Grace Van Ronk, the backbone of the Rosary Society. It is only with the experience of age that I have come to have a glimmer of a hypothesis: Any number of friends of mine from the roaring sixties—alcoholics, druggies, sex maniacs, complete social lepers—have gotten married, built careers, moved to the suburbs. They keep up some of their old friendships, but there you are, sitting in the living room with them, and you hear them remonstrating with their children, telling them to stick to the straight and narrow, and to “just say no” to pretty much everything that could give a young person pleasure. I sit there, smothering my guffaws, and I have to think: we’ll never know about our parents, either, will we?

As for Paul Clayton, he was one of my closest friends and also something of a mentor at times. There can have been few singers as unlike one another as Paul and myself, and yet he had a considerable influence on me, as he had some years later on Bob Dylan. He was a brilliant man and had thought through a lot of musical questions very carefully. His voice was a smooth, midrange baritone, almost a Burl Ives sound, which was not usually
to my taste, and while he could play quite effective accompaniments on guitar or dulcimer, he was not an expert instrumentalist. His great strength as a musician was that he phrased marvelously, quite unlike anyone else. He had a very personal way of reading a lyric, and gave you the feeling that he was talking to you directly, so you listened with an attention you would not have paid to another singer. In that sense, he had the same sort of skill that Frank Sinatra had, though in a totally different style.

Paul was also a folklorist and collector of songs in the field, and made some quite important finds. He was the first person since the 1920s to record Pink Anderson, one of the great old medicine show guitarists and singers, and he also found a blues guitarist named Etta Baker and innumerable ballad singers. He had a unique repertoire of songs that he had come across on his collecting trips in the Appalachians, and I learned several of them, including the version I do of “Duncan and Brady.” God knows where he collected that, but I never heard another version like it, with that great refrain “He’s been on the job too long.” It is one of a kind, and I have to wonder whether it was at least partly his own work. Paul was a serious folklorist, but when it came to his performance repertoire, he had no qualms about combining verses from different songs and changing words around to suit his taste. He had a beautiful thing called “I’m Going to Georgia,” which I am quite sure he had done more with than just collect. And he had found a song called “Who’ll Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone,” which he changed to “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons”—not a masterpiece, but it got to be a great point of contention later on when Dylan copped the melody and a couple of lines for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

Paul was one of the most delightful human beings I have ever met, a marvelous guy to go out and have a few drinks with and argue about whatever came to mind. At that age we were prepared to debate almost anything. For example, after the Kingston Trio hit, a bunch of folksong collectors and singers filed a class action suit against them for all the supposedly “public domain” material that they had slapped their names onto. A few of these songs had actually been written by professional folksingers like Cynthia Gooding, and a lot of the others had clearly been collected in specific versions from particular sources—Frank Warner had acquired “Tom Dooley” from a banjo player named Frank Profitt, and even if Profitt had
not written the song, it was certainly his version that the Trio had made into a number-one hit. So there was this huge suit, and one of the trio made some comment that got widely quoted to the effect that “Jean Ritchie should wear looser shoes and eat more roughage.” It was adding insult to injury, and we were all righteously incensed. Jean and Frank Warner were not exactly our people, but when you put them up against the Kingston Trio, we were in full solidarity with them. As someone who had collected a lot of material in the field, Paul was hotly engaged in this debate, but he was also pretty funny about it. He had put his own name on a good many of his arrangements of older songs, and began saying that his motto was “If you can’t write, rewrite. If you can’t rewrite, copyright.”

Like all of us, Paul had strong political opinions, and he had spent some time in Cuba, so when Castro and company were in the Sierra Maestra, he decided that he wanted to get up a bunch of volunteers, call it the Patrick Henry Brigade, and head over there like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. That was when I took to calling him “Pablo.” I remember one night sitting around at the Village Gate and telling him, “Well, I can go along with you up to a certain point, but what we really need to do is to take the Patrick Henry Brigade up to the Sierra Catskills and liberate Grossingers, and turn it into a folk music room.”

Paul was quite a character in other ways as well. He had a collection of walking sticks—it was one of his passions—and he wore some pretty extraordinary getups. I remember once a friend of ours had borrowed a book from him—a rare volume titled
The Short History of Sex Worship—
and had failed to return it. After dunning this fellow off and on for a few weeks, Clayton lost his patience and developed a scheme to deal with the situation. (I don’t know if this actually came to fruition, but I certainly like to think it did.) As it happened, the borrower was one of the few of us who was respectably employed; he had some sort of job where he worked at a desk in a sea of desks in this huge office. So one day Clayton put on shorts, sandals, a pith helmet, two or three overcoats one over the other—this was in the middle of summer, mind you—and took one of his most ornate Malacca walking sticks. Then he went charging down to this office, ran up to the man’s desk, and started pounding on it with his cane, screaming, “Where’s my
Short History of Sex Worship
?!”

Occasionally I would see Paul with Phil Perlman, who weighed a good 300 pounds and was the first man with a ponytail I ever saw outside of a pirate movie, and it was quite something to watch the two of them walking down the street, wearing these bizarre outfits, to the awe and amazement of absolutely everybody. Back then, most of us dressed pretty conservatively. Not only was it the 1950s, but we were paranoid about the beatnik connection—I remember myself onstage saying, “Please excuse the sunglasses.”

Paul used to bill himself as “the world’s most recorded young folksinger”—the “young” had to be in there because of Pete Seeger—and he had already made well over a dozen albums. A lot of them were thematic collections:
Songs of Love and Marriage
;
Songs of Hate and Divorce
;
“Hunt the Cutty Auk” and Other Auk-Hunting Ballads from the Inner Hebrides
. He sometimes had to stretch a point to find material that would fit these programmatic slots, and a certain amount of garbage was laid down, but some really nice stuff was done as well, and he was recording like a madman. For a while there, every time he needed a few bucks, he would go to the library and thumb through some obscure folklore collection, then go up to Moe Asch at Folkways Records and say, “You know, Moe, I was just looking through your catalog, and I noticed that you don’t have a single album of Maine lumberjack ballads.”

Moe would say, “Well, I guess that’s a pretty serious omission. Do you know anyone who can sing enough of those to make a record?”

And Paul would say, “Well, as it happens . . . ”

Paul was originally from New Bedford, Massachusetts, the old whaling port, and he had a huge repertoire of sailing songs he had learned from his grandfather. He had recorded some of these on his own, but in 1958 he or Moe—or maybe it was Kenny Goldstein, who had produced a lot of his records—decided that he should do an album with a group, singing mostly unaccompanied, the way the songs would actually have been done on the ships. He rounded up a gang of the usual suspects: me, Bob Brill, Roger Abrahams, and Bob Yellin, a good singer and bluegrass banjo player who could also do some nice, simple picking of the sort that a sailor might have done while relaxing between watches.