The Bleecker Street Tapes

By Bruce Pollock

From the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village to the stage of Woodstock, folksingers became a powerful cultural force in the 1960s, Mixing music and politics, tradition and innovation, romance and righteousness, these men and women were outspoken voices for their generation, each with a story to tell. 

In The Bleecker Street Tapes, a collection of intimate profiles and essays, veteran music journalist Bruce Pollock, a Village resident and clubgoer during its heyday, documents folk music's evolution from passing the hat to topping the charts.

• Dave Van Ronk
• Phil Ochs
• Richie Havens
• Tuli Kupferberg
• Melanie
• Buffy Sainte-Marie
• Eric Andersen
• Peter, Paul & Mary
• Roger McGuinn
• John Sebastian
• Peter Tork
• Maria Muldaur
• Loudon Wainwright III
• Janis Ian
• The Roches
• Harry Chapin
• Suzanne Vega
• Don McLean
• Leonard Cohen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trouser Press Books
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798985658972

Book preview

THE BLEECKER STREET TAPES: ECHOES OF GREENWICH VILLAGE

By Bruce Pollock

Trouser Press Books

The Bleecker Street Tapes is dedicated to Barbara, who's been there from the beginning.

The Bleecker Street Tapes © 2023 Bruce Pollock

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Kristina Juzaitis (FebruaryFirstDesign.com)

Photographs are either in the Public Domain or used under a Creative Commons license.

Some of the text has previously appeared in books (In Their Own Words, When the Music Mattered: Rock in the 1960s, Suzanne Vega: Days of Open Hand), magazines (ROCK, Stereo Review, After Dark), newspapers (USA Today, Gannett Westchester Newspapers, Independent News Alliance) and CD liner notes.

ISBN 979-8-9856589-7-2

Published by Trouser Press Books

Brooklyn, New York

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Troubadours of the Folk Era

Dave Van Ronk and the Great American Folk Scare

Phil Ochs: To My Dying Day

Richie Havens: The Voice of a Generation

Tuli Kupferberg: We Thought We Could Do Just About Anything

Melanie: Light a Candle

Buffy Sainte-Marie: Healing Songs

Eric Andersen: Losing Time

Peter, Paul & Mary: Reunited

Roger McGuinn: Just Punks Trying to Play Music

John Sebastian: Magical

Peter Tork: I Think I Was Gatsby

Maria Muldaur: Survival Instincts

Loudon Wainwright: Here Is the Village

Janis Ian: Nobody Is Indispensable but You

The Roches: Swimming Upstream

Harry Chapin: A Cinematic Process

Suzanne Vega: Arrival

Don McLean: The Emptiness of You

Leonard Cohen: Score One for M----

Leon Haggerty, Bobby Dylan and the Sheik of New York

Greenwich Village Playlist

About the Author

Introduction

61 West 10th Street

107 Thompson Street

50 East 8th Street

162 West 13th Street

Those are the places I lived in Greenwich Village between 1966 and 1975, years that coincided with my marriage, the Jerome Lowell DeJur writing award from City College, a bachelor’s degree, a staff writing job at ROCK magazine, the Deems Taylor Award (for my articles in ROCK) and my first published book, In Their Own Words: Lyrics and Lyricists, 1955–1974 (Macmillan, 1975).

I’d been frequenting the Village since 1964, when I worked as a copy boy at Fairchild Publications on 12th Street and Fifth Avenue and often took my lunch in Washington Square Park, surrounded by like-minded furry individuals. Bob Dylans of our block, we were, testing our mettle on the hallowed stomping ground of our idol. At the fashion trade magazine W, I spent much of my time typing song lyrics and short stories for the delight and edification of whoever happened to be looking over my shoulder — if not my boss.

My first experience in the newspaper trade, at the New York Post, was similar. I made the acquaintance of Susy Szekely, writer of the Teen Time advice column. She claimed I was the staff Bob Dylan expert and passed along a letter she’d received from a rabid Dylan fan. I wound up having a date with the girl — we saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Suzy herself wound up interviewing Dylan for the Post and then became the editor of Hearst’s Eye magazine, where she gave me my first writing assignment, a review of Mike Bloomfield’s first album with the Electric Flag.

By then (or soon after), my friend Richie and I were fixtures at the Tuesday night hoots at the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street, as well as frequent drop-ins at the Night Owl (up the block and around the corner on West 3rd) and the Au Go Go (down the block the other way and around the corner on Bleecker Street) and the Garrick below it (or above it), where Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention held the fort for an entire summer, occasionally fronted by the lovely and talented Uncle Meat (a.k.a. Essra Mohawk).

Hosted by the formidable bearded folksinger Dave Van Ronk, the Gaslight hoots were our introduction to the music that would dominate the period, at least within the friendly confines of Greenwich Village (which soon became our home, courtesy of another Gaslight regular who sublet us his apartment on West 10th Street in 1965). It was at the Gaslight where I first saw many of the artists I would later interview for books, magazine articles and newspaper columns between 1972 and 1994. And it was on a bench in Sheridan Square in 1967 that I composed more than 300 song lyrics.

The interviews and articles collected here speak for themselves, about the highs and lows of the era as experienced by those on the ground, just as the music they gave us still speaks to a dimming memory as frustrating as a dream lost to the daylight. ✿

Troubadours of the Folk Era (1992)

  We had a feeling that someday people might look back on this period as important.

Maybe you had to be there. Maybe, as Paul Simon says, you had to have been born at the right time, in the 1940s, so you could pass your high school years under the imposing dual shadows of Elvis and the Bomb. While Elvis provided a heightened experience of generational bonding, the Bomb added just the right touch of impending doom to cause a significant portion of the generation to plunge, as if out of existential despair, to the bottom of what made Elvis twitch — his blues roots, his country heritage. Purists, scholars, college-bound banjo players and nasal urban yodelers — people who had probably spent their early teens searching the cut-out bins at Kresge’s for doo-wop classics in the face of what had become America’s Bandstandization of rock and roll in the late ’50s — abandoned the scions of Elvis entirely, seeking out music that could more adequately represent them in the face of inevitable nuclear death: Delta and Chicago blues, bluegrass, ragtime, jug band music and union organizing songs. Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter and Clarence Ashley joined hands and hearts in the Deltas of their imaginations.

This musical cadre of bespectacled intellectual pickers and picketers, folks who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) dance, was triply cursed. They were not only white kids daring to sing the blues and city slickers taken to warbling old time country music, but children of privilege inspired by the plight of the common man. Liberated as much by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as by Elvis’s yawp and yowl, middle-class cowboys as geographically disparate as Brooklyn’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Hibbing, Minnesota’s Bob Dylan transcended these illusory limitations to follow in the footsteps of their hero, Woody Guthrie, out to the San Francisco Bay and back again. Along the way, they communed with grifters, drifters, lefties and all kinds of misfits and insomniacs from the American Dream.

If Woody’s This Land Is Your Land (adapted from a Carter Family tune) was their anthem, it was also their roadmap. At every truck stop and watering hole from the Dust Bowl to the Rose Bowl, there were mythic travelers like Odetta, a Bunyanesque figure, leveling the Great Plains with the sweep of her booming voice, celebrating American folk heroes like the steel-driving John Henry. Making her way west in the summer of ’58, the Alabama native made her own statement on the relevance of color in the great folk tradition by agreeing to transport Dave Van Ronk’s tape from New York to Chicago and lay it at the feet of Albert Grossman, the vaunted impresario of the Gate of Horn folk music club, home away from home for Muddy Waters, Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy.

While white boys sang the blues, girls, for the most part, were consigned to the upper reaches of the Francis James Child book of ballads, English and Scottish hymns as pure as the driven snow (and just as politically relevant). Then, in the summer of ’59, a pair of longhaired sisters from San Francisco, Mimi and Joan Baez, turned the staid world of the Newport Folk Festival around.

Very shortly thereafter, Joan was giving a piece of her show (as well as her heart) to Bob Dylan, who arrived in New York City from Minnesota in 1961, searching for the ailing Woody Guthrie and a record contract. (A few years later, Mimi Baez would marry Richard Fariña, an aspiring novelist and folksinger whose first wife was the angel-voiced Carolyn Hester, who employed Bob Dylan as a session harmonica player in 1962.) Joanie and Bobby began sharing guest sets and metaphorical appearances in each other’s songs at folkie haunts from Club 47 in Harvard Square to the Gaslight to Carnegie Hall.

Also in ’61, Albert Grossman, in the Sam Phillips tradition of mixing musical genres to create a palatable superstar, asked Van Ronk to join a trio he was concocting to sing traditional music in a pop style. Who else was in the group? Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow. We need somebody who can sing a harmony line and who’s competent on guitar, and we think you’re it, he told Van Ronk. But Dave preferred rough songs like Candy Man and Cocaine Blues. I said, ‘I think you’re wrong.' And that was that. So Grossman instead found his Paul in the person of Noel Stookey, who was known around Greenwich Village as the Toilet Man for his stand-up comedy specialty of imitating a flushing toilet. In the summer of ’63, with an Eastern liberal in the White House, Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind" neared the top of the charts in a sprightly version by Peter, Paul & Mary.

The Great Folk Scare was upon us.

Brought about by the preponderance of baby boom English majors entering (and then dropping out of) college, the Folk Scare’s primary gift to popular music was its blanket refusal to be trapped in the folk tradition ethos (in short: you had no business writing your own songs unless you were Woody Guthrie). Dylan blew that idea out of the water, transmuting and transmogrifying nearly every Elizabethan air extant for his own nefarious purposes. Eric Andersen came down from Hobart College, flush with romantic visions of girls in petticoats and Violets of Dawn on the morning after. Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree Indian, referred to her creations, which included Now That the Buffalo’s Gone and Universal Soldier, as college student songs. They’re high-protein lectures, she said. I wanted them to get people out of their classrooms and onto their feet.

Pretty soon everybody and Pete Seeger’s brother-in-law was writing songs. But not everybody wrote ballads as lovely and lonely as Ewan MacColl’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which jazz vocalist Kitty White premiered in 1962 and Ewan’s wife, Peggy Seeger, also sang. Robin (George) Remaily wrote Jesse Colin Young’s aching folk blues Four in the Morning and Euphoria, which became the loopy signature tune of the loopy Holy Modal Rounders. They brought traditional music one step closer to the future with Mister Spaceman, Steve Weber’s response to Johnny Cymbal’s chart-topping Mr. Bass Man.

For the next couple of years at least, Woody’s land was their land. The best minds of a generation were learning how to play the washboard and sing like Sleepy John Estes. The folk message was being heard by the masses and written into legislation by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, as blacks and whites marched together for freedom in Mississippi and turned up dead in that state’s swamps. The folk and blues tradition even went to England, where it became a godsend to the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds; in return we got the Beatles. When we sent them the American Beatles (the Byrds), they sent us the English (well, Scottish) Dylan (Donovan). Then Dylan topped the charts with Like a Rolling Stone, which was either his ode to the Muddy Waters blues of his youth or the Mick Jagger cast of his future. Or both.

For a while, this merger of electric blues, folk sensibility and a rock and roll audience into folk-rock seemed like the answer to a folkie’s prayer. The Holy Modal Rounders became the backup band for the notorious Fugs. The Grateful Dead made acid jam out of Canadian Bonnie Dobson’s ode to nuclear fallout, Morning Dew. Jesse Colin Young hit the charts with the Youngbloods. Dick and Mimi Fariña, with the aid of Bruce Langhorne’s guitar on tunes like One Way Ticket and Reno Nevada, successfully straddled the line in the sand that Dylan drew at Newport in 1965 by plugging in with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier was covered by Donovan and Glen Campbell, while Elvis Presley made her song Until It’s Time for You to Go a 45. And Roberta Flack subverted The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in her chart-topping version of 1972 by changing one word in the last verse. (Ewan: "I thought our joy would last; Roberta: I knew our joy would last.")

Eric Andersen had the most problems with the change, going so far as to recut his entire second album, 'Bout Changes and Things, for electric guitar and band, a move almost as disastrous as Dave Van Ronk’s costly episode with the Hudson Dusters. In this county, in order to achieve your freedom, you have to become almost like a parody of yourself, he said. But there’s still a hunger for folk music: that realism, that truth, that experience the artist conveys to them about their lives.

Part II

It was with a good deal more than his customary reticence that Paul Simon approached Simon & Garfunkel’s debut gig at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village in 1964. Though their first album on Columbia Records featured folk chestnuts like You Can Tell the World and Go Tell It on the Mountain, it also contained Simon originals like The Sounds of Silence, Bleecker Street and He Was My Brother, written about the killings of three Freedom Riders in Mississippi. While it was the ragged folkie in his soul that Simon wanted to project, at the Gaslight he and Artie wore the suits and ties of folk-singing accountants.

We were being represented by the William Morris Agency, Simon recalled, and they were looking for a way to sell us, with typical disregard for the content. They wanted us to be the Smothers Brothers. I arrived at the Gaslight that night with a terrible sense of foreboding, because I used to go there to watch the other acts in normal attire, and now here I was, knowing I shouldn’t be wearing this jacket. I told our agent we were making a terrible mistake, and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter what the audience thinks; there are television people here.’

In the early ’60s, the simultaneously welcome and dreaded television people brought folk music to the (uptrodden) masses in a way even the peripatetic minstrel Pete Seeger, in or out of the Weavers, never could. Pete was banned from the tube; Elvis Presley had only been censored from the waist down. (Times change: both have since been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps.) But Seeger’s body of work and his popular legacy could not be entirely suppressed. When the Weavers spent a couple of months at the top of the charts in 1950 with their version of a Leadbelly tune, Goodnight Irene, it was easy to write off as a fluke. When Billy Grammer’s version of their Gotta Travel On (later sung by the Au Go-Go Singers, featuring Stephen Stills and Richie Furay) hit the Top 5 in 1959, it was dismissed as a country tune. But from 1958 to 1960, when the Kingston Trio, in the wake of Tom Dooley, accounted for something like 20 percent of Capitol Records’ total album sales, the financial appeal of a weekly folk music show on television made it a cultural reality.

It could be said that Hootenanny will be remembered primarily for cutting folk music’s subversive message off at the legs. Certainly, it was a showcase for the most well-scrubbed, well-shorn and politically neutral groups, like Wesleyan’s Highwaymen and the University of Washington’s Brothers Four, who offered evocative, inoffensive singalongs like Michael and Greenfields, sort of the fraternity man’s doo-wop.

We were trying to sound like the Weavers, said Dave Guard, who left the Kingston Trio in ’61 for the Whiskeyhill Singers with Judy Henske. We liked authentic-sounding stuff. We wanted to do some songs from the Spanish Civil War, because they were very ballsy, but our manager said, ‘If you do that, it will bring all sorts of people around here.’ We said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Don’t even worry about it.’ Politically, we didn’t know what was going on.

There was a lot of mutual hatred, admitted Peter Stampfel of the traditional, if nutsy, Holy Modal Rounders. A lot of the more mainstream guys like the Kingston Trio were theatrical types, who considered the traditional folk people imposters, sloppy and untalented, because to them the stage was a sacred, holy thing, and our stagecraft attitudes were heretical and not sufficiently dedicated, whereas the traditional people thought the music was the sacred, holy thing. So both groups felt the other was doing things for the worst possible reasons. Of course, we were both right and both wrong.

At the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, Jim McGuinn was seriously studying Leadbelly and Pete Seeger licks and Kingston Trio tunes in preparation for his job as backup instrumentalist in the Limeliters. He later performed that role in the Chad Mitchell Trio, until he quit to invent folk-rock with the Byrds in Los Angeles.

Leadbelly and Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson played the 12-string, McGuinn later recalled, and I was into those guys. I thought, if you’re only going to have one instrument, the 12-string would be the best one, because it’s got such a full sound. I had a couple of folk trios and quartets that mostly sang around the coffeehouses in Chicago. It was pre-Beatles; bands weren’t happening.

At the University of Minnesota, harp-player Tony Glover ran into a 12-string Leadbelly freak named Dave Ray and together they played the same circuit as Dylan: the Scholar in Dinkytown, the Purple Onion in St. Paul and some of the other bars where slick groups like the Journeymen would play. But we also had a real studious, write-to-the-Library-of-Congress-and-get-the-tapes kind of scene going on, said Glover. Once they found Spider John Koerner, Koerner, Ray & Glover became an item on the folk scene and Linin’ Track, an old Leadbelly field holler, became a staple of their act.

In Greenwich Village, the members of the Even Dozen Jug Band (which included John Sebastian, David Grisman, Stefan Grossman and Maria D’Amato, the future Maria Muldaur) were hardly in it for the money. "Many of the