Although he didn’t know it yet, Dave Van Ronk was about to meet his next and perhaps most promising protégés. Arriving at 321 Avenue of the Americas that day in 1968, John Roche parked the family station wagon and, with his teenage daughters, Maggie and Terre, stepped into the narrow row house just north of Bleecker Street.

For Roche, known to many as Jack, returning to the area must have felt like old, comforting times. Three decades before, he was living in Buffalo, New York, with his first wife and children and working as an English teacher. But while acting in a local play, he met and fell in love with one of his costars, Jude Jewell. The couple—John eleven years older than Jude—eloped as soon as they could and moved to the West Village, ending up in an apartment on Commerce Street; John took a job at Ross Roy, an advertising agency. Their first child, Margaret (Maggie), was born in October 1951 in Detroit, where John had been temporarily transferred. Returning to New York, the family settled in Queens, and another daughter, Theresa, nicknamed Terre, arrived in April 1953. As the family grew—daughter Suzzy was born in September 1956 and son, David, soon after—the Roches migrated to the suburbs, eventually settling into a split-level home in Park Ridge, a New Jersey suburb thirty miles outside Manhattan.

The family may have been removed from what Suzzy would later call her parents’ “bohemian life” in Manhattan (a world John was unhappy to leave), but their artsy and liberal-leaning outlook was ingrained in them. John would read poetry to his children and write songs to be sung at rallies for local Democratic candidates. Jude, who also composed poetry and worked on an unpublished novel, had what she called a “reading hour” at home; their kids would have to sit quietly for that amount of time and listen to classical music as their mother prepped dinner. The ritual felt torturous, but Maggie, demonstrating a driven side even at that age, would use the time to practice piano.

As self-described nerds, the sisters always felt a little removed from their Jersey environs. Their friends were immersing themselves in the latest rock-and-roll bands, such as Led Zeppelin, but Maggie and Terre had grown up on their parents’ Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Simon and Garfunkel records, and preferred the folk bins of their local department store. One day Suzzy, then about five, planted a garden of watermelon seeds in their backyard. A neighborhood boy who seemed to have a crush on her came by to see if the seeds had sprouted into fruit. As Suzzy watched, horrified, he stomped out all the nascent watermelons. It felt like yet another reason for the Roche sisters to distance themselves from their surroundings.

In high school, Maggie and Terre learned to play guitar by way of Folk Guitar with Laura Weber, a public-television series, and began playing the songs Maggie had started writing or ones their father wrote for fund-raising events. Maggie was reserved and spoke softly but quickly, her dark hair dropping to her shoulders. Terre, a sandy blonde, was chattier and more outgoing than Maggie, who would make charts out of her mood swings. Maggie had a lovely, plain-spoken singing voice, while Terre’s was higher and sweeter, drifting more toward a soprano. But the blend worked, and Maggie pressed her younger sister into learning harmonies for the early tunes she’d written. “Simon and Garfunkel were my favorite group,” Maggie said. “I felt passionately about them, listening over and over again in my room and feeling like they were talking directly to me.”

During John Roche’s bus rides into New York City, one of his fellow commuters, who knew his daughters were fledgling singers, told him about a man named Izzy Young, who had a connection to a radio show on WBAI. Apparently, folksingers could audition for the program; perhaps the sisters could do the same. John, who by then had left the ad-agency world and had developed a language-skills class on tape for high school graduates who couldn’t read well, could be enveloped in dark moods at home, according to Terre. But he always seemed in a better frame of mind when he would bring his family into the Village, so a return visit felt like the right idea.

Climbing the two flights of stairs at 321 Avenue of the Americas, Roche and his daughters found themselves inside the new Folklore Center. In 1965 Izzy Young had relocated the store there from MacDougal Street, also moving into an apartment above it. The cheaper rent and the increased square footage, which made live performances inside more feasible, were two factors. So were the Mob guys in the building near his old location, who’d pressured Young to turn his business into a numbers front. One of them, a tall and gray-haired sort, came to be nicknamed “The Admiral” since he always wore a navy uniform.

As the Roche family had hoped, Young was there—and so too was Van Ronk. The sisters had never heard of him before, and his now expanded girth and beard reminded Terre of Santa Claus. As their father watched, the sisters sang and played a few of Maggie’s songs. Young seemed to enjoy them, but Van Ronk was even more enthusiastic and told them he wanted to have them meet his wife, Terri, who was a manager. Following him outside, they all found themselves several blocks away, at 190 Waverly Place.

The Roche sisters weren’t the first neophytes encouraged by Van Ronk and Thal. Somewhere along the line, they’d met Janis Fink, a small-framed teenager from New Jersey who wrote and sang delicate and prematurely wise songs about the generation gap, suicide, and other outré subjects. Eventually rechristening herself Janis Ian in the tradition of the Village, she made several beelines for Washington Square Park’s Sunday-afternoon sessions. “What a great metaphor the fountain was,” she said, “spouting new water all the time from old water—that’s folk music.” Thanks to the Gaslight’s lack of a liquor license, which made it easier for a teenager to land work there, she was able to perform, although she was frequently taken aback by the sound of the toilet flushing while she was onstage.

Thal and Van Ronk eventually took Ian under their wings, inviting her to dinner at 190 Waverly. Wary of her daughter spending time with what she called a “boozing Irishman,” Ian’s mother made her bring a friend. But Ian discovered that Van Ronk was actually more traditional than his image let on—a gentleman, not quite the brawler he appeared on stage. Winding up with a record deal with Verve, Ian recorded “Society’s Child,” sung in the voice of a young white high schooler who has to break up with her Black boyfriend thanks to the disapproval of her friends and family. With its haunted blend of girl-group pop and chamber folk, the record became a belated hit in 1967. Van Ronk strongly advised her to scrutinize her royalty statements to avoid being ripped off by the heinous music industry.

Van Ronk and Thal seemed to take even more to seventeen-year-old Maggie and fifteen-year-old Terre Roche, lending the sisters albums by artists they’d never heard of—Joni Mitchell, Tim Hardin, and Tim Buckley, a curly-haired, West Coast–based troubadour with a multi-octave vocal range. With their father in tow, the sisters dropped into the Kettle of Fish, where they took a seat at Van Ronk’s table and watched as talk turned to the events of the day. For Terre, who’d never smoked a joint or even a cigarette, the experience was overwhelming. “I was a goody-two-shoes and all of a sudden I’m hanging with Communists in bars,” she recalled. “We’re sitting around in the Kettle and people are talking about Marxism and Trotskyism. I’d grown up thinking that I’m not supposed to be a Communist.”

Van Ronk invited them to see him play at the Gaslight, where they were riveted by a throaty delivery that made Dylan’s sound comparatively velvety. Van Ronk remained a daunting stage presence, appearing to say whatever was on his mind. He even made blunders work for him: when a guitar string broke mid-song, the Roche sisters watched as he paused and told the crowd, “My mistakes are golden,” and the crowd ate it up. The sisters would sometimes crash at the Waverly Place apartment. By then, Maggie was a student at Bard College, just north of New York City, where she earned a C in English, but Terre would have to take an early-morning bus home in order to take her PSAT to prepare for college herself.

The Roche sisters practiced in their bedrooms in New Jersey and had played before a few audiences, including in a heart-fund benefit at a local restaurant. But with their newfound Village connection, they, Maggie in particular, grew more serious about their craft. They were still novices, staring at their feet as they performed, but Maggie had acquired a penchant for aqua-blue tank tops and miniskirts—a change from the matching jumpers and white shirts they had worn at one show in New Jersey. As Van Ronk and Thal knew all too well, the Village music community felt like a tarnished gem. Maybe the Roche sisters could carry on a tradition after so much had changed around them.

When Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters was released in March 1968, the initial reaction was encouraging; Billboard approved of the single “Romping Through the Swamp,” which, its reviewer noted, “borders on progressive rock.” But although Van Ronk would call it one of his favorite albums, most critics didn’t know what to make of it: “so saturated in whimsy that at times it almost threatens to float away,” wrote one, adding, “What happened to the old, unamplified Van Ronk, hunched over his acoustical guitar, his teddy-bear face contorted with anger, bristling through each number whether happy or sad?” As Barry Kornfeld recalled, “This was a commercial album for Dave, but it wasn’t very commercial.”

Given its graceful melody and relatable sentiments, “Clouds (From Both Sides Now)” had the strongest chance of radio airplay, and plans were made to release it as a 45. But a last-minute snag arose. Phillip Namanworth was hanging out with Van Ronk at 190 Waverly when Judy Collins came to visit. Collins, who’d included her version of the song on her album Wildflowers the previous November, wanted to make it her own next single. Somewhat begrudgingly, Van Ronk agreed, and Collins’s version—which, starting with Collins’s more mellifluous voice, had a sparkling arrangement that lent itself to AM radio—peaked at number 2 in late 1968. “What could we say?” Thal said. “We liked Judy, and we wished her the best of everything. We were philosophical about it. It happened. But we weren’t happy. What do you do? You say, ‘Oh, shit.’ And maybe you say it for a couple of days. And life goes on.” Added Namanworth, “We were starting to get airplay. If she hadn’t done that, we could have had a big record.”

When the Hudson Dusters went on the road to promote their record, Van Ronk didn’t encounter anything close to the adverse reaction Dylan received at Newport. Namanworth felt that he personally lost a degree of hearing thanks to the amplification, but audiences appeared to accept the idea of Van Ronk with backup musicians. But, in the end, the numbers didn’t add up. “It was a very good group,” Thal said. “But it wasn’t enough of a rock group to become lucrative.” By the end of 1968, the band was no more. The original Hudson Dusters street gang had fallen apart when the bohemians infiltrated the Village; now, the band of the same name collapsed just as the bohemians were leaving.

The year brought another, even more symbolic change when Van Ronk and Thal’s marriage dissolved. As Thal would later detail in her memoir My Greenwich Village, the strain of working together, as manager and client, began taking its toll. When he was on the road and Thal remained in New York, both slept with other people. In typically idiosyncratic fashion, they didn’t officially pursue a divorce at the time. “When we broke up, Dave said, ‘Let’s stay married, let’s not get a divorce,’” Thal said. “And it didn’t make any difference to me; I didn’t intend to ever marry again. So I said okay.” Van Ronk soon moved out of 190 Waverly Place and into his own place on Sheridan Square, and the breakup robbed the music community of an especially strong foundation.

With the help of Van Ronk and Thal, the Roche sisters made it onto the stage for at least one Monday open-mic night at Folk City in July 1969. By then, the club was no longer the focal point it had once been. Indicating a desperate need for customers, the club’s ads now announced a “new, no-minimum policy” for its “Best in Folk Entertainment.” (Popping into the venue one day, Happy Traum witnessed the debut of Emmylou Harris, a southern-raised folksinger who’d dropped out of Boston University and made the Village her home for a short period.) The times had also changed, but Folk City hadn’t fully changed with them; Mike Porco was reluctant to have electric instruments in his club.

When New York University took over and then condemned the West Fourth Street building that housed his club and restaurant, Porco was forced to close in September 1969. Luckily, he found a new space even closer to the Bleecker Street action. Formerly home to Tony Pastor’s, the Italian restaurant and gay women’s gathering spot, 130 West Third Street held 110 in the main room and 50 at the bar. Porco moved the stage from the far back corner to the right, just past the bar, but retained its most memorable decor—a mural, created to commemorate New Year’s Eve 1939, that depicted New Yorkers gazing upon flamenco dancers, their eyes on fire. The new Folk City opened in November, a mere two months after the first location shut down.

At least it was still open, which couldn’t be said for other local landmarks. Despite the coffeehouse busts of the late fifties and early sixties, the Cafe Figaro had survived and prospered, largely because it didn’t officially present live music and didn’t need any of the required paperwork. But in January 1969, another obstacle—a dramatic rent increase—caught up with the Fig, forcing it to close. The shutdown was accompanied by the city equivalent of a yard sale. The Ziegler family, which still ran it, took the lamps and checkerboard tables, but the public was invited in to buy its tables and chairs for as little as fifty cents each. Once it was empty, the new and telling tenant moved in—Blimpie, part of a Jersey-based chain of sub and sandwich shops that already had several stores in the city but was now bringing its vinegar-and-oil taste of suburbia to the Village.

Several streets down on Bleecker, the Cafe Au Go Go began to stumble. Beginning in 1968, the club had unexpected competition when promoter Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East, the New York version of his San Francisco venue the Fillmore West, off Second Avenue and East Sixth Street. The Fillmore could hold roughly five times the customers as the Au Go Go and paid better than Howard Solomon could. But the shady characters increasingly inhabiting the Village also left their mark. When an anonymous hood threatened to kidnap Solomon’s two young children, Jason and Candace, for reasons Jason never discovered, their father decided it was time to leave. An ad in the June 12, 1969, Village Voice sought a “responsible tenant” for the space. In the end, the building owner, Moses Baruch, took it over and reopened the Au Go Go. Yet despite a few high-profile bookings, such as the Grateful Dead, the club couldn’t find a revitalized groove and closed again in December 1969. As Baruch told Rolling Stone, “The big groups go to the Fillmore East, and personally, if I wanted to see them, I’d rather go there since you see a show and it’s not too expensive.”

A glimmer of hope—and rock glamour—announced itself in the summer of 1970, when Jimi Hendrix’s long-planned studio, Electric Lady, opened on Eighth Street, near the corner of MacDougal. That space had once been occupied by a country bar and then a short-lived club, Generation, that presented soul and blues acts like B. B. King and Muddy Waters. It was now an underground studio with tie-dyed pillows and lighting that could be adjusted to accommodate a musician’s mood. Hendrix died the month after it opened, though, and overall, Bleecker and its surrounding streets were now being increasingly given over to poster-art stores and a carnival atmosphere that made it seem even seedier than it was. More of the old businesses began leaving. In 1968 Manny Roth sold the Cafe Wha?, and Marc Silber closed Fretted Instruments, selling most of his instrument inventory to Izzy Young and the Folklore Center. A Buffalo Evening Post reporter wandering the MacDougal Street area one summer evening found stretches that were “fairly empty,” with clubs that “looked fun from the outside but turned out to be luminously painted and vacuously dull” once he made his way inside.

Given how hobbled the neighborhood appeared to be, it was ironic that Dylan chose that moment to return. His departure from Woodstock had at least something to do with Albert Grossman; after Dylan suspected that Grossman had been taking a bigger chunk of his publishing income than he thought, he’d finally broken with his manager. Woodstock was getting insufferable anyway; fans were showing up in Dylan’s driveway, and Grossman, who owned property, a recording studio, and at least one restaurant there, seemed ubiquitous. Dylan bought a brownstone at 94 MacDougal Street, about a block and a half south of the Gaslight. He and his wife, Sara, and their children were now a few short streets from his first apartment in the neighborhood. The building, whose front door was accessible to anyone who wanted to knock on it, also shared a vast courtyard with several other structures, and locals began spotting him walking up and down the block or, in one case, driving a van with kids in the back seats.

Once more, Dylan could be seen huddled at a table at the Kettle of Fish. Catherine Todd, a Gaslight employee, would marvel at the up-and-coming acts booked into the space, including a young Bonnie Raitt. Todd would sometimes be sent upstairs to the Kettle to take drink orders for the musicians between or after sets and witnessed the unusual pecking order there. The front table, she noticed, would be populated by “everyone with a record contract,” such as Dylan or another returning visitor, David Blue. “If you were a buzz act who was possibly getting a deal, they would be at the next table,” she said, “and the next table were the nobodies.”

Although Dylan was rarely one to look back, he appeared to be hunting for inspiration in more of his old environs than just the Kettle of Fish. He stopped by 190 Waverly Place, where he and Terri Thal, who still lived there after her breakup with Van Ronk, spent several hours talking. “I think he was looking for a piece of his past…,” Thal told Dylan biographer Anthony Scaduto. “He seemed stressed. He said he was uptight, told me he had all this money and didn’t know what to do with it.” Thal had held on to one of Dylan’s corduroy caps from the early days, which he’d given to her, but when she offered to return it to him, he declined to take it back. In one of the few times he stepped into a studio in 1971, he recruited Happy Traum to remake a few older songs; “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” now felt like a commentary on the new Village.

Returning to the Gaslight to see Happy and his brother Artie, Dylan was seen wearing what comanager Susan Martin Robbins, formerly of the Four Winds, called a “big white Cossack hat,” adding sarcastically, “like he doesn’t want any attention.” Robbins and Betty Smyth, who were comanaging the club under Ed Simon, were terrified that Dylan would be recognized and that a scene would result. As they stood at the doors watching customers leave, one said, “Do you know who’s in there? Tony Glover!,” referring to the Minnesota blues harmonica player who knew Dylan. Both breathed a huge sigh of relief.

But if he needed a reminder that one era had ended and another, stranger one had begun, all Dylan had to do was see one of his most obsessive fans, A. J. Weberman, picking through the trash cans located to the right of his front door. The canisters lay behind a small metal fence, easily accessible to anyone who cared to excavate them. On the day of Dylan’s thirtieth birthday, in May 1971, Weberman, who felt his hero had abandoned songs that addressed social conditions and politics, organized a “Free Dylan” rally for his “Dylan Liberation Front” outside the building. Dylan himself was out of town, reportedly in Israel, but that didn’t prevent hundreds from clogging MacDougal Street, which the police had barricaded for the occasion. “Bobby, come on out—we know you’re in there,” Weberman said into one of the three microphones before presenting Dylan with a birthday present—a new garbage can, this one with a lock. “Free Bob Dylan” buttons were handed out.

A new Gaslight regular was Erik Frandsen, a talented and dry-witted fingerpicking guitarist who hailed from Sleepy Hollow, New York, and had started playing guitar with David Bromberg, a high school friend a year older than he. Around the time he graduated from high school in 1964, Frandsen and Bromberg visited the Village and grabbed a seat at the Gaslight for an evening with Doc Watson and Skip James, the Mississippi blues guitar great who was then in his early sixties. To his dismay, Frandsen watched as the crowd talked nonstop during James’s opening set. Suddenly, Frandsen saw a hulking figure position himself in the door by the stage, taking up the whole frame. At the end of one of James’s songs, the man—Van Ronk—glared at the crowd and said, “Shut the fuck up!” The audience complied, and afterward Frandsen approached Van Ronk, introduced himself, and shook his hand, becoming the latest to inquire about guitar lessons.

After a detour living and performing in California, Frandsen returned to New York. Sam Hood offered him work at the Gaslight, and Frandsen soon found himself at the Kettle of Fish as well. One night, one of those Dylanologists was there, extrapolating about the origins of Dylan’s “Went to See the Gypsy,” included on Dylan’s just-released New Morning album. Frandsen himself had witnessed Dylan write a portion of the song, which, he recalled, made a reference to Chicago. “Lot of gypsies in Chicago, Bob?” Frandsen had wisecracked. Dylan wondered aloud if Las Vegas was a better idea and changed it. Elvis Presley’s run of shows in Vegas may have also inspired the song, although Dylan would later claim the two never met. But here at the Kettle was someone holding forth on the way Dylan intentionally chose Vegas as a symbol for capitalism. Frandsen could only chuckle at the absurdity of it all.

Surveying the state of jazz in the city in 1968, critic Leonard Feather was less than optimistic. Playing off New York’s nickname as the “Big Apple,” he wrote in his syndicated column that the club scene in New York was “rotten to the core,” particularly from Harlem to midtown. The year before, the Five Spot had discontinued presenting music, giving up its cabaret license and focusing on food. (“We used it for storage,” Iggie Termini told the Village Voice’s Gary Giddins of the music area.) Although Feather didn’t refer to it at all, Miles Davis’s second quintet was coming apart; Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter had both left by summer of 1968. Feather detected a ray of hope in the Village Gate, but even those dreams were dimming. As Art D’Lugoff told him, “If we had to survive on just jazz, we’d be padlocked within a week.” That year, D’Lugoff announced that he could no longer pay the bills and would begin recruiting rock acts, and soon Chuck Berry and a barely eighteen-year-old Stevie Wonder worked its stage.

The Village still played host to adventure, however. In November 1968, Hancock, now on his own, played the Vanguard with a new sextet that included Carter on bass and Pete La Roca, one of the drummers on Rollins’s landmark Vanguard live album. The following year saw the opening of Boomers, at the intersection of Bleecker and Christopher Streets. As Mel Watkins would later recall, Boomers initially focused on piano and bass duos, but before long the Black-owned club was also hiring Charles Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, and Joe Beck. At the Vanguard, Chick Corea, who replaced Hancock in Davis’s band, would debut a new lineup with bassist Dave Holland, drummer Barry Altschul, and saxophonist Anthony Braxton. But the increasing dominance of rock, the drop-off in jazz gigs, and the sense that the music was no longer being treated with the same respect was prompting musicians, including Dexter Gordon, to uproot themselves and move to Europe.

Even before rock began shifting to the East Village, the jazz world had started the exodus. Disillusioned with the jazz-club business, saxophonist Sam Rivers transformed his home at 24 Bond Street, just east of Broadway, into Studio Rivbea, a loose-knit performance space where players would wander in and out. It was eventually joined by other spots that were one neighborhood or street removed from Greenwich Village’s traditional boundaries: Ali’s Alley on Greene Street (started in the apartment of former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali), the Tin Palace on the Bowery, and Environ, south of Houston in SoHo.

The movement would eventually have a name—loft jazz, after the kind of spaces where the music would be made. In those rooms, which were cheaper than West Village property, free and avant-garde elements of the music flourished. Other loft-jazz venues materialized in Chelsea and the Lower East Side. What united them was that none were in Greenwich Village proper: the Vanguard and Boomers aside, the area seemed to have almost priced itself out of jazz.

With help from Terri Thal, who had taken the Roche sisters under her managerial wing, Maggie (or “Maggi,” as it was mistakenly spelled in the ad) and Terre Roche made their formal Village debut on January 22, 1970, opening for Len Chandler. The show was at the space now sometimes called the Village Gaslight. Sam Hood and his wife, singer and songwriter Alix Dobkin, had both left New York for Florida but returned and were working with Ed and Penny Simon, the club’s current managers. Other than the name, everything remained in place: the overpriced glasses of apple juice filled with ice, the envelope of cash that one of the staff was told to give to a city inspector when he came by. With the Hudson Dusters consigned to the dustbin of his history, Van Ronk also returned, securing a regular Monday-night slot even as many of the artists who started shortly after he had—Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs—had moved on to large halls and venues.

By then, Maggie had a stack of roughly fifteen finished songs. Fueled by the decade that had just ended and the Vietnam War that raged on, two of them, “War Song” and “Flag,” had topical overtones—in the former, a soldier whose “battlefield is strewn with corpses”—that connected them to the Village’s previous heyday. John and Jude Roche hadn’t been shy with their political opinions: in June 1969 Jude had published a letter in the Record, one of their local newspapers, in which she declared she would vote for the independent candidate for governor of New Jersey. “As near as I can figure,” she wrote, “the party system does little more than assure a great strength to a powerful few.” But in perhaps the first interview she ever gave, to the Poughkeepsie Journal in August 1970, Maggie made it clear she wouldn’t be so easily categorized. “We’re not trying to put across a political philosophy,” she said, adding, “You can get pretty mad at the flag wavers and that kind of behavior.” Most of her songs, in fact, were more personal and intimate, like “Malachy’s,” which chronicled the often indifferent response she received when performing at the Upper East Side bar during her Bard period.

In that regard, the sisters unintentionally embodied the altered singer-songwriter sensibility that had made its way into the Village. With the advent of a new decade, the socially aware songs inspired by headlines were tapering off, and a new approach—more inward, more personal, more resigned to the fact that the largely unlikable Richard Nixon was now president—was encroaching. In March 1970, James Taylor returned to the Village. Following his days with the Flying Machine at the Night Owl and subsequent meltdown, Taylor had moved to England. After he connected with Apple Records executive Peter Asher, Taylor was signed to the Beatles’ company, which released his well-received if not commercially successful album.

Taylor’s second album, Sweet Baby James, was just starting to appear in record stores in the early months of 1970, but he was already a symbol for the new retreat in pop, leading to long lines along MacDougal Street for each of his two nights at the Gaslight. The audience included music-industry types, critics, and even Taylor’s father, up from North Carolina to see his still drug-hobbled but now more successful son. Staff worker Denny Brown was handed the responsibility of jamming in as many people as possible in a space that held only about sixty. It was so crowded that the opening act, the Traum brothers, couldn’t leave the stage when Taylor began his set. Although the staff couldn’t stop the notorious leaky pipe above the stage—leading Taylor to make a crack playing off of the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”—Brown made sure that a smaller rise was placed on stage so that Taylor could sit and still be elevated above the crowd.

To further support the Roche sisters, Thal agreed to help with contacts, starting with a suggestion to take a songwriting class at New York University with Paul Simon. In her typically goal-focused way, Maggie waited in the lobby of the NYU building in the East Village and introduced herself to Simon as he arrived for a class. At the peak of his Simon and Garfunkel phase thanks to the release of Bridge over Troubled Water, Simon invited the sisters to audition by way of singing a few songs for him and agreed to let them sit in on the classes, for free. After the first session, Simon drove them in his sports car up to the George Washington Bridge, where they took a bus home to New Jersey. As Terre watched, in awe of her sister, Simon asked Maggie if she considered herself as good a songwriter as Paul McCartney; she replied yes.

Beyond the thought of working with one of pop’s most respected songwriters, the class appealed to the sisters in terms of Simon’s success in a duo with Garfunkel and the gentle, introspective sound they’d created. “We were thinking that what we were doing is what they were doing,” Maggie said. “We were patterning ourselves after them.” The sisters watched as Simon carefully dissected the work of some of their classmates, including a local songwriter named Melissa Manchester, and observed how he didn’t seem to flinch when a camera crew filmed one of the sessions. With the help of one of their father’s friends, the sisters sublet an apartment on Charles Street in the West Village and landed a ten-week residency at the same bar, Malachy’s, where Maggie had played on her own while at Bard.

Maggie’s emphasis on the personal over the political in her new songs was evident in other incoming songwriters. The same season that the Roche sisters had driven into New York and met Young and Van Ronk, Loudon Wainwright III made his debut at the Gaslight. Beginning with his upmarket name and short-haired, straight-arrow look, which incorporated buttoned shirts and slacks, Wainwright was far from anyone’s cliché of a Village bohemian. Growing up in Westchester County, the son of journalist and Life magazine columnist Loudon Wainwright, he had been a rakish, boarding-school preppie. The first records in his collection were Fats Domino singles, but he caught the folk bug around 1960, forming a jug band at St. Andrew’s school in Delaware and, during weekends back home, taking the train into Manhattan to see the likes of Van Ronk and Clarence Ashley at Folk City. He studied theater at Carnegie Tech, where he and his fellow student and pal George Gerdes played some early attempts at rock. Winding up in San Francisco during its vaunted Summer of Love in 1967, Wainwright indulged in psychedelics and other aspects of that culture, but he came to realize he wasn’t meant for the hippie life and made his way back to the East Coast.

Busted for weed on the drive back, Wainwright retreated to his grandmother’s house in Rhode Island and began writing songs and playing them to Japanese tourists in a Village basket house. In the summer of 1969, Wainwright began working the open-mic nights in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Gaslight before landing opening slots for some of its name performers, such as Carolyn Hester and John Hammond.

Compared to acts like those and their peers, who took themselves very seriously, Wainwright wrote and sang songs that were comic and caustic, often taking the knife to his own wrist in the process. “Glad to See You’ve Got Religion” took aim at the escalating self-help movement. A breakup song like “I Don’t Care” wasn’t remotely maudlin or nostalgic, and his ode to his prep school period, “School Days,” wasn’t afraid to brag about the girls he took to his bed. In “Uptown” he even complained about the squalid conditions in the Village and dreamed of leaving it all behind for a day and taking in Central Park, a basketball game at the Garden, and a museum visit or two. In performance at the Gaslight, Wainwright wasn’t always a genteel folkie either. To fend off stage fright, he would whip his tongue in and out; at times, his face could twist into grimaces that made one reviewer compare him to a “Quasimodo-like derelict.”

Still, the music business continued to sniff around for post-Dylan troubadours. Milton Kramer, who ran the publishing company Frank Music, caught a Wainwright set at the club and was duly impressed, and after the Village Voice called him “unquestionably great,” record executives, including Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun, could be seen wedged behind the Gaslight’s tables. Very quickly, Wainwright ended up with a contract with Atlantic, which outbid Columbia.

Like many who came aboard the scene, Wainwright found himself befriending Van Ronk, who, for all his surface sternness, could still be supportive and welcoming. After hearing Wainwright’s “Plane Too,” a deadpan list of everything he experienced on a flight, from a copy of Time magazine to “earphone music” and “airplane booze,” Van Ronk told him it was either the best or the worst song he’d ever heard. Wainwright wasn’t sure what to make of that comment, but he came to view Van Ronk and Patrick Sky as older brothers, joining them on various escapades in and out of the city. Although Wainwright could throw back his share of drinks, he couldn’t always keep up with Van Ronk and Sky. Some nights at the Kettle of Fish, he would take a shot of whiskey and, when Van Ronk wasn’t looking, pour it out on the sawdust floor.

On June 28, 1969, Van Ronk was two days from turning thirty-three and having an early birthday meal with friends at the Lion’s Head on Christopher Street. The Lion’s Head remained a magnet for writers, musicians, and artists; it wasn’t uncommon to find one of the Clancy brothers, Art D’Lugoff, or other local luminaries inside. But once he began hearing police sirens, followed by some type of commotion, Van Ronk knew tonight would not be his usual evening at the bar.

Stepping outside to gauge what was taking place, Van Ronk saw a crowd outside the Stonewall Inn two doors down. At 53 Christopher Street, a few streets south of the Village Vanguard and a quick walk to the Sheridan Square area once home to Cafe Society, the Stonewall had become a hub for gay men and women and runaways. A Mob-owned joint, the Stonewall didn’t have a liquor license; gay dancing and kissing were considered “disorderly” and therefore illegal. Instead, it was dubbed a private-membership “bottle bar” (as in “bring your own”), and as with most of the gay and lesbian bars in the Village, the Mafia also routinely bribed police to keep those businesses open.

Tonight, though, a full-on raid was taking place, the street outside the Stonewall filled with gay men who’d been told to leave while the police went through the bar and dragged others out. As each person was pulled out and emerged on the street, the crowd outside cheered him or her on. Once the paddy wagons arrived, though, the mood turned defiant, and the crowd, expressing its pent-up anger at the harassment, began hurling bottles and coins at the cops.

As Van Ronk told author and Stonewall historian David Carter, he was happy to add his voice and whatever else to the protest. “What I saw was another example of police arrogance and corruption,” he told Carter. “As far as I was concerned, anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed.” Van Ronk admitted to Carter that he too had “tossed a quarter or just some pennies” in the direction of the cops. As he was preparing to head back into the Lion’s Head (or, according to one policeman, retreat into the crowd), a cop grabbed him. The two fell over, and Van Ronk was arrested and pulled inside the Stonewall, where he was handcuffed. Since it took three cops to overcome Van Ronk, none remained on the street, which, according to an initial report in the Village Voice, intensified the protest. Along with others who were arrested, Van Ronk was booked at the Sixth Precinct for second-degree assault for allegedly hurling an “object” at one police officer. His court dates were scheduled and rescheduled several times, up through February 17, 1970, when he appeared in court and charges were dismissed; Van Ronk ultimately pled guilty to harassment and paid a fine.

The antagonism between authorities and gays in the Village had been fomenting for years. In 1964 Police Commissioner Michael J. Murphy, with the approval of then Village Democratic leader Ed Koch, assigned more police to the Village to curb, as the New York Times put it, “loitering and solicitation by homosexuals.” In one form or another, music venues that catered to a gay audience were also affected. By the time of the Stonewall riot, the Page Three, the basement space with the cross-dressing crowd that had nurtured talents like Sheila Jordan, had shut down. Dating back to 1937, Tony Pastor’s, the restaurant on West Third Street into which Folk City had moved in 1969, had originally been a nightclub, complete with a gay clientele, a large dance floor, and live, small-combo music. But in March 1967 the city revoked its liquor license after determining it had allowed, in the words of the State Liquor Authority of New York, “homosexuals, degenerates and undesirables to be on the license premises and conduct themselves in an offensive and indecent manner.” The Bon Soir, the cabaret on Eighth Street that had been the launchpad for Barbra Streisand a decade before, was also history.

In the wake of the Stonewall Riot, the gay-rights movement grew and became emboldened, and a new wave of venues began springing up to cater to both gay and straight crowds—and for those in search of modern rock and roll and pop. Named after a character in Cole Porter’s musical Anything Goes, Reno Sweeney took up the basement of two brownstones on West Thirteenth Street. The decor was art-deco–chic, with palm trees flanking the stage. From its opening in October 1972, the club was envisioned as a successor to the Bon Soir, even down to hiring that club’s former emcee, Jimmie Daniels, and it aimed for both gay and straight acts and audiences.

It would be gay acts—which included Australian singer, songwriter, and pianist Peter Allen, who would came out as gay, and early transgender and Warhol Gang darling Holly Woodlawn—that especially came to be associated with the club. As Rolling Stone would report, “This year the gays dominated the club scene with places like Reno Sweeney, where Barbra Streisand lookalikes (male and female) sing smoky ballads and people primp and parade in ice-cream outfits under lighting that makes everybody a star.” Three months after it opened, Reno Sweeney hosted a party for Bette Midler, who’d sung backup for another act during the club’s earliest weeks and was now a brassy, red-haired hurricane of a star, with a gay following she’d developed playing at the Continental Baths uptown.

The same year Reno Sweeney launched, David Johansen heard about a new opportunity for the band he’d just joined. Although he’d grown up on Staten Island—and had the brusque accent to prove it—the hardened-faced Johansen felt more than plugged into downtown life. When he was a child in the fifties, an aunt would take him to a restaurant in the West Village where waiters would do the limbo; as a teenager, he took day trips to MacDougal Street and the Night Owl, where he saw the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Blues Magoos. The atmosphere and security in those venues were so casual that when he saw Van Morrison at the Cafe Au Go Go in 1968, Johansen was able to walk into the dressing room and chat him up. A natural performer with the strut, swagger, and comic leer of a front man, Johansen soon had his own bands. His first, the Vagabond Missionaries, played R&B covers and a few originals during afternoon shows at the Cafe Wha?. “We were not very good,” he said, “but we made up for it in enthusiasm.”

In late 1971, Johansen joined what would become the New York Dolls, which owed more of a debt to garage rock and glam than any of the other bands that thrived at the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal. Johansen was also friendly with Eric Emerson, the front man of what Johansen called a “gypsy rock and roll” band called the Magic Tramps and also a bisexual member of the Warhol gang. “Eric said, ‘I’m playing at this new place—do you want to come and play before we play?’” Johansen recalled. “And I said yeah. We were just starting up and trying to get any gig we could get. We weren’t choosy. Our first gig was in a welfare hotel, so this was a step up.”

Located just west of Broadway and a block north of Bleecker, the Mercer Arts Center wasn’t strictly a music venue. Carved out of the back half of the Broadway Central Hotel, where young folkies like John Sebastian and John Hammond had once watched visiting bluesmen party, the Mercer had been converted into a series of small theaters, a sort of avant-garde downtown version of Lincoln Center. Over the previous century, the space had been home to venues like the Winter Garden, where John Wilkes Booth and his brother had acted in Julius Caesar the year before Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. In 1966 the Village Gate’s Art D’Lugoff had leased the space, but in 1971 air-conditioner magnate Seymour Kaback took control, taking over the first two floors of the back of the hotel and converting them into the Mercer Arts Center. “I mix my air conditioning people in with it, so we’ve got five on the staff altogether,” Kaback explained at the time. Even the city lent an unexpected hand: the Economic Development Office contributed money for improved street lighting, more regular trash pickup, and a new sidewalk.

The Broadway Central, renamed the University Hotel in 1969 but often referred to by its previous name, was a $5.70-per-night dump known for housing addicts and criminals. But the Mercer Arts Center, which opened in January 1970, was its own universe. The entrance, at 240 Mercer, led to a staircase and a narrow corridor with a labyrinth of rooms, with a capacity ranging from fifty to several hundred people. Rooms that once were rented for bar mitzvahs and wedding banquets were home to off-Broadway plays such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and video installations. But two of its theaters, the 299-seat O’Casey and the 200-seat Oscar Wilde Room, weren’t merely performance spaces. With the Village rock world never shakier, the theaters provided work for musicians, possible salvation for the scene—and a haven for a sexually liberated music community seeking to define itself in a new decade.

In the summer of 1972, the Blues Project resurfaced on Bleecker Street, and in their old haunt. But a mere half-dozen years after they’d recorded their first album at the Cafe Au Go Go, neither the band nor the venue that had established them was the same. Ever since it shuttered at the end of 1969, the Cafe Au Go Go had remained vacant, a depressing symbol of how hollowed out the scene had become. Then, in the spring of 1971, it suddenly reopened, but with a new and mystifying name—the Gaslight at the Au Go Go—that only added another layer of confusion.

In spite of higher-profile bookings like James Taylor’s, the original Gaslight had struggled. Local lore had it that Sam Hood and his father, Clarence, had placed a $100 bet on the Mets to win the pennant and World Series in 1969. To everyone’s surprise, the Mets pulled out a miracle. But the bookie didn’t pay up—he was supposedly fished out of the East or Hudson River—and Hood allegedly never collected on his $100,000 windfall. In the spring of 1971, the Gaslight briefly closed, and Hood moved his business into 152 Bleecker Street, once home of the Cafe Au Go Go, and rechristened it the Gaslight at the Au Go Go. To complicate matters, the first Gaslight then reopened in its original MacDougal Street location, now managed by Ed Simon, who had run the Four Winds basket house.

The reconstituted Gaslight at the Au Go Go, which held about three times as many people as the original Gaslight, launched auspiciously with Miles Davis and an electric band. After each show, Denny Brown, who had moved from his job washing dishes and other tasks at the Gaslight to help manage the new place, had to pay Davis nightly, in cash, and with a Davis valet watching carefully. “Miles didn’t trust anyone,” Brown said. “I’m counting out cash and there are guns in the room. And they weren’t mine. He wanted to get paid.”

Among the familiar faces seen on the stage was Danny Kalb, making his return to the club that had launched the Blues Project. Since the dissolution of the group in 1968, Al Kooper had instigated his plan to merge rock with jazz and big-band horns, emerging with Blood, Sweat & Tears, which also included his former Blues Project adversary Steve Katz. Moving to Marin County, Roy Blumenfeld and Andy Kulberg formed Seatrain from the remnants of the Blues Project’s final lineup. As for Kalb, he was still recovering from his debilitating drug experience but was attempting to pick up where he’d left off. Early in 1969, he’d formed Danny Kalb and His Friends, sharing vocal duties with Karen Dalton, the early Village fixture who had moved out west and grappled with heroin and alcohol issues before making her way back east. The group played at the first Cafe Au Go Go but dissolved by summer.

A few months later, Kalb revived the name that had established him: “The Blues Project II featuring Danny Kalb” debuted at the new Au Go Go, with only Kalb remaining from the original band. That same year, Kalb finally reemerged on record. With Stefan Grossman, the guitarist who had played in the Even Dozen Jug Band with Steve Katz and John Sebastian, he made an album, Crosscurrents. Most of the songs were sung by Grossman, whose adept fingerpicking, with its roots in Celtic music, dominated the album. Vocally, Kalb stepped out for only two songs. His version of Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” about a man who receives a letter from a woman after she died, was stark and chilling. But his guitar, and the way it intermingled with Grossman’s, hadn’t lost its sting or sparkle.

In August 1970, Kalb and his friend Ron Radosh attended a Muddy Waters show at the Museum of Modern Art, which held concerts in one of its gardens. Kalb had long worshipped Waters and felt redeemed when the bluesman commended Kalb on his version of “Two Trains Running.” “Muddy heard Danny do it and he said, ‘You got me with that one—you reached me,’” said John Berenzy, a local college student and guitarist who befriended Kalb during this time. “Danny said it was the high point of his life.” But after approaching Waters at the museum and having a quick chat with his idol before the set, Kalb announced he had to leave, for reasons never made clear to Radosh. Maybe it was all still too much for him.

Berenzy, a Blues Project aficionado, had randomly called Kalb one day. To his surprise, Kalb invited him to a restaurant where he was playing a gig. “He was part of that tradition, like the Weavers—he would play anywhere,” Berenzy said. “He loved playing for people and he loved the folk tradition of telling stories.” Later Kalb invited him to his Village apartment for a guitar lesson. Berenzy took note of the studio apartment with its large windows, record and book collection, and eat-in kitchen. Kalb would down many cups of coffee, smoke, and tell tales, such as the one about the time he showed up at Van Ronk’s for a lesson and instead gave him one. Berenzy found Kalb’s stories about his hallucinatory meltdown heartbreaking.

In 1971 Kalb and Blumenfeld, who had left Seatrain and the music business and was working as a lumberjack, reconvened and revived the Blues Project as a trio with bassist Don Kretmar, landing a contract with Capitol. Released in 1971, Lazarus had its moments; the title song, the same traditional tune Van Ronk had taught to Kalb, was transformed into eerie, simmering electric blues. (On the cover, in contrast to his smiling bandmates, Kalb appeared sullen and more disheveled than during his Blues Project days, another sign that he was still coping with the aftereffects of his bad trip.) But while opening for the likes of Black Sabbath and Yes, the new Blues Project found itself confronting the new rock world order that had arisen since they’d dissolved. Before each set, Blumenfeld would stand up from his drums, flash a peace sign, and scream, “You wanna rock and roll?” The audience would scream back in unison—and then the band would open with an unhurried blues. “You could hear the yawning and see people talking among themselves,” Blumenfeld recalled. “It was a different game.”

In 1972 original front man Tommy Flanders returned for one more album, but the resulting record, simply titled Blues Project, again failed to relight the old fire. The band made it through a few shows, including one at the Gaslight at the Au Go Go, but at their Los Angeles performance at the Troubadour, Kalb was missing in action. Joni Mitchell, who was in attendance, asked Blumenfeld where he was. After one last show, in New York’s Central Park, Kalb, depressed over the latest incarnation’s lack of liftoff, left the band. Knowing how much the label had invested in the group, a Capitol executive asked Blumenfeld if he wanted to keep it going without its founder. Blumenfeld declined, and the Blues Project as an active band was laid to rest.

At times, the Gaslight at the Au Go Go remained a destination. In May 1972 a blossoming Jersey talent named Bruce Springsteen auditioned there for John Hammond, who would soon sign him to Columbia. But that same year, the original Gaslight finally closed for good, as did the Gaslight at the Au Go Go the following year, seemingly taking Village rock and roll with it.

In Park Ridge, New Jersey, in early 1972, the Roche family had just settled down for dinner when the phone rang. The caller was none other than Paul Simon, and he was asking for Maggie. Given what the sisters had been through in the years since they’d taken his class, the call came not a moment too soon for their salvation.

On the recommendation of Terri Thal, the sisters had dragged their guitars and cases over to the Bitter End early in 1970. By then, owner Fred Weintraub had handed the keys to his club over to its manager, Paul Colby. Starting with early bookings like Joni Mitchell, who made her New York debut at the space in June 1968, the Bitter End was supplanting Folk City and the Gaslight as a leading showcase for the new wave of troubadours from around the country, including Randy Newman in 1970 and John Prine in 1971. During one of his sets, Kris Kristofferson invited a friend in the audience, Steve Goodman, to come up and play his newly written “City of New Orleans.”

The Bitter End had also become the place for those eager to break into music and show business to audition for what was called the Coffee House Circuit (which, at various times, had the word “College” or “Campus” preceding it). Established pop and rock acts with hit records or large followings could make a good living playing colleges and universities, but the market had become so lucrative, and the artists had begun demanding such exorbitant fees, that some schools could no longer afford them. Established by Weintraub in 1966 and run by his company’s vice president of special projects, Marilyn Lipsius, the Coffee House Circuit would offer unsigned or nascent musicians to colleges, which would pay two hundred dollars per year to Weintraub’s organization; in turn, the Coffee House Circuit would book and promote the shows. The musicians would be paid a few hundred dollars a week and had to play two sets per night for a week in a school’s cafeteria, student union, or similar space.

With the Bitter End’s famed brick wall behind them, the one immortalized on the first Peter, Paul and Mary album, the Roche sisters sang a few of Maggie’s songs. Their voices weren’t as tightly blended as those of their heroes Simon and Garfunkel; sometimes the harmonies would circle around each other as if they were each singing their own separate melodies. But the blend of Maggie’s and Terre’s different tones was unique, and with John and Jude Roche’s approval, they were offered one of those college touring jobs, even though Terre was still a senior in high school. Starting in Fargo, North Dakota, the duo traveled to schools out west and down to Louisiana, and to spaces that would sometimes be reconfigured to look like something familiar. Revealing what a brand the “Village” had become, said Terre, “They would turn the cafeteria into a coffeehouse patterned after the Gaslight or the Cafe Wha?.” During their show at Louisiana State University, a student reporter compared Maggie to “a very tranquil Janis Joplin” who “might weigh 80 pounds with guitar,” and described their music as “up-to-date folk.”

At a school in West Virginia, the sisters, along with Derek, a friend they’d met in Louisiana, got high on mescalin and were fired from the circuit. That escapade would be nothing compared to the wild and sometimes traumatic times to follow. After one last show in Idaho—and a gig opening for, of all people, the Vegasy pop belter Gary Puckett, in Missouri—the sisters kept going west, ending up in San Francisco. With contacts supplied by Thal, they ended up at a newly opened, three-hundred-seat club, the Boarding House, where they began gigging regularly starting in May 1971. At open-mic nights at other clubs, they would play to small crowds who didn’t know who they were and didn’t seem interested in songs that were lovely but decidedly quirky.

The music soon stopped, though, once Maggie fell in love with the club’s bartender and Terre with their soundman. As Terre would recount in her memoir Blabbermouth, the sisters began living a lifestyle that felt, at least to an outsider, like a rebuttal to their strict Catholic upbringing; Terre would remember taking acid daily for a month. They also crisscrossed the country, Maggie falling pregnant along the way, and eventually returned to their quasi-base in San Francisco. After putting her sister on a bus back to New Jersey, Terre remained in San Francisco but found herself with a drug-dealer boyfriend, his nefarious friends and associates, and a black eye after getting into a fight with a Boarding House employee and another woman. When she took a detour down to Los Angeles to see Van Ronk, who was playing there, he took one look at her and said, “I’d like to see what happened to the other guy.” Terre’s time out west would soon come to an end; after a devastating sexual assault in the middle of the day in Golden Gate Park, she too returned to the family home in New Jersey.

Undeterred, Maggie began phoning Paul Simon’s office daily, leaving a message each time. When he finally returned her call during the family meal, Simon, who remembered them from his class, asked what was so urgent. Maggie filled him in on the songs she’d written and that the sisters had been performing, and Simon suggested she reach out to his lawyer and business partner, Michael Tannen. At his Upper East Side apartment, Tannen didn’t know what to make of the women who showed up at his door. Maggie was eight months’ pregnant—she would soon give birth to a son, in March 1972, whom she would give up for adoption—and Terre looked to him as if she were twelve. Tannen listened as they went through their repertoire, then told them about the publishing company he and Simon had started. Soon, the sisters were signed to DeShufflin Music and provided with an apartment on Sullivan Street in the Village, the rent paid by Simon and Tannen’s company. Simon also took them record shopping and hooked them up with music teachers to hone Maggie and Terre’s chops on piano and guitar, respectively.

The sisters also went back on the road for further college-campus work. In Pittsburgh they learned from Tannen that Simon had expressed interest in having them sing on his second post–Simon and Garfunkel album, which he was recording in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Without alerting Simon of their plans, Terre and Maggie took a bus to that city and showed up at the famed Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Simon and the ace session musicians he’d hired were out to lunch, and when they returned, the sisters were waiting for them outside the studio. For a Caribbean-flavored amble, “Was a Sunny Day,” Simon told them he’d been absorbing Jimmy Cliff’s soundtrack to The Harder They Come and wanted the sisters to add harmonies similar to those on that album. They did their best and were soon back on a bus to Pennsylvania.

Months later, in May 1973, Maggie and Terre received a finished copy of Simon’s album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. Cracking open its gatefold sleeve, they were shocked to see a photo of themselves inside; Simon’s camp had somehow gotten hold of a shot and had kept it a complete surprise. After a tumultuous three years, it was hard to imagine a better reintroduction for the sisters to a world they thought had tossed them aside.

Starting in the first month of 1973, Dylan, Baez, and James Taylor made return engagements to the Village, but not in the way anyone would have expected or predicted.

As he began making his way daily from his apartment on Bank Street to the Village Gate, Christopher Guest still recognized much about his neighborhood. The thirty-one-year-old son of a British United Nations diplomat had grown up at 160 Waverly Place, down the block from Van Ronk and Thal’s home, and had played stoopball in Washington Square Park as a kid. For a time, his babysitter was Mary Travers, a family friend; later, she would later drop off copies of the latest Peter, Paul and Mary records at the Guest family home. (A folk purist who gravitated toward Alan Lomax field recordings, Guest admitted he wasn’t initially taken with Peter, Paul and Mary records: “I never opened one of them. They were always put in the closet because I thought, ‘This is just not my thing. These are ostensibly folk songs, but this isn’t real folk music.’”) After learning to play guitar, the teenage Guest picked out a regular spot around the fountain and discovered the Folklore Center, where he once saw Dylan asking to try out a guitar hanging on the wall. He was too scared to say anything to him or to Van Ronk, whose beard and lumbering gait reminded Guest of a pirate.

When the Bleecker and MacDougal intersection became overrun with out of towners, Guest, like many locals, learned to walk in the middle of the street to circumvent the gawkers. He eventually landed a job at the Village Vanguard, where he worked the cash register until Max Gordon relieved him of those responsibilities after a few incorrect-change flubs. He also helped escort the blind multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk from the dressing room to the stage; Kirk would hold onto Guest’s arm, bob his head back and forth, and say, mysteriously, “Chris, where I am right now, you can’t write to me.”

Before his family moved uptown in 1963, Guest and his friends would often run over to Washington Square Park, with his mother’s approval, and return home on their own when dusk fell. Now, the park was a place to avoid—filled with, as he put it, “people sleeping on the sidewalk and broken bottles.” Mark Sebastian, John’s brother, was playing the clubs himself at the time and would notice the junkies in Washington Square Park as he walked from the family’s apartment on Washington Square West down to Bleecker Street. At the Gaslight, Catherine Todd took note of customers nodding out at tables. “I thought they were just falling asleep,” she recalled. “I‘d say to the girlfriend, ‘Is your friend all right? He can go lay down if he’s tired.’ She would say, ‘No, he’s all right.’ I didn’t understand heroin. Nobody understood heroin or cocaine at the time.” The Hotel Albert, once an affordable retreat for musicians, was now populated with addicts and derelicts.

Izzy Young told Village Voice writer Ira Mayer that his store was doing only a third of the business it had done during the mid-sixties. Rightly sensing that the Village music community was in decline—concerts in the store would sometimes only attract a dozen people, recalled Mayer—Young set his sights on Sweden. His wife, who was French, was intrigued by the Swedish women’s movement, and Young had met Swedish musicians in his store who filled him in on their scene and their nation’s progressive politics. In 1973 he closed the Folklore Center and moved there.

The grime and gloom overtaking the city as a whole, making it feel psychologically overcast, also left its mark downtown. In 1973 the number of burglaries in the Village was 31 percent higher than in other parts of the city, and grisly stories seemed everywhere. A Macy’s copywriter was robbed and stabbed in the foyer of her Hudson Street apartment by a heroin addict who took seven dollars from her; a week later, an aspiring actor was also fatally stabbed outside his Ninth Avenue home. Store owners along Bleecker began closing early for the night after the city placed hundreds of Rikers Island inmates at a hotel on the block. In response to the crime wave, four hundred Village residents marched on the Sixth Precinct to demand more police protection. St. John’s Lutheran Church, on Christopher Street, launched what it called Operation Eye-Opener to take in runaways being lured into addiction and prostitution. When it came to drug dealers, “the staff from the church has often had to fight to get a runaway from them and back to the safety of the church,” it reported. In a wildly overstated number that still spoke volumes about how the Village was being perceived, St. John’s also claimed that “85 percent of the residents take drugs.”

In 1970 Guest had received a call from Jerry Taylor, the publisher of National Lampoon—and also Mary Travers’s husband at the time. At that point, Guest was in acting school and hadn’t written much of anything, but when Taylor asked if he wanted to contribute an article to the magazine, Guest soon became part of a stable of gonzo-satirical writers and editors. A gifted musician and mimic who could submerge his low-key personality into his characters, Guest took acting jobs—including one soap opera where he was asked to portray a dope-smoking, bongo-playing hippie—but truly came into his own with the Lampoon. Overseen by writers and editors Tony Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue, the 1971 Lampoon album Radio Dinner didn’t remotely spare the music heroes of the previous decade. Guest’s parody of Dylan—“Those Fabulous Sixties,” an ad for an album, Golden Protest, of vintage topical songs—was so spot on that the magazine received a threatening call from Dylan’s lawyer.

Having ventured into magazines and albums, the Lampoon bosses decided to franchise their success and create a stage production that could tour around the country. As Radio Dinner suggested, the new big-money business of rock and the increasing insularity and wealth of its superstars were easy targets. As casting proceeded, it turned out that some were skilled at mocking rock: Guest for one, but also John Belushi, recruited from Second City in Chicago, who nailed the hot mess that was Joe Cocker. “A bunch of us got together and started kicking this thing around,” said another newly hired cast member, Chevy Chase, a twenty-five-year-old comic-ensemble actor and writer who was skilled at acting, drumming, and piano playing. “We discovered what each of us could do and built the show around these individual abilities.”

Lampoon editor Hendra, a thirty-two-year-old Brit with long blond hair and a subtle wit, would direct the show, and Guest and Canadian-born Lampoon writer Sean Kelly, along with the show’s musical director, Paul Jacobs, would write the parodies. The actors would serve as the band, with Guest on guitar, Chase on drums, Jacobs on assorted instruments, and Belushi attempting bass. The Lampoon secured the Village Gate, which had been hosting off-Broadway and often-irreverent theater productions for years, including the hot-ticket revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and MacBird!, a satire of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam that was shut down at least once by the Fire Department during its nearly year-long run. Art D’Lugoff suspected that the latter show’s leftist bent offended certain department officials, but he was never able to confirm his suspicions.

The first half of the show called National Lampoon’s Lemmings comprised a series of random sketches, such as Chase playing a Hells Angel who wanted to take down a “peace creep” for daring to touch his motorcycle. Chase delighted in those moments when he would push his way into the seated crowd and get a bit too up close and personal with some in the audience. “I remember some guy was like, ‘Don’t touch me!’” Chase said. “It was wonderful.” Other sketches mocked Jesus Christ Superstar, the ubiquitous gospel-rock musical.

But by the early seventies, no more enticing pop target existed than Woodstock. As chaotic as it was, the 1969 festival had spawned a cottage industry all its own, including a lucrative feature film and two best-selling albums. Guest himself hadn’t attended the gathering. “I thought, ‘This is just going to be a bunch of these fucking bozos from New Jersey—it’s going to be a nightmare,’” he recalled. “I wouldn’t go near there.” He wasn’t the only one who thought it ripe for savagery; Chase also found the Woodstock legend lacking, saying at the time that it “didn’t really work—it was the peak of the acid era, and everyone there was wiped out on drugs.”

The second half of Lemmings delivered on that scathing assessment. Called the “Woodchuck Festival of Peace, Love and Death,” it skewered the idea of mass rock gatherings, starting with the premise that the fans who flocked to them were a brain-dead herd being sent to their death. In his role as the festival’s emcee, Belushi encouraged fans to climb the sound towers so they could leap to their demise; an “All Star Dead Band” comprised Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Duane Allman, and Paul McCartney, who, according to a conspiracy theory, had supposedly died four years before. “The Lampoon always had this other side, which was pretty out there,” Guest said. “And this was the music version of that.”

The Village Gate had had troubles of its own; six months before, D’Lugoff held a benefit, with music by David Amram, to bolster its finances. “The Village nightlife scene isn’t what it used to be,” D’Lugoff told Newsday, “but I believe it’s on the upswing now.” Still, when the cast and crew of Lemmings gathered at the club for opening night on January 25, 1973, they found the doors padlocked. The club had fallen behind in its taxes, and only a last-minute cash infusion from one of the Lemmings producers kept it open. Lemmings could be equally chaotic backstage. During its run, Hendra introduced Belushi to cocaine; Guest would glimpse Belushi’s dealer at the backstage door, and he watched as his costar overdosed twice. Hendra fired Belushi for being out of control, only to rehire him. “We needed him,” Chase said. “I’m sorry he was an asshole, but we needed that asshole!” Chase freaked out one night when an actual Hells Angel was in the audience, brandishing a weapon in case he saw anything offensive in the show.

Lemmings not only had an edge that had long been missing from the artists who played Bleecker Street; it also had more buzz than just about anything apart from the occasional event, like Stevie Wonder’s run at the Bitter End in 1972. The Daily News called the revue “generally hilarious,” and the show, which ran every day of the week except Mondays, began doing brisk business. Dylan, who still had a home around the corner on MacDougal Street, was never spotted in the audience, but Dustin Hoffman was, along with James Taylor and Carly Simon, pop’s reigning soft-rock power couple. (Simon and Chase had also briefly dated during their high school years in New York City.) Guest was about to play “Highway Toes,” a devastating parody of Taylor (“Farewell to Carolina, where I left my frontal lobes,” went one line), when he saw the couple take front-row seats. “James is sitting there looking up at me,” Guest said, “and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, have I fucked up? I love this guy. I love his songs. What am I doing?’” Simon laughed hysterically at the satire of her husband, but Taylor, who was in the grip of addiction, seemed catatonic to Guest. Afterward, Taylor and Simon visited backstage, but Taylor merely stood there, never saying a word.

Guest also noticed an occasional person in the Village Gate audience, possibly on heroin or another drug, nodding out in his or her seat. “It was a dark time because the surrounding area was very much changed, and even the people who came to the show were those ‘other people,’ as I called them,” said Guest. “It was not like doing a show in the Sixties. It had all changed. It was all on the verge of some other thing.”

Although Lemmings served as a commentary on major-league rock, it also, in its way, skewered the Village and the style of music most associated with it. Guest reprised his Dylan parody, this time with a guitar and harmonica rack and having him play the Woodchuck Festival only after Belushi, as the emcee, flashed a wad of cash. As first heard on the Radio Dinner album, Mary-Jennifer Mitchell sang a devastating satire of Baez and liberal piety, “Pull the Tregros,” written by Hendra and arranged by Guest. A sitcom parody starring Mimi Fariña was tabled as being too arcane, but even without it, a show that mocked some of the stars of the Village became the show to see in the area throughout 1973.

Lemmings closed in November 1973, moving on to Philadelphia for the first stop on a planned national tour that didn’t come to fruition. That cast included only Belushi and Chase from the Village Gate production, but did add former Lovin’ Spoonful guitarist Zal Yanovsky, who was still grappling with life after the band and who got into fisticuffs with Chase. Before it ended its New York run, the cast gathered in a Village bar to do one more interview to promote the opening of the Philly version. Chase cradled a glass of beer that, in Village tradition, had a cockroach in it. “Would you bring me another glass?” he asked the waitress. “Either another glass or another roach.”

Lenny Kaye, a twenty-five-year-old guitarist and rock critic working at the Village Oldies record store on Bleecker Street, began noticing flyers on the wall of the store for the New York Dolls. Having seen the Blues Project, Hendrix, and the Fugs the previous decade, Kaye had witnessed the Village’s first rock era rise and sputter out. But the handbill for the Dolls, advertising a show at the Mercer Arts Center, promised an outlandish new dawn.

First in the Oscar Wilde Room and then in the larger O’Casey, Kaye and a few hundred others saw a band that, musically and visually, made everything about rock and roll in the Village at that time look and sound as dated as a Vietnam protest ballad. The Dolls were a battered-bridge-and-tunnel version of the Rolling Stones, with none of the white-blues jamming, progressive-rock excursions, or troubadour balladry that had overtaken FM radio. “They were resurrecting values in rock and roll that myself, along with many other rock journalists at the time, felt were in need of revisiting,” Kaye said. “The Dolls brought it right back to the hard beat and sense of humor and a lot of bouncing around on a stage that was informed by this pansexual atmosphere of New York City at the time.” Kaye ended up going to see them every week.

The Dolls themselves—David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane, and drummer Jerry Nolan (replacing original member Billy Murcia, who overdosed in late 1972)—were straight men who all looked as if they’d been on a bender, woken up in the home of a woman they didn’t know, and left in her clothes. Johansen could come onstage with his hair in a bun or wearing a gold bodysuit, and some of the other band members sported eyeliner and makeup. Nothing about it, musically or visually, would ever be associated with the Bitter End or Folk City, which made it all the more enticing to kids like Lance Loud and his high school friend Kristian Hoffman. In California, Hoffman had seen a photo of the Dolls in Melody Maker, the British music newspaper, and he and Loud—who was becoming semi-famous as part of television’s first reality show, An American Family—moved to New York. The Dolls were one of the first groups they saw play live, and Hoffman was especially entranced. “They were theater of outrage,” he said. “They were playful with sexuality. Lance didn’t come out on the show, but he started putting on eye makeup during that time.” Even the songs stood out: “Vietnamese Baby” was antiwar, but not in the old-school Village sense. “It wasn’t a folk song,” Hoffman said. “We hated those songs, and the albums with a stupid jam on one side and three tone-deaf blues covers on the other side. We were completely reactionary against that, and so were the Dolls.”

One of their opening acts was the Planets, an equally stage-storming and also interracial band featuring guitarist Binky Philips and front man Tally Taliaferrow. Like Kaye, Philips had checked out the Dolls and was instantly hooked; he was especially moved by “Frankenstein,” which felt like Johansen’s commentary on how he would be teased about his looks as a kid. “Nobody was booking rock bands with original material,” said Philips. “You could be a folkie and get a gig at the Bitter End and play an entire set of songs you wrote. The Dolls were the first band in my memory who could get away with playing nothing but originals. They opened the door for all of us.”

By the time the Planets were able to share the stage with the Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, the Dolls were very much a sensation, with a growing and increasingly flamboyantly dressed crowd. By Philips’s estimate, “About 30 percent of the audience was decked out in high-heeled boots and satin pants, up from 10 percent.” David Bowie, in his full-on Ziggy Stardust phase, was spotted there at least once. The audience wasn’t heavily gay; many remember it being largely hetero, including plenty of women lusting for a Doll of their own. But the freedom to be whatever one craved was in the air. Paul Nelson, the music critic then working as a publicist for Mercury Records, became a relentless champion of the Dolls and called those nights “a benign Clockwork Orange filmed in a packed-to-the-rafters Hollywood Mutant High wired for massive sound.” As Johansen recalled, “The subway went through it. You could feel it. But not when we were playing—the subway could probably hear us.”

The music rooms of the Mercer Arts Center held out hope that rock and roll could maintain a grip on the Village the way it had once before. But late in the afternoon of August 3, 1973, ominous sounds started rumbling through the hotel that housed them, and just after 5 p.m., a chunk of the building caved in and collapsed, the wreckage overtaking Broadway. Since the theaters were empty at that time, musicians or actors weren’t injured or even on the premises, but four people trapped inside the hotel were killed and more than a dozen injured. Most of the theaters inside the Mercer Arts Center were not seriously damaged, but the four plays in production had to find new homes, and several offices and a studio were buried.

When a friend called to tell him what had happened, Philips couldn’t quite grasp what he was hearing and went to the site a few days later. “It was pure, unadulterated rubble,” he said. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Well, that’s that. That was fun while it lasted.’” Lawsuits alleging building violations were filed, and it turned out that the hotel had been cited for sixty-three violations during its sixty prior years. The cause of the crash was ultimately determined to be a destabilized support wall in the hotel that had been weakened by an unapproved drainpipe installation. The Mercer was ultimately condemned, and within a year, the Kitchen—one of the performance-space rooms at the Mercer—had relocated several blocks south, to SoHo.

Major rock acts had started playing the Academy of Music, a theater on Fourteenth Street, at the northern border of the Village. But the end of the Mercer Arts Center as a music hub proved to be the next step in rock beginning its gradual move east. Just months before the collapse, the Dolls were booked to play the Gaslight at the Au Go Go. On the afternoon of the show, Johansen arrived with Thunders. As the two were about to walk down the two flights of stairs to the entrance, a large man with a knife jumped out from nowhere, screaming he was going to kill Johansen because he had “impregnated” him from the stage. “Apparently I had been looking at him in such a way that he became pregnant,” Johansen said. Thunders pushed the intruder down the stairs from street level, and the man ran away.

Later that year, bar owner Hilly Kristal opened CBGB on the Bowery—an unintentionally symbolic move, since that street could be found at the eastern end of Bleecker, home to the previous decades’ folk, rock, and jazz heyday. The lifestyles, music, and culture that a venue like the Mercer Arts Center had supported and encouraged would survive, but they would now do so blocks removed from the heart of Greenwich Village.

As if their owners were convinced of a pending rebirth, new venues still periodically arose. At 188 West Fourth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, a short walk from the new Folk City, the Metro Cafe became a new base for acoustic music. Starting in late 1973, its bookings included Mimi Fariña and the man who continued to live nearby, Dave Van Ronk.

The last few years had been thorny for the local legend who’d been dubbed the Mayor of MacDougal Street by a Kettle of Fish bartender in the early sixties. In 1969 Van Ronk put his signature on an MGM Records contract that called for three albums in a year. None appeared, but in the fall of 1970, label president Mike Curb dropped eighteen acts from the roster for supposedly promoting drug use with their music. Van Ronk was not publicly mentioned, yet neither was he on the list of those who were retained. (Perhaps Curb or someone else at the company heard “Cocaine.”) In 1971, Van Ronk did finally return to making records, three years after the Hudson Dusters and now with Polydor, which had bought MGM. Van Ronk was among his most opulently produced LPs. As usual, it tossed together songs by modern writers (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) with compositions by Jacques Brel and Van Ronk’s Village friend Peter Stampfel. He also comically tipped his hat to his past in “Gaslight Rag,” a self-penned homage to what he called “Mitchell’s Café” with its rats, fellow tunesmiths, and “grunge on the floor.” Given that the Gaslight was teetering and its founder John Mitchell was long gone, the era he sang about seemed even further back than ten years.

By then, Van Ronk and Terri Thal had divorced, although it had taken a few years. “We stayed married for about five more years,” she said. “Finally, he was acting weirdly, although not to me, and I called him up and said, ‘I’ll bury you because you’re my friend, but not because you’re my husband. So let’s get a divorce.’” In a new relationship, with Joanne Grace, he was still living at his apartment on Sheridan Square, right across the street from what was once Cafe Society. In interviews or with friends, Van Ronk remained loquacious and intellectually voracious, whether talking about Greek history and French literature or the batting average of the New York Mets. Like a bear prematurely woken from hibernation, he could still be his cranky self. During an interview in the Village with writer Mike Jahn in 1973, he pointed out the businesses now shuttered or replaced and grumbled about the state of the area and the sightseers who still flocked to it. “I don’t like the tourists,” he said. “It’s becoming almost pathological with me, I hate them so badly.” He grimaced when he heard people at the next table ordering a “drinky-poo.” Being the curious person he was, however, he took a seat at their table and started grilling them on their stories.

Van Ronk wasn’t the only one who was landing work at the Metro into 1974. Starting January 24, Happy and Artie Traum and their band settled in for three nights—and with a mystifying opening act. Having left her New Jersey upbringing behind somewhere on the Garden State Parkway, Patti Smith was now a poet, writer, and playwright. With accompaniment from Lenny Kaye on guitar, she was increasingly pairing her poetry with rudimentary rock and roll. At Max’s Kansas City, just north of the Village, on New Year’s Eve 1974, Smith opened for Phil Ochs, who was in the midst of a debilitating period of his life and career. Ochs’s dreams of a new America and pop success had both crashed after the 1968 Democratic Convention; he was drinking heavily and seemed depressed and rudderless. His father, a doctor, had suffered from manic depression and, according to Ochs’s sister, Sonny, would have meltdowns every three years; Ochs was starting to exhibit some of those same signs. Kaye’s most enduring memory of the show was seeing Ochs at the Max’s bar, where Ochs apparently left his pay without realizing it.

Still managed by Albert Grossman, the Traum brothers were specializing in singer-songwriter folk. But the crowd at the Metro seemed to be there to see Smith, who was joined by an early version of a band with Kaye, pianist Matthew Reich, and actress and Warhol regular Diane Podlewski. Set against the venue’s brick-wall backdrop, the show lay halfway between cabaret rock and performance art. Happy’s wife, Jane, was mesmerized by Smith and admired her gutsiness on stage. “Compared to the long-haired girls who played Joan Baez songs,” she said, “I thought, ‘We need this.’”

Jane Traum’s admiration for Smith did not translate to the small dressing room, where both bands were crammed. Kaye recalled one of the Traums, likely Artie, approaching him and barking, “What do you know about music? You just know three chords!” (“I was quite taken aback,” Kaye recalled. “I didn’t know where it came from. They were a little protective of their universe.”) When one of the Traum players asked Smith who she was, she replied, “I’m a little bit happy and a little bit arty.”

Matters soon grew physical. In Happy Traum’s recollection, Kaye borrowed an amplifier from one of the Traums’ musicians and blew it out. (Kaye had no recall of that moment.) How physical it became depends on the source. Guitarist Arlen Roth, who’d been hired for the show, wound up arriving late and was told he’d just missed something. “You wouldn’t believe what just happened!” another Traum band member told him. “We just had a fight with Patti Smith’s band!” The scuffle was trivial but also revealing: a new wave of rockers was being shunned by a world that once had welcomed them.

Morgan Studio in London was a far cry from Folk City and the college coffeehouses where Maggie and Terre Roche had worked to fine-tune their songs and stage presence. Much like the legendary Abbey Road building, its control room looked down upon the recording room, which could make musicians feel dislocated from their producers. Glancing down at the sisters, Paul Samwell-Smith, the balladeer-sensitive British producer who often worked there, wondered if they found it overwhelming. “I thought, ‘It must be tough for them,’” he said. “They seemed like a couple of nice, innocent, naive girls who came over not knowing anything, really, about the recording business. But they seemed really eager for this.”

For the making of what would be the duo’s first album, the stars appeared to finally be aligning after a difficult few years. Paul Simon had connected them with Samwell-Smith, the former bass player for the Yardbirds who’d shifted to record production and had worked on “American Tune” on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. The sisters’ album would be put on tape in the same studio where Samwell-Smith had recorded Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman and Carly Simon’s Anticipation, two of the best-selling singer-songwriter records of the time. “They thought, ‘Maybe Paul Samwell-Smith can do what he did with Cat Stevens for you guys,’ and we were into it,” Terre said. “We were like, ‘Oh, that’d be exciting, wouldn’t it?’” During their stay the sisters made the most of their temporary London home, exploring the pubs and inviting their mother, Jude, over for a visit. According to Terre, Maggie, unhappy with her songs up to that point, had torched all the tapes of her earliest material. But she had written a whole new set of material that reflected her and her sister’s adventures and struggles of the last few years.

In what would prove to be a litmus test for how the next generation of Village-rooted songwriters could fit, or not, into a particular music box, the making of the album would be anything but a breeze. Maggie’s songs had intricate chord and tempo changes that resisted conventional arrangements. (When their sister Suzzy later tried learning to play “Jill of All Trades” on piano, she realized that every chord on the right hand was a different chord on the left.) Samwell-Smith felt the need to make the sisters’ album more amenable to radio airplay. “That might just have been me doing the normal pressures,” he said. “But I thought, ‘Why are they coming in and paying for all the airfares and the studio time?’”

After several weeks, the sisters and Samwell-Smith had several finished songs, including “West Virginia,” an elliptical, Terre-sung look back at their time (and drug taking) on the campus tour, set to a delicate string arrangement. But one day they received a call from Michael Tannen, telling them that no one was happy with the rough mixes that had been sent back to New York and that the sisters should return to the States. Dejected but momentarily free of any need to conform, Maggie sat down at the studio piano and, with Terre playing along, worked out a new song, a downcast ballad about dashed hopes called “Down the Dream.” “Maggie was able to relax and sing and play just like she wanted to,” Samwell-Smith said. “It was lovely. We had the attitude of, ‘Oh, well, we should be doing more of this.’”

The sisters found themselves back in America and at the same Alabama studio and with the same studio musicians who’d worked on parts of There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. “That was Paul’s doing,” said Tannen. “He was trying to make them more commercial.” But almost immediately, another conflict flared up. Keyboardist Barry Beckett, their new producer, preferred that the sisters not play their guitars and have the musicians handle the instrumental tracks. Such was their traditional method for recording, but the Roches protested—Terre in particular was becoming a skilled guitarist—and Beckett quit. Hurriedly stepping in to salvage the project, bassist David Hood and guitarist Jimmy Johnson, the new producers, realized it was best to let the sisters be more involved. “I worked with Aretha and she didn’t do great until they sat her down in the studio at a grand piano and she played when she sang,” Hood said. “And that’s what made it work with Maggie and Terre. Their singing wasn’t as good when they weren’t playing.”

Challenges remained. Simon, who wasn’t present, sent word that from the tapes he heard, the sisters should “sing more in tune,” as Hood recalled. At that time, Maggie didn’t write down chords or have notated sheet music; she preferred to teach a song to the musicians by playing it for them on the piano. She also had a vision for her music that adhered to the complexity of her writing. “You couldn’t get her to change anything,” Hood said. “She never wanted to hear the word ‘commercial.’”

Seductive Reasoning, its title suggested by Maggie, reflected the scattershot way in which it was made. Wrestling with melodies that would switch tempos without advance warning, the Muscle Shoals musicians made the songs either jaunty, melancholy, or country-fried. On the final version of “Down the Dream,” the augmented instrumentation heightened the song’s melancholy, but in “The Mountain People” and “Wigglin’ Man,” the Roche sisters came off as an Appalachian version of the Andrews Sisters, the cheery World War II–era entertainers. The songs helmed by Samwell-Smith were set to sparser arrangements, like “Jill of All Trades,” which featured only Maggie’s piano. “If You Empty Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change,” the one song on the album produced by Simon, reflected his rhythmic sensibilities and, with its harmonies by the white gospel band the Oak Ridge Boys, his own eclectic sensibility.

Although Maggie demurred from talking about the stories behind her melodies and strongly discouraged Terre from doing the same, the songs alluded to the sisters’ lives over the previous five years. “Malachy’s,” Maggie’s song about playing that bar, made the cut. With its references to men wanting virgins and leaving them in ruin, “Underneath the Moon” could have easily been about Maggie’s tumultuous personal life. References to pills and Louisiana, where they’d traveled during their San Francisco period, had the same effect in “Down the Dream,” and lyrics about bus rides and “a needle and a kid” in “Jill of All Trades” could have been inspired by Maggie’s return home when she was pregnant. She and Terre took turns on leads, Terre’s voice swooping in and around her sister’s when Maggie was in the forefront.

The finished album in hand, Simon and Tannen shopped it around. The sisters met with David Geffen, whose Elektra/Asylum label felt like a suitable home but who struck Terre as pompous. Ultimately, they signed with Columbia, Simon’s home.

But even then, the promotion for the sisters’ launch into the mainstream would be as taxing as making their record. Asked in her 1970 interview about why she apparently didn’t wear makeup, Maggie had shot back, “I don’t like to be kicked around by anybody. But I’m not in any organization of any kind.” The years hadn’t affected Maggie’s uncompromising nature. Before the album was unveiled, the label had an executive take Maggie and Terre clothes shopping at Macy’s and arranged for a high-end photo shoot in which the sisters, rarely prone to posh outfits, were dressed in black velvet. “They tried to tell them what to wear—all the stupid things people say to young women,” said Suzzy. “That was not going to happen. Any rule given to Maggie and Terre, they would break.” Rejecting the photos, the Roches opted for a far more casual shot of themselves in sleeveless white blouses, lounging on a couch, Terre in a buzz cut that lent her a boyish look. “We and the record company jointly tried to get them to dress a little better,” Tannen admitted. “They would dress in ankle-length dresses, like from a thrift store. In hindsight, it was very cool, but what the fuck did we know?”

Columbia sent Maggie and Terre to Los Angeles to play a few early shows and hobnob with its California staff. The sisters thought the encounters had gone well, but upon their return to New York, they went to Tannen’s office after hours one night; they’d been told they could use the piano there to practice. On his desk, they saw a folder labeled with their names and couldn’t resist peeking inside. To their horror, they saw a report from a West Coast Columbia executive that harshly criticized their stage skills and looks and, as Terre would recall, disparaged “Maggie’s ever-present Wallabees,” the earthy, moccasin-style shoes in vogue. “Maggie and I said, ‘We’re in over our heads—we don’t know how to hang with this high-powered thing,’” Terre said. “We started to feel like, ‘We don’t sing well enough, we don’t play well enough, and we’re not good enough. We’re making fools of ourselves.’ We were swimming upstream.”

Released in March 1975, Seductive Reasoning began garnering airplay on WLIR, the Long Island progressive radio station. Billboard cited Maggie’s “perceptive writing” and called the album “remarkably well done and versatile” and “quite different from anything happening in a big way today,” with a “strong commercial possibility.” In the Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau found them a bit arch but overall approved of their “assured, relaxed and reflective” women’s sensibility.

But as Tannen saw for himself, repeatedly, Maggie and Terre tended to react the same way when a decision had to be made: they would go off, talk between themselves, reach a verdict, and stick with it, no further discussion allowed. In this case they opted to leave New York and the record business and head to Hammond, Louisiana, where a friend had opened a kung fu temple. “Maggie was very fragile, always,” said Tannen. “She was kind of a mystery, which was part of her appeal. But the record is released and there’s no Maggie and Terre.” Tannen freaked as well, telling them they were making a huge mistake, but it was too late; the sisters gave up their downtown apartment and were soon out of town.

“Don’t be afraid to flop,” Van Ronk had told them when they were spending time with him a few years before. When Terre had heard that advice as a teenager, the thought was liberating and, as she put it, took the pin out of the grenade when it came to career pressure. It seemed the essence of the bohemian world they’d engaged with after that drive into the city to see Izzy Young. They were outsiders who flourished in an outside world, and for the time being they would choose to remain that way.

By the summer of 1975, it wasn’t merely the Village that seemed under siege; the entire city felt as if it were capsizing. In the spring, New York had defaulted on its billions of dollars of debt, plunging it into the worst financial crisis in its history. The first week of July, Abe Beame, a Democrat who’d been elected mayor the previous year, was forced to lay off 40,000 city workers, including 5,000 police and 1,500 firemen. In protest, the Sanitation Department went on strike, allowing 28 tons of daily trash to start piling up on seemingly every block, with accompanying odors to match. “Stay off the streets after 6 p.m.,” warned a four-page pamphlet, Welcome to Fear City, published and distributed in the city by a group that included unions of firefighters and police.

The same week Beame ordered the municipal job cuts, Allan Pepper witnessed something neither he nor anyone else had seen in several years. Bob Dylan was back in the Village, and one of those sightings had taken place at the Bottom Line, the club that Pepper and his partner Stanley Snadowsky had opened the previous year.

For all the pessimism engulfing the city, the Bottom Line had injected a degree of hope for the future of the Village. Both thirty, Pepper and Snadowsky had known each other since grade school in Brooklyn and were oddly complementary. Pepper, a sociology teacher, was short, garrulous, and music-focused; Snadowsky, more inclined toward business and already running his own entertainment-leaning law firm, was more oversized. When they were barely out of college, they’d started Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit that organized jazz shows at, among others, the Five Spot and the Top of the Gate. In 1968 they began booking shows at the Village Gate proper, bringing in rock acts like Seatrain, the Blues Project spinoff. Pepper and Snadowsky left the Gate and, in 1971, moved over to Folk City at its second locale, on West Third Street.

Given their interest in acoustic music, Pepper and Snadowsky were a good fit for that space, even if they had once clashed with two of its nascent talents. In their club-haunting days before their trip to London, Maggie and Terre Roche had been given an assigned open-mic slot at Folk City and expected to be let in for free, as Mike Porco had done before his new bookers had been hired. “Maggie and I acted like we owned the place,” she said. “No one ever charged us to go in. We were late and suddenly these two guys at the door are giving us some trouble. I remember saying to Allan, ‘Fuck you!’”

Porco didn’t know what to make of some of the amplified acts Pepper and Snadowsky signed up for the place, and the men also made subtle changes, like ordering the wait staff not to take orders during the performances. But Folk City was still struggling to reinvent itself and book name acts; Milton Kramer, Loudon Wainwright III’s manager, chose to place his client at the Gaslight rather than Folk City, which he considered small time.

At his law firm, one of Snadowsky’s clients leased the Red Garter, a Dixieland- and jazz-inclined club at 15 West Fourth Street, across the street from the original Folk City. In 1973 Snadowsky heard that his client was about to renege on the deal. Pepper’s wife, Eileen, had an uncle who worked in the sportswear business, and with his financial aid the two men raised around $250,000 to buy and gut the Red Garter and start their own live-music business. The intersection of West Fourth and Mercer was far from the Bleecker and MacDougal crossroads, and the area around the club would be quiet and unsafe at nights. The first Folk City was now a parking lot, and the Mercer Arts Center, which had been catty-corner from the Red Garter, was closed. Anybody who parked their car in the vicinity risked a break-in or theft.

Still, Pepper and Snadowsky were intent on establishing an upscale, four-hundred-seat music venue, and timing was on their side. Soon after the Traums and Patti Smith show, the Metro shifted from music to comedy. At their embryonic venue, Pepper and Snadowsky installed an upgraded sound system and monitors that would allow the musicians to hear themselves on stage as best as possible. Ringless cash registers and phones would make sure that nothing encroached on the music during the shows. The new owners also built soundproofed dressing rooms behind the stage; that way, the acts wouldn’t have to walk through the crowd to get to their space, as they did at the Village Vanguard, the new Folk City, and others. “It’s much different when we say ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ and they walk out onto the stage rather than pass through the audience,” Pepper said. “It’s more dramatic and professional.”

Professional would remain the operative term for the Bottom Line. From the moment it opened, the club noticeably injected the big-money, high-living rock world of the seventies into the Village. The venue had a soft opening with Labelle, a year before “Lady Marmalade” made the trio a glitter-funk sensation. The official opening night, February 12, 1974, presented New Orleans voodoo rocker Dr. John. Photographer Peter Cunningham sensed that he needed to be there—“there was a buzz that this was going to be the next big place,” he said—and he and his camera weren’t disappointed. In the crowd were Mick Jagger, Carly Simon, and Albert Grossman, among others; Stevie Wonder and Johnny Winter joined Dr. John onstage for a jam session. As Carol Klenfner, who was handling publicity for the club, recalled, “I was very focused on the opening. We tried to get everybody who was anybody who was in town.”

Local talents like Van Ronk, Wainwright, and the Traum brothers each played the Bottom Line during its inaugural year. At the same time, bigger rock stars began dropping in. That first summer, Stephen Stills stopped by to sit in with Bonnie Raitt. His sometime bandmate Neil Young, in the house for a Ry Cooder show, sent a member of his posse to Pepper’s office to ask if Young could play an impromptu set of his own after Cooder’s. For those who remained, which was most of the house, Young ran through eleven songs, including several, such as “Long May You Run” and “Pushed It Over the End,” that few outside his circle had heard before. Tom Scott and the LA Express, which had worked with George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, and others, headlined one night, and Mitchell, a backstage guest, was asked by Scott to sing with them. When she proved resistant, a microphone was run to where she was standing, at the bottom of the steps at the back of the stage, and she sang out of sight of the crowd. With an elevated stage that was set higher off the floor than those in other Village clubs, the Bottom Line also unintentionally demonstrated the way that rock stars were now cultural gods placed on pedestals.

In April 1974 the New York Dolls took over the Bottom Line. Their first, self-titled album had rolled out at almost the same time as the hotel next to the Mercer Arts Center collapsed, and they were now releasing a second one, tellingly titled Too Much Too Soon. Their music was not to the tastes of the club owners: as Pepper told the New York Times shortly after, “We detest that kind of music.” But he and Pepper wanted to serve up as much variety as possible at that early point in the club’s existence. The night of the Dolls’ show, a bomb threat cleared the club, but even more rattling for Pepper and Snadowsky was a visit to the dressing room, where they found a smashed mirror. “I was just furious,” Pepper said. “I felt personally aggrieved. We had spent so much time and here these guys were in their own world and couldn’t give a crap.” The owners deducted the cost of the mirror from the band’s pay—along with, as club policy, half the cost of their beverages. “There was some sort of intramural brouhaha going on,” the Dolls’ David Johansen said. “Arthur threw a seltzer bottle or something at the back of my head and I ducked it and it smashed the mirror. I guess they call that ‘trashing.’” The band was banned from playing the club.

The Bottom Line bosses soon learned the peccadilloes of their audiences. Bluegrass crowds brought their own wine and paid in pennies. Fans of Leonard Cohen, who played the club in the fall of 1974, left it spotless, whereas Deadheads left behind their share of vomit when Jerry Garcia (who was paid a higher-than-usual $7,000 for his show, according to the Times) brought along his own band.

Whether it intended to or not, the Bottom Line also affected the rock clubs in the Village and in nearby districts. In August 1974, Max’s Kansas City filed for bankruptcy; that venue had been “the leading rock music club in New York City and hence the country,” opined the Times. Sam Hood, of the Gaslight and the Gaslight at the Au Go Go, had been booking acts there. Max’s had its share of issues—it endured several fires, and owner Mickey Ruskin spent a good deal of money remodeling it—but Ruskin explicitly blamed the Bottom Line’s success for cutting his space off at the knees. A month later, in September, he sold it to a new owner, temporarily ending an era.

But nothing could stop the Bottom Line. Record companies began shelling out thousands of dollars for press parties in the venue, like the time Elton John hosted one for British singer Kiki Dee. In what Pepper called “a whole new world,” the labels also bought batches of tickets to give to members of the press. Dylan had played Madison Square Garden the month before the Bottom Line opened, but his surprise appearance during a Muddy Waters show, where he sat in on harmonica, was likely the first time that anyone had seen him onstage in a Village club in years. (When Pepper and Snadowsky were booking Folk City, Dylan had stopped by with George Harrison to see David Bromberg, but he never set foot anywhere near the stage and even left early.)

The next month, a further coronation of the Bottom Line took place when Bruce Springsteen started a five-night showcase. Playing the same venue a year earlier, Springsteen had barely been able to fill it. “If you brought one hundred of your best friends, I could have gotten you seats,” said Pepper. This time around, the shows were sold out, and Lou Reed and Robert DeNiro were in the house. To stress the connection between Springsteen and his fans, Columbia, his label, asked Pepper and Snadowsky to not let anyone from the press or the music business sit up front. “Bruce knew how to work the stage, but people thought it wasn’t translating onto the records,” Pepper said. “So their notion was that any disbelievers who thought it was all hype could see real people reacting to it, and that would make a statement and an impression. They wanted the fans up front. They knew what they were doing, like they were going into battle.”

Pepper and Snadowsky also knew to fortify the front tables, since Springsteen would likely walk on them. It was a small repair price to pay for the euphoric talk generated from some of the most enthralling shows the Bottom Line had so far presented.

Late in the evening of October 23, 1975, Van Ronk could be found where he often was, at the Kettle of Fish. Whether it was the alcohol or the passing of time, it took him a minute to recognize the twenty-seven-year-old who approached him. Along with Maggie and Terre Roche, Rod MacDonald was yet another musician who’d been raised on the troubadours and songs of the previous decade. Connecticut-born, MacDonald had played in a commercial folk group, the Lovin’ Sound; enrolled in Columbia Law School; and worked as a reporter for Newsweek. Along the way, he’d also begun a solo performing career. Moving to Thompson Street in 1973, he’d met the Roche sisters in a local laundromat, and he’d also encountered Van Ronk during an out-of-town trip to Chicago, where the two wound up drinking into the night.

After MacDonald reintroduced himself, Van Ronk stood up, announced, “Come with me,” and led MacDonald out of the Kettle and across MacDougal, where they ran into David Blue. Although still based in California, Blue had had a checkered career. Thanks in part to his friend Joni Mitchell, Blue became part of managers David Geffen and Elliot Roberts’s roster of Laurel Canyon songwriters and had made several albums for Geffen’s Asylum label. At the Bitter End in 1972, he’d introduced Springsteen to Jackson Browne, launching a long-running friendship between the two. But Blue himself hadn’t achieved anything close to the success of Browne or the Eagles, who recorded one of his songs, “Outlaw Man.” To promote his latest album, he was back in town for a few gigs in the Village.

Van Ronk and Blue, who struck MacDonald as wired, embraced, and the three proceeded to Folk City, a few doors down. The club was normally quiet—on Thursday nights and many others as well—but this evening, a small crowd hovered outside. Mike Porco was turning sixty-one, and Van Ronk was adhering to his tradition of stopping by, wishing Porco a happy birthday, and downing a shot of whiskey. Once that was done, Van Ronk, who later said he had an upset stomach, said to MacDonald, “I’m not sticking around, but you should.” A couple of local songwriters MacDonald knew, including Van Ronk pal Erik Frandsen, were playing that night. But the real draw was the tables at the far left rear, partly subsumed in darkness, where MacDonald saw, to his shock, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, with more luminaries on the way.

As just about everyone in the downtown music community was aware, Dylan was once again a Village regular. On the heels of releasing Blood on the Tracks, with songs that hinted at marital turmoil, he’d left his wife, Sara, and their children behind in California and taken an apartment in the vicinity. A few days before sitting in with Muddy Waters at the Bottom Line, Dylan turned up at what was once the Bitter End. The same year the Bottom Line had launched, the Bitter End had run aground. Ultimately, manager Paul Colby found himself with the lease to both the Bitter End and the next-door Now Bar. Breaking through the wall that separated the two businesses, he merged them and renamed the expanded space the Other End, complete with a liquor license, tables and chairs replacing the bench pews, and a separate but connected bar area called the Other End Bar.

One night in June 1975, Dylan was inspecting the present and maybe future of rock. Patti Smith was most regularly seen tearing it up at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, but starting with her tense co-bill with the Traum brothers at the Metro Club, she also made her way into a few West Village clubs. When another act dropped out of a booking at the Other End for late June 1975, Smith landed the slot and unveiled her full new band, featuring Lenny Kaye. The shows were nothing like the venue, or possibly all of Bleecker Street, had quite witnessed: an androgynous poet whose band could blend crude but still refined punk and garage rock with dollops of reggae and spoken word. Many of the acts who were playing the club seemed like prisoners of the past; Smith simply took no prisoners.

During one of those shows, Kaye saw a familiar figure walk in. It was unclear how Dylan knew of Smith, although she was already chummy with Dylan’s pal Bob Neuwirth. “We’d been getting good press, so I’m not sure he was totally unaware of her,” Kaye said of Dylan. “Bob is a little slicker than he would like to have one believe. He probably knew there was a brouhaha around a rock ‘poet.’” For his part, Kaye tried to concentrate on his playing, including a guitar solo on a version of “Time Is on My Side,” and thanks to a spotlight, he couldn’t see much of Dylan, who took a seat, drank wine, and chain-smoked. Afterward, Dylan made his way backstage, and a photographer took playful photos of him and Smith together. “They kind of danced around each other,” Kaye said. “Both of them were trying to be cool.”

To Colby’s delight and the astonishment of journalists and musicians alike, Dylan kept returning to the club, often wearing a black-leather jacket and a striped shirt, and accompanied by Neuwirth and lyricist and new collaborator Jacques Levy. When Ramblin’ Jack Elliott started a multi-evening stand, Dylan sat in with him, returning two nights later with Smith and Neuwirth. During Elliott’s performances and then bleeding into a series of July shows headlined by Neuwirth and others, Dylan made the Other End an unofficial second home. He could also be found at the tables near the adjoining bar, trying out new material, such as “Isis” or an ode to dead mobster Joey Gallo, for whoever was around.

“Bob was trying to reconnect with this scene that he’d been too far away from,” said Rob Stoner, a guitarist and bassist who’d met Dylan before and been pulled into Dylan’s circle when Neuwirth offered him a hundred dollars to back Neuwirth at the Other End. “He’d tried to [reconnect] when he moved back with his family earlier, but he couldn’t do it with Weberman [the “Dylanologist” who’d gone through his garbage] and those cats. Now he was back, but this time he was unencumbered. He was there with his bodyguard—Neuwirth—and he went crazy with chicks. He was making up for lost time.”

Back again in the city in October, Dylan was finishing up a new album, Desire, and formulating his next move. After another gig at the Other End, Elliott was in the back room collecting his pay when Dylan walked in, handed him a glass of red wine, and told him he was thinking of going on the road for “small gigs” with a gang including Neuwirth and Baez. Elliott said he was in, and on a call a few weeks later, Dylan said they would start in November. More name musicians began stopping by the Other End, jockeying for a role in whatever Dylan was planning. “There was a certain magic but at the same time a competitive ugliness to it,” Stoner said. “They could see he was casting around to do something new, and whatever it was they wanted to be either witness or be part of it. People were trying to be cool and wanted to end up doing whatever crazy project he had in mind. But no one knew what it was yet.”

By the time Van Ronk led MacDonald into Folk City on October 23, however, everyone knew: Dylan was making some sort of movie. A film crew had shown up at the club first, telling Porco they were shooting an “educational television” special. They began filming the entire evening, starting with Porco’s birthday celebration, which was organized by another local talent, troubadour Jack Hardy. In a surreal start to what would be an equally strange evening, Hardy and Rosie Smith, a gregarious spitfire who emceed many of the club’s hoot nights, dropped the birthday cake on the stage, splitting it in two. Soon after, a car pulled up in front of the club, and Dylan, Baez, Stoner, musician T Bone Burnett, and Dylan’s longtime friend and road manager Lou Kemp emerged and filed in, making their way toward the back. Eric Andersen, who drove in from his home in Woodstock, entered with Smith. “The night held an expectation of fireworks excitement,” Andersen said, “but also the feeling of broken glass.”

Sporting a multicolored shirt for the occasion, Porco followed the gang to the back of his club, where he kissed Dylan and Neuwirth on the cheeks. Soon enough, Smith called “Joan Baez and her friend” to the stage. Looking taken aback as he walked onto it, the club’s still gloriously tacky mural behind him, Dylan smiled shyly as Smith hugged and kissed him. With Stoner on bass, Dylan and Baez sang “One Too Many Mornings” before a moment of chaos ensued: the bridge on Stoner’s stand-up bass broke halfway through, but Baez pulled him closer to her and Dylan so he could sing a harmony. “Let’s get outta here,” Dylan said to Baez after, but it wasn’t to be: with Dylan now strumming along, Baez led the crowd in a birthday toast to Porco. “You can’t go wrong with entertainment like this!” Smith said. Finally, Dylan spoke: “We’re just really happy to be here and be able to wish Mike a happy birthday and many more.”

For the expanding crowd inside, the evening grew only more Fellini-esque, with a mélange of folk, spoken word, and cabaret moments that recalled an earlier, headier time in the Village—a grown-up version of the old Gaslight. Patti Smith improvised a poem. Ginsberg recited from William Blake. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, who’d become part of the Other End hang-out crew, materialized to play “Chestnut Mare” and “I’m So Restless,” the latter with its sly dig at Dylan’s semiretirement. Bette Midler, who’d also befriended Dylan, sashayed toward the stage and joined Buzzy Linhart on his song “Friends,” which had become an anthem for her. (When she whispered her name into Rosie Smith’s ear, the emcee mistakenly introduced her as “Betty Miller.”) Accompanied by Burnett, Neuwirth made a crack about the guitar he was using—asking if Eric Andersen had tuned it, a dig that referenced the old Kettle nights—and played a rowdy version of his “Mercedes Benz,” which Janis Joplin had popularized.

Watching it all from the stage was guitarist Arlen Roth, who’d been given a heads-up by Andersen to rush down to the club that night. “The survivors of the Seventies will be decided tonight,” Andersen told him. His Martin and Telecaster guitars at his side, Roth opted to remain on stage for anyone who needed his accompaniment—and found himself grappling with a parade of counterculture heroes old and new. “It was obvious that everyone was vying for Dylan’s attention,” he said. “The fact that anyone could come up there and start singing—the whole thing felt weird and decadent and strange. It was very much New York in the Seventies.”

With dawn rapidly approaching, Rosie Smith indicated that the night was wrapping up. But the woozy, boozy festivities would end on a sadly poignant note, a vision of the Village past. All night long, Phil Ochs had been a peripheral presence, sidling up next to Dylan and talking away; he too craved an audition to be part of the traveling tour Dylan had in mind. Ochs had just come off a summer of extreme bipolar behavior. Declaring that the Ochs everyone knew was gone, he had taken on the persona of an untidy, arrogant, and often physically threatening figure named John Train, often wearing a dirty leather jacket over untucked shirttails. Friends would steer clear of him on the street; Colby threw him out of the Other End. “There were times when you didn’t know if you were talking to Phil or John Train,” said writer Larry Sloman, who was chronicling the Dylan summer of 1975 for Rolling Stone. “It was kind of a hairy situation. He’d go into Folk City with an axe and knock the axe into the bar. Was he going to use it to kill someone in the Village? Of course not. It was a flamboyant display of who knows what.” At times like those, Porco, ever the supportive father figure, would talk Ochs or Train down.

Ochs’s former manager Arthur Gorson, who remained in touch with him, thought Ochs was trying to hark back to a time when he was relevant, when people talked about politics; John Train was his way of acting out those fears. At his apartment on Prince Street in SoHo, where Ochs stayed from time to time, Sloman would attempt to cheer Ochs up by inviting women over and, with their encouragement, asking him to try out the new songs he was writing about his alter ego. “He was so hesitant to sing,” Sloman said. “So I’d say, ‘Hey, Phil, what about that song where you check into the Chelsea Hotel?’ And he would start doing them.” Some were completed songs, others fragments, but a few that emerged, like “The Ballad of John Train,” proved that Ochs could still summon his melodic gifts and entrancing voice.

By the time Ochs walked onstage at Folk City at the end of the Porco birthday bash, John Train had been vanquished—along with such sketchy plans as buying a building in Tribeca that he would turn into an entertainment complex. (Ochs, or Train, had given Sloman a check for $1 million toward that project, which Sloman knew shouldn’t be cashed.) His face hidden under a white brimmed hat he’d snatched off Dylan’s head, Ochs looked bedraggled and a little puffy. He made it clear to Roth he didn’t need accompaniment, then had trouble tuning his guitar. Drama began even before he sang a note. Porco’s birthday cake, its cutting knife still jammed in it, sat on the floor in front of Ochs. Suddenly, a mysterious man, who’d been spotted at the bar and was now in the front rows, pulled the blade out of the cake and seemed to threaten Ochs.

Glancing down at the man, Ochs appeared nonplussed: “You better use it quick or else I’ll use it,” he said, with a chilling matter-of-factness. But others were less sanguine as the night took on an element of seventies New York danger. “Like everything else, things can turn on a dime,” Andersen said, “and things suddenly became a threatening situation.” To defend his friend, Andersen tackled the man, the two of them tripping over into the tray with the cake. The would-be assailant was dragged out of the club as Andersen wiped icing off his face.

As if matters couldn’t get any more fraught, Ochs finally started to perform. Over sixteen nonstop minutes, he wove his way through such folk songs as “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” Johnny Cash’s “There You Go” and “Guess Things Happen That Way,” the Everly Brothers’ “Maybe Tomorrow,” and Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron.” At times, he sounded rusty; other times, hints of the rousing voice many had heard a decade earlier poked through. Whatever his voice was doing at any moment, the performance added up to a moving journey through Ochs’s musical roots and life. It was as if he were trying to find himself again in song—to return to that younger, more eager kid who’d settled into that part of town a dozen years before. For some in the house, though, the set was difficult to watch. “Phil saw that night as his last chance at redemption,” said Stoner. “But he didn’t have it physically together. He was too far gone. Everyone was looking uncomfortably at each other.” When Dylan got up at one point, Ochs implored him to stay. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby,” he called out. “Where you going, Bobby?” Dylan replied that he was just heading for the bar. By then, the Dylan crew had stopped filming, preserving some of Ochs’s performance only in audio.

Once Folk City emptied out, the party moved to a loft apartment on Eighth Street and MacDougal, where Andersen saw Dylan and Patti Smith huddling in an upstairs bathroom, whispering conspiratorially. Downstairs, a visibly unhappy Ochs may have realized he had blown his chance to join what would become Dylan’s roaming crew of musicians, the Rolling Thunder Revue—and maybe he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen at all. “Phil was getting more antsy and quarrelsome,” Andersen said. “David Blue and I tried to calm him down. He then began threatening to go down to the street to summon the cops for a drug raid.” Given the amounts of pot and coke at the party, Andersen was nervous. When Ochs jumped up from a couch and made for the front door, Andersen followed him to calm him down. Ochs was adamant, insisting he would get everyone busted. After twenty minutes, though, he settled down, collapsed on the same couch, and closed his eyes. Andersen left soon after; it was the last time he would see Ochs.

Dylan himself wouldn’t be in town much longer. His nights at the Other End stopped as mercurially as they’d begun, and the Rolling Thunder Revue buses were already preparing to leave for the tour’s first stop, in Massachusetts, a few weeks later. But the memory of Porco’s boldface-name party would linger. “It was such a microcosm of all these hopes and dreams and careers, crammed into one tiny space,” Roth recalled. Dylan’s Village summer, culminating in the Porco party, had drawn more attention than just about anything in the neighborhood in years. Perhaps the darkness that had enveloped the Village for nearly a decade was preparing to lift.

Chapter 6

down in the flood

1968–1975