The Mayor of MacDougal Street (25 page)

The Gaslight was not the only place having problems—the Bizarre, the Café Wha?, and most of the other coffeehouses that had entertainment were shut down from time to time—but Mitchell’s insistence on fighting City Hall made him a special target. The cops had been in the habit of coming around and getting a little cash from all the club owners, and Mitchell started keeping books in which he wrote down all of these contributions to
what he called the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, and he turned those books over to the press. That made a lot of noise, and at one point some lieutenant came down and informed John that if he kept stirring up trouble, he was going to be shot while resisting arrest. Meanwhile, he was also trying to avoid the usual payoffs to the mob, so what with one thing and another the word was out that Mitchell was not going to live to see his next birthday. It must have been just around that time that John Brent and Mitchell had a falling-out, and one Saturday night while I was onstage, Brent came charging in with this very realistic-looking cap pistol, got John in his sights, and started shooting. Mitchell thought it was a real gun and hit the floor, then tentatively started feeling his body for bullet holes. Eventually he realized that he was unharmed and got up, by which time Brent was on the floor himself, laughing.

It looked pretty serious for a while there, though, and people were actually laying bets on whether Mitchell would see another year. I was sitting upstairs in the Kettle one night when he came marching in, walked up to the bar, and said, “Ha-ha-ha, fuck you all,” and bought drinks for the house. It was his birthday, and he was celebrating having made it. All in all, he led a kind of charmed life. Not only did he survive, but he survived with a degree of success that is incredible, considering the trouble he made for a lot of powerful people.

To be frank, any authorities who were looking for an excuse to shut down a coffeehouse should have had a field day with the Gaslight. Though the room had apparently once been a speakeasy, it had been a coal cellar for twenty or thirty years before Mitchell came in, and it was hopelessly filthy. When he remodeled it, he had people scrubbing and scrubbing for days, and they tried their damnedest, but there was just no way to get the grit out of that place. Hercules himself could not have cleaned that Augean stable, even if he had diverted the East River.
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The Gaslight was set up so that there were two doors at the sidewalk level, one on each side of the stoop to the tenement above it, where the Caricature was, next to the Kettle of Fish. Either door opened onto a flight of stairs that led down to the club. There was a cash register right at the door,
and the stage was all the way in the back. The room was maybe fifty feet deep and maybe twenty-five to thirty feet wide, and it was very dark—which was a fortunate thing, considering how filthy it was. When you came in off the street, you had to give your eyes a while to adjust before you could find a seat, and when you were onstage with a light shining in your face, you might as well have been completely blind. I was always covered with bruises from bumping into things while trying to navigate that space.

For furniture, Mitchell had gotten hold of a bunch of nineteenth-century oak tables, mostly round ones, which you could buy very cheaply in those days because this was the era of Danish modern. Another thing you could get very cheaply were Tiffany lamps, so there were Tiffany—or at least Tiffanoid—lamps over a lot of the tables. I took one of those lamps out with my head one night, though that was purely Albert Grossman’s fault. That was after he had come to New York from Chicago and become the great folk impresario, with Peter, Paul, and Mary. He was sort of managing me for a while and became convinced that one of the reasons I was not becoming a superstar was that I performed sitting down. I took his counsel to heart, and one night I got onstage with my guitar on a neck strap and did the whole show standing up. At the end, just to give my exit a little more pizzazz, I sort of leapt off the stage, in the process demolishing the Tiffany. I actually knocked myself cold and had to be carried back to the kitchen. It was a valuable lesson. Grossman gave me some good advice over the years, but in this case I concluded that a seated Van Ronk was a safe Van Ronk, and I have stuck with that.

The Gaslight held about 110 people according to the fire codes, though with a shoehorn on a good night you could squeeze in 125 or 130. And there was this weird rule that no applause was permitted, because all these old Italians lived on the upper floors and they would be bothered by the noise and retaliate by hurling stuff down the airshaft. So instead of clapping, if people liked a performance they were supposed to snap their fingers. Of course, along with solving the noise problem, that also had some beatnik cachet.

There was no air conditioning whatsoever, and in the summer it would get to be like a Turkish bath. To add to that impression, the Fire Department had insisted that Mitchell put in a sprinkler system, and it would go off every now and again for no apparent reason. One time it went off on a
Saturday night in the middle of a show, and all the customers were drenched, yelling and fighting their way up the stairs. I was back in the dressing room with Luke Faust, and we got soaked along with everybody else, but instead of leaving, we just went out and sat on the lip of the stage, all by ourselves, racing paper boats down the main aisle.

Those coffeehouses were pretty tenuous as business ventures, because generally a club makes its money on alcohol sales and they did not have liquor licenses. There was not much money to be made selling coffee, even at $2.50 a cup, which was considered an astronomical price in those days. In a bar, people would pay that much for a drink, and in the course of a couple of hours they might have three or four each, but our customers typically just bought one cup and sat with it for an hour or two. That was all that could be expected of them, because one of the distinguishing features of those coffeehouses was that they had the worst coffee I have ever encountered. To give an idea, at the Gaslight they used to wash out the coffee urn with bicarbonate of soda, and one night Kevin, the kitchen man, forgot to rinse the urn, and they made the coffee while the urn was still caked with bicarb, and we did not get a single complaint. It tasted no worse than what we usually served. The only reason those places were able to survive as long as they did was that the rents were very low, and when the property values went up, most of them gradually folded. They sometimes made a little more money by serving food, but no one who had seen those rooms with all the lights turned on would have considered ordering anything to eat in one of them.

Even in the dark the Gaslight was pretty horrible. Along with the prehistoric grime, there were cockroaches, rats—all the usual denizens of a tenement basement. Sam Hood, who managed the club in the mid-1960s, tells a story about one night when a rat climbed up onto the stage in the middle of a show. People started pointing and giggling, and someone got word back to Kevin, who came out of the kitchen with a coal shovel. There was a performer onstage and a hundred-and-some-odd people watching, many of them trying to eat their dinner, but he paid none of that any mind. He just walked across the stage, positioned himself directly over the rat, cut it in half with the shovel, scooped it up, and walked back to the kitchen.

The Gaslight was one of the first coffeehouses to feature entertainment. Mitchell began hosting poetry readings early in 1959, and until the day the
place closed, it was listed in the phone book as the Gaslight Poetry Café. By the time I began paying attention, there was very little serious poetry being read there anymore, but Hugh Romney and John Brent would both do some, along with their comedy and general MC patter. Hugh and John had come in as poetry directors, then segued from that into more general entertainment directors. They also had an apartment upstairs, where we hung out on occasion. They were both “hip” comedians, in the Lord Buckley tradition, though each had his own style. Hugh was quite a natty dresser; he used to wear this wonderful houndstooth suit with matching vest, and he became something of a cult figure. At one point, Marlene Dietrich came to hear him and gave him a copy of Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
. She left her lipstick print on a cup, which Mitchell kept in a glass case until one day Kevin washed it and Mitchell chased him down MacDougal Street with this antique sword that he had hung up on one wall. (It was a lovely, curving scimitar, which eventually ended up on the wall of my apartment.)

Hugh, who ought to know, says that the first folksinger to play in there was someone named Bobby Seidenberg, but Roy Berkeley is the first that I remember, and by the time I was at the Commons the regular musician was Len Chandler. They actually put out a record of Len, Hugh, and John on a one-shot label called Gaslight Records. It was titled
The Beat Generation
and is now an extremely rare collector’s item. Len was a good singer and songwriter, and one of the few people on the set with a formal musical background. He was from Ohio and had played English horn and oboe in symphonic groups before winding up on MacDougal. (
Variety
referred to him as “musician turned folksinger.”) When I met him, he was teaching at St. Barnabas School, and I may even have been the person who first dragged him down to the Gaslight. Len was a hell of a performer, and he remained the big weekend draw for several years. Sam Hood recalls that he was the highest paid of the regular acts, though that was also because he was more than usually argumentative and drove a harder bargain.

Len was one of the few young black musicians on the folk scene, and one time he got jumped right outside the Gaslight by a gang of Italian kids who were trying to “clean up the neighborhood.” There was a lot of that shit going down back then. It had actually started in the early 1950s, and originally the main targets had been homosexuals. There were all these transvestite bars over on 7th Avenue, and at one point an entertainer who was
working in one of those clubs was walking across Washington Square Park after work, and some of the Thompson Street guys jumped him with chains and tire irons. The word went out in the gay community, “Watch it on 3rd Street,” and business slumped off, which did not please the mob guys who were running the clubs. This fellow they called Uncle Dominic from Jersey City came in, and there were a couple of little talks with the local guys about how their kneecaps might come in handy in the future. For a couple of years after that, the streets were pretty cool, but around 1961-62 it got nasty again, this time with the focus on blacks and especially interracial couples. In a way, the real issue was neither homosexuality nor race; it was that this had been the old residents’ turf and they were losing it. The rents were going up and the locals were feeling threatened, so the kids were taking it out on the most obvious outsiders.

The next singer to come into the Gaslight after Len was Tom Paxton, and shortly after that I crossed over from the Commons, and then a whole flood of other people showed up. Some of them would become the legendary names of the folk revival, but as in the 1950s, it was a more varied scene than is often remembered. The regular acts included a flamenco guitarist named Juan Sastre, and after he left, another named Juan Serrano. Then there were the comedians: Hugh and John, to start off, and later Bill Cosby took over for a while. Noel Stookey, who became Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary, started out there as a comedian. He was a good mimic and would do a sort of Ernie Kovacs fake German routine, but his masterpiece was his imitation of an old-fashioned flush toilet, and for a while he was billed as “The Toilet Man.”

One interesting thing is how few of the people who had been around in the 1950s were involved in this scene. Most of the acts who became popular in the 1960s came from elsewhere, to the point that by about 1962 two-thirds of my close associates were people who had blown into town in the last year or so. I did not particularly notice this at the time, but when I go over the names, there is a striking discontinuity between my coworkers in the Folksingers Guild and the people who became the mainstays of the Village scene once it picked up steam. New York was slow to catch the folk wave, but the local attitude has always been “If anything is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing,” so once the boom began, there weren’t three or five rooms to work in, but fifteen or twenty, all in about a five-block radius.
There was an unbelievable amount of work, and as a result musicians began streaming in from all points of the compass: Paxton from Oklahoma, Len Chandler and Phil Ochs from Ohio, Carolyn Hester from Texas, Patrick Sky from Georgia, Mark Spoelstra from California, Judy Roderick from Colorado, Ian and Sylvia from Canada, Dylan from Minnesota, and on and on. But with very few exceptions, my old friends who had been huffing and puffing all of those years to become professionals were nowhere to be seen.

Basically, what I think happened was that the New York singers simply were not as competitive as the newcomers. You do not stick it out in this line of work unless you are fiercely driven, and most of the New Yorkers, while they might have had the talent, did not have that competitive drive. It was simple economic determinism: they were going to college, getting money from their parents, and however much they might have told themselves that their real focus was the music, when push came to shove, they found they had an easier time doing whatever they were learning to do in school. Meanwhile, these hungry kids were coming in from places like East Overshoe, Montana, and they would claw their way into a job; they would just camp out on a club owner’s doorstep until he hired them. It was not really a matter of talent, because if you walked into the Why Not? or some of those other clubs in the mid-1960s, you heard stuff that was as bad as the most dreadful performances the Guild ever sponsored. Even the people who got to be very, very good were not necessarily that way when they arrived. Phil Ochs was not a better performer than Roy Berkeley when he started working in the Village; he just needed it more. I was one of the few New Yorkers to stick it out, and that was because I was stuck with it. There were any number of times when I would have got out of this dumb business if there had been any viable alternative, but there wasn’t, and in the end I am glad things worked out the way they did.