Thanks to a case of mononucleosis, Danny Kalb’s time with Dave Van Ronk’s Ragtime Jug Stompers had ended prematurely, but then so had the ensemble itself, which only lasted six months. But the first day of 1965 was bringing both a calendar change and a glimpse of the future. On New Year’s Eve, Kalb invited a group of friends to his family home in Mount Vernon for a party. Among those who showed up was Roy Blumenfeld, a handsome, athletically built kid who lived a block away and was dating one of Kalb’s cousins. A year younger than Kalb, he had attended the same high school and played percussion in the marching band. To Blumenfeld, the teenage Kalb had been a loud-voiced, caustic, and opinionated kid—“it was his way or the highway”—but he’d also kept tabs on Kalb’s developing guitar skills, especially a fingerpicking technique inspired by blues great Lightnin’ Hopkins.

Since the party involved music making, Kalb wanted to try something he hadn’t done since his stint with his high school rockabilly band. The Ragtime Jug Stompers had been a kick, and he’d made inroads as an accompanist, playing behind Phil Ochs and Judy Collins. With Sam Charters, his bandmate in Van Ronk’s jug band, Kalb had also formed a folk, blues, and ragtime duo, the New Strangers. Meet the New Strangers, issued by Prestige in 1964, revealed Kalb to be more than a guitarist whose fingers could dance around a fretboard. On their version of “Alberta,” the Lead Belly–associated sultry blues, Kalb sang in a husky, heavy-lidded voice that communicated burden, weariness, and hardscrabble feistiness. But now it was New Year’s Eve, and as he said to his cousin and fellow musician, drummer Peter Kogan, he wanted to plug in. “He was very articulate about it,” said Kogan. “I just remember him saying, ‘This is the direction, to go electric.’”

Kalb was also partly inspired by something he’d absorbed in the Village likely a few months before, and right around the corner from the Gaslight. A street-level storefront, the Night Owl—at 118 West Third Street between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—was another one of those irregular music spaces in the area. At the dawn of the sixties, it had been home to Art Ford’s Bowl-a-Gallery, a combination bowling alley and art gallery, before Joe Marra, a stocky Italian American, took it over. In keeping with the musical changes in the Village, Marra renamed it the Night Owl as a folk club. Like the Gaslight, it didn’t have a liquor license, so its waitresses took orders for sodas and ice cream.

For all its quirks, the Night Owl was also distinguishing itself as the place for singer-songwriters who were pushing the form beyond the ballads and newspaper-headline broadsides that had so far typified Village folk music. Using musicians like guitarist and vibes player Buzzy Linhart, Fred Neil truly began breaking free of any previous stylistic restraints. Singing in a rumbling baritone that sounded as if it originated in the pit of his stomach, he would lead the musicians in long, incantatory jams where folk, jazz, and blues collided and frolicked. Another recently arrived transplant, Tim Hardin, was doing the same at the Night Owl. Born and raised in Oregon, Hardin had been in the marines and had become hooked on heroin during service abroad. Moving to New York in 1961 and hoping to be an actor—carrying on the tradition of the Clancy Brothers, Jimmy Gavin, and others before him—Hardin began spending time in the Village. There his love of music—both his parents had been musicians to varying degrees—overtook his thespian interests.

Hardin was an intense character: small, with an imposing forehead and a penetrating stare, he could be “a feisty guy… a mean guy” and “not terribly pleasant,” as Marra recalled. But he also had a boisterous, phlegmy laugh, and his music defied categorization. Hardly a typical folk-crooning strummer, Hardin made music that was doused in blues, country, and jazz but owed allegiance to none of them, and he sang in a voice that could be tender one moment, boastful the next. In his mind he was more a jazz singer than a folk one, and he was also beginning to write songs, such as “It’ll Never Happen Again” and “How Can We Hang On to a Dream,” that hinted at his fragile and self-absorbed soul. “Oh, God, Jesus, what beautiful songs,” as Marra also said.

As Kalb saw for himself one night at the Night Owl, Hardin played an electric guitar rather than acoustic and sang blues and R&B covers, and Kalb thirsted for a taste of those possibilities at his house party. “As soon as I heard those sounds, I knew that was what was happening,” he told a Hartford newspaper in 1966, “and I had to be with it in order to express myself and my music.” He and Blumenfeld already had several musical bonds: they’d both played together in a Dixieland combo, they’d both taken guitar lessons from Van Ronk, and both were hooked on The Best of Muddy Waters, a compilation of the bluesman’s work that included “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I’m Ready.” Listening to Little Walter’s harmonica solo on the latter gave them both chills. As Blumenfeld recalled, “Danny liked that power.”

Although Kalb was playing a Gibson acoustic guitar that New Year’s Eve, he invited Blumenfeld to join him on a version of “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” Blumenfeld took over the drum kit Kogan had brought with him, and the deep blues the two of them played sparked something creative in both young men. Van Ronk would say that the area around Bleecker and MacDougal transformed itself every few years—and Kalb and Blumenfeld would be among its next agents of change.

When Hardin played at the Night Owl, he would sometimes be accompanied by a cadre of like-minded musicians, including Neil, Linhart, and the newly ubiquitous John Sebastian. A Village native, Sebastian hailed from a family steeped in music and the arts. His father, John Sebastian Pugliese, had grown up in Philadelphia, studied at a university in Italy, and, upon returning to the States, announced he had no interest in his own father’s financial world. Instead, Sebastian decided to concentrate on the chromatic harmonica he’d been playing since he was a teen, and before long he was appearing at cabarets and clubs, including Cafe Society, where his son saw him perform with the folk-blues sensation Josh White. Along the way, he dropped his Italian last name professionally. In an attempt to warn his son about the dangers of weed, the elder Sebastian told him he’d shared a cab with Billie Holiday as she toked up during the Cafe Society days.

Sebastian and his wife, Jane Bashir, who worked in TV and radio, welcomed their son John in March 1944; another son, Mark, was born soon after. By the time John was ten, the family was ensconced at 29 Washington Square West, an elegant building at the park’s northwest corner. One of their neighbors, albeit briefly, was former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Given the Sebastian parents’ connection to the arts, their home became a gathering place for creative types: Woody Guthrie once stayed in a guest room next to the boys, although John’s only memory would be the tones of Guthrie’s harmonica. “As I was falling sleep,” he recalled, “I remember thinking, ‘Not as good as my dad.’”

Even though the family’s spacious apartment on the fifteenth floor faced west, not directly over the park, the younger John Sebastian could still hear music, including the occasional bongo, from the windows. During his teen years in the late fifties, he would wander into the park to see and hear banjo players in one corner, a doo-wop vocal group in another, and a guitarist trying hard to sound like Lightnin’ Hopkins. (His brother Mark, meanwhile, would take note of the junkies outside the Hotel Earle, just around the bend from their building.) When he started out in his own music career, as a member of the Even Dozen Jug Band, Sebastian went by “John Benson,” his middle name, to avoid confusion with his illustrious father, who’d already recorded albums for Columbia and Decca.

By early 1965, Sebastian had become one of the scene’s omnipresent accompanists. Starting with the first time he sat in with Neil at the Cafe Wha?, he left behind his father’s classical technique and began developing a fulsome style of harmonica playing that sounded like a chugging train. He’d also seen how musicians were not always welcomed in the area. “That was an Italian neighborhood,” he said, “so if you were going to try to have a little club in the basement, some woman on the second floor was going to be yelling ‘get out of here,’ in Italian, out the window.” Sebastian had been floored when he heard Hardin’s early demos wafting out of the next-door apartment at his own place on MacDougal Street, which belonged to Erik Jacobsen, a former member of the Knob Lick Upper 10,000 who was moving into production. Sebastian was equally taken aback when Hardin knocked on his door, said he’d heard Sebastian was going to be his harmonica player for an upcoming recording date, and informed his soon-to-be accompanist that he would never play better because he’d be supporting Hardin. “Modesty must have gone out of style somewhere,” Sebastian thought to himself.

Like Kalb, Jacobsen had decided that electric music was the future and saw a hint of those possibilities in the Sellouts, a Long Island band that began working in the Village and was acknowledged to be the first local group to plug in and cover Beatles songs. Their name derived from the fact that their original bass player, Marc Silber, came from the folk world. Jacobsen and Sebastian had caught at least one of their sets at a space near the Night Owl, possibly Trude Heller’s, and Jacobsen wound up producing a record with them.

But Jacobsen and Sebastian were more serious about the concept, “always scamming and scheming about something or another,” Jacobsen recalled. Sebastian had been intrigued by the electric Les Paul that the Sellouts’ guitarist, Skip Boone, was playing, and he now had a potential partner in electric-rock crime. Sebastian had already befriended Cass Elliot, a brassy-voiced Maryland native who’d sung in two folk groups—the Big 3 and the Mugwumps—and was working the cash register at the Night Owl, among other jobs in the Village. (In an in-joke about her size that bordered on insensitive, Marra had named its most over-the-top sundae after her.) In February 1964, she invited Sebastian over to her apartment at the time, in Gramercy Park, to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Another guest was Zalman (Zal) Yanovsky, a wild-eyed and energetic Canadian guitarist who looked like a six-foot-tall version of Ringo Starr. “We sit down and the show begins, and by the end, we’re like 16-year-old girls,” Sebastian said. Their bond was instantaneous—they even began swapping licks on the guitars they’d each brought to Elliot’s place—and soon enough, they were joined by a bass player, Steve Boone, who’d been in the Sellouts, and a drummer, Jan Buchner.

From sitting in with Hardin and others, Sebastian already knew Marra and was blunt about what his new band wanted. “There is a big changing coming in music,” he told the Night Owl owner. “The wind is changing—folk is going to get a beat. It’s going to get happy, and we want to be the first to do that kind of music here. When I sing, I want all the little girls to flip out.” Marra agreed to host the band, which was dubbed the Lovin’ Spoonful after a line in Mississippi John Hurt’s “Coffee Blues” (“I wanna see my baby ’bout a lovin’ spoonful, my lovin’ spoonful”). Marra would later write that the inaugural show took place in January 1965; Boone would say February. What no one disputed was that the musicians smoked a joint together in the basement dressing room, made their way upstairs, and squeezed onto the stage. They played rough-hewn versions of the blues “Route 66,” the folk-blues traditional song “Wild About My Lovin’,” and Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown,” but also the Sebastian original “Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” a summer-breezy, softly sung tune that pointed to a folk-rock future.

By then, Marra had changed the setup of his club. The stage, which had been in the back, was moved to the front and against the right wall. A few rows of seats were in front, the rest on either side of the stage; the musicians now faced a brick wall. But the fact that the Night Owl hadn’t been reconfigured for a rock-and-roll band with drums and amplifiers became immediately apparent. “They broke glasses, windowpanes and eardrums…,” Marra would write. “The audience left. Man, they weren’t even polite. They flocked out.” When water started dripping onto the stage from the ceiling, Marra assumed the neighbors upstairs were protesting in any way they could.

Afterward, Sebastian would recall Marra saying “You guys are no fucking good” before explaining to them, during a group meeting in the empty club, the precise problems. “Zal, that fucking amplifier—you’re killing these people in the front row,” Sebastian recalled Marra saying. “John, you’re looking at your shoes. You gotta look at the people.” (Eric Eisner, who drummed in another Night Owl band, the Strangers, recalled that Marra seemed to say “fucking” every fourth word.) Marra stuck with them for two more weeks, but by the end of that run, the place was empty; on the last night, the club took in only $7.85. Although Marra liked Sebastian and believed in the potential of the Lovin’ Spoonful—and likely knew there would be money to be made in local rock and roll—he also had a business to run. Calling the band in one afternoon, he fired them and watched as they forlornly slunk back outside.

In Marra’s words, the Night Owl then went “back to blues and rhythm & blues,” but the movement in the Village, and elsewhere, was not to be halted. On January 13, Sebastian was invited to CBS Studios in midtown Manhattan to participate in the first sessions for Bob Dylan’s next album. Starting in high school, Dylan had experimented with rock from time to time, particularly on the ill-fated 1962 single “Mixed Up Confusion,” but with producer Tom Wilson onboard, he was plunging in deeper than before. In the studio, Dylan would first lay down new material by himself, then invite musicians to join him on subsequent takes. Although Sebastian wasn’t a bass player by trade, he accompanied Dylan on “She Belongs to Me,” which also benefited from Bruce Langhorne’s refined guitar winding its way throughout the song, and Sebastian played harmonica on “Outlaw Blues.” Kalb, who’d kept in touch with Dylan since their University of Wisconsin days four years before, later claimed he’d been invited to the sessions to play lead guitar. But in what wouldn’t be the first time, he was recovering from another bout of depression, what he would call a “dark time” in his life, and he assumed Dylan had been unable to reach him.

Steve Boone, who’d driven Sebastian in from Long Island for the session and had stuck around in the studio, was handed the bass guitar when an actual skilled player was needed. Either he or Sebastian provided the bottom end on a take of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and Boone had a feeling it was his bass line on the final take of the wonderfully scraggly “Maggie’s Farm,” although he couldn’t say for sure. What no one could deny was the overwhelming possibilities of what they were hearing. That same January, another group of reformed folkies, renamed the Byrds, recorded an overhauled version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” in Los Angeles. Very soon, the impact of all that activity would reach the part of town where Dylan, Kalb, Sebastian, and others had established themselves just a few short years before.

The fall day that Kalb walked into Fretted Instruments at 319 Sixth Avenue (and Third Street), no introduction was needed. Steve Katz, who was working in the store, already knew Kalb as the fastest player in the Village, and they’d both had a connection as Van Ronk students. About two years before, they’d even been on the same jug-band bill at Carnegie Hall that featured Van Ronk’s group and the one Katz was part of, the Even Dozen Jug Band.

For musicians in the Village, Fretted Instruments, along with Matt Umanov Guitars, was a destination spot. With the help of Izzy Young, owner Marc Silber, who was raised in Michigan and was both a musician and connoisseur of stringed instruments, had found the second-floor space in the fall of 1963. He knew nothing about business but noticed the people playing acoustic instruments and realized that a market existed. Among his first customers were Dylan and Joan Baez, who came in to buy guitar picks. Silber would sometimes see Sebastian in the shop for hours on end. Katz and the Even Dozen Jug Band would practice there before Katz took a part-time job in the shop. Even though he was only twenty and enamored of folk music, Katz could sense things were changing in the tightly knit world of Village musicians.

In March, the Lovin’ Spoonful returned to the Night Owl a more focused, less blaring unit. After their shambolic start, they’d secured a rehearsal space in the grungy basement of the Hotel Albert, at Tenth Street and University Place, where their new drummer, Joe Butler of the Sellouts, was living. To everyone’s surprise, including his brother Mark, Sebastian had started writing songs and becoming a more authoritative front man, and the group in general tightened up its arrangements; it also helped that Butler could sing, which bolstered their harmonies. They played a set at the Cafe Bizarre—still in operation, years after opening with Odetta, Van Ronk, and others, but more than ever a tourist trap that sold “Bohemian Burgers.” Marra saw the band there and was suitably impressed—and also stunned by the sight and sound of Sebastian’s new instrument, an electrified autoharp. He rebooked them into the Night Owl, improved the sound system, and placed a huge blow-up photo of the Lovin’ Spoonful outside the club, as if they were already stars. “We rehearsed at the Cafe Bizarre every afternoon until our show at night began,” said Sebastian. “That straightened us out real quick. When we came back to the Night Owl, we were pretty ferocious.”

Suddenly, the club was jammed with teenagers along with mover-shakers such as Albert Grossman and producer Phil Spector, who spent the entire time with his head against the brick wall, for reasons no one quite understood. “When you put an ear against the wall,” Sebastian considered, “you get that all-encompassing sound and can’t hear anything else, so maybe that was an element of it.”

For his part, Kalb was encouraged enough by his New Year’s Eve blues jam to plow down a similar road. Not long after that party, Kalb and Blumenfeld ran into each other in the East Village, and Kalb invited his friend to join him at a club show on Long Island. It went well enough, but they needed a bass player for future work. By chance, Blumenfeld’s roommate knew Andy Kulberg, a dry-witted kid from Amherst, New York, who’d attended music school in Boston, then NYU, and played upright bass and flute. With the addition of Artie Traum, Happy Traum’s younger brother, the Danny Kalb Quartet (sometimes billed as the Danny Kalb Four) was born in the early months of 1965. The quartet played one of its first performances—what Kalb would call, rightly or wrongly, “the first electric blues show in New York”—at a free-speech benefit for striking Ohio students, held at the Empire Hotel on the Upper West Side in April.

Thanks to Kalb, whose fluidity as an acoustic musician was easily translating into the new format, the group had a raw, nascent approach—Kalb sang a more than credible “I’m Troubled”—and Marra booked them into the Night Owl. Arthur Levy, a young folk fan who’d begun making trips into the Village, already knew Kalb’s name from his work with Van Ronk. But seeing Kalb’s own combo at the Night Owl, where the musician was both lead guitarist and front man, was an entirely different experience. “There was nobody in that folk scene who could go from playing Chuck Berry guitar to Muddy Waters guitar to Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar, and back again,” said Levy, who came to befriend Kalb. “He was totally in control.”

Quickly, word of mouth about the band was growing louder, and the high-end Morris Agency expressed interest in booking it. But that next step was put on pause, and by Kalb, who instead decided to spend the summer in Europe. Visiting England that season, Silber ran into Kalb, who was hanging with the new-folk crowd in Cambridge.

In August, Kalb returned to the States after receiving a telegram about a possible record contract for the band. Within those few short months, the music world as he knew it had changed even further. Bringing It All Back Home, the album for which Dylan had recruited Sebastian and Boone, was released in the spring and served as an initial warning signal that the musician was changing course. In June, Dylan’s evolution accelerated when he recorded “Like a Rolling Stone,” a volcanic six-minutes-plus message “telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky,” he said at the time. When Kalb first heard the track—an acetate that Dylan played for him, likely before Kalb traveled overseas—he didn’t know what to make of it. Dylan’s performance at the Newport Folk Festival in July, where he startled some in the crowd with a short, scraggly, overamplified set of his new rock and roll, was another shot across the bow. That same month, the Lovin’ Spoonful unveiled its first single, a romp called “Do You Believe in Magic,” written after Sebastian watched a girl dance to their songs at the Night Owl; the tune would quickly ascend to the Top 10. The idea of either ditching folk or electrifying it was now legitimized.

After Kalb returned and tried to reconvene his quartet, he was suddenly down one member, as Artie Traum (who also went to Europe for the summer) opted not to return. In search of a replacement rhythm guitarist, Kalb tracked down Katz that fateful day at Fretted Instruments and asked if he wanted to audition. Even though Katz didn’t have an electric guitar and didn’t know how to play one, Kalb was going with his gut more than any business savviness. “Danny knew Steve had worked with Van Ronk and he could do certain picking,” said Blumenfeld. Katz said yes and, after borrowing a DeArmond pickup from a friend, made his way to the Night Owl for this tryout. There he met Kulberg, “the practical one,” as Katz called him, and Blumenfeld, “the goofball clown but very bright and fun.” Plugging his guitar into an amp, Katz was unaware the pickup was turned up high, and out came a loud, riotous squalor. “I felt like I was being chased by a herd of rhinos,” he said. “The sound was just so horrible.” He turned his volume down to zero and could barely hear himself, but Kalb said he liked the way he played and hired him.

When Katz auditioned, he noticed another name on the marquee announcing the band: “Featuring Tom Jones.” Likely keeping an eye on the British Invasion that had overtaken the radio, Kalb—at the suggestion of a manager friend—had recruited a lead singer who, thanks to the popularity of a certain Welsh pop star, would soon revert to his given name, Tommy Flanders. Under the name Jones, he’d briefly been the lead singer of the Trolls, a Cambridge band. With his Beatles bangs, raw voice that conjured an American Mick Jagger, and stage moves that included splits, Flanders injected the fledging band with the showy rock-and-roll personality it needed, not to mention a dose of braggadocio. At the Night Owl one evening, Flanders told Marra he could sing better than anyone else he was booking, and Marra called his bluff, telling him to come back with a band. Flanders returned with Kalb, Blumenfeld, and Kulberg, and before long the new band was sharing a bill with the Lovin’ Spoonful.

Kalb’s concept also had a changed name. The year before, producer Paul Rothchild had pitched Elektra’s Jac Holzman on a series of albums, each with “project” in the title, that would explore forms like blues, old-time banjo, and the new groundswell of singer-songwriters. To Rothchild, the concept gave Elektra a connection not merely with commercial folk but also with its origins. The first of these records, The Blues Project, was the result of one day-long session that featured Van Ronk, Kalb, Mark Spoelstra, Geoff Muldaur, Eric Von Schmidt, and others, with Dylan playing piano under a pseudonym, Bob Landy. Among its friskiest tracks were Kalb’s “I’m Troubled,” featuring Sebastian on harmonica, and “Hello Baby Blues.”

The album, which cost just under $1,000 to make, sold more than 35,000 copies after its release, according to Rothchild, and it gave Flanders an idea: given Kalb’s association with the album, why not name his new band after it? Kalb agreed, and on October 7, 1965, days after Katz’s audition, the renamed Blues Project Featuring Danny Kalb and Tom Flanders (with “rhythm in blue” added beneath the name) made its Night Owl debut. In the quickened way in which record deals could happen at the time, Columbia’s Tom Wilson brought them into a studio that same month.

With the pop charts in mind far more than any blues credibility, the band chose to record Eric Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn,” a florid and borderline erotic love song that made others by his peers sound chaste. The band quickened the tempo and made it into an effervescent piece of folk pop, all with the help of a studio musician recruited by Wilson. Only twenty-one, Al Kooper, born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt, already had serious credits to his name, from playing guitar with the Royal Teens to cowriting “This Diamond Ring,” the biggest hit that would ever be associated with Jerry Lewis’s son Gary and his band, the Playboys. Equally talented as a musician and studio hustler, Kooper had attended the recording sessions for Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and inserted himself into the proceedings over Wilson’s initial objections; it was his organ that Kalb heard when Dylan played him the final version.

For Kooper, accompanying the Blues Project for a potential single was merely another gig in a schedule filled with them. But to his surprise, Kalb and Kulberg took him out for a meal later and offered him a full-time role in the band. “At sessions, I had to play what people wanted me to play,” Kooper recalled. “I appreciated how that improved my training, but it robbed me of things I wanted to do. When they asked me to join the band, I had the notoriety, and I thought, ‘This will be great.’ They weren’t nothing, but we built it at rehearsals until we could finally play a set in front of people. That was much more enjoyable to me than playing sessions.”

In various apartments downtown, they began to work up a collection of songs to play—until, that is, they were booted out of each place for playing too loud. By his own admission, Kooper hardly knew anything about the blues, and Kalb had to drill the music into his head by inviting Kooper over to his downtown place and playing him blues records again and again. The two men were wildly different in musical backgrounds, but they were both Jewish, young, and hungry, and the Village—as well as the record business—were open to whatever they had to offer.

As the scene was growing more amped up, in every way, its unofficial clubhouse remained the Kettle of Fish. But with Dylan’s success and the pressure and attention that came with it, the dynamics at those gatherings began to shift. In 1964 Robert Shelton of the Times watched—with a sense of wonderment rare for such a fixture on the scene—as Dylan entered the Kettle one night with the Supremes and members of the British band the Animals, whose sulking, electrified makeover of “The House of the Rising Sun” had given the ballad an audience far beyond the coffeehouse crowd. Those pop stars were a departure from the small, insular posse Dylan generally preferred, one that protected him and, many thought, egged him on as he dissected the peers and strivers at the Kettle on any given night. For extra privacy, Guido Giampieri would close and lock the front door at a late hour.

Dylan’s gang was usually led by Bob Neuwirth, his road manager, sidekick, and would-be bodyguard. An artist by trade and education, the Ohio-born Neuwirth had attended art school in Boston, where he learned to play guitar and banjo and eventually made his way into the Village; Dylan would recall first seeing him in the audience at the Gaslight. Neuwirth’s barbed-wire gibes and hipster persona were also of a piece with Dylan’s. As a source told Rolling Stone a few years later, regarding Neuwirth’s arrival in New York in 1964, “Dylan started to change at that time. Part of it was Neuwirth; he was a real strong influence on Dylan. Neuwirth [was] stressing pride and ego, sort of saying, ‘Hold your head high, man, don’t take shit, just take over the scene.’ He was the kind of cat who could influence others, work on their egos and support those egos.” Neuwirth’s striped pants would soon be seen behind Dylan on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, the album that announced, as much as any, that the folk revival had passed its expiration date.

Thanks to his work with Dylan on records and on stage, including playing with him at the chaotic Newport Folk Festival, Kooper was often at Dylan’s table and saw how perilous it could be for anyone in the vicinity. “If Dylan focused on you, you were in trouble,” he said. “He could out-think anybody.” David Blue was a recurring member of the posse, although, as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would recall, he was rarely if ever the brunt of Dylan’s withering gaze or comments. “Blue had a certain kind of stature,” said Elliott. “He was a large guy, way bigger than Bob, and he had a certain composed personality.”

By 1965, Van Ronk was holding his own. The Ragtime Jug Stompers hadn’t worked out, but he retained his Mercury Records contract and, that year, released Just Dave Van Ronk, which again pared his music back to just his voice and guitar. There, he was finally able to unveil his arrangement of “The House of the Rising Sun,” along with a moving rendition of “God Bless the Child.” Though far from a household name in any home, he was nonetheless growing in stature. Shortly before a New York Post reporter showed up at 190 Waverly Place for an interview—where the writer found the apartment strewn with battered guitar cases and a sizable stone owl—a teenager had knocked on Van Ronk’s door. It had happened before, some of the fans coming from Cambridge, but this one was from Montreal and wanted to meet Van Ronk for himself. At the Kettle one night, Dylan began offering advice on how Van Ronk could become a far bigger name. Increasingly irritated, Van Ronk finally shot back, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?”

To Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto, Van Ronk theorized that Dylan zeroed in on particular targets for a reason: in Van Ronk’s mind, they all wanted to “get rich,” too. Whatever the motivation, the atmosphere could be fraught. “The level of ‘rapping,’ as we called it, was tough,” said Arthur Gorson, the manager who sometimes found himself amid the Kettle gang. “People fell by the wayside. They would talk about songs and someone would say, ‘Hey, man, you can’t use that word—I used that word.’ Eric Andersen was slightly damaged by Neuwirth’s taunts.” Andersen would later pen “The Hustler” about Neuwirth and those times in that bar. In the fall of 1965, Dylan himself would unveil “Positively 4th Street,” a stern single that sliced and diced someone—or some group—who hadn’t supported him. He never specified who, but some in the Kettle posse wondered if it were one of them.

One especially tense evening, Andersen witnessed Dylan lacing into Phil Ochs. As Dylan drifted from topical writing, Ochs fully embraced it—and was being lauded for it within their world. Reviewing Ochs’s performance at Newport in 1964, Shelton opined that he was “rivaling Bob Dylan as a protest spokesman.” Broadside also weighed in, commenting, “Ochs is much more deeply committed to the broadside tradition.” With one album under his belt and a second, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, due in the early months of 1965, Ochs was primed to be an even more socially conscious voice of his generation than Dylan was, and the two men had a “love-hate thing,” as Paxton put it.

At the Kettle one evening, Dylan and Ochs got into a verbal match that ended with Dylan dismissing Ochs as merely a singing journalist (which, in Dylan’s defense, wasn’t too far from the truth at that point in Ochs’s career). Andersen, who had grown close to Ochs (he had encouraged Andersen to add more verses to “Violets of Dawn”) and would often crash at the apartment where Ochs lived with his wife, Alice, was suitably offended. As Andersen observed (and Scaduto also reported), Dylan turned on Ochs another night as well: “You oughta find a new line of work, Ochs. You’re not doin’ very much in this one.” As an appalled Andersen recalled, “He said it right to Phil’s face and really insulted him, and I said, ‘Stop picking on him. Cut it out.’” Dylan, said Andersen, retorted, “Look, I’m buying all the wine here. I can say whatever I want to say. What do you want me to talk about, the sunset over the Hudson and the deep blue sea?”

For a brief period, Ochs and Dylan were both managed by Albert Grossman until Ochs felt he wasn’t receiving the attention he deserved, and late in 1965 he asked Gorson to take over. (In a poke at the name of Grossman’s company, ABG, Ochs asked Gorson to use his initials for his own management firm, which became AHG.) But Ochs had an emerging star power of his own: covering his January 1966 debut at Carnegie Hall for the Times, Shelton felt that Ochs still needed some seasoning and admonished his melodies and guitar playing but noted that the audience was “predominantly teenaged.”

Later that year, in preparation for recording Pleasures of the Harbor—a lavishly produced record intended to be his moment of arrival as a full-on recording artist—Ochs introduced songs like “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” and “Flower Lady” at Carnegie Hall. The latter—seemingly about a mysterious middle-aged woman who would walk into Folk City and sell bouquets of flowers, supposedly purloined from cemeteries—was set to one of his most sumptuous melodies. He and Dylan weren’t far apart in some ways: they’d both grown up with rock and roll and eventually turned to acoustic music. With Kooper adding one of his recognizable keyboard parts, Ochs even recorded a plugged-in remake of his antiwar rouser “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” But he and Dylan remained mirror images of the Village, the acoustic and the electric, the old world and the new world, circling each other and staring each other down.

Starting in the fall of 1965, Roy Blumenfeld would leave his apartment in the East Village, at First Avenue and East Fourth Street, and begin making his way west toward 152 Bleecker Street, between Thompson and LaGuardia. “As I’d get closer to the Village, everything was lit up,” he said. “It was like going to the carnival.”

On nights like those, Blumenfeld’s destination was a striped, half-circular canopy, where he would walk down two flights of stairs and enter the Cafe Au Go Go, the Blues Project’s home base and—along with the group itself—the embodiment of the Village’s musical makeover. The club began as anything but the Village’s rock-and-roll heart. As a teenager, Ella Lefkowitz, a vivacious redhead, had left home in Brooklyn for the Village, where she devoted herself to poetry, taking acting lessons, and ingratiating herself with the Beat writers she loved. Lefkowitz waited tables at the Cafe Bizarre and the Figaro, where she met and would soon marry Howard Solomon, a theatrical agent turned stockbroker who had small, deep-set eyes. In time, she convinced him to open what she first envisioned as a coffeehouse and then a nightclub in the basement of 152 Bleecker.

At that point, the space had been empty for so many decades that it took nearly a year to clean it out after the Solomons filed with the city, in May 1963, to open a business. And as the couple soon learned, it was one thing to prepare to open a club seating four hundred, quite another to grapple with New York paperwork and hassles. Ella Solomon didn’t want to serve alcohol—the thought of coping with angry drunks didn’t appeal to her—but the city nevertheless pressured the couple to obtain a liquor license, according to their son Jason. In turn, they sued the city and were able to open without a license, serving only ice cream, coffee, and soda. Professor Irwin Corey, an unconventional and zany stand-up comic, opened the Au Go Go with a six-week run in February 1964. Subsequent bookings—comics Mort Sahl and George Carlin, jazz artists Stan Getz and Bill Evans, the long-established Josh White—put the venue more in line with the Village Vanguard than a pop club.

Two months into its run, the Au Go Go suddenly became notorious. Just as he was preparing to go onstage, the famously freewheeling and opinionated Lenny Bruce was arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws; Howard Solomon was also arrested for allowing a supposedly indecent performance to proceed in his club. Six days before, the police had obtained a club soundboard recording of one of Bruce’s performances, which a grand jury heard as part of the evidence against him. Both Bruce and Solomon were found guilty of their respective charges, with Bruce sentenced to a year in a jail and Solomon fined $1,000. (In the end, Bruce served four months, and Solomon’s conviction was reversed upon appeal.) The only positive development to emerge from the ordeal was that the Cafe Au Go Go was now pinned on the national map. Its size also made it more suitable for rock and roll, bookings for which largely began in July 1965, when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Chicago band led by its street-tough harmonica player, appeared there.

Still calling itself “The Blues Project with Danny Kalb and Tommy Flanders,” Kalb’s expanded band opened at the Cafe Au Go Go in November. Because comedians were sometimes billed with folk or rock acts, their opening act was a young Black comic, Richard Pryor, who had also been spotted getting high on whippets (nitrous oxide) at the Gaslight. For the moment, their set relied heavily on blues, R&B, and early rock and roll, some sung by Flanders and others by Kalb: Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” and “Spoonful,” Muddy Waters’s “Louisiana Blues” (retitled “Goin’ Down Louisiana”), Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights Big City,” and Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm.” The quintet’s varied musical backgrounds played out in their stage persona, as Flanders strutted and spun around, while Katz looked the sensitive, withdrawn troubadour. They didn’t put much thought into their clothes; as Kalb would later tell a reporter, “We don’t wear any set costumes when we play. We all wear just what strikes our fancy.” The crowds were sparse and the band still learning about stagecraft. “One stamped his foot, another did little knee bends, a third shook all over, a fourth gaped at the others, and the last rocked back and forth over the drums,” groused a critic of one of their early performances. But their lack of collective stage experience didn’t seem to trouble Solomon, who was hungry to put people in the seats: as Kooper wrote, “Business stunk and Solomon was desperate.” To their surprise, Solomon booked them for additional shows.

For several years, there had been no shortage of actual blues legends in the venues south of Fourteenth Street. Happy Traum took lessons from Brownie McGee, and the New World Singers shared bills with Reverend Gary Davis, who later complimented the guitar that Katz used to audition for the Blues Project. It was possible to see Mississippi John Hurt or Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Gaslight, or later Howlin’ Wolf at the Cafe Au Go Go. “You could sit at the feet of people like John Hurt, who was a master,” Andersen recalled. “It was like going to Adelphia, where the gods lived in Greek mythology. You were watching one god after another come down to play shows and you could sit there and soak it up.” At the Allan Block Sandal Shop—the leading destination for handmade sandals in the Village and also an impromptu performance space for pickers who had to leave Washington Square Park by a certain time—Sebastian would watch as Delta bluesman Son House transformed from subdued to raving after a few drinks. When the blues artists would come to town, some would stay at the Broadway Central Hotel, on Broadway and West Fourth Street, and retreat to their rooms for parties after their shows. Sebastian and John Hammond (Jr.) both found themselves in Hopkins’s room as one party was underway. “It was very wild times,” Hammond said. “Guys would get really drunk and there were all kinds of scenes. It was crazy.”

For those fledgling musicians, it was hard to determine how the blues players, some under-recognized before the folk and blues revival, felt about playing to largely white audiences in coffeehouses and clubs in downtown New York. Some were honored, others not so much. “There were guys who were like fish out of water, like ‘What am I doing here?”’ said Hammond. “Son House was a little recalcitrant. Lightnin’ Hopkins was full of himself and wanted to be a big star. It was the whole gamut.” Others were seemingly happy to be out of the South. Patrick Sky and his girlfriend, Lucy Brown Karwoski, got to know Hurt, whose career had languished before he was rediscovered by the folk-festival crowd. Walking down MacDougal Street with him one day, Karwoski noticed Hurt continually turning around and looking behind him. When she asked why he was doing that, he told her that if he were walking with a white woman in the South, someone would likely grab and lynch him.

As the name accidentally implied, the Blues Project comprised students enamored of a style of music far removed from their own backgrounds. But to their credit, they didn’t attempt to mimic the vocal styles. “Danny didn’t do anything just by rote,” said Terri Thal. “He put himself into the music. He could adapt arrangements well and intelligently. If he did blues, he never tried to sound like an old Black man from Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama. He never tried to sound like anybody but himself.”

The same gradually became true for the band as a whole, which was aiming to expand on the music they all loved. Kalb would later tell an interviewer, “Our idea is to combine the emotion of the blues with the power of the rock band. Naturally we take advantage of all the new electronic musical resources.” Kalb didn’t use the effects increasingly common to guitarists, opting for a clean sound, but his fingers clambered all over the fretboard during solos, adding a loose, almost psychedelic edge to his notes. Although he was using a cheap Farfisa organ, Kooper pulled squeals and squeaks from its keyboard. Flanders’s delivery was more garage-rock Jagger than ersatz Delta blues, and Blumenfeld’s rhythms had the looseness of jazz. When one of Blumenfeld’s drum pedals broke at an Au Go Go show, Katz filled the time between repairs by playing “Catch the Wind,” the forlorn ballad by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan that became a regular part of their repertoire—and another sign that they were stretching the definition of a so-called blues band.

Signaling how the music business was now eyeing the electric Village, the Blues Project soon found itself with a record contract. MGM Records wasn’t a player like Atlantic or Columbia (which had passed on the band), but its roster included the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and Roy Orbison; the Lovin’ Spoonful was part of its Kama Sutra subsidiary. The company soon after launched two separate labels, Verve Forecast and, with Folkways’ Moses Asch, Verve Folkways; the Blues Project was signed to the latter.

Capitalizing on the roots-music rumble, Verve Folkways, working with Cavalier magazine, assembled what it called the “Blues Bag,” four nights at the Cafe Au Go Go starting November 24, 1965. The lineups brought together authentic blues acts (John Lee Hooker, Bukka White, T-Bone Walker) with Village troubadours (Eric Andersen, Fred Neil, David Blue); the Blues Project would close out each night. With an eye toward using the Blues Project’s sets for their first release for the company, MGM recorded each night. The streets were now teeming: as Blumenfeld would remember, the recording engineer for those nights kept his machines in a van parked outside the Au Go Go, with his German shepherd standing guard. Kooper would later admit to being embarrassed that Black musicians so much more seasoned and iconic would open for the Blues Project.

In an optimistically titled story “Blues-Rock Gains Foothold,” Billboard reported that the Blues Project had been “signed by Verve Folkways in a move by the label to strengthen its singles image.” In January 1966, in keeping with that plan, the label rolled out the first Blues Project 45: their cover of Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn,” which Billboard enthused had “possibilities for a smash folk-rocker.” Unfortunately, there was a glitch: “Violets of Dawn” featured Flanders, who was no longer in the band.

Kalb felt that Flanders’s delivery, especially on a rave-up version of Bo Diddley’s pummeling “Who Do You Love,” was “fucking fantastic, monumental—a monster.” But as the band would tell it, Flanders had a persuasive girlfriend who demanded that his name precede the band’s and also urged him to start his own career. “She said, ‘You don’t need these guys, this backup band,’” Kalb recalled. “Me, a backup band!” Matters came to a head in the first week of January 1966, when MGM flew the Blues Project to Los Angeles for the label’s annual sales convention to introduce them to its staff. The band played at a company party, was invited to a screening of Dr. Zhivago (MGM had the rights to the soundtrack), and was wined and dined. According to the band, Flanders informed them he wasn’t going to pitch in to help buy new gear for them because he was the singer and didn’t have any equipment. Accounts vary about whether Flanders quit (as Kalb would remember) or was fired (as Katz and Kooper maintained). Either way, Kalb would describe Flanders’s exit from the band as “great and sad at the same time.”

Without its front man, the Blues Project carried on. Starting in January 1966, it became, in essence, the house band at the Cafe Au Go Go, playing roughly once a month, several days in a row each time. The arrangement was especially beneficial in the wake of Flanders’s departure. MGM had concerns about releasing an album featuring a singer who was now out of the band. With Kooper and Katz stepping up as occasional lead singers along with Kalb, the Blues Project recorded more songs at the Au Go Go, saving themselves and their record contract.

When it was released a few months later, Live at the Cafe Au Go Go could or should have been a train wreck. On the cover, the venue name was larger than “The Blues Project.” The words “Featuring Tommy Flanders,” in an even smaller font, practically proclaimed that the Blues Project was not what it once was. At times the sound quality was so thin that the album sounded as if were emerging from a tinny car radio, not a stereo system. “You Go and I’ll Go with You,” a loose shuffle, seemed more like a practice tape than a fully developed performance.

Still, no record of the moment captured the thrill and potential of the new, gone-electric Village more than the Blues Project’s debut. The array of genres on it—troubadour folk, Chicago and Delta blues, primal rock and roll—reflected what could be heard throughout the Bleecker and MacDougal vicinity. But the Blues Project took each style, put it through their collective mincer, and emerged with something all their own. With Kalb’s voice taking on a more sensuous moan, “Alberta” was more seductive than his previous rendering with the New Strangers. Thanks to Flanders’s borderline salacious delivery, the band’s take on Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” approached the Howlin’ Wolf version as much as a bunch of white kids from the suburbs ever could. Andersen’s “Violets of Dawn” and Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” rocked the folk, rather than the other way around. Kalb’s guitar scraped and wailed, Katz’s harmonica chugged, and Kooper’s organ lurched the song into the present. Coming across green but hungry, they sounded as if they were ready to conquer the block, the whole neighborhood, and maybe the rest of the world.

In the Village Vanguard’s kitchen one evening, Herbie Hancock and drummer Tony Williams began goofing around with a martial-arts routine. Onstage was Charles Mingus, who finished his set and walked into the kitchen. Mingus remained an imposing presence—the Van Ronk of jazz, in some regards, although Van Ronk was nowhere near as volatile—and Hancock sensed that aura as Mingus stood behind him. To his relief, Mingus backed off. “He said, ‘I ain’t gonna fuck with those guys—they’re doing some karate shit,’” Hancock recalled. “I looked at Tony and we were amazed: ‘Wow—Charles Mingus is afraid of us.’”

They were all united in a sense of fearlessness. The middle of the sixties would be among the most electrifying in jazz history, and the Village was one of its central hubs. As a kid from Brooklyn, Gary Giddins had ventured into the Village and witnessed Dylan at Folk City and Phil Ochs and Son House on separate nights at the Gaslight; he’d also bought copies of Sing Out! at the Folklore Center. But his mind was suitably blown when he discovered jazz. At the beginning of his senior year in high school, Giddins borrowed a friend’s ID to get into the Vanguard, which became a second home to him; he even asked his father to take him there for his eighteenth birthday. One night Miles Davis didn’t show up with the rest of his second quintet, and the audience stood up to leave, as if they’d heard that a stand-in would be performing at a Broadway show. But Giddins stayed and heard Hancock, Williams, Wayne Shorter, and Ron Carter playing on their own, which was staggering in itself. On a subsequent evening when Davis did make it, he passed Giddins on the left side, near the piano, and extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray on Giddins’s table. “Keep this, kid,” Davis said. “Someday it’ll be worth something.”

The offerings were overwhelming during the summer of 1965 alone: Mingus at the Village Gate, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk at the same venue, Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor at the Vanguard. One weekend in August, one could have chosen between Rollins at the Vanguard, Monk and flautist Herbie Mann at the Village Gate, and a jam session at the Vanguard that brought together Shorter, Roland Kirk, Max Roach, Freddie Hubbard, and Clark Terry. On a double bill with Coleman Hawkins at the Vanguard, Rollins, who was into the fourth year of his return to performing, began with a forty-five-minute version of “Take the A Train”; for the second set, he emerged, in typically dramatic fashion, from the kitchen at the back of the club.

Much like rock and roll, jazz was pushing the boundaries once again. Hancock’s thematic Maiden Voyage was inspired by the sounds of the ocean and conjured that mood with his fluid interaction with members of the Davis band. Coltrane, who regularly played the Village during this time, recorded Ascension, its two forty-minute improvisations wandering even further out. But there were implications that came along with all this innovation. Jazz was growing so experimental that it threatened to alienate some of its audience, and rock players were dipping their toes into improvisation, potentially luring some away from jazz and toward the epic jams of bands like Cream and, starting nationally in 1967, the Grateful Dead. The consequences of that shift in jazz were exhilarating but still unknown.

By early 1966, the West Village coffeehouse world had become so overexposed that it was ripe for an entire book of spoofs. From the Folk Bag, by Brooklyn artist and musician Marcus Uzilevsky (but credited to Ry Cooper), took merciless aim at the voguishness of the Village. In one cartoon, a white guitar player was seated on a couch in a living room, surrounded by an attentive group of men and women: “Yeah! This is a song I wrote last night when I was down an’ out in Greenwich Village!” he told them. In another, two young men were huddled in a railroad boxcar, one saying to another: “Man, this is not the fun like it sounded in that song you used to sing back on McDougal [sic] street.”

But those jokes already seemed dated, as more and more folk acts in the area opted for amplified instruments and rock and roll. The same year the Lovin’ Spoonful started at the Night Owl, the Magicians, a quartet that emerged from an interracial pop and doo-wop band called Tex and the Chex, also played there, and Columbia put out a single of theirs, “An Invitation to Cry.” But the Spoonful loomed large, and now on a national level. After “Do You Believe in Magic,” the Spoonful had returned to the Night Owl once more in the fall of 1965. But after they landed three more hits in the Top 10—the bubbly “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice,” the sauntering “Daydream,” and the winsome “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”—they were swept up in national touring and promotion. They never played the Bleecker Street circuit again.

Another band that succeeded the Spoonful at the Night Owl, the Blues Magoos, was several more rattling steps removed from owner Joe Marra’s original vision for the club. According to Peppy Castro, the band’s uptown-raised singer and guitarist, Marra was less than supportive when the band made its own leap from primitive rock to indulgent psychedelia. That transition was egged on by a tape-delay machine that accidentally fell off the stage, emitting a godforsaken screech that became part of their act. “We were starting to do freakouts,” Castro said, “and Joe comes up to us and says, ‘It’s too loud. If you play this fucking music like this, you’re out of here.’” The band was ultimately fired for the racket—much like another band getting its sea legs in the Village that same year. Booked into the Cafe Bizarre just before Christmas 1965, the Velvet Underground was hardly folk or folk rock or anything easily definable. Their one show was notable for their future mentor Andy Warhol seeing them for the first time and drummer Maureen Tucker not being allowed to play her instrument due to owner Rick Allmen’s objections; they were promptly fired.

In keeping with Sebastian and Kalb, many other folk musicians were eager to relegate their acoustic guitar to a closet and go electric. Perry Miller, a silky-voiced singer and guitarist who’d attended the same Queens, New York, elementary school as Art Garfunkel, had transformed into Jesse Colin Young after college in Ohio and then New York University. Until that point, his exposure to Greenwich Village amounted to the times his mother dragged him there for her dental appointments. Dropping out of NYU, he took a railroad apartment across the street from the Five Spot, where he once saw Thelonious Monk lingering outside. He eventually began working the basket houses and recorded an album, Soul of a City Boy. By then, he had changed his name, based on Old West outlaws Jesse James and Cole Younger and race-car driver Colin Chapman. Playing in Boston, he met another like-minded singer and guitarist, Jerry Corbitt, who introduced him to musician Lowell “Banana” Levinger and a drummer, Joe Bauer. Inspired by Paul McCartney, Young decided he would sing and play bass.

Moving en masse to New York, the musicians named themselves the Youngbloods and landed an early job at Folk City, where the club was so unprepared for amplified music, and the stage so small, that Levinger and his electric piano had to be set up in the audience. But whether they were taking a crack at Blind Willie McTell’s stomping “Statesboro Blues” or Young’s originals, they sounded like few other bands in the Village. Young’s sweet, sometimes churlish voice was balanced by Corbitt’s tough, snarling guitar, Bauer’s locked-in drums, and Levinger’s piano and velvety guitar parts.

In the spring of 1966, the Youngbloods were booked into the Cafe Au Go Go, where they were able to rehearse in the afternoons when the Blues Project wasn’t doing the same. There, the Youngbloods heard the song that would eventually rewire their lives. A gentle tune espousing brotherhood, “Let’s Get Together,” written by Dino Valenti under the name Chet Powers, had been kicking around for a bit; the Kingston Trio had recorded a version in 1964. At the Au Go Go, either Young alone or the band together, depending on who relayed the story, heard Buzzy Linhart singing it. “I felt the heavens open,” Young said. “I knew. I felt instantly that I had found something that would be a key to my path forward. I felt my life change.” Even though at least one recording was on the market, Young asked Linhart to write down the lyrics and, in teaching it to himself later, tweaked the melody. With the Youngbloods, the song, now called “Get Together,” went electric, complete with Levinger’s spiraling guitar solo.

Even Kalb’s sibling was swept up in the change. Like the brother three years older than him, Jonathan Kalb had gravitated toward music making at an early age, starting with classical piano before shifting to guitar and making his way to Washington Square Park, where he was stunned to see Lightnin’ Hopkins behind him. He too had paid Van Ronk for guitar lessons, marveling at how his playing was poignant in its simplicity, and he also enrolled in the University of Wisconsin. In the summer of 1966, just before the start of his senior year, Jonathan, nineteen, returned to New York, now playing more electric guitar than acoustic. The entire scene struck him as so different from the one he’d left a few years ago, when he would watch Erik Darling play banjo in the park. “You still had some of the same places, like the Kettle of Fish,” he said, “but all of a sudden it had changed dramatically.”

During a jam session at the Cafe Au Go Go, Jonathan was approached by Ed Sanders, poet, writer, and owner of the iconoclastic Peace Eye bookstore on East Tenth Street. Sanders was also the cofounder (with Tuli Kupferberg) of the Fugs, the anarchist band that melded guttural rock, near-psychedelic folk, and lyrics that veered from tender to raunchy to politically subversive. Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber of the Holy Modal Rounders had been early members, and the Fugs had shared a bill at the Au Go Go with the Blues Project. The Fugs, too, were being monitored by the FBI for their “four-letter filth words,” as one letter to the Bureau complained. Bringing their Lower East Side rock performance art to the Village, the Fugs rented out the Players Theatre, next to the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal. In need of a guitarist, Sanders asked Kalb, still a college student, to become the band’s musical director, and the guitarist was soon adding musical muscle to the Fugs’ verbal mayhem and parodies. Keith Richards and actress Kim Novak were among the stars spotted in the crowd.

When the band took breaks, a Black guitarist playing next door at the Wha? would talk with Kalb about effects boxes, like the fuzz box Kalb used on his guitar. Then going by the name Jimmy James, he was fronting a band called the Blue Flames and burrowing deep into the music and vibe of the Village after having been a sideman for the Isley Brothers, Curtis Knight, and others. That same guitarist, who was about to change his name to Jimi Hendrix, was playing songs from John Hammond (Jr.)’s album, and Hammond went over to the Cafe Wha? to see him. Soon after, he was playing behind Hammond at the Au Go Go.

Lenny Kaye, a student at Rutgers College who was writing music reviews for his college paper, attended a blues night at the Au Go Go and watched Hammond introduce someone he called Jimmy James. “The guy comes out and starts doing all these tricks, biting the guitar and playing behind his head,” he recalled. Kaye had seen the Blues Project, Richie Havens, and others. But here was a musician taking his art to another level—and another instance of the Village as that incubator of change.

In the summer of 1966, the Blues Project had just finished a four-night run at the Cafe Au Go Go, but to a guy in a pirate hat outside the club, something was off. “These teenagers have spoiled everything,” he told UPI writer Aline Mosby. “City Hall sent cops from the riot squad down here. They have submachine guns in their trunks.”

During the pre-electrified days in the Village, Dave Van Ronk would situate himself in front of the Gaslight and watch the same people walking back and forth on MacDougal Street. With each passing year, the escalation of street traffic was noticeable. In the summer of 1965, the Chicago Tribune was lamenting how “Greenwich Village every weekend turns out to be like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” Twelve months later, the situation had grown even more suffocating. “Oh, we’re from the Bronx,” a young woman—dressed, along with her friends, in “fashionable printed cotton suits”—told one reporter as they stood in front of the Cafe Figaro. “Everybody comes to the Village now.” Runaways were also beginning to flock to the area, and one of the regular and respected beat cops, Jimmy Byrnes, would guide some of them to the Cafe Au Go Go for ice cream and sodas. Some eventually landed work as waitresses there.

The corner of MacDougal and West Third Street became a particularly overrun intersection, thanks partly to the Night Owl and its street-level configuration. “You could look in the window and see people play,” said the Blues Magoos’ Peppy Castro. “That corner was packed. You couldn’t move.” Milling about outside of clubs like the Night Owl, the young men, with their long hair, flowered shirts, pinstriped bell bottoms, and chinos, wanted desperately to resemble a Beatle or a Rolling Stone; with their kohl-rimmed eyes, the women looked like clones of Cher, who had become a pop star along with her husband, Sonny, in L.A.

With the influx, new aromas began to linger in the air. “The smell of piss was all over,” said the Blue Project’s Steve Katz. “It went from a nice Italian neighborhood with folk music to this goofy, crazy thing, all these kids who wanted to go into the Village and see what the fuss was about. And the fuss was rock and roll.” Van Ronk would later tell writer Mike Jahn that stern measures were sometimes required. “We used to have to defend our old ladies,” he said. “The crowd I used to hang around with, everyone carried a knife. Those clods would come and assume that every ‘beatnik’ girl would go to bed with anybody.”

The influx of tourists, along with wealthier sorts, was starting to drive less financially secure artists to the East Village, where a loft could be rented for as little as $40 a month. When a publicist set up an interview on WOR radio for his client Art D’Lugoff of the Village Gate, he sent along a list of “suggested topics” to the station that included “changes in taste and entertainment: the electronic revolution” and “expansion to the East Village due to high-rise apartments and NYU aggrandizement making inexpensive living in old Greenwich Village a myth. Creative writers, artists, et. al. can no longer afford the old Village.”

The pirate in front of the Au Go Go may have exaggerated the hordes of law enforcement, but the teens and twenty-somethings swarming the Village streets did make for a sizable and viable market for drug dealers, and the police presence shot up accordingly. In March 1966 the city’s mayor, John Lindsay, announced a sweeping plan to clean up both the Village and Times Square. On March 24, officers disguised as beatniks—complete with pins attached to their coats that trumpeted legalizing drugs—slipped into the Village. After scoping out the streets around Bleecker and MacDougal, the undercovers went into action and, by midafternoon, had arrested twenty people for sales of heroin, pot (including one dealer with ten thousand dollars’ worth on him), barbiturates, and weapons; another dealer had weed, a gun, and a teenage runaway in his apartment. A month later, a new play, Wait Until Dark, opened on Broadway, and suddenly its plot—burglars breaking into a West Village apartment to steal fifty thousand dollars’ worth of heroin that was hidden there—didn’t seem so far-fetched. A doorman at the Cafe Wha? was busted for weed when police walked by the club, smelled the telltale aroma, and chased him down the street before collaring him.

In June 1966 the Village Voice published an account of “teenage hopheads” lured to MacDougal Street for heroin and amphetamines. Several months later, detectives swooped into the midtown apartment of Harvey Backer, a mysterious writer who slept in a coffin and was on the verge of selling fifteen pounds of heroin and pot to Village-bound teens. Crime was even impinging on the Folklore Center. When Izzy Young and Jack Prelutsky, another fledgling guitarist and Van Ronk student (and future poet and author) who began working at the store a year after it opened, would take a break to play chess in the back room, several times someone grabbed an instrument right out of the window and dashed away.

The availability of first-rate weed and speed was an aphrodisiac to musicians on many levels. To Mitch Blank, Danny Kalb would recall the night in 1966 when Dylan—“on speed or something,” he said—came by Kalb’s apartment with David Blue and talked for several hours, almost nonstop, about his parents and upbringing in Minnesota. Bob Neuwirth would make his way to the Village to obtain the quality weed he’d heard about. To make ends meet during his pre–Lovin’ Spoonful days, John Sebastian would sell pot. “You’re buying a shot glass of pot that had been through a fucking grinder so the seeds are in it,” he said. “But it was the social exchange, too.”

The harder drugs infiltrating the community were affecting the musicians in far worse ways. Tim Hardin soon became the scene’s most chilling example of addiction. When Hardin would appear at the Night Owl, often late, he’d ask Marra for two dollars for a taxi. “No cab,” Marra noted later. “Heroin.” During one rehearsal for a recording, Sebastian, who was backing him on harmonica, watched Hardin casually shoot up as he was instructing Sebastian on the song they were about to learn. Erik Jacobsen’s apartment on MacDougal, next door to Sebastian’s, was the place where Hardin would shoot up. (“Oh, no, it’s Tim,” Jacobsen would say to his visiting friend, musician, and photographer Henry Diltz when he’d look through the peephole and see Hardin on the other side.) One night at the Cafe Au Go Go, Hardin went onstage, after a lengthy delay, with a fresh needle mark evident on his arm.

No one denied Hardin’s talent, especially as it was heard on Tim Hardin 1. Here was someone equally at home with ballads as fragile and delicate as rose petals and blues that were cocky and swaggering—someone who could compose as pained a song as “Reason to Believe” and slip effortlessly into the role of a “Smugglin’ Man.” Not intent on re-creating his songs live, Hardin would play with the phrasing, lending him the feel of a jazz singer. “As weird as it was, the heroin and all, there was a core of something I was getting from this guy,” Sebastian said. “It was a singular vibe, the combination of his skills and the heroin. That was what made it like Ray Charles.” But it didn’t make Hardin any easier to deal with. When Hardin and the Youngbloods shared a bill uptown, Levinger returned to the band’s dressing room and found his guitar missing. Jesse Colin Young assumed Hardin had taken it to sell it for drug money. At a subsequent Village show, Hardin showed up with Levinger’s guitar, and Levinger merely took it back without question, but the incident was just a reminder of how challenging it was to cope with Hardin.

Heroin also engulfed the lead singer of the band that took up a residency at the Night Owl after the Lovin’ Spoonful had moved on. James Taylor had arrived in the city in the summer of 1966 with mental-health issues. As a teenager growing up in North Carolina, he’d dealt with depression as well as his father’s alcoholism, and, after dropping out of high school, had spent part of the previous year and into 1966 at McLean, the psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. Taylor had already begun making music in North Carolina and at the Martha’s Vineyard home where his family summered; there he met a fellow guitarist and sparkplug, Danny Kortchmar. Ten months into his stint at McLean, Taylor reconnected with Kortchmar, who was now in New York and forming a band. Taylor bailed on the hospital by telling the staff he was simply moving “heavier stuff” out of his room, when in fact he was the one leaving.

Kortchmar was initially thinking of calling their band the James Taylor Group: his friend was clearly the lead singer, and the British band Spencer Davis Group was on a roll. Instead, they settled on the Flying Machine. Despite little in the way of performance experience, they were hired by Marra to play several sets an evening at the Night Owl, for $12 a night; at least once they were also booked into Folk City, opening for bluesman Lonnie Johnson. The band worked out the songs Taylor had written, including one, “Knockin’ Round the Zoo,” about his time at McLean, and “Steamroller,” a parody of the young, white blues singers gravitating to the Village. “Their idea of soul was to crank up the volume on the amplifiers their parents bought ’em,” Taylor told writer Susan Braudy a few years later. “They were all singing these heavy blues numbers that sounded really pretentious in their mouths.” Revealing Taylor’s appreciation for prerock standards, the Flying Machine also assayed Hoagy Carmichael’s “Baltimore Oriole.”

But even with his parents paying the rent for his Upper West Side apartment, Manhattan was jarring for Taylor, who was eighteen and couldn’t say no to anyone, from dealers to runaways who wanted to crash in his home. Before long, he’d begun using heroin. His family predilection for addiction played a part, as did the nights he would crash in Washington Square Park, where savvy dealers would descend on him. One day Taylor came into the Night Owl carrying a crutch. Marra naturally asked if he’d injured his foot, but Taylor answered no, he hadn’t, but he’d found the crutch and thought he might “need it someday.” Realizing he had a problem, Taylor called his father in North Carolina, who drove up to the city and walked into the Night Owl looking for his son; when he found him, he brought James back home to recuperate. The Flying Machine, which soon crashed, left behind a tape of their songs, one of which, “Night Owl,” was written in honor of their residency.

In an advice column in a Pennsylvania newspaper, a young woman wrote in to confess that her new boyfriend was urging her to move to the Village. The move felt like an important escape: her family was in turmoil, and her mother was coming home drunk most nights. But the columnist warned her against the plan. “Young love in the Village may sound romantic, but it can be deadly—and perhaps you’ll be the unlucky one who ends up dead,” she wrote. “The Village environs are where the drugs are and these don’t just stop with weak ‘tea.’”

It was yet another fraught night at the Kettle of Fish, but this time it didn’t involve Ochs, Andersen, or Van Ronk, but rather the Blues Project. According to Kalb, Dylan had wanted Al Kooper to join his band for a European tour that summer of 1966. Given that Kooper’s organ had become a recognizable part of Dylan’s sound, it was hard to blame Dylan for asking. But the Blues Project convinced Kooper to stick with them, and as Kalb later recalled, Dylan had a tense exchange at the Kettle with Blues Project manager Jeff Chase. During one of the band’s gigs at the Cafe Au Go Go, Katz then watched as Dylan and David Blue heckled them from the audience; he assumed they were irked that Kooper hadn’t taken Dylan up on his offer. “At that time, we thought we were the bees’ knees,” Kalb told Mitch Blank. “He was Bob Dylan, okay, but we thought we could be the new Rolling Stones, or something. It goes to your head sometimes, especially if you’re 23 years old.”

Whether the Blues Project would ever rise to the level of the Stones was uncertain. In spite of MGM’s hopes, neither of their singles—“Violets of Dawn,” followed by “I Wanna Be Your Driver”—made it anywhere near AM radio playlists, and Live at the Cafe Au Go Go sold a respectable, but not chart-crashing, twenty thousand copies in its first few months. As Kooper would recall, the band members weren’t always greeted like conquering heroes when they ventured outside of the Village; parts of the rest of the country treated them like freaks, booed, and hurled things at them. They were making a living but just barely. Each member had a weekly salary of between $115 and $123. For a week’s run at the Au Go Go that summer, the band was paid a total of $1,500.

But their reputation, both in the city and beyond, was growing, and their peers were taking notice. In July 1966 the band shared a bill at the Cafe Au Go Go with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. To Kalb’s relief, the notoriously critical Butterfield gave them his seal of approval. “The second night, Butterfield comes around drunk and says to me, ‘We heard your guys were pussies, but you’re not—you can really play,’” Kalb said. “To hear that from Paul, one of the greatest musicians ever, was very important to us.” During a two-band jam on the third night, Kalb and Mike Bloomfield, the Butterfield band’s own guitar hero, found themselves in an impromptu duel. “Then God reached down, I kid you not,” Kalb said. “And for reasons not known to me or anyone, the two bands break into ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ as an instrumental. It was su-poib!”

The band’s increasing bravado and confidence would play out in the making of its second record. “We’re never satisfied with our sound,” Kalb told a reporter while promoting Live at the Cafe Au Go Go. “Our next one is going to be even better. Live albums in a club such as our first one can’t match a good studio sound.” When the group assembled in New York and Los Angeles to make its first album of studio material, Kalb’s prediction came true. Projections, as it would be called, didn’t simply move the band beyond the genre in its name. Reflecting the varied influences of each member, the album aimed to show that the Blues Project was arguably the most versatile band to emerge from the Village.

Blues were represented, of course. For an Elektra compilation dubbed What’s Shakin’, Kooper had remade “Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying,” a traditional gospel tune, into “I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes.” With the Blues Project, especially Kalb’s guitar, the song shook off its roots and became a brooding psychedelic shuffle. There was folk rock: Kooper’s jangling “Fly Away” resulted from the breakup of his first marriage, and Katz contributed a song originally called “Twelfth of December,” which started like a medieval madrigal before blossoming into a pained song about his relationship with Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez’s sister and a singer herself. When the label asked Chase for the title of the song as the record was about to get pressed, he replied, “What song? You mean Steve’s song?” To Katz’s chagrin, “Steves Song,” complete with a missing apostrophe, became the title. Kooper had also been hooked on a lick at the end of a number by jazz guitarist Barney Kessel and turned it into “Flute Thing,” which had elements of jazz but also a swirling solo from Kalb. Kulberg had drilled a hole in his flute, adding an echoplex and also connecting it to a fuzz pedal. “Andy invented the electric flute,” said Kalb. “He put it through an amp so you could make it faster or slower. When he played ‘Flute Thing,’ he could play three lines at the same time. It was fucking weird and amazing.”

About fifteen years earlier, Muddy Waters had recorded “Still a Fool,” whose narrator grappled with an illicit affair and, in general, felt out of control and directionless. In 1966 Butterfield and his band recast it as a frisky romp now called “Two Trains Running.” Now, on Projections, the song was more dramatically reinvented. Kalb clearly related to something in its lyrics (Kooper would remember that Kalb’s apartment, which had a hot plate for a stove, was enough to give anyone the blues). The Blues Project transformed the song into a dramatic, personalized epic, with peaks and valleys that lent it the feel of a manic-depressive episode set to a slow-burning blues.

The song became a breathtaking peak of their sets and a spotlight for Kalb. “Danny was an amazing guitar player,” Kooper said. “His technical facility was amazing. He could do anything. He was more original than [Mike] Bloomfield. He took more chances than Bloomfield.” In the studio, though, the song nearly went off the rails. The band was deep into what felt like a nearly perfect take when, Blumenfeld recalled, “all of a sudden there was this really strange pause.” A string on Kalb’s guitar went out of tune by a half tone, but as the band continued to play, he retuned it, turning that glitch into a phrase all its own, and slid back into the song. The moment was preserved in the version heard on Projections.

But beneath the bravado, the band was starting to disintegrate. They fired Chase and hired Sid Bernstein, the promoter and impresario who had booked the Beatles into both Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium. Onstage, the competitive drive between Kooper and Kalb became noticeable. “They were both so loud,” Katz said. “Al would go up the high keys on the piano and Danny would be screaming [on the guitar] and they would be fighting each other. It was like the Punch and Judy show. Roy and I would look at each other like, ‘Oh, my God.’” With his fondness for flowery shirts and a taxi-driver hat, Kooper was also the most fashionably flamboyant of the bunch.

Because Kalb was seeing a psychiatrist, the apparent solution was a group-therapy session with the shrink, Arthur Eaton, at his Park Avenue office. Eaton was, to say the least, progressive—he brought a joint to the session to loosen everyone up—and they all let out their issues with one another. As they left, they realized that it was effective but perhaps too much so: if they had another session, the band could fall apart.

Kooper and Kalb’s clashes weren’t centered only on volume. Around them, debate continued to rage about whether Village musicians should be authentic and pure or aim for pop crossover. A variation of that argument played out in a feud between Izzy Young and Robert Shelton, who appeared to have nothing but disdain for each other. One particularly testy dustup began in January 1966, when Shelton published a Times roundup of “folk-rock” albums—the latest from Dylan, Judy Collins, the Byrds, and others—and called it a “healthy movement.” A few weeks later, in response, the newspaper ran what it called a “Folk-Rock Symposium” including letters from Sing Out!’s Irwin Silber, writer Nat Hentoff, and Paul Nelson, the opinionated editor of the folk magazine Little Sandy Review. Notably, Silber called Shelton’s piece a “self-conscious apologia” and the genre “a Tin Pan Alley gimmick.”

In a letter to Howard Klein, the music editor at the Times, Young went even further, questioning Shelton’s folk knowledge and accusing him of being compromised by writing liner notes for albums. “Now that they call it ‘folk-rock,’” Young wrote, “the Negro is easily separated from rock and roll and Mr. Shelton can write paeans to all the white imitators and ignore every Negro group as he did” in his roundup. In a seven-page letter he sent to Young, Silber, and Hentoff, along with Albert Grossman and Pete Seeger, Shelton responded that he had considered suing Young for libel. But upon realizing it could financially ruin the Folklore Center, he decided against it and instead offered to put up a hundred dollars toward what he called Young’s mental-health care.

When it came to the bands on the scene, the Blues Project most embodied the choice between purism and the pop charts. “There was always a battle for control between Danny and Al,” said Katz. “Danny was very stubborn, a purist in those days. Al had to have everything his way. It was about Kooper’s ego and Danny’s intransigence.” Nor was Kooper alone: the band took notice when the Youngbloods, their peers at the Cafe Au Go Go, scored a minor hit with their first single, a jaunty jug-band rocker called “Grizzly Bear.” “We were jealous of that,” Blumenfeld said. “We didn’t have a tune like that. We tried.” Projections, which Verve Folkways released in late 1966, also suffered from its occasionally guitar-pick-thin sound: the band had been allotted only a few hours of studio time at a time, depending on which of MGM’s other acts wasn’t working.

With his background in Top 40 and his fascination with horns and rococo arrangements, Kooper was eager to expand the group’s palette, and he wrote two songs expressly constructed to be pop hits, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” and “No Time like the Right Time.” The gambit almost worked—the latter peaked at 96 on the Billboard Top 100. The band even hired Emmaretta Marks, a Black waitress at the Au Go Go, to sing with them on “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire.” Kalb played along, literally, but disliked both songs. Blumenfeld recalled a Cafe Au Go Go rehearsal where they worked on one of those numbers. “The whole band was ready to kill each other,” he said. “It wasn’t blues enough. Danny was rough on Al. I started to do a 6/8 time thing, big, bombastic drum stuff, and everything came together.” At one point, he later wrote, Kooper also took to carrying around a cane for additional affectation—but soon stopped when he realized he could have pounded Kalb on the head with it out of frustration.

Kooper remained undeterred, pushing for the group to add a horn section to beef up its sound. Kalb rejected the idea, saying it didn’t make sense to add overhead to a band that wasn’t making much money to start with. He also argued that they’d only begun to explore what the five of them could do together. Kalb remained a classicist, shooting down producer Tom Wilson’s idea of recording a cover of Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now.” During the making of Projections, he also dismissed a suggestion that they cover the stomping “Wild Thing,” which would soon become a ubiquitous radio hit for the Troggs.

To complicate matters, their love lives were in disarray. Katz was still recovering from his brief affair with Fariña. One day, Blumenfeld received a call from Katz asking him to come to his apartment in the West Village. “I didn’t know what was going on,” Blumenfeld said, “so I went over and opened the door and there’s a woman with blond hair, sitting with her back to me, playing guitar. I thought this human being was gorgeous. We left there pretty quickly and skipped down the street and went to her place in Chelsea.” It was Joni Mitchell, a Canadian singer and songwriter who had appeared at the Gaslight with her then husband Chuck Mitchell. Now in the city alone, she’d hooked up briefly with Katz. The only issue was that Blumenfeld already had a girlfriend, who was in Europe at the time. “I fell in love with Joni, but we had to break up because my girlfriend was coming back,” he said. “Joni knocked me out, I fell in love with her. But she was beyond me, in a way.”

Despondent when she heard the news about Blumenfeld’s other relationship, Mitchell ended up at the Tin Angel, a bar next to the Bitter End. Kooper offered to take her to his place, to console or otherwise; instead, she sang him a bunch of her songs there, including one called “Michael from Mountains” that he thought would be ideal for his friend Judy Collins. He felt compelled to call Collins and tell her about Mitchell—and ask her to maybe give Mitchell a ride to the upcoming Newport Folk Festival. Collins came through with the car and gained a potential source of new songs for her next album.

In 1967 Phillip Namanworth, a jazz-leaning keyboard player then living far uptown, answered a musician-wanted ad for a band. He turned up at a rehearsal space in the West Village, where he set up his Farfisa organ. Immediately, Namanworth—whose nickname, Pot, came from his job as a dishwasher, not from marijuana—knew the project would be far from a traditional folk record. Guitarist Dave Woods asked Namanworth if he could play a blues in B flat. He could and did, and was hired immediately.

The band for which Namanworth was enlisted was the latest in Van Ronk’s search for ways to musically stretch his legs. In 1966 Van Ronk had become the next area musician to sign with Verve Forecast. His first album for the label, No Dirty Names, was an exuberant acoustic affair with a saucy version of Josh White’s “One Meatball,” where he pushed his voice into a growly scat, while one of his first originals, “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again,” was a dreamlike depiction of the Village underbelly with a double-tracked vocal that lent the song an added eeriness. His jazz jones emerged in a rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Blues Chante” and his love of Kurt Weill in “Alabama Song”; with added accompaniment from Woods, both songs were fully remade in the Van Ronk mode.

At the same time, Van Ronk had never been averse to augmenting his voice and guitar, and like many around him, he felt the pull of rock and roll, with all its creative and financial opportunities. “Dave wanted an electric band,” Thal said. “He thought it would make good music. And there were groups forming all over the place and they were getting rich. So he thought he could have a good band and, perhaps, do better financially than he did as a solo performer.”

Similar makeovers of acoustic musicians into amplified ones were happening all around Van Ronk. By 1967, in addition to Kalb and Sebastian, the list would include David Blue, who’d fully made the transition from actor to troubadour. David Blue, his 1966 Elektra debut, very much followed in the folk-meets-rock footsteps of Dylan’s work and featured originals such as “So Easy She Goes By” and “Grand Hotel” that held promise for Blue’s own future. But the album hadn’t sold, and soon enough, Blue had formed a four-piece band, the American Patrol, that pushed his sound even further into rock and roll. And despite being firmly entrenched in the unplugged world, brothers Happy and Artie Traum—along with guitarist Marc Silber, owner of the still-thriving Fretted Instruments store—formed the Children of Paradise, which aimed to simulate the British Invasion groups on the radio. They landed work at the Cafe Au Go Go and a contract with Columbia Records that included free electric guitars and amplifiers.

Unlike the Children of Paradise, Van Ronk’s crossover dream didn’t need an outside cash infusion. The royalties he had made on Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “Bamboo,” which Thal had tucked away in a bank account, would now underwrite his electrification. By the time Namanworth was invited to join, the band had a name—the Hudson Dusters, after the New York City street gang that had formed in the late 1800s—and two other members, bass player Ed Gregory and drummer Rick Henderson. For a producer, Van Ronk turned to his friend Barry Kornfeld, who had largely left the coffeehouse scene behind and was venturing into session work and even publishing. In 1965, Kornfeld and Paul Simon had become business partners by forming a publishing company, Eclectic Music, with the intention of snapping up Village songwriters and signing them to deals. Among the first songs they published was David Blue’s “I Like to Sleep Late in the Morning,” an ode to the lazy life that would become his best-known and most-covered song.

If Van Ronk was aiming to sell records, he would do it his own way. Among the songs he and the Hudson Dusters put on tape were a version of the Hollywood Argyles’ novelty hit “Alley Oop”; a demented piece of folk rock called “Head Inspector”; a version of the Bing Crosby–linked “Swing on a Star,” with intentionally lush, corny harmonies; and an electric, full-band remake of “Cocaine,” which had become a staple of Van Ronk’s repertoire. “He didn’t mean it to be an album of eclectic stuff,” said Namanworth. “He said, ‘Let’s gather things from around me from all different influences.’ Dave could take something in a song and make it his own.”

At one rehearsal, Van Ronk asked Namanworth if he wanted to hear a new song. With just his guitar, Van Ronk played “Both Sides Now,” with what Namanworth recalled as a “young blonde lady” sitting in the corner, listening. Van Ronk had met Joni Mitchell in Detroit, where she was living at the time. He loved the tune—he had a fondness for ruminative songs about life, aging, and regrets—and decided to include it on the album. He called it “Clouds,” although Mitchell preferred her own title, “Both Sides Now.” They compromised by calling it “Clouds (From Both Sides Now).” Woods arranged it as twinkly folk pop and also lent a plusher, more pop-chorale feeling to an arrangement of another Mitchell song, “Chelsea Morning.”

For her part, Thal had her doubts about the entire project. “I thought it was a lousy idea,” she said. “I didn’t think Dave belonged in any band. He wasn’t a group-conforming person. But he wanted it, so we went ahead with it.” Besides, Van Ronk and others associated with the record felt that no matter what it was called, “Clouds” would be the song that would finally give Van Ronk the hit that he—and many of his peers—secretly coveted.

By the summer of 1967, the musical electrification of the area between Fourteenth and Houston Streets had all but consumed it. As the Cafe Au Go Go demonstrated, it wouldn’t merely be local acts that flocked there. The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane would rattle its walls, as would Cream, making its Village debut at the Au Go Go. Sitting a few rows back, the Youngbloods took in the pulverizing, electroshocked blues of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker; Levinger said it was the first time he’d ever experienced a stomachache from a bass guitar. Upstairs from the venue, owner Howard Solomon opened the Garrick Theater, which hosted off-Broadway musicals but most notably Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, who brought their shows, a theater of the musically and politically absurd, from Los Angeles. Their one-week gig became such a must-see that they stayed in the city for several more months.

In ways it was beginning to be hard to count, the vestiges of the previous Village world were starting to fade. In August 1967, the city abolished its odious cabaret-card system, including the fingerprinting of musicians. As License Commissioner Joel J. Tyler announced, a department study determined that “a need to be suspicious of top-flight artists,” along with wait staff and “go-go dancers,” was no longer necessary. To keep the live-music world in some semblance of order, licenses for the venues themselves would suffice.

But even with those restrictions lifted, the neighborhood was still roiled. The Night Owl closed in early 1968. In a blow to coverage of the scene, Robert Shelton, at work on a major biography of Dylan based on his years of interviewing and chronicling him, left his job at the Times and relocated to London that same year. Had he remained, it’s unlikely Shelton would have devoted much space to the latest club to open on MacDougal Street. Situated a few doors down from the Cafe Wha?, the Answer was run by a sandal-clad twenty-four-year-old and decorated with flowers and graffiti. In fact, it was a Salvation Army–operated “coffeehouse ministry,” as it was called, which aimed to convert runaways to Christianity with the help of no-name folksingers.

Ed Koch, then a city councilman, continued his quest to ensure that unlicensed music-connected businesses were monitored and not disruptive to those living in the neighborhood. Cafe Feenjon, a coffeehouse where Dylan and José Feliciano had played during their formative New York days, had started on Seventh Avenue South and eventually moved to 105 MacDougal, formerly home to the Fat Black Pussycat. There, the space made room for largely acoustic world-music groups; its owner, Manny Dworman, even fronted the Feenjon Group, which included musicians from Greece, the Middle East, and Turkey. Although the music was hardly abrasive or rattling, police slapped the coffeehouse with a summons in late 1967.

Some of the old-guard musicians remained. After years in or around the Bleecker Street vicinity, Richie Havens, the Black singer and strummer who’d made such a lasting impression during his basket-house days, finally started commanding attention outside the area. Unlike his peers, Havens hadn’t ridden the Village wave as quickly as some of his peers. He’d signed with Albert Grossman in 1963 and made early recordings for a small label. But it wasn’t until 1967, when he joined the Blues Project and Tim Hardin on Verve Folkways, that Havens’s career began to take shape. On Mixed Bag, he displayed the deft way he could dip into the Village repertoire, recasting Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and the Fugs’ “Morning Morning” by way of his masculine but tender delivery. “Handsome Johnny,” cowritten with actor and fellow musician Louis Gossett Jr., showcased the rhythmic guitar approach that set him apart in his early days, and its haunting evocation of a soldier who fought in war after war, like a roaming ghost, proved how much he could contribute to the topical-song world.

But Havens was now starting to look like the last musician standing in his neighborhood. Up in Woodstock, where he had moved and was still recovering from a mysterious 1966 motorcycle accident, Dylan was spending the summer of 1967 with the Hawks, recording new songs (in their rented, salmon-colored house) to pitch to other artists. After his early shows at the Night Owl, followed by ones at the Cafe Au Go Go and the Bitter End, Fred Neil had become one of the Village’s most admired and most enigmatic troubadours. Tear Down the Walls, a collaboration with Vince Martin, set the table, but Neil’s own 1965 debut, Bleecker & MacDougal, announced a newly liberated songwriter who could whoop it up on the title track and, on “Little Bit of Rain,” dip into a deep well of regret. But never fully comfortable on stage or with the music business, Neil was soon living and recording in California before transferring for good to Florida. Tom Paxton and his wife, Midge, left their apartment on West Tenth Street and found a house in East Hampton, Long Island, where they could raise their family.

From early shows at Folk City to a headlining set at the Bitter End, Arlo Guthrie was beginning to construct his own path in the Village, apart from his father’s legacy. At one of those Folk City shows in 1966, he’d premiered an early draft of “Alice’s Restaurant,” a long, comical talking blues about a Thanksgiving Day littering bust; by the time he was playing it at the Gaslight, it had expanded to include the way he’d avoided the military draft as a result of being arrested for that littering. Now the differences between the scene he’d experienced in the late fifties and the one a decade later were impossible to deny, especially from his vantage point of an apartment at the corner of MacDougal and Eighth Streets. “It used to be that you could just walk in and sit down [at clubs or coffeehouses] and people would know you,” Guthrie said. “Then they started havin’ people outside at the doors to watch who’s comin’ and who’s goin’. It changed from bein’ easygoin’ to more organized, more militaristic. The tightening up made it not feel quite as welcoming. I remember thinkin’ it became more like Disneyland, with people lookin’ to see hippies. We’re in a zoo, and that didn’t feel as comfortable as hangin’ out with your own kind.” Before long, Guthrie and his family sold their apartment and moved to Massachusetts.

The wounds in the community could also be self-inflicted. If Dylan could break into AM radio and into the album charts, why couldn’t they? With visions of hit records and warmer weather in mind, many other songwriters left the Village and headed west, draining the scene of some of its visionaries. John Phillips, part of the Journeymen with Dick Weissman, soon relocated to Los Angeles with his new pop band, the Mamas and the Papas, which also included former Night Owl employee Cass Elliot. Los Angeles was also now populated with young folkies like Stephen Stills and David Crosby, who had each given the Village coffeehouses and basket houses a shot before heading out west. Phil Ochs subsequently moved there, as did Tim Hardin and, soon after, Carolyn Hester. David Blue’s plugged-in band, the American Patrol, recorded an album so unappetizing that Blue asked Elektra to shelve it, and soon after he followed a girlfriend to California.

Andy Wickham, a Los Angeles record executive who’d befriended Ochs and encouraged him to make the transition out west, made the same pitch to Eric Andersen. In 1966 Andersen’s second album, ’Bout Changes & Things, heralded the Village’s next apparent star. Steeped in the sensuous romanticism of his voice and tender guitar, the album included his original version of “Violets of Dawn” and “Close the Door Lightly When You Go,” an elegant fare-thee-well love song. Andersen sounded less like someone at a rally and more like a man mulling over life choices. Like more than a few of the songs by his peers, “Thirsty Boots,” also on that second album, felt like something written decades before in a mining camp. In fact, it was inspired by the sight of the New World Singers’ Gil Turner walking into the Gaslight with mud-caked footwear after returning from a civil rights rally down south. (Hearing the tune in an early stage, Ochs told Andersen, “Man, that’s a great song—finish it,” which only made Dylan’s putdowns more infuriating to Andersen.) Meanwhile, Andy Warhol had cast Andersen in a small role in his film Space, although Andersen was so embarrassed when he saw the close-up of his crotch that he sank low in his seat as he watched it in a theater.

Andersen made all the crossover moves anyone needed to make at the time. At one of his Cafe Au Go Go shows in 1967, writer Glenn A. McCurdy noted the mix of “high school and campus-set hippies, twisted intellectuals [and] dropped-out establishment couples” who filled every seat. To satisfy the British market (and to Ochs’s unhappiness), Andersen rerecorded that sophomore, largely acoustic album but with a folk-rock–leaning rhythm section and keyboards, calling it ’Bout Changes ’n’ Things Take 2. He then left his manager, Arthur Gorson, and was about to sign with the Beatles’ overseer, Brian Epstein, just before Epstein’s death. Given all that had transpired, New York had little left to offer him. “The scene kind of stopped,” Andersen said. “I found Vanguard Records a little stultifying, and they didn’t really promote anything.”

Although Columbia had signed Len Chandler and put out his first album, To Be a Man, in 1967, sales were minimal, and Chandler also packed up for the West Coast, for a job with KRLA in Los Angeles. There he wrote and sang three topical songs a day as part of the station’s news programming. After the Youngbloods had recorded their first of several albums for RCA, with a repertoire of blues songs and Jesse Colin Young originals they’d sharpened at the Cafe Au Go Go, the group toured out west and beheld the difference between California and Manhattan. “In New York in those days, you felt that anyone who smiled at you on the street was going to ask you for money,” said Young. “In San Francisco everyone was smiling at me on the street and everyone was high. It was a beautiful thing.” After their third trip west, they asked one another why they kept returning to the grime of the Village and Manhattan in general and decided to make Marin County their new home base. Two years after its release, “Get Together” would belatedly become the Youngbloods’ breakout hit—but by that point, no one thought of them as a Village-associated band.

For a band that projected such a good-timey image, the beloved Lovin’ Spoonful experienced what amounted to a slow-motion car wreck. In San Francisco in mid-1966, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone were busted for pot after leaving a party; told they had little choice but to cooperate with police, they brought along an undercover agent to another bash. For a while, the incident gained little to no traction. “Summer in the City,” a collaboration between the Sebastian brothers that injected a jolt of urban tension and grit into their sound, ruled that summer.

But after the San Francisco police arrested someone at the party that Boone and Yanovsky had mentioned, word of their collaboration spread through the underground press. The fact that the two musicians were essentially forced to work with the police didn’t leak, however, and the Lovin’ Spoonful became outcasts, especially in their East Coast stomping grounds. Walking down Village streets, Boone would later write that he felt as if people were shooting him death-ray looks. The Spoonful never recovered. Tension between Sebastian and Yanovsky led to the band firing its lead guitarist, and despite replacing Yanovsky, the Spoonful didn’t last that much longer. Eventually, Sebastian also left the city and moved to Los Angeles.

Those who remained found streets littered with beer bottles and broken dreams. The Children of Paradise, the Traum brothers’ rock band, released a single, “Hey, You Got Somethin’,” that was largely derivative and went nowhere, as did a full album. “It was very Beatle oriented, but not good Beatle oriented,” Happy said. When they played a free concert in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, the musicians were told to load their gear into their car within five minutes of finishing their set. Parking it near the stage, they began packing their guitars and amps into the back of the vehicle, unaware that “some locals,” as Marc Silber put it, were extracting equipment from the front of the car. Disillusioned by that experience, Silber quit. With his wife, Jane, Happy Traum moved to Woodstock, and Artie followed. Nancy Sinatra and her creative partner, songwriter, musician, and producer Lee Hazelwood teased the perceived crass commercialism of protest songs and the area identified with them in “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman,” a jaunty mockery of a song peddler hawking folk-rock tunes about Vietnam and LBJ. For added ridicule, they pronounced the title word “Green-witch.”

For anyone who’d followed the scene, though, the collapse of the Blues Project was the most disheartening development. In her Rock Encyclopedia, the first such undertaking in publishing, writer Lillian Roxon had called them “New York’s first band—first band of its own, that is.” As before, they appeared to be making strides. Projections had outsold Live at the Cafe Au Go Go, with tracks like “Flute Thing,” “Two Trains Running,” and “Steves Song” making headway on the fledgling free-form FM radio. The band was slotted into a multi-act bill in midtown in April 1967, alongside the Who, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Simon and Garfunkel. A month later, the Blues Project headlined at the prestigious Town Hall, a performance that MGM and Verve Folkways recorded as the band’s follow-up to Projections.

But the volcanos within the band began erupting with more frequency, and their bond, a shared Jewish heritage, wasn’t enough to keep them together. Kooper was calling the others “fat and lazy” for not being, in his mind, more musically adventurous and for sticking with the identical set list night after night. When the band played in Montreal, Kooper and Katz found themselves in a fistfight. As Katz wrote in his memoir, Kooper accused him of nabbing a sandwich, which led to fisticuffs. Kooper, who had already had a nervous breakdown, had another soon after, going into something resembling a comatose state in his apartment. Frustrated, Kooper, who was also coping with a recurrent ulcer, quit the band in May.

In June the band had been scheduled to play the Monterey International Pop Festival in California, another prestigious gig that would have them sharing the bill with the Byrds, Otis Redding, Simon and Garfunkel, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jimi Hendrix, who had moved to London in the fall of 1966 and fully transformed into the psychedelic guitarchitect he’d long promised to become. (Hendrix was one of the few musicians who found his voice once he left the Village rather than after he’d arrived there.) To replace Kooper, the Blues Project hired a Black lead singer and keyboardist, John McDuffy, who’d previously played in the King Bees. In an interview just before the festival, Kalb sounded optimistic: “There’s been a discrepancy between the power of the electric band and the puerility of the lyrics. Well, we’re trying to fuse the power with meaningful lyrics. We think we’re coming very close.” But those prospects proved short-lived. “The band was disintegrating on a certain level at Monterey,” said Blumenfeld. “Losing Al was a really big deal. He brought a certain upbeat craziness and flair and a charismatic attitude. People were drawn to that. He was an entertainer. Danny was more of an inside guy, serious about the tunes, demanding people listen to him.”

For Kalb, the splintering of his band was proving to be especially disorienting. “We played Monterey, but it wasn’t a happy scene,” he said. “I was almost suicidally depressed.” Following a new girlfriend on a side trip to San Francisco, he met up with Owsley Stanley III, the Grateful Dead’s sound wizard and LSD chemist. When Stanley offered to sell him LSD, Kalb was not averse, calling it “the sacrament—not just a drug, but a religious test.” But as he realized too late, digesting acid was the last thing he should have done, especially once he found himself in the midst of an horrific trip. “All of a sudden, the world explodes into the most gorgeous experience of my life,” he recalled of the initial moments when the LSD hit. “The beauty of the colors was exquisite and a half. It’s like I’m in heaven, for about eight hours.” Unfortunately, that high didn’t last. “It started to turn into something else,” he said. “The dark side happens. The sky turns black, and I know I’m heading straight to hell.”

Kalb returned to Stanley’s house and attempted to come down over the course of a few hours, after which Stanley took him to what Kalb called a “gathering of freaks” where no one smiled and all Kalb heard was incessant and increasingly loud drum beating. He wound up running through the streets of San Francisco all night, yelling, “Can you be my executioner?” (as he later told a bandmate, John Berenzy) before being picked up by police. Brought to a hospital, he was put in a room alongside another acid casualty. “I’m scared shitless,” Kalb recalled. “I’m in hell.” With the help of Kulberg and Blumenfeld, he returned to New York, but he was still suffering from the experience. “The acid had come down, but I was insane,” he said. Back on the East Coast, a wealthy friend, he said, took him to a facility for recovery.

Meanwhile, the Blues Project staggered on into the fall of 1967, with Kooper returning for a series of Cafe Au Go Go performances. Kalb was largely missing in action, a few times temporarily replaced by his brother, Jonathan, who played a different style of blues. That same season, Verve cobbled together a third and shockingly slipshod Blues Project album, Live at Town Hall. No one who bought it knew, but only some of the record had been taped at that venue. To fool listeners into thinking the rest of it had been, applause was tacked onto studio recordings (Kooper’s two attempts at hits and a Katz-sung version of Patrick Sky’s “Love Will Endure”). A more anticlimactic finale for such a promising band was hard to imagine.

“Strangely enough, the death of the Blues Project hit New Yorkers badly,” wrote Roxon in her Rock Encyclopedia. “They still feel wounded and betrayed by it all. Those nights at the Au Go Go were a big part of the musical coming of age of a lot of people in the audience, as well as of the performers.” Because the band owed MGM one more album, Kulberg and Blumenfeld recruited new members and produced a faux Blues Project record, Planned Obsolescence, before folding the group. They couldn’t have picked a more sadly fitting title for both the band and, as 1968 approached, the scene that had birthed them.

Chapter 5

trains running

1965–1967