The Mayor of MacDougal Street (32 page)

This did not sit well with me. I do not have a sporting drop of blood in my body, and I was damned if this superannuated sharecropper was going to make us look like idiots. But I figured, look, he just threw these three bohrans; his arm must be tired by now. So I said, “John, that was just a fluke. We weren’t ready. Let’s try it again.” And, blam! blam! blam! He threw us again. As I remember, he even did it a third time, just to put us in our places. By now that man has been dead for almost forty years, and he’s probably still in better shape than I am.

All in all, the number of colorful characters and the amount of talent that was around in those days was incredible. Skip James showed up a year or so after John, and did a week at the Gaslight on a double bill with Doc Watson. Lightnin’ Hopkins was around pretty regularly, as was John Lee
Hooker. Those guys were an integral part of the scene, as much as people like me and Dylan and Ochs, and that is one reason that I tend to cock a jaundiced eye at the recurring rumors of another folk revival. There will undoubtedly be times when there is a heightened interest in folk music, but we simply do not have the deep sources of talent that we had in the 1960s. Unless we can hatch another generation like Gary, Skip, and John, or John Lee and Muddy Waters, the quality will be sadly second-rate—and the world that produced those people is long gone.

Even at that time, the older musicians often seemed like emissaries from a vanished, mythic age—though of course that was our perception and not theirs. I have often been asked whether it wasn’t awfully strange for them, especially the ones like John who had spent their lives working on farms in Mississippi, to suddenly find themselves in this completely foreign situation, carried off to the big city and being carted around clubs full of young white fans. Obviously, there is no single answer to that: some of them loved it, some didn’t; some of them really did not like to be in the cities, and some thought it was very interesting; some were amused, some were bemused, and some were annoyed. But overall there was a lot less culture shock than one might think. These people were mature men and women who knew who they were. That was one of the most important things about their music, and why they had become famous in the first place: because they played and sang like people who knew who they were. So they were not people who could be overawed all that easily. It doesn’t much matter if you are a sharecropper from Texas or a Harvard grad; if you don’t know who you are, you are lost wherever the hell you find yourself, and if you do, you do not have much of a problem. A lot of them actually found the whole thing kind of funny: “Gee, look at this. What am I doing here?” But in a way it was not all that different for the rest of us. While we weren’t coming from rural Mississippi, none of us was prepared to suddenly be onstage in front of twenty thousand people. Anybody who did not from time to time think, “Gee, what am I doing here?” had to have something wrong with him. Because what is anybody doing in a situation like that? But then again, it’s like when somebody asks me, “What the hell are you doing in Sandusky?” The flag follows trade! It was a good payday, and most of them were glad to get it. Different people took it different ways, but I dare say you can say the same about any group of traveling musicians.

What some people have trouble understanding is that these were remarkable men and women, not exotic exhibits in the blues museum. They were friends of ours, and they were working musicians. When we would sit around and shoot the shit, it was not just us youngsters asking, “Tell me about Charlie Patton in 1927.” A lot of the time, the conversation would be, “That sonofabitch at the so-and-so club stiffed me last time through. Did he do that to you?” There was a lot of shop talk. And that was a good way to get to know them.

There is one last story that perfectly illustrates this point. I did not get this firsthand, and it probably has improved some in the telling, but it gives an idea of what I mean. Champion Jack Dupree was one of my favorite blues singers and piano players. He was originally from New Orleans, but in the late 1950s he moved to Europe and ended up settling in Germany. In the 1980s I started to tour over there a lot, and for a while it seemed as if we were playing tag across the continent. I would hit town, and there would be posters plastered all over the place: “One night only! Champion Jack Dupree! You just missed him, schmuck!” or “One night only! Champion Jack Dupree! But you’ll be playing in Dusseldorf that night!” So I never got a chance to meet him, but you could not be a blues musician in Europe and not hear Jack Dupree stories. The man really carved himself out a legend, and this story is a good example.

Sometime in the early 1960s Jack was living in Hamburg, and he got a call from an agent there. The guy said, “Jack, I’m going to put you on the tour of your life. We’re going to start you in Stockholm, and we’re going to send you from Lisbon to Leningrad.” It sounded all right, so Jack signed on. He was traveling with a small band, and they trundled from country to country, town to town, and eventually they got to Kiev, I think it was. That was still the Soviet Union, and this was the height of the Cold War—how they arranged to get in there at that time is anybody’s guess. In any case, there they were, and all of a sudden, the tour just evaporated. There Jack was, stranded in Russia, with no money, three or four musicians, and no way to get home.

God knows how he wiggled out of that one, but musicians get to be very good at that sort of thing—our improvisational skills are by no means limited to music. In any case, somehow or other he limped back to Germany, licking his wounds.

The years go by, and then one fine day he gets a call from the same guy, with the same offer: “Jack, I’m gonna put you on the tour of a lifetime. We’ll start you in Stockholm, and you’re gonna be in Lisbon, in Marrakech, in Kiev . . . ”

Dupree said, “Now, wait a minute. I remember you. First of all, I am going absolutely nowhere unless I have airline tickets covering every single stop on the tour, in my pocket before I leave my house.” There was an audible gulp at the other end of the line. And Jack added, “I fly first class.”

There were more gulps, but eventually the guy said, “Well, OK, Jack.”

Jack said, “All right, I’ll be at your office tomorrow morning, and you just have those tickets ready. Then we can talk through the rest of the terms.”

The next morning, Jack showed up at the agent’s office, and the agent handed over a sheaf of tickets for him and his band that looked like a Gutenberg Bible. Jack went through them carefully, checked that they covered the whole tour from beginning to end, and said, “Yes, this looks all right.” Then he left, went over to the Lufthansa office, cashed them all in, and went home.

Man! To an over-the-road musician, that is sheer poetry.

B
lues and traditional material were integral to the Folk Scare, but what defined the period in most people’s minds were protest songs and the appearance of what has since become known as “singer-songwriter” music. This was in many ways a quite new style, but it tended to be generically lumped in the folk category and praised or damned as such, at least until Dylan plugged in his guitar in 1965. I can’t blame the average consumer for failing to note the change—crowds are never long on analytical thought—but excusing the music critics is quite another matter, and even today many of them continue to refer to this music as “folk.” This is both silly and an abdication of responsibility. Although some of the new songwriters—Dylan and Paxton, for example—had a deep grounding in traditional styles, even in those cases calling their music “folk” is like calling the music of Duke Ellington or Lester Young “ragtime.” As for Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, they have as much to do with folk music as Schubert or Baudelaire.

In an attempt to avoid the migraines brought on by serious thought, most of the critics and music marketers have relied on a simple formula: if the accompaniment to this music is acoustic, it’s folk music. With amplified backup, it’s rock ’n’ roll, except in those instances where a pedal steel guitar is added, in which case it’s country. To be fair to the critics—which is no
fun at all—the performers themselves have rarely been more perceptive when it comes to labeling their work. I have heard everyone from Paxton to Suzanne Vega refer to themselves as folksingers, though the last time Tom sang a folk song was roughly 1962, and I doubt that Suzanne has ever sung one in her life. The problem is that, in order to eat, people have to sell records, and to sell records, there has to be a way of marketing them. I once heard a record producer remark about Janis Ian, “Her music isn’t folk, it isn’t rock, it isn’t country—who the hell am I supposed to sell it to?” Janis got lucky, but a lot of talented writers have died on the vine simply because there was no convenient pigeonhole for them. Calling such people “singersongwriters” avoids that particular pitfall, but I have never liked the label because it defines the performer rather than the music. Also, if followed to its logical conclusion, it puts Joni Mitchell and Hoagy Carmichael in the same closet (interesting thought, that), which leaves something to be desired, to say the least. The best idea would be to classify all of this music as “new song,” which is what Latin American musicians call their own version of the style, and while I have little hope of anyone following my advice on this point, that is how I think of it.
²⁹

In any case, that period spawned a new style of songwriting that was quite different from what had come before it. Any music is the music of its time, of course—you can’t avoid that—but a great deal of the music written in the 1960s was also
about
its time. It dealt directly, almost on a one-to-one basis, with the experiences that people were going through at that moment. Pop lyrics have tended to be of the most vague and general nature: “I love my baby,” “Get down and boogie.” Generally it’s pretty mindless, and mindlessness has a certain eternal quality. But the songwriting in the sixties was often very specific, whether it was about politics or about what people were going through in their personal lives. Of course, a lot of
that material suffered from its specificity—if you weren’t the person who had written it, you couldn’t get next to it. I am reminded of an anecdote about Lenin: The Soviet state publishing house had brought out a book of love poems written by a poet to his wife. When it was presented to Lenin, he said, “Don’t you know there’s a paper shortage on? We should have printed two copies: one for him and one for his wife.”

Dylan is usually cited as the founder of the new song movement, and he certainly became its most visible standard-bearer, but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton. When Tom came to New York, around 1961, he had precisely one song of his own in his repertory, “The Marvelous Toy,” but over the next six or eight months he wrote some more, and as he tested his songs in the crucible of live performance, he found that his own stuff was getting more attention than when he was singing traditional songs or stuff by other people. It gradually dawned on him that his vocation in life was to be a songwriter, and at that point he decided, “OK, if I’m gonna be a songwriter, I’d better be serious about it.” So he set himself a training regimen of deliberately writing one song every day, and he kept that up for about a year. The songs could be good, bad, or indifferent; the important thing was that it forced him to get into the discipline of sitting down and writing. In the course of that year he wrote some of the most dreadful things I have heard in my life—I still treasure “The New York Mets Victory and Commiseration Song”—but he also wrote “Ramblin’ Boy” and “The Last Thing on My Mind.” Dylan had not yet showed up when this was happening, and by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material.

That said, it was Bobby’s success that really got the ball rolling. Prior to that, the folk community was very much tied to traditional songs, so much so that songwriters would sometimes palm their own stuff off as traditional. So in some ways the most important thing that Bobby did was not to write the songs but to show that the songs could be written. I think people like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen felt toward Dylan sort of the way Ezra Pound felt toward Walt Whitman: “You cut the wood; now it’s time for carving.” From a stylistic perspective, I was always rather dubious of Bobby’s contrived primitivism, and his later obscurantism reached a point where he wasn’t even trying to make sense anymore. But if Bobby had not
succeeded in breaking out with what he was writing, almost all of the original material to come out of the folk boom would have been protest songs, because up to that point those were the only things you were allowed by consensus to write.

As in the days of the Almanac and People’s Songs, the Folk Scare of the 1960s rode in on a wave of social protest, and neo-ethnics like myself were simply carried along on its coattails. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War profoundly changed the political atmosphere, and pulled a lot of people to the left. The hipsters of the 1950s had tried to divorce themselves from all things political, but in the sixties that was no longer an acceptable option. With the Civil Rights Movement, any kind of identification with black culture took on a whole new meaning, and a lot of people who a decade earlier would have been apolitical beatniks no longer felt comfortable simply standing on the sidelines. Meanwhile the war was affecting the folk audience even more directly, because most of us were of draft age and the government was threatening to ship us overseas to get killed.
³⁰

This was the height of the culture wars, and while the McCarthy era was dying, it had a hydralike ability to keep regenerating heads as fast as you chopped one off. The blacklist, for example, resurfaced with some regularity throughout the early 1960s. By 1963 Joan Baez had been on the cover of
Time
magazine; Peter, Paul, and Mary were in the Top 10; and ABC television jumped on the bandwagon with a show called
Hootenanny
. About a month before
Hootenanny
was supposed to go on the air,
Broadside
magazine broke the story that Pete Seeger was not going to be allowed to appear. This was particularly outrageous because Pete had been the person responsible for giving the word “hootenanny” any currency, and ABC made its position even worse by saying it was not blacklisting Pete, but had simply decided he was not up to their artistic standards. At that the entire entertainment business, left, right, and center, broke into howls of laughter—I mean, you should have seen some of the crap they had on that show. A bunch of us promptly got together and formed an organization called
Artists against the Blacklist, and a lot of the top names on the scene, including Baez, Dylan, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, announced that they would not appear on
Hootenanny
or any other show that did not let Pete appear.