Chapter 4

violets of dawn

1963–1964

Anyone who sang or worked at the Gaslight knew about the other, secret Gaslight that awaited them if they chose. One flight up sat a one-room apartment where performers could play cards, leave their instrument cases, or crash between sets on a small bed—alone or with company. “People would take someone from the audience up there for a little visit,” one regular said. “We were terrible people.” Thanks to a wire run from the club into a small speaker, the musicians could also hear whoever was onstage and prepare to follow them. On a night when Bob Dylan asked to crash at her apartment in the neighborhood, Carolyn Hester, unsure about whether she wanted to get involved with him, told Anthony Scaduto that she fabricated a date and instead found herself alone in the auxiliary Gaslight room.

If inspiration struck, a typewriter, supposedly contributed by Hugh Romney, could also be found there. Unwinding in the room one night between sets, Tom Paxton noticed Dylan tapping away. When asked what he was writing, Paxton recalled, Dylan handed him five typed sheets of paper. “I said, ‘This is terrific—it’s like “Lord Randall” in 1962,’” referencing the Scottish folk ballad in which a mother speaks with a son poisoned by his lover. Dylan told him he wasn’t sure of his plans for the work, and Paxton suggested he send it to one of the small literary journals—“and get 25 bucks for it,” he counseled—or set it to a melody. At the Gaslight a few nights later, Paxton watched as Dylan premiered the song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” now a conversation between parent and child in what felt like a nuclear wasteland, and Paxton realized it was never meant to be a poem. “When he got to the sixth verse,” Paxton recalled, “I thought, ‘What was I thinking?’”

The wider public would hear “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in May 1963, part of Dylan’s long-in-progress second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. By then, it wasn’t merely his music that was the talk of the Village. Nearly two years before, he’d been introduced to Suze Rotolo, a vivacious then seventeen-year-old who, thanks to her proudly Communist parents, was already immersed in the worlds of art and literature. After they’d met at the all-day folk radiocast from the Riverside Church in the summer of 1961, where Dave Van Ronk, Danny Kalb, and Roger Sprung, among others, played, Dylan and Rotolo drifted into each other’s arms.

Rotolo watched as her boyfriend’s career began to intensify; eventually, she began to harbor doubts about his connection to the truth and sensed that his growing cult might overwhelm her. There were family issues as well: her sister Carla and Dylan famously did not get along. Barry Kornfeld would recall receiving a call in the middle of the night from Carla, telling him to get over to the apartment she and Suze were sharing at 106 Avenue B in the East Village. There, Kornfeld found Suze “sitting in a bed, almost oblivious to what was going on—she was stunned—and Bob and Carla were frothing at the mouth at each other.”

Kornfeld never learned more about the origins of the fight, but he sensed the pressure that Rotolo was receiving from her family to break up with Dylan. In June 1962, Rotolo decamped for Europe with her mother and stepfather. When Rotolo returned to the city at year’s end, people on the scene treated her coldly, as if she had done Dylan grievous harm by leaving him. But she and Dylan reconciled and started living together at 161 West Fourth Street. For the cover of Dylan’s second album, photographer Don Hunstein captured the two walking down Jones Street, not far from their apartment, Rotolo huddled next to him, Dylan exuding his James-Dean-of-folk aura despite insisting on wearing only a light jacket in freezing weather. Even more than the photos that graced Peter, Paul and Mary’s debut and Van Ronk’s Folksinger, the cover of Freewheelin’ crystallized the Village’s romantic ambience like none before—what Rotolo (who was startled to learn she was included on the cover) would call “the time-honored language of youth and rebellion against the status quo.”

Dylan had debuted some of his new songs at the Gaslight in the fall of 1962, when Albert Grossman funded a mysterious audition tape for Dylan over two nights at the club. (Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin suspected that Grossman may have needed such a tape to sever his client’s relationship with Columbia and move to another label.) According to John Sebastian, “It was like he just changed the whole fucking atmosphere.” Sebastian, a beatific, Village-born musician who was working his way into the scene by accompanying artists on harmonica, had met Dylan in the basement of Folk City, where they both caught a set by the blues singer Victoria Spivey. Having heard Dylan play harmonica on a Harry Belafonte album (another of his earliest recordings), Sebastian wasn’t initially impressed: “I said, ‘Holy Christ, I gotta bear down on this—this guy isn’t a good harmonica player, it isn’t his strength!’” (According to Columbia publicist Billy James, who was at the Belafonte session, Dylan was stomping his foot so hard on the floor that the recording engineer had to jam a pillow under it.)

But that night in the Gaslight told another story. Dylan played at least three ambitious songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” and the results were astounding. The naturally graceful “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was widely interpreted as his take on his separation from Rotolo, and the folksy use of words and phrases like “knowed” lent it a patina of authenticity. But the song also felt universal, something many others would soon start singing in coffeehouses. (When Ramblin’ Jack Elliott included it in one open-mic night at the Gaslight, Dylan, who was in the house, stood up, waved his arms, and said, “I relinquish it to you, Jack,” and it became part of Elliott’s repertoire.) “All of a sudden, little English ballads didn’t count,” Sebastian said. “Suddenly it was, ‘Now we’re here. We’re not there anymore.’”

The music inside The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan fortified Dylan’s artistry as well as the evolution of the community that had nurtured and fueled him. As much as any record released up to that moment, it was the look and sound of the new Greenwich Village. Like his debut, it largely consisted of Dylan accompanying himself. But unlike Bob Dylan, it was dominated by his own material, and the leap he’d made in just over a year was nothing less than remarkable. A few moments, like “Down the Highway” and “Talking World War III Blues,” retained the frolicking, jumping-bean energy of Bob Dylan. But opening austerely with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Freewheelin’ was a more mature and sobering record. Listeners were also confronted, seemingly out of nowhere, with a stern antiwar ballad, “Masters of War,” and the lilting “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” At a time when most pop songs didn’t venture past the three-minute point, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” stretched out to nearly seven minutes. A gentle, rewritten version of “Corinna, Corinna,” a country blues that dated back to the 1920s, gave one of the earliest indications of how Dylan could adapt to a sympathetic backing band. His first album had gone nowhere fast on the charts, but The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan ascended to 22 after its release.

Among Rotolo’s new comrades in the Village was Sylvia Tyson, née Fricker, a Canadian who’d moved to the city in early 1962 with her singing partner, Ian Tyson. The duo, who performed as Ian and Sylvia, had met on the Toronto folk scene in the late fifties and were musically and visually striking. Ian, who’d yearned to be a rodeo cowboy before an injury derailed those plans and led him into music, was movie-star handsome and had a wood-grained baritone; Sylvia sang in a lustrous contralto and was equally attractive. Their voices could blend in unearthly harmonies but also sound as if they were singing separately, like two people having parallel conversations on the same topic. Many assumed they were a couple, even though they were platonic partners at the time.

Thanks to a friend who worked at one of the leading Canadian folk festivals, Tyson and Fricker were able to land a meeting with Grossman in his New York office. At first, Grossman said he wasn’t sure he could handle them, saying he had his hands full with “a new trio” he’d signed. But he eventually agreed to work with them and, during another visit, took them down to the Gaslight, where he introduced them to everyone in sight. At Folk City, Mike Porco, displaying his thick Italian accent once again, referred to them as “Enos and Sylvius.” Grossman also sent them to one of the leading talent-booking agencies, the same one that handled the Kingston Trio. Waiting in the reception area, Sylvia saw a map on the wall sprinkled with red pins that indicated every college in the country that had booked the Kingston Trio. Clearly, the entertainment complex was keyed into something in the culture.

Given Dylan’s sponge-like ability to soak up all the influences around him, the social consciousness apparent in his avalanche of new songs could have been inspired either by the times or by his peers. Sylvia Tyson thought it was at least partly the latter. “It’s my opinion that Dylan didn’t have a political idea in his head until he met Suze,” insisted Tyson, who by then had become close to Rotolo. “She introduced him to all the Beat poets. Suze was a red-diaper baby and was very familiar with the whole leftie scene in the Village, which was her background.” According to Tyson, Ian also affected Dylan: after the two met, she observed, Dylan stopped rolling up his jeans because Ian told him that cowboys didn’t do that.

What no one doubted was that Dylan’s stock and abilities were both rising in ways that surprised those who remembered the funny, fumbling, somewhat chubby kid who’d shown up in town a mere two years before. Dylan clearly knew how to make an impression. When he and Kornfeld would play chess, Kornfeld picked up on his friend’s wiliness. “I would characterize it as, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing—checkmate!’” Kornfeld said. “If we had been playing for money, I would have described him as a chess hustler.” With the black chinos, cowboy boots, and frayed brown-suede jacket he often wore, Dylan was becoming so iconic in the Village that he was the subject of at least one affectionate parody. José Feliciano, a Puerto Rican teenager from the Bronx who’d been blind from birth, had learned to play guitar—or, rather, the guitar succumbed to his love of blues, flamenco, and jazz. Making his debut at Folk City in 1963, he would play versions of pop and folk hits like “A Taste of Honey” and “Walk Right In,” often with his service dog with him. One of those evenings, the Daily News captured Feliciano and a beaming Suze Rotolo sitting next to him onstage; she likely escorted him on and off it. Rotolo was amused by his flawless impersonation of her boyfriend’s speaking voice and wheeze. To Feliciano’s shock, Dylan witnessed it for himself during one of Feliciano’s sets but shrugged it off, telling Feliciano it was fine and he could do whatever he wanted.

In light of his looming legend and aspirations for himself, Dylan needed a consigliere. Who exactly introduced him and Grossman would remain debated. It may have been Noel Stookey during one evening at the Gaslight, although the Times’ Robert Shelton maintained he brought Dylan over to Grossman’s usual table at the club the first time Shelton saw Dylan there, in 1961. (According to Shelton, Grossman said little and, after Dylan left, asked him how successful he thought Van Ronk, not Dylan, could be.)

Either way, Grossman had evidently been keeping both eyes on Dylan: as early as September 1961, he told Izzy Young (noted in Young’s journals) that “Bob Dylan has a much better chance of making it” than others, especially in light of Shelton’s review of Dylan’s show at Folk City that month. Sylvia Tyson insisted it was she and Ian, along with Stookey, who convinced Grossman to add Dylan to his roster. “Albert was very hesitant about signing him,” she said. “He wasn’t that keen on his music. Ian and I and Paul basically pressured Albert to sign him.” However it happened, Dylan informed a startled Thal that he was becoming Grossman’s latest client in the summer of 1962.

Grossman immediately renegotiated Dylan’s one-album deal with Columbia and, with his hand in the publishing income as well, pushed for his other clients to record Dylan’s songs. Ian & Sylvia’s first album for Vanguard relied heavily on traditional songs like “Rambler Rambler” and “Mary Anne” (the latter in a definitive version, their voices poignantly intertwined). But Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” found a place on their second album, Four Strong Winds, and Peter, Paul and Mary included three of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the rowdier “Quit Your Low Down Ways,” on their third album, In the Wind.

Although Dylan’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” was already in stores, it would be Peter, Paul and Mary’s harmonies—which both caressed the melody and lent it a pained, long-suffering quality—that took the song to another cultural level. “How do you translate a Dylan tune that doesn’t have much of a melody?” Travers said. “You make a very moving first harmony part. You construct the harmony part that becomes, then, the melody. Then the melody becomes sort of a solid base. And then you construct the second harmony off of the first harmony. So that all of a sudden, you’ve got movement. You have a part on top, and a part on the bottom, and the melody serving at the bottom.”

Rolled out in June 1963, the trio’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” became the fastest-moving single in Warner Brothers’ brief history, selling 320,000 copies in eight days, or so the label claimed. Radio stations in Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington, DC, began playing it hourly. At the Newport Folk Festival, a month after the record’s release, Dylan—inserted into the bill at Grossman’s urging—led a group sing-along of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Behind him, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Freedom Singers, and Peter, Paul and Mary formed an all-star, all-approving chorus. Not everyone on that stage knew every word to every verse, but the way the title phrase was turned into a wistful chorus made it easy enough to join in. By the end of the year, thanks to that song, Peter, Paul and Mary had three albums in the Top 10 of Cashbox, another of the music business’s leading trade papers.

Meanwhile, the New World Singers could only watch from afar as a song they’d first covered became a milestone for another group with a more aggressive manager and a more prominent record company behind it. “We didn’t stand a shot,” said Happy Traum. “Our version was on Folkways. Peter, Paul and Mary were on Warner Brothers. We didn’t have that kind of clout. Their version was better and more commercial.” Added Delores Dixon, who had left the band by then, “I was a little jealous of Peter, Paul and Mary. But I had to move on.”

Without Dixon, the New World Singers were signed to Atlantic Records that year, and their one and only album for the label included a rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—but not “Blowin’ in the Wind.” During their audition for the label, Atlantic head Ahmet Ertegun, sitting in front of them in a chair, listened intently as they sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” According to Traum, he said, “I like that song. But could you change the words and make it a love song?” Knowing Dylan as they did, the group didn’t bother to ask him for a rewrite.

From his vantage point at the Folklore Center, Izzy Young had witnessed the way folk musicians were competitively jockeying for traditional songs. But one day in 1964, he beheld a very different sight. A few of them, including Tom Paxton and Len Chandler, were trading songs they’d written themselves, and the excitement among them was palpable.

Judy Collins also started noticing the shift. In her first two albums for Elektra, she’d largely relied on traditional songs, as did many of her peers; it wasn’t uncommon to see a few of the same ballads, such as “Poor Lazarus” or “Mary Anne,” on records by different artists. But now Collins was seeing her new home base—she moved to an apartment on Hudson Street in the spring of 1963—becoming a breeding ground for material that adhered to folk traditions but spoke a more personal language. “Tom Paxton would say, ‘I’ve just written this song called “Bottle of Wine”—want to record it?’” she said, referring to a partly whimsical, partly desperate ode to that libation that may have spoken to her own developing drinking issue. “I didn’t write anything, but I had a record contract, and if they could get on my record, that was good for them. It meant their song was going to get out there.” By the time of Judy Collins #3, Collins was including two songs by Dylan, the doleful “Farewell” and “Masters of War.”

Certainly, Dylan’s overwhelming and unexpected new stature, now as a writer as much as a performer, had lit a fire under many Villagers. “When Bob started writing, everyone took notice because nobody was writing songs at that point,” Sylvia Tyson said. “And he was so prolific. The reason a lot of us started writing songs is we thought, ‘If this kid can write songs, we could too.’” The financial rewards were also a lure: as businessmen like Grossman knew all too well, the real money in the business lay with publishing—and royalties that could extend for years, if not decades.

But the times were also calling out for material that hadn’t been written a hundred years before. Beyond the Village, incidents like Governor George Wallace’s attempt to block the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963 kept the civil rights movement on the nightly news and on everyone’s mind. Appearances by Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary at the March on Washington that summer made the connection between topical music and the Village even clearer. To lure Villagers to the march, a pickup truck parked on West Third Street blared a recording of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Meanwhile, the country’s increased involvement in Vietnam—the United States now had more than fifteen thousand troops there—was leading to skepticism about the government at large.

The combined turmoil and outrage came spilling out in songs that could be heard in Folk City, the Gaslight, and the Bitter End. Dylan’s “The Death of Emmett Till” honored the young Black man killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he was accused of disrespecting a white woman. Paxton’s “When Morning Breaks” was a courtly ballad about a soldier preparing for war; his sprightlier “What Did You Learn in School Today” was a sarcastic commentary on the type of simplistic world history taught in schools. “We wanted to write about the life we were observing,” Paxton said, “and we would sing those songs because they got a reaction.” Paxton’s “Daily News” mocked the New York tabloid and its squaresville approach to covering their world because, he said, “everyone hated that paper.”

Ian and Sylvia also joined the growing list of singers who wrote their own material. In about twenty minutes, Ian dashed off “Four Strong Winds,” which had a horse-trot gait and a message of rootlessness and moving into the unknown that spoke to a generation that suddenly wasn’t sure what lay ahead for itself or the country. Another song of departure, “Someday Soon,” was narrated by a woman in love with a rodeo cowboy who provided an exit ramp from her family life. Written during a stay at the Hotel Earle, Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind” was, at heart, an ebullient pop song, even more so when it was remade and restructured a few years later by the We Five.

Although Elektra’s Jac Holzman had been unsure about Paxton, he eventually relented and brought him into the company. Two weeks before he was set to make his first album for the label, Paxton learned a different way to play the G to C chord progression and wrote “The Last Thing on My Mind” in under a half hour. By then, Paxton had married his girlfriend, Margaret Anne (Midge) Cummings, and when he played the lovesick song at the Gaslight, friends approached and asked him, “Everything okay? The song is so sad.” His response, invariably, was “It’s just a song!” (“I wrote in the first person a lot,” he recalled, “and it’s almost never me.”) Songs like Paxton’s “Ramblin’ Boy” and “I Can’t Help but Wonder Where I’m Bound,” which both spoke to the restlessness of his generation, had melodies as sturdily crafted as a well-made cabinet. They felt like they’d always been there, in the air and in coffeehouses.

That creative drive would soon be fueled by newer songwriters flocking to the Village and blending the personal with the political. Raised in Buffalo, New York, Eric Andersen had been a premed student when he caught the folk-music bug and started gigging with a group called the Cradlers, who once opened for Peter, Paul and Mary. At a coffeehouse in San Francisco, run by his future wife Debbie Green, he met Paxton, who tipped him to the Village and its beguiling opportunities, and Andersen landed in New York in February 1964. With his intimate baritone and the way he looked like a male model on a day off, Andersen made his debut at Folk City almost immediately after. At the Gaslight in late February, he played originals that adhered to folk traditions, such as “My Land Is a Good Land,” which evoked the Guthrie standard, but he also included “Come to My Bedside,” a strikingly erotic song that made some, like the Times’ Shelton, take notice.

The previous June, Shelton had written a roundup of “New Folk Singers in ‘Village,’” which included another fresh midwestern refugee, Phil Ochs. Like so many others lining up for the hoot night at Folk City, Ochs had come from elsewhere—in his case, Ohio, where he’d been a journalism major at Ohio State and a would-be folksinger and writer. A shy man who could rabble-rouse when needed, Ochs had been immersed in politics for several years—outraged by the McCarthy hearings, inspired by Kennedy’s presidential victory—when he arrived in New York in 1962. He reconnected with a college friend, Jim Glover, who had also come to the city and had formed a duo, Jim and Jean, with Jean Ray, that regularly played at the Cafe Rafio on Bleecker Street.

Very quickly, Ochs inserted himself into the community, beginning with wanting to join Jim and Jean and make the group a trio. “I didn’t want to do that,” Glover said. “Phil was kind of bossy. But his talent was amazing.” After he moved into Jim and Jean’s small apartment and overwhelmed them with his energy, intensity, and slobby ways, they concocted a plan to get him out by introducing him to their friend Alice Skinner. Soon enough, she and Ochs were a couple, and he moved into her apartment at 178 Bleecker Street, at the corner of Thompson. There, Ochs’s slovenly habits continued: his sister, Sonny, who was three years older and a schoolteacher in Queens, observed what she called one of her brother’s “favorite games”—sitting in the kitchen at night, the lights out, seeing how many cockroaches he could kill in a minute.

Anyone visiting that apartment—a list that would include most of the notables on the scene—could see that Ochs, who had a passion for songs triggered by current events, was plugged into current events. “He watched the news religiously,” said Andersen, who met Ochs soon after he moved to Manhattan and spent time in that apartment. “Nobody could talk when the news came on.”

On the surface, Ochs didn’t look like any sort of radical: he kept his hair short and sang in a clear, vibrato-free tenor that recalled country singers like Faron Young. But his intensity spilled over into the songs he began writing and introducing at Folk City and at the Third Side, a coffeehouse on West Third Street whose owner guaranteed him twenty dollars for any set. By mid-1963, Ochs had already written over fifty tunes, including ripped-from-the-headlines zingers about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Black activist and journalist (and FBI target) William Worthy, and the Birmingham, Alabama, protest that resulted in police employing dogs and fire hoses to beat back the crowd of Black protesters. Bobbing and weaving while singing, strands of hair falling in his face, Ochs had a nervous, infectious energy; he was a musical crusade and parade that swept people along with it.

On the day of his audition for the Gaslight, Ochs developed a crushing headache and, to the surprise of Sam Hood, said he had to undergo a spinal tap. Although he was barely able to sing, he still showed up for his audition and became a regular at the club. “He developed an audience so quickly,” Hood told Van Ronk. “Probably quicker than anyone else I had.” Broadside would soon declare that he was “virtually alone in his field” in the matter of topical material—while also wondering, in light of the increased attention on him, “Can he maintain a sincerity of principle despite material prosperity?… For Phil Ochs, on whom the future of topical music now rides, ‘these are the days of decision,’” quoting one of his song titles. At that moment, those days had arrived for Ochs and his friends in the area.

Happy Traum was back in the Gaslight, attending an open-mic night, when what he called “this large guy with a Guild guitar and no teeth” walked through the crowd. “I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’” he said. “It was unusual to see a Black guy among all those folkies.”

Over six feet tall, Richie Havens made an impression on multiple fronts. Missing his top row of teeth before later implants, he used his left thumb to barre chords on his guitar and sang in a gravel-road voice that lay somewhere between folk, soul, and the gospel group he joined when he was in high school. At seventeen, he’d left home—dismantling his family’s dream of him becoming a surgeon—to move to the Village, where he made a decent living painting portraits of the tourists who came to gawk at beatniks. He began working the basket-house circuit, strumming his guitar with a fervor that threatened to bust all its strings and made anyone who followed him sound flimsy by comparison. “There was no touching this, that rhythm thing,” said Sebastian. “The pail would be passed around and the audience would empty its pockets. By the time you got on, there was nothing left.”

People of color and of alternative lifestyles continued to make their way to the Village. The Moroccan Village, a club on Eighth Street, was home to singers and female impersonators. At the corner of MacDougal and Eighth, the Bon Soir was as much its own world as the Page Three, which had been a shelter for Sheila Jordan and Tiny Tim. The club had once been home base for Mae Barnes, a Black singer and dancer whose 1953 recording “(I Ain’t Gonna Be No) Topsy” became an early Black-pride moment. The Bon Soir’s emcee, Jimmie Daniels, was a gay Black man. (The spot was also known as the launching pad for a young Brooklyn singer named Barbra Streisand, who played engagements there until the fall of 1962.) Each night it was open, the Bon Soir would undergo a makeover after the largely white dinner crowd left and a primarily Black clientele took over for the second show.

At the same time, Black music fans and musicians alike were sometimes made to feel like outsiders. In 1961 Art D’Lugoff claimed he heard police make a “racially insensitive comment” about the Blacks in the audience at the Village Gate one night, which led to the Police Department launching an inquiry into the accusations. Black musicians, particularly on the folk circuit, were still considered so uncommon that one night during her New World Singers days, Delores Dixon and a friend were ordered to step into a patrol car as they walked along MacDougal Street. The women weren’t told what they’d done wrong, but Dixon heard one of the cops say, “We’ll take you someplace and then let you go.” Dixon began crying so much that the cops told her friend, “Would you shut her up?” Ultimately, they grew so tired of Dixon’s weeping that both women were asked to step out of the car. Only later did Dixon realize that the cops assumed she and her friend were prostitutes. “I used to think the police were my friends,” she said. “But then I realized that they’re men.”

Havens was far from the only Black vernacular singer trying to carve out a living and a career on the scene. Odetta, who had joined Van Ronk for the opening of the Cafe Bizarre, continued to loom over the community, conveying enormous dignity and steadfastness. After seeing her perform before he moved to New York, Dylan ditched the electric guitar he’d had in Minnesota and traded it in for an acoustic model, altering the course of his music in the process. Odetta would regularly appear as a headliner on the scene, as when she played the Village Gate for several weeks in the summer of 1963.

The scene was also supported, in a sense literally, by at least two Black musicians. Bruce Langhorne, a guitarist who hailed from Florida but had come north after his parents divorced, played on Carolyn Hester’s Columbia debut; Peter, Paul and Mary’s first album; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan; and Odetta records. On some of those occasions, he was joined by Bill Lee, the southern-born jazz upright bassist who was becoming the go-to bottom end for folk-music sessions. Tom Wilson, the sharp-dressed, laid-back Columbia staff producer who oversaw albums by Dylan, Hester, Pete Seeger, and others—and recruited Langhorne for some of that work—was himself Black, a rarity in the music business of that era. “There were no racial components at the time,” Langhorne said. “At least, none that affected us.” When he wasn’t appearing on Broadway or film, in works like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Louis Gossett Jr. sang in a folk duo.

Watching the community expand from his space inside the Folklore Center, Izzy Young felt those advances weren’t enough. “There is a real wall of segregation in the folk music scene I’m part of,” he said to Richard Reuss. “We’ll listen to the old Negro singers, and a bit of the young Negro singers trying to sound right for the white audience, but nothing is being done about the young Negro kids that are speaking to real audiences, mostly Negro.”

Few experienced the struggles as up close as Len Chandler, the Village’s most prominent Black folksinger. Originally from Akron, Ohio, Chandler was no mere strummer. In high school, he played oboe and English horn (the oboe’s alto sibling) and was introduced to folk by one of his teachers. After graduating from the University of Akron in 1957, Chandler won a scholarship to Columbia to study advanced orchestral instrumentation and moved to Manhattan. A professor took him on a Village walking tour, which included a stop at the relatively new Folklore Center, where he met Van Ronk. On the side, Chandler began working with troubled teens at a facility near Washington Square Park and began singing there himself. He even talked Van Ronk into playing for the kids, experiencing Van Ronk’s taskmaster side along the way. “He was very critical of the way you would approach a song or the guitar,” Chandler told author Elijah Wald. “He would come and look at me carefully. If you played a certain way with your thumb, he hated that.”

In the park, Chandler also met Romney and was invited to join him for a show in Hartford, Connecticut, where a musician was needed to sing between poetry readings. That job, in turn, led to Chandler making his debut at the Gaslight on bills with Romney and John Brent (which included Chandler’s impromptu song during the Fire Department bust in 1961). Taking Chandler under his wing, Romney suggested he ditch his slacks and sports jacket for black jeans and a work shirt with a turtleneck dickey underneath; the look became Chandler’s uniform. “I don’t try to make anybody believe I’m a sharecropper,” he told the Daily News. “I came up through different musical schools. I try to clothe my thoughts in poetry.” After he was offered a job on a television show in Detroit, Chandler left New York for four months. Upon his return, he noticed half the folksingers he encountered in the Village wearing the outfit he’d adopted.

Chandler quickly grew in stature on the scene. He was the first musician Paxton saw play in the Village, likely at the Gaslight, and it was Chandler who invited Paxton to join him for a guest set there. The week after the “beatnik riot” in the park, a pictorial in the New York Post included a shot of Chandler looking on approvingly as the Sunday sessions resumed. Gaslight manager Sam Hood would later say that Chandler was the first Black man he’d ever met, but that gave him no pause in booking him and paying him $175 a week—$25 more than most, and $50 more than Paxton.

Chandler sported a goatee and a hearty, husky voice born to lead sing-alongs on protest songs like “Which Side Are You On” and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”; his was the first version of the latter song that some in town, including Paxton, ever heard. “The heart of the Gaslight was Len,” said Noel Stookey. “If you were upset and left the stage visibly shaken, he’d come over and ask if you were okay. He was the most outwardly caring person in the Village.” On Cynthia Gooding’s Folksingers Choice radio show on WBAI, Dylan would say he “stole the melody” for “The Death of Emmett Till” from a song Chandler had written about a tragic collision between a train and a school bus in Colorado that left nearly two dozen children dead.

But as open-minded and tolerant as the Village could be, especially when it came to alternative lifestyles and musicians of different races interacting, Chandler’s journey was never easy. Bitter End manager Paul Colby would recall the moment Chandler ran into his club after being chased by a group of white kids with baseball bats. Chandler had seen them hitting another Black man and tried to intervene, only to be hunted himself. Another evening on MacDougal Street, Chandler—who, Dylan would later write, had the physique of a football player—attempted to hail a cab, which started to speed up rather than slow down for him. As Hood watched (and told Van Ronk), Chandler reached into the front seat through an open window and began smacking the driver, running alongside as the car continued down the block. “He was crazy brave,” Paxton recalled. “He wouldn’t back down, ever.”

Visiting a friend in a West Village apartment building in the summer of 1963, Chandler accidentally knocked on the wrong door, and the startled resident—whom Chandler would later describe as Jamaican, although Hood heard he was Hispanic—mistook him for a burglar and hit him on the head with a pipe. As Chandler tumbled down a set of marble stairs during the brawl, nerves in two of his fingers were severed. Since he was scheduled to perform at the March on Washington several weeks later, he prematurely removed the cast from his fingers. Dylan, who also became friendly with Chandler, visited him at Bellevue Hospital. Fortunately, he healed well enough that he was able to play on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day. With Dylan and Joan Baez behind him, he barreled through “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” a decades-old traditional song that had taken on new relevance in the civil rights era.

Chandler even added to the growing Village songbook. With poet Bob Kaufman, he rearranged and rewrote “Green, Green Rocky Road,” a traditional children’s song, into something imbued with adult yearning. Before long, everyone seemed to be taking a crack at it during paid gigs or open-mic nights. Yet the industry didn’t seem to know what to make of Chandler. He was the first musician booked into the Bitter End, months before Peter, Paul and Mary made their career-making appearances there. But at that point, he could be heard on only one album—The Beat Generation, a 1960 compilation recorded at the Gaslight, where he shared LP space with Romney and Brent. Still, two songs on an album were better than none.

As the mid-sixties came into view, friction remained between the businesses and residents who predated the music scene and the increasingly boisterous new cafés. The Mob still loomed over the area, although its presence could be almost comical at times. At the bottom of the steps leading into the Gaslight sat a cigarette machine. David Bromberg, a nimble guitarist from Tarrytown, New York, who had started venturing into the neighborhood, noticed that it never seemed to be operational and asked Clarence Hood about it. Without specifying why, Hood told him he had to have it there—but he rebelled by not plugging it in. The basket houses weren’t exempt, either. With guitarist Steve Weber, who shared his taste for the offbeat and arcane, Peter Stampfel formed the Holy Modal Rounders, who began remaking old-timey songs with rewritten, skewed lyrics. While playing at one of the basket houses in the neighborhood, the two were approached by what Stampfel recalled as “the lowest-level Mafia people”—who tried shaking down the musicians for the dollar they’d just earned.

Starting in March 1962, the License Department had been put in charge of approving paperwork for those businesses. But thanks to miscommunication between that office and the Buildings Department over exactly which one would sign off on licenses, only a handful of clubs, including the Cafe Bizarre, the Bitter End, and the Cafe Wha?, were granted licenses to operate. Nearly three dozen others, including the Gaslight, were still awaiting approval. The basket houses, such as the Four Winds, the Zig Zag, and the Why Not, were keenly aware that they were allowed to feature only three instruments and no singers. The staff at the Four Winds worked out a system whereby the “drags”—workers who stood outside trying to lure people in—would signal those inside the club if they saw a cop walking in the café’s direction; whoever was onstage would immediately stop singing. Susan Martin Robbins, a performer who also comanaged the space for a time, recalled how her guitar skills improved exponentially because she couldn’t sing during those moments.

But little about those regulations mollified the residents and shopkeepers who saw sightseeing buses barreling down their narrow streets, their drivers calling out the names of cafés as they passed. At least once, the tension turned horrifically violent. On the last day of March 1963, Ronald Von Ehmsen, the thirty-one-year-old owner of Cafe Rafio, where Jean and Jim had landed a residency, was walking his Doberman a few doors down from the café when he was approached by seventy-three-year-old Simone Pepe. Pepe was not happy: Ehmsen was planning to expand the Rafio, which meant that Pepe would soon face eviction. The two began arguing, and Pepe pumped three bullets from his .32 caliber revolver into the man locals called “Von.” The café owner managed to drag himself into a nearby liquor store, where he died; Pepe himself died a few months later. The situation was also playing out politically. For the job of Democratic Party leader of the district that included the Village, Carmine DeSapio, the longtime Tammany Hall figure, was running for reelection against Ed Koch, who was taking a much firmer stance against the commotion, including coffeehouse employees who stood outside and loudly attempted to entice customers. Koch handily won, ending DeSapio’s power in the community.

The federal government now joined the list of Village overseers. On February 6, 1963, Martin Crowe, a special agent with the FBI, appeared at 190 Waverly Place, a five-story apartment building with fire escapes lining its front windows. As the Bureau knew, the address had been home to Van Ronk and Thal since the previous December. Their friend Barry Kornfeld had moved in first, in an apartment on the third floor, for all of $91 per month in rent, and the Van Ronks took a place catty-corner to his on the same floor. Van Ronk, Thal, and Kornfeld would soon by joined in the building by Patrick Sky, who’d grown up in Louisiana and become part of the Florida coffeehouse scene before moving to New York. There, his combination of tender ballads (like “Many a Mile”) and sarcastic wit set him apart both onstage and off. Times critic Robert Shelton lived across the street, at 191 Waverly.

With the help of the building superintendent, Crowe verified that Van Ronk lived in apartment 3F. Then Crowe made his way to Folk City. There, he was told Van Ronk was, in the words of a later report, “not currently appearing nor scheduled to appear in the near future,” although the club confirmed that Van Ronk had performed at Folk City in the past. Inspecting the Queens telephone books, Crowe determined that Van Ronk’s mother, Grace, still lived in Richmond Hill; then he reached out to the New York branch of the Selective Service for Van Ronk’s files. With the help of an employee of the New York Telephone Company, Crowe was also able to obtain Van Ronk’s number, which was registered under Thal’s name. A memo dated February 14, 1963—ironically, Valentine’s Day—listed all the details of his wedding to Thal, down to the name of the city official who conducted the ceremony and the presence of a “Thomas R. Paxton” as Van Ronk’s best man.

Two weeks later, Crowe rounded up all that background information on Van Ronk—whom he described as “a folksinger and guitar player” largely associated with the Gaslight—into a comprehensive report that detailed, with startling clarity, how much the Bureau was continuing to keep tabs on the musician. The write-up touched upon his connection to the New York branch of the Socialist Party, beginning in November 1962; how he had attended five meetings between then and a month before Crowe’s visit; and his connection to the Socialist Youth League back to the late fifties. Crowe noted that Van Ronk had entertained at “various” Socialist Worker Party functions throughout 1962 and had given “a lecture on African music and jazz” at the Militant Labor Forum on University Place in November 1962. It was also pointed out that Van Ronk participated in an antigovernment protest outside the Waldorf-Astoria, where, during a banquet dinner, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was given an award by the American Jewish Congress.

One of several follow-up reports included a copy of an ad for Folk City, where Van Ronk—called “The Lion of the Blues” in the flyer—would be playing in late April. On May 22, Crowe stopped by the Gaslight, where he spoke with an “unknown individual” who confirmed that Van Ronk regularly played the venue. At that point, Crowe suggested the case be closed “inasmuch as there is no outstanding investigation in this case.” FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was of another mind and pressed the Bureau to continue looking into Van Ronk. That July 1963, in a memo called “David Ritz Van Ronk—Security Matter—Socialist Worker Party,” Hoover made it clear that the coast guard should be contacted in order to glean more backup on Van Ronk’s time in the merchant marine.

The FBI also began monitoring Phil Ochs. In what would amount to a file more than four hundred pages long, the Bureau made note of his 1963 essays on Woody Guthrie, reported on his appearances at a 1964 rally, described his songs as “un-American,” and, according to Ochs biographer Marc Eliot, “looked into his business associations, his membership in the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, his neighbors on Thompson Street, his credit rating, his driver’s license and Motor Vehicle records, and his voter registration history.” (Various attempts had been made to draft Ochs into the army.)

Even Dylan wasn’t exempt. Suze Rotolo already had an FBI file that took note of her application for a passport in 1961 (for a European trip) and its renewal in 1964. During a trip to Prague, it was noted that she was associating with “Communists and Communist front groups,” and she was tracked when she visited Cuba in the summer of 1964. When agents approached her at her new Avenue B apartment, she told them, “I have nothing to say to you. Bye bye.” By then, she had broken up with Dylan, but her former lover wasn’t ignored. Another report noted she had dated “Bob Dylan, the folksinger,” and his performance at the December 1963 Bill of Rights dinner in New York, where he was handed the Tom Paine Award for his work for “civil liberties,” was cited. That same report noted that in his acceptance speech, which was delivered a month after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Dylan said he “agreed in part with Lee Harvey Oswald and thought that he understood Oswald, but would not have gone as far as Oswald did.”

Not everyone took the government surveillance seriously. “It was a given that under Hoover’s FBI, you were going to be under the camera, or at least there was a likelihood,” said Kornfeld. “It was sort of romantic.” Dylan appeared to be aware of the situation, although it was hard to gauge how much it affected him. Years later, Shelton told Dylan about an unusual sight at Folk City soon after Shelton’s first review of Dylan had appeared in the Times: a man in his forties or fifties, far from the usual age bracket for the club, was smiling at everyone. Shelton joked to Dylan that people thought he might be an FBI man, and Dylan replied that he remembered him and that the person in question was a cop. When Shelton asked if the stranger had been looking out for Dylan in particular, Dylan replied that cops had been on his tail for some time, but not so much during the previous year.

During this time, the Treasury Department wrote to the Bureau of Special Services at New York’s Police Department, alerting them to an investigation underway to determine “the suitability of the above-named individual”: Dylan. The Police Department was asked if it had any files that “contain any record of traffic or criminal violations or of subversive activities.” The address the Treasury official was given for Dylan was Grossman’s office on West Fifty-Fifth Street. The agency was thoughtful enough to include a “self-addressed envelope which requires no postage.” No letter of response would surface in the city’s archives.

In the summer of 1963, Van Ronk and Kalb found themselves sharing a stage, but in an unconventional setting and with an unusual lineup. In a twist that was even more unexpected than folk or folk-style songs wending their way onto the pop charts, jug bands were suddenly trending. Made with kazoos, washboards, and stringed instruments, jug was a type of roots novelty music that didn’t take itself too seriously even if genuine musicianship was involved. In the Boston and Cambridge area, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band ruled the scene. Washington Square Park gave birth to the Even Dozen Jug Band, cofounded by two guitarists, Stefan Grossman and Peter Siegel, and eventually including other local talents such as John Sebastian and Van Ronk student Steve Katz, along with Maria D’Amato (later Muldaur), a sassy-voiced Italian American who’d also grown up in the neighborhood. After Izzy Young stepped in to manage them, the group made an album for Elektra while they were all still in their late teens. The mania for the music was akin to a shooting star; the Even Dozen Jug Band went straight from playing in the park to multi-act shows at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.

Village Vanguard owner Max Gordon had witnessed the drawing power of the Kweskin band during a visit to Cambridge. As Van Ronk would recall, Gordon asked Shelton if there were any jug bands in New York, especially since the Even Dozen had quickly disbanded, and Shelton directed him to Van Ronk as a starting point. Game for anything, Van Ronk pulled together a group that included Kalb, Kornfeld, mandolinist Artie Rose, and his friend, multi-instrumentalist and historian Sam Charters. Gordon booked them for a week at the Vanguard in August 1963.

By then, Dylan and Joan Baez were in the heat of their romance. Baez, who was still based out of Cambridge, had been hearing about the Village and dropped by the Cafe Wha? on a night when Romney was reciting poetry. At someone’s instigation, she began singing along with him during his reading. She and Dylan likely first met at Folk City in the spring of 1961, shortly after the “beatnik riot” when Dylan was appearing there. “It was what everyone was talking about, so I went in that spirit of, ‘Okay, what’s going on here?’” Baez recalled. “He was such a scruffy, funny-sounding kid, but then I heard the words. Eventually I got to like that voice, but these words were coming out. I was with my boyfriend at that point, who was gritting his teeth because he could see I was fascinated with Bob and the music. I guess he could see the writing on the wall.” Meeting in front of the club afterward, Dylan played a song for Baez and her younger sister Mimi. “I was so pigheaded that I didn’t realize he had a crush on Mimi,” she said. “I didn’t realize until someone told me years later. I was so self-obsessed that it didn’t dawn on me that someone would be interested in anyone other than me.”

By 1963, though, the two were inseparable, a fact that Van Ronk and his new group couldn’t help but notice at their Village Vanguard debut. “Goddamn, Bob and Joan showed up and were sort of going through their moment of a real passion,” Charters said. “They were sort of fumbling with each other underneath the table, so all the people who came were really paying all the attention to Joan and Bobby, and not much attention to us up on the stage.”

That year, the industry also turned its head, for the first time, to Van Ronk. After making three albums for Prestige—including In the Tradition, which found him returning to one of his favorite genres with the Red Onion Jazz Band—Van Ronk had signed with his largest company to date, Mercury. His jug-band excursion would be his first LP for the company. Released in time for its Vanguard gigs, Dave Van Ronk and the Ragtime Jug Stompers found the group romping through versions of songs by Fats Waller, Sonny Terry, and Jesse Fuller; Van Ronk’s voice sometimes sounded like a kazoo itself.

As another relatively recent arrival to the city was learning, the Vanguard was hosting even more forward-looking music. In 1961 a bus from Chicago brought twenty-one-year-old pianist Herbie Hancock to Manhattan. In his home city, Hancock had been a child prodigy, joining the Chicago Symphony for a Mozart performance when he was a mere eleven. After attending college in Iowa, he played with Coleman Hawkins and, back in Chicago, Donald Byrd. Invited to New York to join Byrd’s band, Hancock soon found himself playing with Byrd at the Five Spot, and he was enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music.

Then Hancock met an even more audacious boss, and in a new downtown setting. In the few years following 1959’s Kind of Blue, Miles Davis had been outpaced by younger players and appeared to be in a creative depression. Starting in 1963, though, he assembled a fluid new band featuring bassist Ron Carter, saxophonist George Coleman (soon to be replaced by Wayne Shorter), teenage drummer Tony Williams, and Hancock. With them, Davis’s so-called “second great quintet” began undoing and reassembling standards and blues. In February 1964, the group was booked into the prestigious Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center to support a benefit for voter registration in Mississippi and Louisiana, but Davis also needed a smaller room to work out his revised approach.

Jazz continued to thrive, sometimes just south or east of the Village. The Five Spot had moved farther east, to St. Mark’s Place, after the original space was demolished to make way for an apartment building. In the spring, Nina Simone held court, as she frequently did, at the Village Gate. D’Lugoff had booked her into his venue during its first year, after the former Eunice Kathleen Waymon recorded her first album and her version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy” became the least likely song anyone would have expected to crack the Top 20. Although she would soon be bankable enough to headline Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, Simone returned to the Gate regularly, calling it her “home club.”

A 1961 show was recorded for a live album, At the Village Gate, and the songs on it—light on the standards that made Simone’s name, heavy on vernacular numbers, like a rumbling “The House of the Rising Sun” and a brooding version of the gospel standard “Children Go Where I Send You”—seemed to absorb the genres then associated with the neighborhood. Her Gate shows were equally notable for their attendant drama. Between songs one night, she looked up from her piano and glared at the crowd after what she considered an insufficiently positive response. “You’re not giving one thing tonight,” she told them. Among those in the crowd was budding actor James Cromwell, who worked as a maintenance man at the club and was able to get into shows for free.

Meanwhile, at the Vanguard, Hancock and the audience were able to witness Davis’s genius up close. Onstage, Davis had a reputation for turning his back to the people in the seats or pointing his trumpet toward the floor or wall. Seeing it for himself at the Vanguard, Hancock noticed that there was an element of shtick to it and that some in the audience, possibly tourists, came to see the notoriously mercurial Davis ignore them. “People would feel insulted by that, and they would come down here to see him do it,” Hancock said. “Part of him was thinking, ‘Well, this is actually working for me, so I might as well actually do that!’”

But Hancock also observed that Davis wasn’t belittling the audience as much as he was facing the band; he seemed less like a moody bandleader and more like a conductor. If Davis heard something Carter was doing, he might pivot to the bass player and launch into a musical counterpoint; the same would be true with Williams, Hancock, or Coleman. When Davis would point his instrument toward the ceiling or down at the floor, Hancock also realized he was essentially playing the Vanguard. “He was exploring how it sounded coming off of the wood of the floor or how it sounded coming off of the angles of the walls,” he said. “I never saw him do that as a disrespect for the audience. And people just never understood.”

Although Van Ronk’s own stint at the Vanguard was brief, he was proud of Dave Van Ronk and the Ragtime Jug Stompers; Kalb called his jazz-derived solo on “You’s a Viper” the best he’d ever recorded. But the jug-band craze came and went quickly, as pop-culture fads tended to do, and Kalb also felt that current events interfered as well. At the end of “You’s a Viper”—“viper” being uptown slang for a toker—he and Van Ronk had fun with jive-talk riffing: “We could switch to junk,” one of them said, while the other wisecracked about how “junk” was spelled “JFK.” When Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, just as the record was being released, the timing couldn’t have been worse, and Van Ronk’s first attempt to cash in on a pop moment was ignored.

A week before Kennedy’s assassination, an Associated Press reporter, in search of the folk-music escalation in New York, ventured into Washington Square Park. There, during the Sunday-afternoon hootenannies, he watched a “pale girl uniformed in jeans, bulky sweater and long blonde hair.” Her song of choice was a plaintive version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which, after only a few months on the radio, had joined the repertoire for songs any upcoming folksinger needed to learn.

The appearance of Dylan material in a gathering that tended to favor traditional songs was just one of many indications that the scene was evolving in ways no one could have predicted. The Greenwich Village Inn, one of the earliest bars in the area, was now an apartment complex. The downtown Cafe Society had become home to off-Broadway plays, not music. After selling the Gaslight, John Mitchell was now running the Fat Black Pussycat, the new name for the Commons. There, Tiny Tim established himself as less of a freak and more of a music-geek novelty act that everyone needed to experience. But trouble seemed to follow Mitchell: asked to leave town by the Mob, which threatened to bomb or smoke out the club, he was soon gone. Mitchell was reportedly in Tangiers, Morocco, before resurfacing in Spain, where he opened a new Fat Black Pussycat.

As the Daily News announced that fall, though, “The folk music craze is sweeping New York,” even citing an exact number of folksingers—100—who worked downtown. Greenwich Village Story, a potboiler movie that showed up in theaters in 1963, included contrived footage of beatniks dancing; it also re-created the inside of the Gaslight, with Noel Stookey making a brief appearance alongside a “Gaslight Cafe” sign constructed expressly for the film. Musicians from other parts of the country were curious as well. Johnny Cash, deep into his addiction to pills, popped into the actual Gaslight to catch a set by Peter LaFarge. Cash was so stoned and discombobulated that he walked right into the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling of the combined kitchen and dressing room, smashing it, and the room went dark.

The days when it was possible to saunter into the Gaslight, the Bitter End, or Folk City to see Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, or Judy Collins were now over. They were all now being booked into larger uptown venues, such as Town Hall; Peter, Paul and Mary were commanding four thousand dollars per show. But enough musicians, singers, and writers remained downtown. In a Village Voice ad, Bitter End owner Fred Weintraub sarcastically apologized for the club’s prices—“75 cents for espresso, 75 cents for a stein of dopey cider”—by saying he compensated by booking talents like the Weavers’ Ronnie Gilbert and a new comic, Dick Cavett. “If you want coffee go to Riker’s,” he wrote, adding, “if you want coffee and swinging entertainment,” the Bitter End was the destination, as was the Village itself. In the course of a few weeks in September and October 1963, it would have been possible to see Odetta or Cuban bandleader and percussionist Mongo Santamaria at the Village Gate, Bill Evans at the Vanguard, or Fred Neil and his singing and strumming partner, Vince Martin, at the Gaslight.

Opening for Clarence “Tom” Ashley and the Irish Ramblers at Folk City on October 22, 1963, was a new duo that called itself Kane and Garr. They weren’t actually all that fresh, nor were those their real names. In their hometown of Forest Hills, Queens, they’d been known as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, then as Tom and Jerry, whose “Hey, Schoolgirl” made them one-generic-hit wonders in the late fifties. After the duo split and each had gone off to college and travel adventures, folk pulled them back toward each other. Simon had tapped into the folk scene at Queens College and then in England—writing songs that weren’t remotely political but had the guitar style and melodic range down—and before long the two were playing open-mic nights at the Gaslight. One of those songs, “Bleecker Street,” had a melancholy, gently floating melody that evoked the early-morning hours in the Village, after the clubs had closed and customers began making their way home on streets not nearly as crowded as the night before. When Simon (who would sometimes use the stage name Paul Kane) sang a new song, “The Sound of Silence” for Columbia Records producer Tom Wilson, the duo had a record deal. The label urged them to change their name—the Rye Catchers was one suggestion, since the J. D. Salinger novel it played off was now a generational touchstone—but they stuck with their given last names.

Barry Kornfeld, who had seen Simon around the Queens College campus they’d both attended, got to know him better when Simon remade himself, in the Village tradition, as a thoughtful balladeer with pop smarts. The two started spending time together playing songs, and at the Gaslight, Simon asked Kornfeld to accompany him and Garfunkel on their first album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. In the Village, though, Simon and Garfunkel never quite fit in. Starting with Simon’s short hair, they looked a little too well-groomed for the scene, and Simon was said to have been irritated when Dylan talked throughout one of their sets, likely at Folk City; Kornfeld said Dylan would dismiss Simon as “a friend of Kornfeld’s.”

The alternately convivial, carousing, and driven community that did fit in often gathered at the Kettle of Fish. Sitting above the Gaslight on street level, the Kettle—dubbed a “bohemian mecca” by the Daily News in 1958, eight years after it opened—now made for a convenient hangout and watering hole for musicians, before or after gigs. It still pulled in working-class regulars and locals who wanted cheap beer in a sawdust-floor setting. But neither the bar nor its owner, Guido Giampieri, were “mobbed up,” as Van Ronk and others said, and the curtained windows offered a degree of privacy for the musicians gathered at the round front tables.

Van Ronk could still be found there, holding court and intimidating more than a few—like John Hammond, the son of the Columbia Records legend. The younger Hammond had grown up in the Village and was now playing his own form of blues. “Dave was kind of a gruff, opinionated guy, and to hang out with him was to get an earful of opinions about everything,” Hammond recalled. “He was a little intimidating to me. I kept my distance. I was not one of his guys.” Dylan, back in Van Ronk’s good graces after their falling-out over “House of the Rising Sun,” could be found there together, although they remained sparring partners. “Bob and Dave had big, long arguments over a giant bottle of burgundy wine, about everything and nothin’,” said Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “They just liked to argue. Bob used to put a mark on how much they’d drink out of that gallon jug of wine.” (To Anthony Scaduto, Van Ronk would refer to those evenings as “our wine-drinking nights of arguing.”) When she was still living in her Village apartment, Judy Collins would watch as some of her fellow musicians straggled into the Kettle in the morning to sober up and start their day. Collins herself was not averse to letting it rip: after friends gave her a first-ever hit of acid, she drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam to come down from it.

Watching some nights from the bar on the left side was Woody Guthrie’s teenage son, Arlo. Eager to see what a day in the Village was like, Guthrie had once parked himself in front of the Gaslight for twenty-four hours. In the morning, he saw women opening their windows and shaking out the rugs, followed by the garbagemen. “Everybody had their five or ten minutes,” he recalled. During the afternoon, the street remained quiet, very few people walking by him, but by six or seven at night, things grew crowded. At the Gaslight, Giampieri and his crew allowed Guthrie to sit at the bar and nurse a Scotch and soda, thanks to his lineage. He would see the gang—Dylan, Van Ronk, Ochs—“goofin’ off and having fun.” But the five- to seven-year age difference between him and them made them seem like the “serious guardians” of the form, and at that point he was never encouraged to join their table.

To some, like Buffy Sainte-Marie, the scene remained oppressively male. While studying Asian philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Sainte-Marie found in the folk revival a style of music ideal for her impressive tremolo, the way her voice could fluctuate in volume. Sainte-Marie, who said she had Cree Nation ancestry, wrote songs like “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” and sang them in a coffeehouse near the campus. Visiting New York, she learned more about the blossoming downtown music world and went to one of the Monday open-mic nights at Folk City. There she met Dylan, who suggested she drop by the Gaslight, where Sam Hood booked her in August 1963. That performance led to a rapturous Times review by Shelton that called her “one of the most promising new talents on the folk scene” and cited two songs in particular, the historically minded “The Universal Soldier” and the harrowing “Cod’ine.”

As a woman on the scene, Sainte-Marie was happy to land work in coffeehouses rather than bars, with their potentially boisterous male drunks. “A pretty woman standing on a stage with a guitar—are you kidding me?” she said. “I wasn’t going to sing in a damn bar.” The coffeehouses were more welcoming, yet the combination of her ethnicity and gender still made her feel, in her words, like “a guest,” and she rarely wandered into the Kettle of Fish, where Van Ronk would often be found with Patrick Sky, the troubadour who’d moved to New York after meeting Sainte-Marie in Florida (the two became lovers, and he followed her north).

But to Sainte-Marie, the community was “controlled, misogynistic and really white,” which became apparent when she premiered an uncompromising song, “My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” at the Gaslight. It chronicled the way indigenous people in North America had suffered or been humiliated or marginalized. “The reaction was, ‘Oh, the little Indian girl must be mistaken—we wouldn’t do nasty things like that,’” she recalled. “There was a sense of being patronized. People were so unfamiliar with the American genocide that they just couldn’t believe it. Most people did not know anything about indigenous anything.” She found it hard to reconcile images of some of the performers on the scene “having their pictures taken at a well-publicized rally” and the reaction to some of her material. “I had something totally different on my mind than ‘hang down your head, Tom Dooley,’” she said, “and I didn’t believe the answer was blowing in the wind, either.”

Given the amount of alcohol and the late-night hours in bars, it was hardly surprising when that same crowd turned libidinous. Paxton and Sylvia Fricker went on a few dates, which, according to Paxton, precipitated her marrying Ian Tyson in the summer of 1964. Collins had an intense fling with David Blue, a would-be actor from Rhode Island who’d shown up in the Village in 1960, when he was still David Cohen. Tall and roguishly handsome, Blue had started washing dishes at the Gaslight, worked his way into the songwriting gang there, and eventually began composing. At some point, Blue—who changed his last name at the suggestion of Andersen, who thought the word “blue” defined him—met and befriended Dylan, whose sense of humor matched Blue’s. As legend had it, it was at the Fat Black Pussycat that Dylan asked Blue to strum chords as he wrote out lyrics for what became “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Collins would describe Blue as “deliciously cute” while also remembering the cowboy boots he didn’t always remove when they found themselves in his single bed. Hood would later tell Van Ronk that he caught the two of them going at it in the kitchen of the Gaslight.

The atmosphere could also turn rivalrous. Paxton felt jealous when Eric Andersen, who had come to New York on Paxton’s advice, quickly scored a record deal with Vanguard. Andersen also benefited from a gleaming New York Times review by Shelton—who, Andersen claimed, arranged for that Folk City show and offered to manage him. “I’m saying, ‘Wait a minute—no one’s written about me in the Times!’” Paxton said. “What’s wrong with this picture? It was so competitive in that respect. You were happy for your friends’ success but wanted some yourself.” Dick Weissman of the Journeymen, who also made a living as a studio musician, felt a degree of contempt from the New Lost City Ramblers’ purity-minded John Cohen when the two would encounter each other in the Folklore Center. “I didn’t care for him, and I had no desire to defend myself against charges of commerciality,” Weissman said. “That was an argument I had with myself that I had settled, and I wasn’t into re-creating it. And I didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”

That said, the community could be supportive, too, musicians going out of their way to support their friends. “If you were playing a gig at the Gaslight you’d have your break and you’d go running over to the Bitter End or Gerde’s and see who was on,” said Happy Traum. “And they always let you in because they knew you, so you never had to pay. It was competitive, but people were helping each other out.” One night over beer at the Kettle, Dylan leaned over to Paxton and sang another new song into his ear—“Gates of Eden,” a surrealistic dystopian ballad in the folk tradition. “People would be sitting at the bar at night and the next morning they’d come in with a new song,” said Arthur Gorson, a college-age activist who, like Terri Thal, found himself managing a few of the locals (in his case, Ochs and Blue). “This whole crew of people were writing five or six songs a week and then they’d go downstairs to the Gaslight and show off the new songs. They were challenging each other and showing off.”

In June 1964, Elliott was standing in front of the Folklore Center when a car pulled up, and Dylan, wearing what Elliott called “boots of Spanish leather, with high heels,” ordered him into the vehicle: “We’re gettin’ ready to go uptown to do some recording.” With Elliott carrying a few bottles of Beaujolais that were in the car, the two made it to Columbia’s midtown studio, where Dylan’s producer, Tom Wilson, and his road manager, Victor Maymudes, were prepping for Dylan to record his first new music since his headlines-oriented third album, The Times They Are a-Changin’. That disc, from February 1964, had handed the world the title song—another, more proactive anthem—as well as songs describing the murder of a Black woman named Hattie Carroll, the death of Black activist Medgar Evers, and a tragic, despairing midwestern farmer who killed his family and himself.

This time, over the course of just a few hours, Elliott observed as Dylan laid down on tape songs that reflected his breakup with Rotolo, including “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “Ballad in Plain D,” and “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met).” On the cover of the album that would eventually be called Another Side of Bob Dylan—the title was Wilson’s idea—Dylan was seen wearing jeans that Rotolo had cut to fit over his boots.

For the new legion of Dylan heads who looked to him for social and wardrobe cues, Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in the middle of the summer of 1964, was considered a letdown. Only one song, the elliptical “Chimes of Freedom,” could have conceivably been sung at another march on Washington. Unlike the two releases that preceded it, it failed to crack the Top 40 on the album chart.

But the Village still spewed out enough topical songs to compensate, especially from the man many considered to be Dylan’s closest rival. Phil Ochs’s debut, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, more than lived up to its title. With Danny Kalb’s guitar making for a chiming, spunky sidekick, Ochs sounded like he looked on the album cover—someone who could absorb a TV newscast or an edition of a newspaper and turn its contents into songs. Some of them, like his talking blues about the Cuban Missile Crisis, felt dated almost as soon as they arrived. But with a steadfast, affectless voice that seemed to demand social justice with each syllable, Ochs could also turn a news event into a gripping narrative. In “Too Many Martyrs,” he delivered his take on Medgar Evers’s death, and the tale of a Black social worker who’d tried to break up a gang rumble and died provided the basis for “Lou Marsh.” Ochs also revealed he had the heart of a poet when he transformed Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” into a twinkling beauty and wrote the rousing “Power and the Glory,” which critiqued and celebrated America at the same time. Ochs played a few of those songs at a fall 1964 evening of protest songs at the Village Gate, where he shared the stage with Paxton, Sainte-Marie, Chandler, Andersen, and LaFarge (and, noticeably, not Dylan).

As the musical activity in the Village escalated, so did the city’s issues with the cacophony of strumming, coffee machines, and smatterings of applause emanating from nearly every club, coffeehouse, or basket house. In March 1964, eleven coffeehouses, including the Gaslight and the Four Winds, were issued summonses for contributing a “honky-tonk atmosphere” to the area and were allowed to present only “musical entertainment of a limited nature.” The fines were so small—twenty-five dollars in many cases—that most of the owners could afford to pay them; one coffeehouse, which was not named by the city, placed its summons in its front window as a point of rebellious pride. Such open defiance only made the authorities jack up their tactics. In November, officials pushed for injunctions against the Gaslight and the Cafe Rafio for violating zoning regulations, and the Four Winds and the Cafe Bizarre were cited for not having a “coffeehouse license” and for violating zoning rules over their use of “drags.”

But the community also had bigger issues stemming from its own success. By the end of the year, oversaturation had taken its toll, and musical tastes were shifting. As 1964 wound down, neither the Kingston Trio nor Peter, Paul and Mary had seen any of their singles reach the Top 10 in about two years. “Folk music has gone from boom to bust,” groused a concert promoter who’d laid out $50,000 for a festival that would eventually lose money. Village club owners had hoped that the New York World’s Fair, held in Queens, would encourage visitors to stream into their venues, but that didn’t happen. “New Yorkers’ habits are changing,” the Vanguard’s Max Gordon told the Times. “Older people have stopped going to clubs and younger people are going to different places than they used to.” The Times noted that “one well-known Greenwich Village club” didn’t have a single customer one evening.

Simultaneously, anyone who’d tuned into The Ed Sullivan Show earlier in the year saw the writing, and the electric-guitar playing, on the wall. “The Beatles scuttled all of us,” Sylvia Tyson said. “We still worked, but we didn’t have the volume of work we had before.” True to form, Dylan was among those who sensed the changes on the horizon: at the Cafe Figaro one night, he enthused to Kalb about John Hammond (Jr.’s) new album, Big City Blues, which he’d recorded with an electric rhythm section. In his West Village apartment, Noel Stookey, on a break from his ongoing work as part of Peter, Paul and Mary, heard music coming from the courtyard of a nearby building. The ruckus came by way of John Sebastian, who appeared to be fronting a rock-and-roll band. As Stookey would soon realize, Sebastian, along with Kalb and a growing number of other musicians, was about to change everything up, with enormous ramifications for their music and shared neighborhood.