The Mayor of MacDougal Street (27 page)

I think that was a big part of what got him into writing songs. He wrote “Song for Woody” specifically to sing in the hospital. He was writing for Woody, to amuse him, to entertain him. Of course it was also a personal thing, he wanted Woody’s approval, but it was more than that. We all admired Woody and considered him a legend, but none of us was trucking out to see him and play for him. In that regard, Dylan was as stand-up a cat as I have ever known, and it was a very decent and impressive beginning for anybody’s career.

Looking back, what a lot of people don’t understand is that it was tough for Bobby at first. He was a new kid in town, and he had an especially abrasive voice, and no one had any way of knowing that he would eventually become BOB DYLAN—he was just a kid with an abrasive voice. Sam Hood, who took over the Gaslight around that time, insists that he would use Bobby only on crowded nights when he wanted to clear the house. So Bobby’s experience and his memories of that time would be quite different from mine, because I was at least making a living. Bobby was doing guest sets wherever he could and backing people up on harmonica and suchlike, but there was no real work for him. He was cadging meals and sleeping on couches, pretty frequently mine.

At that point Terri and I were still living over on 15th Street, but very shortly thereafter we moved down to Waverly Place. That was an interesting building, because over the next few years it became kind of a folksingers’ commune. The agent who ran the place was a music fan and he got an apartment for Barry Kornfeld, then Barry got an apartment for me on the third floor, and then when I moved to a larger place on the second floor, Patrick Sky was installed in my old apartment. Alix Dobkin was living on the fourth floor, and Billy Faier and John Winn moved in as well at some point. John was a classical tenor, a marvelously good musician who did a lot of John Dowland, and he, Ed McCurdy, Bob Dylan, and I used to do madrigals together, which had to be heard to be believed. There was an endless succession of parties, and a constant stream of people wandering in and out. We eventually had to lay down rules so that we could screw without having to worry about people barging in, which shows how much barging in was going on.

The crowd was a mix of old friends and newcomers, musicians, writers, and acquaintances of all varieties and inclinations: Clayton came around a lot, as did Paul Simon. There were different cliques that developed: Patrick had sort of a swing role, because he was close to the crowd around Eric Anderson, Dave Cohen, and Phil Ochs and also with the crowd of Paxton, Noel Stookey, and me. Then there was the crowd around Fred Neil, which included Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, and Peter Stampfel, who became the guiding light of the Holy Modal Rounders and later one of the Fugs. We didn’t socialize as much with them, except for Peter, who has always been one of my favorite people and is undoubtedly some kind of genius—though so far, no one has ever figured out
what
kind.

If I went through the basement of Waverly Place and checked out the lower strata, I would probably still find memorabilia of that period, including a whole bunch of early drafts of songs by various people, not to mention all the coloring books. We used to get stoned out of our minds and do coloring books, and Dylan never colored anything but what he would sign it. So somewhere I probably have a shitload of awesomely bad coloring jobs signed by Dylan.

At least in the early years, I think Terri and I were the only legally married couple in that particular crowd, and in our way we were a good deal more settled than the other people we knew. That was something that set
me apart from the other performers on the scene, though I did not think about it that way at the time: I was married and had sort of made a nest, and I was trying to establish a secure place for myself. Most of the people I knew were trying to get away from a secure place, which was what had brought them to the Village. That was why everybody used to come over and hang out at my house: I was the only one who had a house. I had a bed, a couch, a coffee table. Everybody else was sleeping on floors and proclaiming their holy poverty, and I hated poverty.

In any case, within a very short time after hitting the city, Bobby became a regular visitor and part of the gang. And the more I heard him perform, the more impressed I was with what he was doing. Later, when he became more popular, it was completely different. By 1964 his shows were not even generically similar to what he had been doing at the beginning. Back then, he always seemed to be winging it, free-associating, and he was one of the funniest people I have ever seen onstage—although offstage no one ever thought of him as a great wit. He had a stage persona that I can only compare to Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Fellow.” He was a very kinetic performer, he never stood still, and he had all these nervous mannerisms and gestures. He was obviously quaking in his boots a lot of the time, but he made that part of the show. There would be a one-liner, a mutter, a mumble, another one-liner, a slam at the guitar. Above all, his sense of timing was uncanny: he would get all of these pseudoclumsy bits of business going, fiddling with his harmonica rack and things like that, and he could put an audience in stitches without saying a word. I saw him one time onstage, with just his guitar and harmonica, and he was playing a harmonica chorus that consisted of one note. He kept strumming the guitar, and every now and again he would blow this one note, and after a few measures you were completely caught up in trying to figure out where the next note was coming. And you were always wrong. By the end of two choruses, he had all of us doubled over laughing, with one note on the harmonica.

He had the same kind of unique timing when he sang, though in that context you would call it phrasing. It was quite different from what anyone else was doing, even before he started to write much of his own material. He was singing Woody Guthrie songs and things like “Pretty Polly,” but no one else did those songs that way. And his repertoire changed all the time; he’d find something he loved and sing it to death and drop it and go on to
something else. Basically, he was in search of his own musical style, and it was developing very rapidly. So there was a freshness about him that was very exciting, very effective, and he acquired some very devoted fans among the other musicians before he had written his first song, or at least before we were aware that he was writing.

Another thing that worked very much to Bobby’s advantage was his populism, the romantic hobo thing. He had that Guthriesque persona, both on and off stage, and we all bought it. Not that we necessarily believed he was really a Sioux Indian from New Mexico or whatever cockamamy variation he was peddling that day, but we believed the gist of his story, and even what we didn’t believe was often entertaining. I mean, one night he spent something like an hour showing a bunch of us how to talk in Indian sign language, which I’m pretty sure he was making up as he went along, but he did it marvelously. And when we found out that a lot of his stories were bullshit, that didn’t really lower his stock all that much. It was an old showbiz tradition—everybody changed their names and invented stories about themselves. So we kidded him some, but nobody held it against him. I don’t think Bobby ever understood that. He never really got the fact that nobody cared who you had been before you hit town. We were all inventing characters for ourselves. Look at Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who had grown up as a Jewish doctor’s son in Brooklyn and then gone out west and become a cowboy and Woody’s hoboing buddy.

Jack was obviously a very important model for Bobby—both in terms of his music and because he had really lived the life and done all the things Bobby wanted to do—and at first Bobby had no idea that he was anything but a good-coin goyish cowboy. The revelation that Jack was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro. We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people, and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Park-way and was named Elliott Adnopoz. Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again. Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word “Adnopoz,” and back he went under the table. A lot of us had suspected that Bobby was Jewish, and after that we had no doubts.

That kind of thing was happening all the time, and we tended to just take it in stride. I remember when Jack first blew back into town, which was right around the time Bobby arrived. That was a big deal, so of course I was at Gerde’s for his New York debut. Now, Jack’s mother and father were very prominent people in Brooklyn; I understand that his father was chief of surgery in a hospital, and the family had been in medicine for several generations. So the fact that Jack had turned into a bum was a great source of grief. However, he had been away for a long time, and now he was home, and they were making some attempt at a reconciliation, so Dr. and Mrs. Adnopoz came down to see the kid. I was sitting at a front table with them and the cowboy artist Harry Jackson, and Jack was onstage, and he was having some trouble tuning his guitar. The audience was utterly hushed—a very rare occurrence in that room—and Mrs. Adnopoz was staring at Jack raptly, and then she lets out with a stage whisper: “Look at those fingers . . . Such a surgeon he could have been!”

All in all, personal reinvention was the order of the day, and I still do not know—I do not think anybody really knows—how much of what Bobby was telling us was bullshit and how much actually had some basis in fact. Once everyone found out that he was a nice middle-class Jewish boy named Zimmerman, it was easy to assume that he had made up all the other stories as well—but then there was the time when Big Joe Williams came to town. Big Joe was one of the legendary Mississippi blues men, and Bobby had been telling stories for months about how the first time he ran away from home, he hopped a boxcar and who did he meet but Big Joe Williams, who began to teach him old blues. Bobby said that he was thirteen or something like that, and that they went all the way down to Mexico together. We listened to this more or less politely, but nobody believed him, and when we heard that Big Joe was coming to New York, a bunch of us arranged to go down with Bobby and see Joe—that was a meeting that nobody wanted to miss. We walked into the club, and Joe spotted us, and he came right over and said, “Hey, Bobby! I haven’t seen you since that boxcar down to Mexico!” I will always wonder whether Bobby somehow got to Joe and set the whole thing up, but it certainly blew us away.

For a while there, Terri and I were probably Bobby’s biggest boosters, at least when it came to actually getting him jobs. Terri was taking care of my
business, such as it was, and also handling some booking and paperwork for people like Paxton, Chandler, Mark Spoelstra, and a couple of others, and she became Bobby’s manager, as well—not that there was any competition for that job. No other manager would have touched him with a ten-foot pole. In the professional folk music world, most people were still into Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio, and Bobby was too weird, too scruffy, and he sang funny. But there was a sort of Village cabal that had a certain amount of influence within our small world, and among other things, we pushed Mike Porco to book Bobby. Terri had been helping Mike by doing this, that, and the other thing, but she really had to call in every favor to get Bobby that gig. In the end, Mike put him on opening for John Lee Hooker, and it went OK. Then a few months later he opened for the Greenbriar Boys, and Bob Shelton wrote him up in the
Times
, and that was really what got Bobby started.

After that, Bobby’s career kind of took off, but it was by no means an overnight thing. In November of 1961, a couple of months after the
Times
piece, Izzy Young booked him into Carnegie Recital Hall for his first solo concert, and only 53 people showed up. Still, there was a definite groundswell of interest, and he soon had a small but fanatical claque of fans who would show up anywhere he was playing; if he dropped by to do a guest set at the Gaslight or one of the other clubs, they would appear by the second song. Then John Hammond signed him to Columbia Records, and that really got people’s attention—though many of them thought Columbia was making the biggest mistake in history and I have been told that within the company Dylan was referred to as “Hammond’s Folly.” Still, that made a big difference, and within a very short time he was doing concerts rather than working on MacDougal. In fact, he boasted to me once that he had played only two club gigs in his life, and although he was wrong about that—he had, to my personal knowledge, played at least five—in essence it was true.
²⁵

In a way, what was happening in that period was that the folk music wave that had already hit the rest of the country was beginning to overlap with what had been going on in the Village. Until then, we had managed to ignore the pop folk scene. Of course we knew about the Kingston Trio and Belafonte and their hordes of squeaky-clean imitators, but we felt like that was a different world that had nothing to do with us. For one thing, most of those people were simply bad musicians, and that continued to hold true for a lot of the popular groups right through the 1960s. They couldn’t play worth a damn and were indifferent singers, and as far as material was concerned, they were scraping the top of the barrel, singing songs that we had known and dropped ten years earlier. It was a 100 percent rip-off: they were ripping off the material; they were ripping off the authors, composers, collectors, and sources; and they were ripping off the public. Some of them developed a decent stage presence and managed to put on good shows from time to time, but musically the stuff was bad, and we had heard it all before. It was Mitch Miller sing-alongs and the
Fireside Book of Folk Songs
performed by sophomores in paisley shirts who couldn’t play their instruments.
²⁶

Of course, there were some exceptions, but even those were not really to our taste. For example, when I first saw Bob Gibson, he had this almost Vegas-Tahoe approach and it drove me nuts because I was a folk purist and it was the antithesis of everything I held dear. He was also in a whole different league from me and my friends; he played at the Gate of Horn and places like that, and we thought of him as part of the older generation. But in the early 1960s he was working pretty often in the Village, and after I had seen him a few times, I began to have to admit to myself how good he was. The first thing that tipped me off was when I saw him at the Gaslight, working to this audience of fanatical neo-ethnics, and they loved him. There was obviously something going on that I was not getting, and I really had to listen and to think about it, and what I figured out was that he just had this marvelous touch and a marvelous ease on stage. Bob looked people right in the eye, and he attempted to communicate with them, and he had a way of
dramatizing a song that was very striking. Sometimes he would get carried away and overdramatize, but in general what he did was very effective, and while it was never something I wanted to do myself, I had to appreciate it because it worked. Besides that, he was a good musician. I sometimes think that he and Paxton were my favorite melodists in the folk songwriter field, Paxton for his incredible simplicity and Gibson for his ability to come up with unusual modulations and chord progressions.