After a few days of aimlessly banging about the Village, spending money like a drunken sailor (apt metaphor, that), I decided that I had no place here anymore, that there was a big world waiting for me, and that as soon as my money ran low, I would ship out again. After all, what kind of future could I expect from music? I had been hacking away at it for three years, and all I had to show for my trouble was a taste for Irish whiskey and a borderline case of malnutrition. What’s more, I really liked the sea. The work was hard, but I got a kind of masochistic satisfaction from being able to cut it—besides which, it was actually a healthy way of making a living, something I had never dreamed existed. Obviously, I did not want to spend my life working in the mess, chipping rust, and painting on layers of red lead, but I was sure that I could move up pretty quickly and was already dreaming of becoming first mate. The money was good, and I liked the men I worked with and the sleazy gin mills in the sleazy refinery ports where we blew our paychecks. In short, I was hooked.
Even if I had still been intent on a musical career, it was obvious at that point that folk music was not a serious option. I was not about to jettison all my hard-earned prejudices, and in any case I could never have made it as a slick cabaret artist à la Josh White or Theo Bikel. And for us neo-ethnics, there simply was no place that wanted us onstage. Not a single venue in all the greater New York area.
Nonetheless, when Sunday afternoon rolled around, force of habit took me to Washington Square. Force of habit, hell—I couldn’t wait to get there, in my bell-bottom dungarees and Lundeberg Stetson from the ship’s slop chest, brown as a nut and hard as a nail. I was looking forward to pulling rank on my middle-class folkie friends.
My reception was the very model of Village cool: “Oh, hi. You’ve been away?” There was a lot of excitement in our small circle of balladeers manqué, but it had nothing to do with the return of Ishmael from the seven seas. Rick Allmen, who was the landlord at 190 Spring Street, had taken note of all the folksingers hanging out there—probably while desperately trying to collect his rent—and he was opening a coffeehouse in a big old garage on 3rd Street that supposedly had once been Aaron Burr’s stable. As
the troops explained: “We’re sort of helping him fix it up, laying down a cement floor and painting and like that. He’s going to feature folk music, and we’ll have a place to play.”
“Wrong,” I said. “Fattening frogs for snakes,” I said. “The only time you’ll get on that stage is when you build it,” I said. But for once my knee-jerk skepticism failed me. From time to time I would drop by the site and there they would be, troweling, whitewashing, hammering, and sawing. I had to admit that it was starting to look pretty good, but I still didn’t believe there would ever be a payoff. Then the job was done, and good as his word, Rick offered a spot in the opening night’s show to any of the crew who was interested. He even extended the offer to me. Of course, payment was another matter. If the club took off, there would be plenty of money for everybody, but in the meantime it would have to be on spec. “It’s a con,” I said. “Not one of us will ever see a nickel out of this . . .” and I immediately accepted. What the hell—it took a long time to spend fifteen hundred bucks in those days.
The Café Bizarre, which was what Allmen called his room, was the first Village coffeehouse to feature folk music—or any formal entertainment at all for that matter—and it became a howling success that shortly begat clones all over the country. In concept and design, it was a tourist trap, selling the clydes (customers) a Greenwich Village that had never existed except in the film
Bell, Book and Candle
. The ambiance was cut-rate Charles Addams haunted house: dark and candlelit, with fake cobwebs hanging all over everything. The waitresses were got up to look like Morticia, with fishnet stockings, long straight hair, and so much mascara that they looked like raccoons. I swear I even saw some poor clown in a Frankenstein outfit wandering around the set.
13
The Bizarre opened to the public on August 18, 1957, and the entertainment was no slapdash affair. There was a real stage, a sound system, a light script, a suitably spooky MC, and we even had a director: Logan English. Poor Logie had recently graduated from the University of Kentucky as a drama major and was a fine, if somewhat mellifluous, folk singer. His
problem was that he took his job seriously. More to the point, his problem was us. We thought all of his elaborate stagecraft was a crock of shit, and took sadistic delight in deliberately missing our cues, tripping over the furniture, and provoking him into screaming fits of rage. We couldn’t help ourselves; he was so funny when he blew up.
In fact, the Café Bizarre and the rigid formalism of the show were such flatulent frauds that we might have walked out in a body had it not been for the fact that the opening night headliner was to be Odetta. We had heard the
Odetta and Larry at the Tin Angel
album, and by then I think I had her first solo album as well, and she had made an incredible impression on us. Her presence lent the program an artistic legitimacy that—at least to our way of thinking—no other performer could have done, except perhaps Pete Seeger.
I am not certain who all was on that bill. The one review I can find mentions me, Logan, Bob Brill, Luke Faust, and Ellen Adler, as well as an unnamed “skiffle” group, but there were certainly other people involved, including Roger Abrahams, Roy Berkeley, and Judy Isquith. We each took a turn, doing four or five songs apiece, with a full set by Odetta to close the show.
My set opened the second half, and I was scared out of my bird from the minute the house lights went down. This was my first experience with the real thing. Damn, it was exciting! I snuck out to stage center in the dark and was “discovered” by a single spotlight a few seconds after I had started my first song. The effect was stunning—at least it stunned the bejesus out of me. I was so dazed and scared and exhilarated that when I came off the stage, I had no recollection of what I had done while I was up there.
I still do not know what I sang or said, but I remember very well what happened immediately afterward. I was shaking like someone who has narrowly missed a fatal car crash, and just as happy, when up came Odetta herself with a great big smile on her face—and she has a smile that could melt diamonds. “That was wonderful,” she said. “Do you do this for a living?” I told her, no, I was a merchant seaman on the beach and I meant to ship out again as soon as my money ran low. Well, she said, if I was interested, she could take a tape of mine out to Chicago to Albert Grossman, the owner of the Gate of Horn. Of course, she could not make any promises, but there might be a gig in it for me.
On the face of it, me at the Gate of Horn seemed pretty far-fetched. That was where the big kids played: Josh White, Theo Bikel, Odetta herself. On the other hand, I was a pretty arrogant young dog, so why not? Was I not a vessel of the Great Tradition, a Keeper of the Flame? In any case, I had nothing to lose. I thanked the nice lady profusely and told her I would get a tape to her directly.
With some difficulty, I got a demonstration tape made—tape recorders were expensive, and thus rare in my circle—and a mutual acquaintance volunteered to get it to Odetta before she left for Chicago. I remember thinking the tape was pretty good, and by this time I had convinced myself that within a few short weeks Destiny would summon me to the Windy City and my rightful place as King of the Folkniks. (That word had not yet been coined, but you get the idea.)
My money was still holding out, so I was in no great hurry. The days passed. I was sleeping on couches and floors—no point in getting an apartment, since soon I would be in Chicago surrounded by worshipful acolytes (mostly female) or, barring that, back at sea. Parties almost every night. Songs sung and learned. I worked on my guitar playing. I was drinking a lot. No word from Chicago.
Weeks passed. This was getting downright embarrassing. I had been telling everybody who would listen that Odetta had taken my tape to the Gate of Horn and I would be following it forthwith. I offed the remnants of my half-key of dope to a friend for a hundred bucks, but the end of my money was still visible on the horizon. Chicago remained mute.
Finally, I could stand it no longer. I was almost broke, I was drinking like a fish, and my nerves were stretched like piano wires. This thing had to be settled once and for all. I made up my mind to hitch to Chicago and find out what the hell was going down.
Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and call Grossman? And why hitch-hike? I had enough money left for a bus or even a train. (It would never have occurred to me to fly out there; I had never been on a plane in my life.) As to the first question, this was far too important a matter to be handled over the phone, and in any case my association with the radical left in those McCarthyite days—not to mention the fringes of the underground drug culture—had given me the firm conviction that all telephones were tapped and thus not to be used for anything but casual chitchat. As to the second,
hitchhiking was the way we traveled. We had all read Kerouac, after all. Money would be saved for food and drink.
Hitching to Chicago was easy. You just stuck out your thumb near the entrance of the Holland Tunnel, headed west, and switched to public transportation when you got to the Illinois suburbs. The main problem was sleep. It was about 900 miles and took roughly 24 hours, depending on how many rides you needed to get there. There were some rest stops on the recently completed Ohio Turnpike, but if the cops caught you sleeping, they would roust you, and when they found that you had no car, they would run you in. You could get thirty days for vagrancy, so it was a good idea to stay awake.
I girded my loins with a huge meal at the Sagamore Cafeteria and set out with high hopes, my Gibson, a spare shirt and some clean underwear in a shopping bag, and fifty bucks or so in my pocket. For good measure, I brought along a handful of Dexedrine pills to keep the sandman at bay and for the edification of the fine fellows who were going to pick me up. I think they were already illegal then, but I had never heard of anyone being busted for them.
I got lucky with my first lift in New Jersey: a trucker going all the way to Akron. I gave him a couple of Dexies and took a couple myself, just to be sociable, and before I knew it we were pushing that semi 85 miles an hour down the Pennsy Turnpike, babbling at each other like happy lunatics. It was like that all the way, one long ride after another, right to the outskirts of Chi.
I took a bus to the Loop and taxied from there to the near North Side and the Gate of Horn. The whole trip had taken about 22 hours—great time—and I was still wide awake. In fact, I was jazzed out of my skull. It was midafternoon. I was unannounced and unexpected. There was nothing for it but to try the door and, if no one was home, wait until somebody came to open up. The door was open, so I stepped inside.
The room had that seedy, impermanent look that all nightclubs have when the house lights are on. The staff was taking chairs down from the tables and setting up for the night. At the bar, a heavy-set man with graying hair, in a too-tight suit was talking to another guy. The stage was unlit and empty. I figured that tight-suit was in charge, so I walked up to him: “Excuse me, but are you Albert Grossman?”
He wore glasses and had a blank, unblinking gaze. “Yes,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I did a show with Odetta a few weeks ago and she brought you a demo tape of mine. I’m Dave Van Ronk.”
A gray voice, no inflection at all: “I never got a tape of yours from Odetta.”
Suddenly I wasn’t high anymore, just tired. I was on my own in a strange city, and the vibes were spooking me plenty. (To keep the record straight, I later found out that Odetta had never got the tape in the first place. My intermediary had blown it.)
So I told him my sad tale, how I had hitched all the way from New York, blah, blah, blah. He heard me out noncommittally. “Well,” he said, “you’ve come all this way . . . Why not audition right now? There’s the stage.”
This wasn’t going according to my script at all, but maybe I could still pull it out. I got onstage and launched into a set of my biggest flag-wavers: “Tell Old Bill,” “Willie the Weeper,” “Dink’s Song,” and suchlike. I could see Albert plainly—the house lights were still on. His face had the studied impassiveness of a very bad poker player with a very good hand. All around me chairs and tables scraped and thumped, glasses and silverware clinked and rattled, but I forged on. This was D-Day, goddamnit, and I was showing this hypercool Chicago hick how we did it in Washington Square.
I’m afraid that’s just what I did.
When I got off, Albert still had not batted an eyelash. “Do you know who works here?” he asked. “Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me,” he went on, “why should I hire you?”
I could have killed him on the spot, but I contented myself with screaming in his face, “Grossman, you son of a bitch, you’re Crow-Jimming me!”
Back out on the street, where I belonged, I made some quick decisions. I had planned to call some friends on the South Side and hang around Chicago for a few days, but I was so bummed out that all I could think of was getting back on the road and holing up in New York until I could find me another ship—Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego sounded about right. A life on the rolling waves was beginning to look good again.
My first ride going east was with a bunch of young guys who were doing some serious partying. A jug of bourbon was being passed around, and I gratefully took my turn when it got to me. Just what I needed—a few belts of that rotgut and I crashed like the Hindenburg. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake: “Hey, we’re getting off the thruway; you’ll have to get out here.” Groggily, I grabbed my guitar (I had almost given it to a wino back in Chi) and got out of the car somewhere in Indiana.