In the seafaring world where Dave Van Ronk had toiled nearly a quarter century before, it was customary to christen a new ship by smashing a bottle of champagne across its bow. By the dawn of the eighties, the Greenwich Village equivalent of that tradition meant having Van Ronk partake in the opening of a new music venue. He was in the house for the openings of the Cafe Bizarre and the Village Gate, and on the night of September 18, 1981, a rainy day that cleared up by evening, he was once again celebrating a newfangled outlet for him, his peers, and anyone hoping to pick up where he and his generation had left off.

In keeping with another long-standing neighborhood tradition, Speak Easy was a quirky, eccentric space that felt like anything but a music club. The front half of 107 MacDougal, around the corner from Folk City, was a mid-level Middle Eastern restaurant. Anyone peering into its front window would glimpse a slowly rotating pole with cooked strips of meat destined for souvlaki sandwiches, followed by a modest, charm-challenged dining room. A few steps down lay a small stage enclosed by wrought iron and, behind it, a wall-to-wall fish tank, exotic species flapping by. Van Ronk’s longtime friend and Village stalwart Erik Frandsen wondered if the whiskey bottles behind the bar were filled with cheap rotgut. “You could taste it—Van Ronk and I would joke that they bought the stuff from Dutch Schultz,” said Frandsen, referencing the notorious early twentieth-century gangster.

The Village had not been exempted from the recession—and accompanying rise in crime—that settled over New York City that year. When a group of West Springfield, Massachusetts, high school students requested a class trip into the area, their school board shot down the idea, citing the “raw lifestyles” and “depravation [sic]” in that part of town. After NYU intervened, the tour took place the following year, although the city ensured that Washington Square Park was a little less squalid than usual after supplementary police swarmed into it and chased away the drug dealers. Even offspring of the leader of the country didn’t appear to be immune: the same year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, a burglar broke into a West Tenth Street apartment directly above one occupied by his son, Ron Jr.

The new proprietors of Folk City saw eighties grime up close themselves: whenever a car slowed down in front of Folk City, Robbie Woliver would watch as homeless people descended on it and jabbed their hands in any open windows, begging for change. The baseball bat that Mike Porco had retained behind the bar likely went with him, but Woliver did have a foot-long metal bar at the door in case the doorperson needed protection from vagrants or drunk customers.

Eager to lend Folk City a partial musical makeover, Woliver and his two partners immediately began revamping the type of acts and styles of music booked there: as part of a series called “Two Nights of This,” one fall 1981 evening featured a set by early hip-hop artist Mr. Freeze. Reflecting the rise of synthesizer-dominated pop, one Saturday-afternoon showcase found the club doused in clattering electronic music. Meanwhile, a record store full of classic-rock mainstays had recently been dropped by their labels and been forced to return to the bars and clubs where they’d begun. With Folk City eager to hire national names, the timing couldn’t have been better, and before long, the names of Eric Andersen, Levon Helm, and the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn appeared on the club’s marquee. “I couldn’t book the same people over and over again, draining their mailing lists,” Woliver said. “You’re not getting new people in.” In his mind, pairing Odetta with a local artist like Frank Christian would benefit both: Odetta’s fan base would be introduced to new talent in the neighborhood, and Christian’s followers would, in Woliver’s mind, “make people see Odetta in a new, modern light.”

Not everyone in the community was elated by the strategy; seemingly overnight, the Folk City regulars of the previous few years were no longer being rewarded with headlining slots. Some viewed the change as Woliver’s means of taking back control of the booking of the club from Jack Hardy, who had become a dominant figure there. “The Jack-established clique ran all the nights and got to say who played and who didn’t,” said Vincent (Vinny) Vok, a singer-songwriter who had not only played Folk City but also worked as its soundman. “They were at odds with Robbie, who wanted to say, ‘I’m in charge—I say who’s playing, not you guys.’” Woliver himself admitted that his ambitions left some in the scene frustrated. “A number of them were people who were used to playing every night, when Mike had the club,” he said. “And since that wasn’t happening, there were some people we didn’t hire when we took over.”

As the locals became more and more frustrated, Paul Mills, the performance-art poet known as Poez and also Vok’s roommate, suggested they go in search of another venue and start approaching nearby restaurants, just as Izzy Young had done in 1960. Because Hardy was in Europe, Vok teamed up with Angela Page, who had run a well-regarded coffeehouse at SUNY Oneonta; there she had met and booked Hardy, who invited her down to New York to live with him. Page and Vok focused on 107 MacDougal, a four-floor row house built in 1858 that had been a dance hall in the early twentieth century before becoming the Cafe Rienzi, a leading Village hangout in the fifties. Eventually, it was a French restaurant. In 1980 Joseph Zbeda, a Middle Eastern businessman with a thinning pate, a birthmark over his left eye, and white sideburns bought the business for a reported $300,000, and the renamed Speak Easy, in honor of the illicit businesses from decades past, began serving up falafels, gyros, and similar fare. Its back room was converted into a low-rent disco, complete with that fish tank, a glitter ball, a floor that could be lit from beneath, an encased platform for a DJ, and mirrors on each side of that area. When disco cratered soon after, Zbeda recast Speak Easy as a reggae club.

The money behind his Village business didn’t stem from any previous restaurant experience. After moving to the States in 1975, Zbeda was approached by Meir Zarchi, a film director and friend from Israeli in search of financing for his movies. Zbeda became an investor and executive producer of one of them, a low-budget revenge flick called Day of the Woman. The plot itself was grim: a woman from New York, seeking solitude to write a novel, rents a cabin in the woods, where she is stalked and eventually brutalized and raped by four men. She ultimately exacts pitiless retribution on them by way of castration and hanging. When the gruesome movie was completed, it couldn’t find a distributor, but a producer who specialized in grindhouse, horror, and exploitation films soon bought the rights, gave it a grislier new title, I Spit on Your Grave, and released it.

When the film opened in his city in 1980, Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel condemned it as “the most offensive film in my 11 years on the movie beat.” His Chicago Sun-Times rival Roger Ebert agreed, and the film was pulled from its Chicago theater; other cities followed. But Siskel and Ebert’s warnings, combined with the rapidly growing home video market, only served to turn I Spit on Your Grave into a need-to-see videotape. In 1981 the movie was a top-ten rental in America, a windfall that likely helped Zbeda purchase the MacDougal Street business. After Speak Easy had been up and running for a period, Rod MacDonald saw him walk into the restaurant with a rare smile on his face; he told the musician he’d just made a half-million dollars licensing the movie to drive-ins. “You would not believe how much these things make,” he told MacDonald, who wondered if Zbeda had ever seen it. When Zbeda brought it up, he would only call it “beautiful movie—love story!”

Vok knew the place—he’d eaten gyros there—and he and Page investigated. The performance space held a respectable 120 people, which could be boosted to 130 if they grabbed chairs from the dining room. Walking into the restaurant one day, Page met Zbeda, who gave her the distinct impression he wasn’t happy with reggae or its patrons; in a later interview with Joe Lauro, he also said he’d considered converting the space into a comedy club. But when Page pitched Zbeda on a folk venue, he gave the plan his go-ahead.

That summer, a deal, much like the one made by Izzy Young, Mike Porco, and Tom Prendergast at the original Gerde’s Folk City, was struck. Zbeda—a restaurant owner in serious need of customers, much as Porco had been—would pocket the proceeds from food and drink; the musicians would take the money from the ticket sales. A Musicians Cooperative, modeled on food co-ops in the city, would book acts, work the sound system and lighting, handle ticket sales, and do whatever else was needed. “It was like Spanky and Our Gang,” said David Massengill, recalling the thirties show. “It was, ‘Let’s do this!’ It was actually possible to do those things.” The first flyers for Speak Easy called it “New York’s new club dedicated to quality acoustic music,” and in a symbolic switch, Page had the disco ball taken down.

Van Ronk was rarely if ever nostalgic about the old days and wasn’t afraid to voice it. “We had to twist his arm to go to MacDougal Street,” said Frandsen, who still lived right across from Speak Easy, still played sly slide guitar, and had written songs like “Nobody Grieves for George Reeves,” which was about the actor who played Superman on a TV series and shot himself in the head after the show ended. “Van Ronk just got sick to death of it: ‘I hate that fucking street!’”

But Van Ronk sensed the scene might be experiencing a second, or third, wind, and he became a member of the Coop’s executive board and offered to host its dollar-admission nights on Tuesdays. At the grand opening, he and Hardy shared cigars and toasted the music scene’s anticipated revival.

After its “gala opening celebration”—the same weekend that onetime Village talents Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel reunited for a free concert in Central Park—the Speak Easy officially began presenting live music on the weekend of September 25, 1981, with the duo Willie and Annie Nininger and Lucy Kaplansky. Whether out of forgetfulness or a degree of fear, Zbeda failed to inform the reggae musicians he’d originally booked that their services were no longer needed. They were less than happy when they showed up to work, but they left without incident. The second full weekend featured Frandsen, with the opening-act slot given to a newcomer on the verge of graduating from Barnard.

In her phrase, some on the scene saw Suzanne Vega as a “stuffy princess” from uptown; her thin physique hinted at her time as a high school dance student, and she could be as guarded as any native New Yorker. Yet she had a more varied background than anyone would have imagined. Born in Santa Monica, California, in July 1959, Vega would eventually be raised in East Harlem and the Upper West Side after her parents moved to New York when she was two. At age nine, she learned that her father, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, a Puerto Rican writer who went by Ed Vega, was actually her stepfather. As she later learned, her birth father had broken up with her mother, Pat, who was white, soon after Vega was born. Growing up in way-uptown areas with a biracial couple, she was exposed to childhood games that incorporated the types of rhythms that would emerge in hip-hop.

Ed Vega was also a guitarist, and his stepdaughter began playing the instrument herself at age eleven. A fan of the Roches, Ed Vega suggested that his stepdaughter sound like them—or, alternately, funk-rock pioneer Nona Hendryx, whose music he also loved. But Vega was heading in another, less trendy direction. At a thrift shop when she was around fourteen, she came upon a Folkways compilation featuring Odetta, Ed McCurdy, and Cisco Houston, and became enamored of it. Revealing an early analytical streak, she began dissecting songs by Dylan and Janis Ian, among others. “I would study something until I could master what they were doing,” she said, “and I would go on.” As a teenager in the mid-seventies, her friends at High School for the Performing Arts, where she was studying modern dance, were in thrall of David Bowie and Lou Reed. Vega herself was more partial to Dylan, Cohen, Laura Nyro, and Simon and Garfunkel. When a friend asked her to accompany him to a Patti Smith concert, Vega passed, thinking it would be too loud or abrasive.

Given the music that was affecting her the most, it would only be a matter of time before the Village came into Vega’s line of sight. The first time she ever sang in public was at the Tin Palace, the East Village jazz club. Her father was friendly with bass player Richard Davis, and one afternoon in 1976 they made their way to one of its afternoon showcases, where she sang two of the many songs she’d already written. She began playing a coffeehouse in a church basement on the Upper West Side and, with the confidence gleaned from it, made her way downtown to its mythical clubs. A male musician in her dance class filled her in on the Village club hierarchy—first the Other End, then Folk City, then the big-time Bottom Line. The fact that the Village was out of style failed to deter her. “I was aware of that,” she said. “I didn’t care. I was like, ‘No, no, you’re all wrong.’” Adhering to her friend’s instructions, she put on a pair of flared white pants and plastic Candies high heels and made her way to the Other End for their open-mic nights. The experience was vaguely humiliating: she played songs while a manager sat in front of her eating dinner. But in an early indication of how determined she would be, she kept going back to the club for two years even after being turned down every time.

After being awarded a scholarship to Barnard, Vega enrolled in 1977, focusing on English and theater. But like nearly everyone who had dreams of playing in the Village, she absorbed John Rockwell’s 1978 New York Times story on the folk revival and eventually made her way back downtown, discovering Folk City and meeting the likes of Hardy and MacDonald. A tape of her early songs made it to Folk City’s owners, and Marilyn Lash was so impressed that Vega was booked into one of the club’s Sunday-afternoon songwriter showcases. After asking everyone who saw her play at uptown coffeehouses to supply their names and addresses, she already had a mailing list, and thirty people—an impressive showing for an unknown—arrived for that first Sunday spot. She tried playing Kenny’s Castaways but was, she recalled, “too soft” for that crowd; even her hairstyle, which tended to drop to her shoulders and framed her face with bangs, suggested early Joni Mitchell.

Some of her uptown friends also filled her in on the Songwriters Exchange at the Cornelia Street Café. Initially terrified of debuting one of her compositions to a group that would dissect it, she put off signing up for months. When she did participate, she didn’t always listen to what everyone said, but Hardy, whom she called “brilliant and charismatic,” would take her to task for what he called lazy melodies, and she would scoff at his traditional approach. “I thought [rhythm] was as important as the Celtic melodies Jack was excited about,” she said. “The other, older [music] was cool. Some of it was archaic and some of it was beautiful. But why does it always have to be that? It was the Eighties! Why not be modern? It didn’t all have to be that William Butler Yeats thing.” (She also learned of Hardy’s backstory: “A lot of people thought it was a pose, but it never bothered me. That’s what life is for—to reinvent yourself.”) Ultimately she, like others, found the Songwriters Exchange experience exhilarating. “I don’t know of any other place like it anywhere,” she wrote in 1982. “It has the atmosphere of the local meeting place of an old tribe or village, a gathering place for those with a song in their veins that they must express.”

After her family moved into a smaller apartment on the far Upper West Side, Vega decided it was time to move out, eventually renting a room in a sprawling apartment that was part of Barnard housing. To Vega’s gradual realization, the woman living there was in the midst of a nervous breakdown after her husband had left her, and Vega would often find her drunk and lying in a fetal position on her bed. She wasn’t sure what to do, but another recent experience would also feed into the situation. In the fall of 1979 a friend asked if Vega wanted his extra ticket to see Lou Reed at nearby Columbia University. Although Vega knew him only for “Walk on the Wild Side,” Reed’s sole pop hit, she decided to go. The show, pegged to Reed’s album The Bells, shocked her: “Everyone was stoned and shouting, ‘You animal!’ and Lou was throwing lit cigarettes into the audience and kissing his lead guitarist on the mouth.” But one song, his version of “Caroline Says Part II” from Berlin, stayed with her, and she began investigating his music.

Building on the breakdown she’d witnessed and the stark quality of Reed’s music, Vega wrote a new song, “Cracking,” that was unlike any of the strictly folkier songs she’d composed before. Playing a descending series of four repeating, different bass notes, Vega altered the standard one, four, five, and minor six chords of folk by skipping the fifth altogether. That approach, observed composer and musician Doug Silver, was “unusual, leaving us feeling like something’s missing.” That impression, in turn, fed into the lyrics: the words, describing a shattered person’s numb walk through a park, were largely spoken until she reached “the sun is blinding.” As with most of her songs, she sang it—or, here, half-talked it—in a voice that was translucent, direct, and affectless.

When Vega played “Cracking” for her family, an aunt asked if she was OK; a boyfriend at the time raised an eyebrow but also added it was “very good.” Musicians in the Village didn’t know what to make of it. “I try not to be another sappy singer-songwriter,” she said in 1984. “Some people go so far as to say I’m very dry and that I sing with no feeling. I think I sing with a restrained style. Some people don’t perceive the emotions. I try more to project feelings of, say, anxiety or shock. ‘Cracking’ is a song about shock.” But clearly “Cracking” was neither rock nor folk but something in between, hinting at a future for its writer and for a community that was entering a new, starker decade and city.

Like virtually every other bar or venue in the Village, 131 West Third Street, directly across the street from Folk City, had had more than one life. In the sixties it had been a burlesque club; by 1980, the two-story building was David’s Harp, an Israeli-Mediterranean club and restaurant that, much like the first incarnation of Speak Easy, was floundering. Danny Bensusan, a former Israeli soldier who’d moved to New York in 1969 after completing his mandatory service in his country’s military, had already owned a midtown restaurant and a disco, Gatsby’s, in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood. But Bensusan yearned to return to the Village, where he’d first worked as a bartender at a small jazz bar after relocating to America. Walking into David’s Harp one day and finding few customers, he offered to buy it from its Turkish owners. On October 20, 1980, the restaurant, a stage tucked away in the back, was his for a reasonable $195,000.

While Bensusan was still deciding what type of business his new space would be, a local promoter approached him and offered to make it a gay bar. Eager for any steady income, Bensusan went along with the idea. “He says, ‘I guarantee you it will be packed and you’ll make money,’” Bensusan recalled. “I said, ‘Go ahead. I’m not transferring it to you, but you can promote it.’” The makeover didn’t last long. Certain menacing locals stopped by and made it clear they did not want any such establishment or clientele in that part of the Village. Gay clubs, they suggested to Bensusan, should be limited to Seventh or Eighth Avenue in the West Village, not in the heart of the district.

Wisely deciding to change course, Bensusan took another suggestion, this time from a friend who’d worked the door at a jazz club and suggested Bensusan host that music as well. Bensusan knew next to nothing about jazz, but the idea seemed viable enough. In a bit of good fortune, the name “The Blue Note” was available; at that time, the legendary jazz label was out of business and the name was up for grabs. A week and a half after Speak Easy’s opening-night event, the Blue Note added to the amplified activity in the Bleecker and MacDougal area. Its earliest bookings, which veered more toward mainstream jazz, included trumpeter Nat Adderley, whose Village days dated back to early jam sessions at the Cafe Bohemia, and saxophonist Lee Konitz, a cool-jazz standard-bearer.

With the opening of the Blue Note, another glistening era of jazz in the Village—what the Washington Post called “the closest thing to a renaissance of jazz in the United States since King Rock eclipsed all other music in the ’60s and ’70s”—was underway. The Blue Note welcomed veterans like Dizzy Gillespie, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and Zoot Sims. But it now had plenty of company. First opened in 1974, Sweet Basil, just south of the Vanguard on Seventh Avenue South, was taken over by new management in the summer of 1981. For booking, the owners recruited Horst Liepolt, a German-born jazz producer and promoter who’d enlivened the Australian jazz scene. After moving to New York, Liepolt brought on Don Cherry, Arthur Blythe, and Doc Cheatham and inaugurated a recurring series, “Music Is an Open Sky,” that presented avant-garde masters Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, and Lester Bowie. The Village Vanguard remained home base for bop and post-bop musicians, and Seventh Avenue South continued to roar, even after some of its principals had cleaned up. Piano bars, including Bradley’s, the Knickerbocker, and the Cookery, seemed to be on every other block.

But it wasn’t merely the number of places; the revival also encompassed what was heard inside them. Blythe and forward-looking pianist Mal Waldron, returning to the States after a period in Munich, were pulling customers into the Vanguard. Sweet Basil revived the Village’s jazz and poetry blend on Monday nights and also hosted a new-generation innovator. Arriving in New York from his home state of California in 1975, tenor saxophonist David Murray first embedded himself with the loft-jazz scene. Inspired by the likes of Sonny Rollins and Albert Ayler, he seemed headed for his own style of free jazz and became a member of the World Saxophone Quartet. But in the early eighties, he transformed into a new-jazz force. At Sweet Basil, he would sometimes lead a twelve-piece ensemble that was unafraid to swerve from a Sidney Bechet–inspired New Orleans stomp to more dissonant pieces. Murray could also employ cellists and violinists, resulting in music that sounded less like jazz and more like soundtracks for unnamed film noir. With crowds lining up along Seventh Avenue for his shows at that venue and elsewhere, Murray wasn’t just blending traditional approaches with avant-garde ones; he was reminding the scene, the press, and the world that jazz in the West Village could continue to innovate.

The reasons behind the renewed interest in jazz remained puzzling. The recession may have been a factor, since, as the Post also observed, “Jazz historically becomes popular when the economy turns sour. People like to cheer themselves up with jazz.” Still, making music in the Village wasn’t without its difficulties. Clubs could still avoid having a cabaret license if they avoided hiring percussions or woodwind and brass players. At Bradley’s one evening, that meant drummer Frank Gant had to resort to keeping time with brushes, and on a thick atlas, as the Post reported. Another night, a fight broke out in front of Folk City, and Bensusan intervened, winding up in the hospital with bruises. But at least people were showing up in the area; from the music to the younger crowds, the Village felt alive.

At Speak Easy on the third weekend of October 1981, old and new circles collided. In the performance area, David Massengill, his dulcimer before him, sang “The Great American Dream,” a panoramic ballad about an assortment of dreamers (a writer, a prostitute, a Native American, and an immigrant) trying to find their way in modern New York. Inspired by the time a Black foreigner approached Massengill outside the Other End and asked, “Excuse me, I am a foreigner—where is this place called Greenwich Village?,” the song was welcomed as one of the first standards to emerge from the new community.

Loudon Wainwright III was at the bar, and a noticeably pregnant Suzzy Roche, about a month away from the birth of her and Wainwright’s daughter Lucy, sat at one of the tables with Tom Intondi. Wainwright and Roche would soon see their smiling photos in Liz Smith’s gossip column in the Daily News, which announced they were now living together. Wainwright was in the midst of a creative rebirth as well; starting with Fame and Wealth, recorded in 1982, he would roll out a string of albums that finally found a middle ground between his solo performances and full-band studio production, with songs that dug even deeper into family history and his own foibles and complicated feelings toward family and relationships. Also in the Speak Easy midst that night was David Roche, the Roche sisters’ young brother, who was developing his own, decidedly more rock-based style, and also at venues like Kenny’s Castaways.

Intondi was now one-fourth of a group, the Song Project, whose repertoire consisted entirely of songs written by the next wave of Village troubadours. The first incarnation of the band included Hardy, Intondi, Carolyne Mas, and Nancy Lee Baxter, and the latest version (Intondi, Lucy Kaplansky, Martha P. Hogan, and Delaware-born singer and guitarist Gerry Devine) had many feeling that they could be their generation’s Peter, Paul and Mary. Here was a harmony group whose polished versions of songs by their colleagues could potentially tap into a larger audience in the same way the earlier trio had popularized Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot. The New York Times praised them (“Seldom has the expression ‘fresh blood’ been more vividly personified,” wrote Stephen Holden), and the Bottom Line’s Allan Pepper began advising them on how to capitalize on the buzz around them.

Among the tunes in the Song Project’s repertoire was Terre Roche’s “Runs in the Family,” a choice that testified to their stature on the scene. But starting with their interaction with Boz Scaggs fans, the sisters had run into headwinds even while they were still promoting their first album. When they’d played Los Angeles, Warner Brothers head Mo Ostin informed them backstage that they’d need to break into radio next time; the implicit message was that Robert Fripp would not be working with them again. Amenable to a more accessible sound for their second record, the sisters decided to use a rhythm section and recruited Roy Halee, the up-for-anything producer and engineer known for his work with Paul Simon and Simon and Garfunkel.

The Roches had never sounded more confident and more vocally liberated than they did on Nurds. Inspired by the Scaggs tour farce, its title track was a proud declaration of misfitdom, complete with a Suzzy vocal that sounded like a parody of Patti Smith and a grand finale with the sisters breaking into howls and barks. Maggie hinted at a degree of innate loneliness in “One Season,” which was equal to any on her songs on their first record, and they included a tightly harmonized cover of Cole Porter’s “It’s Bad for Me,” a song so self-aware of the dark side of love that it could have been written by them. Terre’s “Louis” examined the impact of fame and success, from their mother commenting that Terre was wearing too much makeup onstage (she told Terre she resembled an owl) to the backlash Forbert was experiencing with his own sophomore record. “When you went back into a club, people would treat you differently,” said Terre. “You realized not everyone was as thrilled as you were about your success. I remember the feeling of being betrayed by the support group: ‘They turned on me!’ You always had been part of that scene and now when you went back you weren’t anymore.” One way she sensed it was the moment she revisited one of their old haunts and encountered a guy at the bar singing a parody of “Hammond Song”—but substituting the name of John Hammond, the musician and son of the legendary music executive.

Their idea of marketable, for one thing, was not especially in sync with everyone else’s. Their backup musicians were not the studio pros favored by Simon but former Patti Smith Group drummer Jay Dee Daugherty and former MC5 and Television bassist Fred “Sonic” Smith. “I think Nurds has a better shot at airplay,” Terre told Rolling Stone when the album was released in September 1980, “but I still don’t hear anything on the radio that sounds like it.”

The comment proved prophetic. Less cohesive than The Roches, Nurds wasn’t greeted nearly as euphorically as its predecessor. The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who’d graded their first album an A, slapped a B onto Nurds, writing that they were “trying too hard.” The sisters also gave an awkward interview with late-night TV host Tom Snyder on his Tomorrow show. “Why would anyone write a song called ‘My Sick Mind’?” he asked them, referring to Terre’s song on Nurds. Unsure what to make of his questions, such as what it was like to open for rock bands, they gave terse, on-guard answers; Suzzy noticed Maggie looking down during most of it. Ultimately, Nurds sold about half the number of The Roches. “I don’t think we operate as a group by trying to further our status in the music business,” Suzzy told the Boston Globe’s Jim Sullivan. “That is not a priority of ours.”

As Suzzy Roche sat with Intondi in Speak Easy’s dining room that night in October, the topic of music venues from years past came up. “Ask Danny,” Intondi said, gesturing toward the front of the club. “He’s been around for a while.” Sure enough, there was Kalb, a stout figure with aviator glasses, his hair longish on the side if mostly gone on top. Looking like a scruffy Buddha, Kalb, approaching forty, was still looking to regain his footing. Earlier that year, the Blues Project had done another one of its occasional reunions, at the midtown club Bond’s, but Kalb was still adhering to his old haunting grounds, playing at Kenny’s Castaways and returning to guitar lessons, which he advertised with ads in the Village Voice. He also remained one of the most politically outspoken on the scene. “America is on the path to nuclear war,” he told a small group huddled with him one night at Folk City, Ronald Reagan now in the White House. “And I don’t think it can be stopped.”

Two decades since the Village’s musical heyday had commenced, the past sometimes felt as if it were growing more distant by the month. After Joe Marra had shut it down, the Night Owl had become a poster emporium; a record store, Bonaparte’s; and, in 1981, another record shop, Bleecker Bob’s. The Four Winds coffeehouse was now an Indian restaurant; the Gaslight served up Mexican cuisine. Another night at Speak Easy in the fall of 1981, a couple sat at a table as one of Phil Ochs’s finest ballads blanketed the room. “He lived here years ago,” the man told his date. “He hung himself. You know that song ‘Changes’?” The woman nodded and hummed a few bars. “No,” the man said, annoyed, “not David Bowie’s ‘Changes.’”

Beginning with Ochs’s death in 1976, the legends who had once prowled Village streets with their guitars were also starting to vanish. A few days after Christmas, 1980, an anonymous caller alerted the Los Angeles Police Department to a “dead body” in an apartment in Fairfax, saying that the deceased was Tim Hardin, only thirty-nine. Few were surprised. Even though he was attempting to clean himself up and preparing to record his first new material in years, Hardin had apparently relapsed; the coroner’s report listed the cause as a heroin and morphine overdose.

Since making Los Angeles his own new home, David Blue, who’d partaken in more than his share of Kettle of Fish revelries, had had his own struggles with the music industry and drugs. The same year Hardin died, Blue was back in New York and in and around the Village. With his new wife, Nesya, a Montreal native making her way into the filmmaking world, Blue sought to reboot his career. He was booked now and then into Folk City (where he would make as little as fifty dollars per show). Returning to his roots as an actor, he took the role of a washed-up rock star in a play, American Days, directed by Dylan’s Desire-era songwriting collaborator Jacques Levy.

Blue also became a semi-regular at Folk City and the Other End, where he frequently caught sets by a recent arrival, Shawn Colvin. Born in South Dakota and raised largely in Illinois, Colvin had played shows in Austin, Texas, and then Berkeley, California, before landing in New York in 1980. Not yet a songwriter, often more inclined toward country than folk, she made her way to the Bleecker and MacDougal area, where Van Ronk, in her words, “scared the shit” out of her. Colvin nonetheless carved out a niche for herself by singing covers of songs by male songwriters like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Sting, and Gram Parsons. Combined with a voice that was alternately earthy and ravishing and a look that recalled Linda Ronstadt, Colvin became part of the parade of women artists who were making the once male-dominated scene their own.

One night at Kenny’s Castaways, Colvin played Rod MacDonald’s “American Jerusalem,” a depiction of a depleted city that captured the mood in New York at that moment. When Blue heard it, he asked Colvin who’d written it; club owner Pat Kenny told him the composer lived around the corner on MacDougal, and Blue found himself at MacDonald’s door that night, where he complimented the surprised songwriter. Blue also hosted Village Voices, a low-budget documentary on which he introduced performances by Colvin, MacDonald, and Cliff Eberhardt, and conducted interviews at Speak Easy.

But Blue’s own return would be sadly short-lived. On the first day of December 1982, he put on his new blue jogging suit, left his and Nesya’s Prince Street apartment, and went for a jog in Washington Square Park. Tom Paxton had run into him there a few days before (jogging himself) and was pleasantly surprised to see his old friend attempting to get healthy after years of partying. But that day, Blue, forty-one, had a heart attack, collapsed, and died. Since he wasn’t carrying any identification, Nesya didn’t locate him at the city morgue until several days later. That week, Eric Andersen was booked into Folk City, waiting for Blue to show up; Blue had told his friend he could stay with him while he was in town. Onstage, Andersen glanced beyond the bar and saw, through the front window, Blue standing outside, stroking his chin. Once his set was finished, Andersen asked a bartender where Blue had gone and was told no one had seen him and Blue wasn’t there that night. Andersen later learned that Blue had died earlier that day.

Of the other area legends, Richie Havens, who’d become a national figure after his riveting festival-opening spot at Woodstock was immortalized in the film of that event, steadily recorded new albums and still lived in the West Village. Dylan remained his usual spectral presence. When Lucinda Williams was on the bill at Folk City one night, Porco introduced her to Dylan—who told her, enigmatically, “Keep in touch. We’re gonna be going on the road soon.” Needless to say, she didn’t hear from him again, at least for many years. When his friends Levon Helm and Rick Danko were playing the Lone Star Cafe, Dylan, in a cashmere coat and fur hat, wandered in during their sound check. In his first time playing with them since the Band’s farewell Last Waltz show, he joined them for both their warm-up and full sets, playing what Helm would call “a rather liquid” version of Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and a medley of “Willie and the Hand Jive” and “Ain’t No More Cane.” As Helm would write later, Dylan was then “out the door, into the night.”

In July 1982, Dylan again returned to the Village, this time in name and legend only. By then, Speak Easy was having trouble pulling in customers on traditionally slow days early in the week. Adhering to a tradition that extended back to the original Folk City, the club made way for open-mic nights on Mondays, and Angela Page, still involved in running them, began noticing that everyone who showed up was trying to emulate Dylan. “It pissed me off,” Page said. “I thought, ‘Sound like yourself.’ Mike Porco used to say, ‘There already is a Bob Dylan—we don’t need another.’”

That combination of desperation and irritation led to the club’s first Bob Dylan Imitators Contest. To everyone’s shock at the club, the idea worked. As soon as the event was announced, the club was besieged with calls from around the country and the globe, asking how to enter the contest and for directions to Speak Easy. After rumors circulated that Dylan himself might show, the line that night stretched down MacDougal Street. Inside, contestants—a blend of amateurs and more seasoned musicians from the club itself—competed in one of five categories: Folk-Protest Dylan, Amphetamine-Rock Dylan, Post-Motorcycle-Accident-Voice-Change Dylan, Born-Again Dylan, and Freestyle Dylan. Whatever the grouping, they would have to sing in Dylan’s voice and within a five-minute limit. The judges included Porco, Cynthia Gooding, and Village Voice writer Geoffrey Stokes. The judges patiently, sometimes impatiently, watched as dozens of fake Dylans traipsed onstage. The best—including Frank Christian, who won in the Folk-Protest category, and George Gerdes, who took the Freestyle award—were greeted with lusty cheers. The worst were booed or heckled. When asked if one contestant should be booted off the stage, Porco grumbled, “No, I think we should shoot him.”

The evening was both an acknowledgment and a tweaking of the Village’s past, especially the sixties loyalists who would still appear and compare the current crop to Dylan, Paxton, or any of their contemporaries. “The fans of those people would show up and look around and say, ‘Oh, you should have been here in 1962,’” MacDonald said. “We’d roll our eyes and say, ‘Well, we’re here now and that’s what matters to us and we’re trying to make something happen now.’” Jack Hardy had his own complicated feelings on the topic. The night of Porco’s all-folk-star birthday party in 1975, he had been the scheduled entertainment, and he came to resent the way Dylan’s film crew essentially hijacked the evening. Hardy was also convinced he and his peers were creating music equal to anything that had come before. To the Daily News’ David Hinckley, Hardy said, unapologetically, “When the smoke clears, I think artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen will be seen as having opened some doors, but not as definitive song-poets, because they didn’t understand the performance potentials—harmonies, textures, etc. That’s why people like the Byrds interpreted them. I think you’ll see things written in the next few years which will surpass anything from the Sixties.”

The Dylan-contest festivities would come with an added element of stress. In the days leading up to the contest, the club received a surprise call from Dylan’s office, announcing they wanted to film it. The thought was both amusing and a little terrifying, and on the evening of the talent show, a two-man crew showed up at Speak Easy. The Dylan staff then took the footage and edited it down to just under a half hour. From what the Speak Easy people heard, Dylan watched and loved what was now called Battle of the Bobs and subsequently agreed to donate a guitar to future winners.

Joe Lauro wondered if the club could benefit in some way from the arrangement; nearly two years into its existence, Speak Easy was in need of a few upgrades. Reaching out to the Dylan office, he asked if the venue could show a then rare copy of Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s penetrating documentary on Dylan’s 1965 European tour, and charge admission. The Dylan team agreed, with the stipulation that it not be advertised. Arriving at the Dylan office, Lauro was handed a paper bag containing the movie—which, once he set it up in the club, turned out to be footage from Dylan’s rarely seen 1966 tour film, Eat the Document.

With the $1,000 raised by the movie screening, Speak Easy was able to improve its sound system and buy new microphones. The annual contest would continue for several more years; at one, Van Ronk served as a judge, and one of the contestants offered him a dollar bill and a cigar to influence him. As far as anyone knew, Dylan never attended any of them.

When Andrea Vuocolo heard the doorbell ring at her and Van Ronk’s apartment, the same Sheridan Square place where he had been living for over a decade, she assumed it was her boyfriend. The two had just returned from one of Van Ronk’s concert road trips, and he’d ventured to a nearby grocery store in search of food. Opening the door, Vuocolo found someone holding a cactus plant in front of his face.

“Is Dave here?” said the voice.

It didn’t take long for Vuocolo to realize it was Dylan, and she asked if he’d like to come in and wait, even offering to make him coffee. “Is Dave coming back?” Dylan answered, a little nervously. Luckily, Van Ronk returned soon enough to find Dylan sitting on his couch, the plant still covering his visage. “Hey, Bob,” Van Ronk said casually. “Still the shy young boy.” Van Ronk was pleasantly surprised; the two hadn’t seen each other in years. Sensing Dylan was uncomfortable, Vuocolo left and went to an office to finish paste-up work for a medical book she was working on; when she returned, Dylan was gone.

Dylan wasn’t alone in continuing to pay his respects to Van Ronk, who, unlike so many of his peers, had stayed put in the Village. He still gave guitar lessons three times a week, which allowed him to work clubs on weekends. Showing up late for a lesson of his own, Massengill was told he’d just missed Joni Mitchell. Van Ronk remained incorrigible, still smoking and refusing to see doctors, and he was drinking heavily at times. In a jokey April Fool’s Day listing at Speak Easy, he was billed as “Dave Van Drunk,” alongside “Suzanne Vague.”

For a batch of Midwest shows, Van Ronk recruited Massengill. At the Bottom Line, the two had been introduced backstage by David Bromberg, who had told Massengill to bring his dulcimer. At Bromberg’s urging, Massengill played “On the Road to Fairfax County,” about a doomed liaison between a highwayman-robber and the woman he encounters. Van Ronk, who didn’t have a driver’s license, said he liked it, adding, “Kid, I think we’re gonna get along. Do you drive?” On their rides to their concerts, Van Ronk would buy a bottle of Irish whiskey and finish it off in one sitting. Although he was unaccustomed to that level of drinking, Massengill would do his best to help finish one of those bottles; having Van Ronk gulp it all down himself didn’t feel like a good idea.

But like the scene he had long been part of and now embodied, Van Ronk appeared to be on a better track than he’d been in years. Thanks to rent control, he’d been able to retain his apartment, which by then cost only about $350 per month. As the seventies wound down, he had met Vuocolo, a gentle New Jerseyan who’d grown up a Van Ronk fan after hearing him on the radio in high school; she was especially mesmerized by his version of “Both Sides Now (Clouds).” Throughout high school, Van Ronk was her favorite singer, and during her college years in Boston, she saw him play there several times. Just a few years earlier, she had ventured into the city to see him at the Other End and summoned up the courage to approach him at the bar between sets and chat. The two eventually became close, and she moved into his apartment in the fall of 1982.

As the decade progressed, Van Ronk gradually began cutting back on his drinking and smoking. He would tell Vuocolo that the sixties were “a ten-year party and everyone was always drunk or stoned.” Now, he told her, people needed to clean up their acts because their shenanigans were no longer charming. Van Ronk preferred to be at home with his books, records, or an old movie, and sitting in a particular spot on his couch (on the left side) so much that Vuocolo would have to replace the cushions. Near the apartment where he and Suzzy Roche were living, Loudon Wainwright III ran into Van Ronk in the aisles of a health-food store; both were shopping for brown rice and green tea. “People shouldn’t know we’re in here,” Van Ronk growled furtively. “It’ll be bad for our careers.”

Every so often, Van Ronk would rouse himself, hail a taxi (it was sometimes hard for him to walk, a result of the wear and tear on his body), and head down to Folk City or Speak Easy. There he was finally given the respect and reverence the music business still hadn’t bestowed upon him. Hardy, never the easiest to please, admired Van Ronk, as did many of the younger songwriters who would stop by his and Vuocolo’s apartment at seemingly all hours. Even during those nights when Van Ronk seemed more interested in staying at the Speak Easy bar than listening to one of the balladeers on its stage, he was impressed with the fortitude and talent of the community. He even told Massengill that his generation was being short-changed and not getting the attention their predecessors had received.

According to Van Ronk’s FBI file, the agency stopped tracking him in 1973, although the impact of that surveillance was still felt in his circle. When Vuocolo would reach out to some of his friends, a few were afraid to talk on the phone for fear of a wiretap. When someone did seem to still be eyeing the scene, the circumstances were almost comical. At Speak Easy, one newbie songwriter started performing a song about assassinating Reagan, which was presented as satire in the song’s spoken intro: “I’m a nice guy and I don’t want to see any harm come to anybody. But if I were not a nice guy and did want to see harm come to anyone, I would sing”—then he launched into a verse—“Kill, kill, kill Ronald Reagan!”

Everyone thought it was funny until, one afternoon, several Secret Service agents showed up, saying they had heard a folksinger there had written a song calling for the death of the president. The agents were informed about the disclaimer, laughed off the report, and left. Still, the incident was an unsettling reminder of the ways that the government had had the scene in its sights, and maybe still did.

Sitting at the bar at Folk City, Lucy Kaplansky could hardly believe what she was reading. That night, she’d opened for singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, who was back on the touring circuit after moving to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. She’d heard that John Rockwell was covering the show and, grabbing an early edition of the next day’s Times, read his write-up, which included a career-making mention of Kaplansky: “If we lived in a healthy time for the record business,” he wrote, “it would be easy to predict stardom for her.” In absolutely another time, such an endorsement would have led to calls from agents, producers, and executives, but Kaplansky heard nothing from anyone in the business. “I had this idea that something should happen, but no, nothing happened,” she said. “Zero.”

Starting at the end of the seventies, jazz musicians who emerged from the loft scene were being rewarded with major-label deals: Arthur Blythe, for one, started recording for Columbia. But the Folk City and Speak Easy regulars were still left out in the business cold, especially now that the wave that had swept up the Kenny’s Castaways crowd had crested. Forbert’s third album, Little Stevie Orbit, didn’t include a hit on the level of “Romeo’s Tune,” and the same outlets that had praised his first two records now found his third one “uneven,” in the word of the Times’ Palmer. Nile’s second album, Golden Down, featured a title song that many interpreted as being about a prostitute, a theory Nile downplayed. No one doubted the song’s visceral, punky power, but the album sold only modestly, and Nile wound up filing for bankruptcy and parting ways with his label. “I walked away,” he said. “It became more about business than music. It should have been a happy time. But it was a really dark time for me.” With his wife and two children, he moved to Buffalo.

In its den-like performance space, those fish tanks hidden behind a curtain, Speak Easy provided regular work for the Cornelia Street Café crowd as well as a spectrum of preceding-era Village talent. The pay wasn’t always enough to survive. Unlike the days when Village musicians could live off club work, other means of income were required; Massengill continued toiling as a dishwasher at an uptown restaurant. The cooperative also managed to book Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, Washington Square Park bluegrass legend Roger Sprung, and even the Monkees’ Peter Tork, who had played Village basket houses early in his career and was once photographed, complete with goatee, watching the Lovin’ Spoonful at the Night Owl. At Speak Easy, it had to be explained to Tork that he wouldn’t be making a substantial fee playing there.

But since no one seemed to want to record the new generation, the Musicians Cooperative at Speak Easy decided to take their careers into their own hands. “Jack always used to say we can’t wait around for other people to let us make our music,” MacDonald said. “We have to do it ourselves.” Hardy’s idea was to release a monthly, independent compilation of songs by his peers, to be sold at Speak Easy and by mail-order subscription. Having by then released several albums on his own Great Divide label, he was conversant in what it took to tape and manufacture records. For an additional seal of approval, he ran the idea by Van Ronk, who wholeheartedly supported it. “He’d come over and I’d say something like, ‘What if we did that?’” said Page. “He would say, ‘Just do it!’” Hardy wanted to call it Fast Folk; Van Ronk suggested the word “coop,” much like the Harvard Coop.

All they needed was an inexpensive way to record the songs. Mark Dann, a bass player and all-around accompanist, had been initiated into the scene a few years earlier, backing musicians like MacDonald and Lucinda Williams. At Speak Easy one night in the final month of 1981, Hardy approached Dann, and, looking at his own fingernails, said, “Is it true that you have a four-track tape recorder?”

The story was correct. Dann still lived in his parents’ four-story Victorian house on a maple tree–lined street in Flatbush, Brooklyn, just south of Prospect Park. In the attic, Dann had set up a recording studio with a TEAC machine. Beginning in the first month of 1982, the songwriters and musicians began taking the subway out to Brooklyn to put their music on tape there. The studio, such as it was, wasn’t soundproofed, but the arrangement worked since everyone was playing relatively quiet music. But the operation still came with certain rules. After entering the house, the musicians would have to quietly climb the stairs to the top floor so as not to disturb Dann’s parents. To conserve tape, no one was allowed a second take. Once a month, anybody and everyone would converge upon the Cooper Square apartment of musician-photographer Brian Rose, where the booklets would be edited, pasted up on boards, and taken to a copy shop for printing.

Propped up for sale at Speak Easy in January 1982, The CooP: The Fast Folk Musical Magazine was priced at $2 and resembled an illicit bootleg. Its plain white cover featured a grim photo of keeper of the political flame Ed McCurdy, who was heard on two tracks, and the inside booklet had the feel of a do-it-themselves fanzine. But the record amounted to a defiant proclamation that something was happening below Fourteenth Street. The first CooP included Frank Christian’s “Where Were You Last Night?,” an elegant blues that conjured an empty, smoky bar and showcased his effortless guitar, and Massengill’s “On the Road to Fairfax County.” Vega’s “Cracking” made its official recorded debut, as did Van Ronk’s “The Jersey State Stomp” (later retitled “Garden State Stomp”), a ragtime-inspired roll call of New Jersey town names. To further inspire him after he had the idea, Vuocolo had found a library book listing the state’s towns and municipalities. The second volume, subtitled The New Interpreters, introduced Vega’s more folk-minded “Calypso,” rendered by Kaplansky, now one of the scene’s most luminous singers; Rose’s “Old Factory Town,” a Celtic-flavored tale of working-class despair sung by Gerry Devine; and MacDonald’s “Honorable Man,” a tense Kennedy-assassination commentary that harked back to an earlier Village era.

Independent rock labels were sprouting up around the country, reenergizing the music and resulting in the first recordings by Black Flag, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, and many others. Even in that climate, what came to be known as the Fast Folk series (after the title was shortened) was frantically ambitious: a new compilation every month, each with a magazine tucked inside. The quality could suffer from that timetable, but scattered through the many albums that followed, which eventually came to include more than 150 songs, were more than enough keepers. MacDonald’s “American Jerusalem” was there, along with Massengill’s “My Name Joe,” inspired by a real-life cook (and immigrant) Massengill knew at the restaurant where he worked. Christine Lavin’s acerbic “Regretting What I Said” rattled off a detailed list of horrific things she surely wouldn’t want to have happen to an ex, and Shawn Colvin’s first issued recording, “No Friends to Me,” felt like a sweetly sung but still stinging update of Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street,” this one aimed at a pal’s backstabbing buddies.

The first volume of 1984 included another of Vega’s songs, this time a striking a cappella song that derived from several different inspirations. As an Upper West Sider, she frequented Tom’s Restaurant, an old-school Greek coffee shop at Broadway and 112th Street. Leaving Tom’s one day, Vega was walking down the street and thinking about her friend Brian Rose and what she called “his romantic, alienated vision as a photographer and how he always felt that he had a pane of glass between himself and life.” Vega decided to write a dramatic monologue from his vantage point, set to a sing-songy melody she’d thought up that refused to leave her brain. She’d also been watching French new-wave films, intrigued by their lengthy scenes of people staring out windows. That same season, the fall of 1981, veteran actor William Holden, apparently drunk, had slipped on a rug in his Los Angeles home, hit his head on a coffee table, and bled to death. That bit of Hollywood lore also made it into the song, as did a reference to someone with whom Vega was having a clandestine relationship, inviting her to midnight picnics at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side.

Early in its gestation, Vega considered setting the song, “Tom’s Diner,” to a solitary piano. But by the time she began performing it in the Village, it became a spell-binding a cappella opener for her sets: in a noisy bar, it was the ideal way to silence the room. “It made people stop talking and drinking,” she said. “When I started the show, everyone would stop and listen to me. And it worked every single time.” Hearing her perform it at Speak Easy one night, Newsday music critic Wayne Robins dubbed it “the first folk-rap fusion song rather than just a talking blues.” Once more, the Village was giving birth to sounds few had heard before.

Even though she’d grown up on Dylan records, the last place Nancy Jeffries wanted to be that night in 1983 was Folk City. One of the earliest executives to make her mark in the male-dominated music business, Jeffries had started her career as the singer with the avant-garde band Insect Trust, along with future Times critic Robert Palmer. She then made the jump to talent scout, landing ultimately at A&M Records. As her tenure in Insect Trust demonstrated, her tastes weren’t limited to acoustic music, but she had to comply when her boss, label head Gil Friesen, essentially ordered her to check out an unsigned folk act. “I was really annoyed,” she said. “First of all… folk music, eh. I had very low expectations. I thought, ‘This is a drag and a waste of my evening.’”

At that point, the actual definition of what constituted folk music had changed. One of the most undeniably riveting records of the year before was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” a modern-day protest song that came from the hip-hop scene gestating in the Bronx. As the Fast Folk records made clear, that community didn’t hesitate to make social commentary, but it had a hard time competing for radio play or MTV time with “The Message,” Nena’s nuclear nightmare “99 Luftballons,” or Prince’s pestering funk “Ronnie, Talk to Russia.” Modern folk protest songs were just as likely to be jokey and funny, like Tom Paxton’s “Yuppies in the Sky,” set to the same melody as the western classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”

As much as anyone on the scene, Vega knew nothing was a given. Some in the same community—including Christian, Vega’s boyfriend during this time—remained hopeful that a music executive would happen upon them and scoop them up, but Vega sensed that those days were over. “Frank and I used to joke, ‘When are the fruit baskets going to start arriving?’” she said. “But I did the work. I was always writing a new song or new bio or making a new demo tape.” Carefully taking in what did and didn’t make an impression onstage, Vega took note when a folk veteran playing Folk City was so drunk he sang the same song twice in a row, and she determined never to shout at or scold an audience that was talking during a set. When Vega opened for the legendary Rosalie Sorrels at the New York Folk Festival at Folk City in August 1981, she approached Times critic Stephen Holden. Aided by a glass of wine, she demanded to know if he was going to review the opening act—her. When she bombed and didn’t receive any write-up, she resolved to never drink again before she went onstage.

By chance, Ron Fierstein, the brother of actor and playwright Harvey, had decided to leave the law firm where he was working on copyright and trademark cases and start a production company with his college friend and onetime band member, guitarist Steve Addabbo. Addabbo would handle the musical and production end; Fierstein would make the deals. One of Fierstein’s law-firm friends told him about a songwriter he’d heard at Columbia, and after meeting Vega for lunch—where she came prepared with flyers for her next show—Fierstein felt there wouldn’t be any harm in seeing her perform.

What he—and, soon after, Jeffries—saw was someone who was leaving behind the long-haired urban-waif image of her earliest shows. Vega’s hair was now cut short, just below her ears, and she dressed in suits. The latter stemmed from her self-consciousness: she had felt uncomfortable exposing any part of herself onstage, cringing at the thought of someone admiring her legs if she wore a dress. Realizing that heroes like Reed, Cohen, and Dylan, along with Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, often wore jackets, she borrowed a tuxedo jacket with big lapels and wide shoulders from a male musician friend. She didn’t quite resemble David Byrne in Talking Heads’ concert doc Stop Making Sense, but the clothing lent her an air of new-wave cool, along with a hint of androgyny, that differentiated her from her peers on the scene.

As Addabbo noted, Vega’s guitar technique was also unusual. Reflecting the minimalist aura of the songs, she was playing clusters and patterns—spikey plucked chords more like Morse Code—rather than strummed patterns intended to encourage sing-alongs. Accompanying Vega one night at Folk City, Addabbo brought along a drum machine for one song. “It was a little bit sacrilegious,” he said. “We were on the edge of going too far with Suzanne.”

“Tom’s Diner” was just one of several songs in Vega’s set that told their stories by way of characters instead of her own persona. “I was not happy with this idea that women wrote confessional songs about their feelings,” she said. “I felt tired of that whole thing. Laura Nyro’s Eli and the 13th Confession was an unbelievable album. But there was no way I was going to do that. So I invented this coded way of writing that I felt very comfortable with.” Although not as bleak as “Cracking,” the autobiographical “Straight Lines” painted a portrait of a woman chopping off her hair and “trying to make sense of my life,” she said. Set to one of her zestiest melodies, “Marlene on the Wall” derived from a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich that Vega hung on her apartment wall as well as a brief romance with George Gerdes, who had already broken up with Terre Roche. (The lyric referenced the time he and Vega had seen the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo as well as his hand motions, which approached mime gestures.) “Neighborhood Girls” was a half-spoken, dryly observed nighttime crawl that particularly reflected Reed’s influence on her work.

Even when her songs wandered into traditional vernacular territory, they walked their own path. In Rose’s apartment one day, she played “The Queen and the Soldier,” which spun out of dating a man who’d cheated on her. In two hours, she’d written a story-song about a female monarch who, nearly lured into a relationship with a man, instead decides to kill him. “It’s about a type of person who will cling to power and not do anything that threatens that power and makes her vulnerable,” she said. “They’ll just get rid of them. I still think it probably says something about me somewhere in there.”

Coincidentally, Fierstein took a meeting with Cat Stevens’s manager, who wanted to discuss a possible movie version of his brother Harvey’s Torch Song Trilogy. Sensing an opportunity, Fierstein, a Stevens fans who envisioned Stevens’s label A&M as a perfect home for Vega, gave the manager a copy of Vega’s tape and asked if he could pass it along to Gil Friesen. After hearing it, Friesen, an old-school record type who’d signed everyone from the Carpenters to the Police, Joe Jackson and Joan Armatrading, instructed Jeffries to see her first Vega show.

Jeffries had neither heard of Vega nor listened to her material, but she was immediately taken by what she saw and heard. In Jeffries’s mind, here was someone who was part of a so-called folk scene but had the potential to make an impact beyond it, and Jeffries took note of the small but devoted crowd that listened intently to every lyric or bit of stage patter. Despite the venue and folk-club trappings, Vega was, she said, “flying in the face of everything,” which also appealed to Jeffries—but not to many of her bosses. “People were hedging their bets,” Jeffries said. “They loved her. But they were thinking, ‘How much money can we put into a folk singer?’” A&M wanted her to keep playing other venues and work on her publicity and fan base. Other labels, including Geffen, passed.

But on a night in March 1984, Vega’s prospects flipped on a dime. During the sound check, she played Fierstein a newly written song, “Luka.” Sung from the point of a view of a child who hints at being hit and keeping it to himself, the song, Fierstein correctly guessed, was about child abuse. To Vega’s shock, he also immediately thought it could be a hit single. As she rolled her eyes, he told her how his generation had ended the war in Vietnam with their music, so it was important to write an issue song.

What she didn’t tell him—or anyone, for decades, starting with interviewer Kevin Burke—was that the narrator of the song, the young Luka, was in fact her. During her childhood, she and some of her siblings had had to deal with what she would come to call “these violent things” involving her stepfather. After telling her she couldn’t tell anyone about it, Ed Vega changed his mind one day. “He said, ‘You can write about it if you fictionalize it, and if people ask you about it, you can say part of it is real,’” she recalled (to this author). In a way, Vega was now following his instructions.

The Times’ Holden saw the show and, two days later, wrote the review Vega had likely been dreaming about since she had buttonholed him three years before. “The most obvious influence on Miss Vega’s writing is the work of the young Joni Mitchell,” he wrote, “which combined a similar eye for detail along with an analytical self-absorption.” That same day, Fierstein received a call from none other than David Geffen, asking why the supposedly new Mitchell wasn’t signing with him—after all, he had managed Mitchell and guided her career early on—and insisting on a meeting with Fierstein and Addabbo. At an uptown gathering with Geffen label executives, the two men, who weren’t accustomed to the big-money ways of the music business, were given the hard sell. The label, they were told, was going to sign her, even though, as far as Fierstein and Addabbo could tell, none of them had heard Vega’s music. To demonstrate his connections and ongoing clout, Geffen also played them an advance copy of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.”

Flattered and stunned, Fierstein and Addabbo left and pondered the offer. Not long after, a Geffen A&R executive took a limousine from New York City to Northampton, Massachusetts, to see a Vega show. At a meeting afterward, he told her, in her memory, “We’d like you to have one or two hits, for the kids, and then any artistic statements you want to make, you can do that on the rest of the album.” Although they weren’t inclined to go with Geffen, Vega’s team was able to use that company’s offer to leverage more money from A&M. The Village now had its first major-label recording artist in half a decade.

The news of Vega’s signing ricocheted through the Village scene. As Van Ronk would tell younger musicians such as Lavin, “Never root against your competition if what they’re doing is good music, because their success means more work for you.” Yet Folk City co-owner Woliver—in the midst of writing Bringing It All Back Home, an extensive oral history of the scene and his club—couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the reactions when Dylan had signed with Columbia twenty-three years before. Some musicians were openly jealous, asking Vega to her face why she was the one. Colvin admits she was “horribly jealous” even if she didn’t yet know Vega. Partly as a result of her signing the contract, Vega and Jack Hardy had a falling-out, although they eventually reconciled.

The making of Vega’s debut album, cut in the early months of 1985 at several New York studios, brought together disparate aspects and eras of the Village scene. The debate between acoustic and electric, purism and commercialism, played itself out in myriad ways. No one wanted to detract attention from Vega’s voice, guitar, and material, but neither did anyone want an overly musty troubadour record. To add a degree of what she considered a downtown New York edge to the tracks—something the West Village had been long rejecting—Jeffries hired her friend Lenny Kaye to coproduce the record with Addabbo. The timing was right; after the breakup of the Patti Smith Group a few years before, Kaye had started venturing into record production. Playing the benevolent guru, he could make his presence known in subtle ways: whenever he felt the arrangements were becoming too fussy, he’d reach into his back pocket, pull out a fine-tooth comb, and place it on the console. Frank Christian played on the album, but only on two songs.

Taking a break one evening, Vega dropped by Van Ronk’s apartment for a party. Early on, she’d felt that Van Ronk was kind; carefully listening to her songs, he too compared her to Joni Mitchell. Vega, meanwhile, was impressed that he knew Dylan and referred to him as “Bobby.” But that evening, she encountered a different Van Ronk, who seemingly had had a bit too much to drink. “He was saying I didn’t give a fuck about folk music,” she said. “I do, actually, but it didn’t seem like the right moment to fight with him, in his own house. He just got belligerent.” In his posthumously published memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Van Ronk would write that while he had heard that Vega had referred to herself as a folksinger, “I doubt Suzanne has ever sung [a folk song] in her life.” Vega soon departed. “I didn’t have to stay and take it, so I left,” she said. “I never held it against him. He thought I had this big-time record deal and possibly he felt he was being left behind.”

That night aside, Van Ronk, inspired by the renewed energy in the clubs around him, grew more creatively energized himself. Thanks to an offer to appear on a British TV show, he overcame his fear of flying (taking some tranquilizers on the plane first) and began performing in Europe and Japan. Van Ronk also decided to do something he’d never done before, an album devoted entirely to his own material. According to Van Ronk’s manager, Mitch Greenhill, the idea was to showcase Van Ronk as a songwriter and encourage others to cover his songs so he could earn a decent living. Stretching back over his life and career, it included remakes of songs from past records, including “Gaslight Rag” and “Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again,” as well as newly recorded versions of “Garden State Stomp” and the sad but affectionate adieu “Another Time and Place.”

Going Back to Brooklyn had originally been made for Philo, home of his previous two records. But when the label ran out of money, the album was suddenly homeless. Depending on the source, another prominent roots label either passed or expressed no interest in a collection of Van Ronk’s own songs. In the end, the album would be issued on Reckless, an indie founded by singer-songwriter Bill Morrissey and Van Ronk’s former student Elijah Wald, now a musician and writer. Van Ronk’s voice was wheezier than ever, but his spirit and guitar were able and willing. Among the new songs recorded as additional tracks for the album was “The Whores of San Pedro,” a novelty that dated back to his merchant marine days and, in a sense, took him full circle.

“Ye gods!” joked Van Ronk to Boston Globe writer Jeff McLaughlin during an interview in his Sheridan Square apartment. “We’re having another folk music scare! Serves us right.”

For a heady moment, the dream of a Village music scene did seem to be a reality once more. The Bottom Line, still the preeminent neighborhood showcase for anything that wasn’t connected to hip-hop or dance music, hosted an evening devoted to the Fast Folk (formerly CooP) crowd, including Lavin (who organized it), Hardy, Kaplansky, Christian, MacDonald, and Massengill. To the wonderment of co-owner Allan Pepper, both shows that evening sold out. “I was a little surprised, because they weren’t being played on the radio,” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘Where does this audience come from?’” After several trying years, the Blue Note started turning a profit in 1984: bass player Ray Brown, who had played with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and others, had stopped in and urged owner Danny Bensusan to hire the reunited Modern Jazz Quartet. That successful run led to the booking of other legends like Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan.

Intent on modernizing the image and feel of Folk City, Woliver had reached out to NY Rocker, the city’s most underground-leaning music publication, to gauge whether its staff could recruit upstart bands to play the club. With the advent of “Music for Dozens,” a weekly indie showcase organized by the magazine’s Michael Hill and Ira Kaplan, it was suddenly possible to walk into Folk City and see early New York performances by the Minutemen, the Replacements, the Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth. “The venue just seemed so completely not right for that,” Hill said. “It was a ramshackle folk club that wasn’t the kind of place where one would expect to hear Sonic Youth. But for one night a week, it was our room to do that.” When Minneapolis’s roaring Hüsker Dü was booked, soundman Vincent Vok found himself pushing all the tables to the side to make room for Folk City’s first-ever mosh pit.

Even more surprisingly, music emanating from the Village began making inroads on the pop charts. Vega’s self-titled first album, released in the spring of 1985, was the most arresting singer-songwriter debut since the heyday of the genre the previous decade. Although she decided to omit “Tom’s Diner,” feeling it didn’t sit with the other songs, her strongest, earliest songs remained, and in fairly unvarnished form. Vega’s roots in the folk clubs were evident; Christian’s graceful playing adding a delicate underscore to “Knight Moves.” But starting with “Cracking,” an unconventional opener if there ever was one, Suzanne Vega was very much of its time. The lyrical edge in songs like “Undertow” and “The Queen and the Soldier” felt more like the New York of the eighties than the previous eras. Addabbo and Kaye added just enough in the way of additional instrumentation, drums, and even strings to blow away any folk-club mustiness; the concluding “Neighborhood Girls” had a hint of rock sleaze. The album respected traditions but cleared the way for a new type of future.

Jeffries’s support for a woman artist—one of the reasons Vega felt comfortable putting her signature on a contract with the company—also salvaged another aspect of the project. At a photo shoot for the cover, Vega was remade with puffed eighties hair and enough makeup to make her resemble, as she would put it, “the girl who did the weather.” The men working with her all approved, but Jeffries took one look at the photographs and rejected them; Vega didn’t look like herself. In the end, they opted for a more washed-out black-and-white portrait, taken on a cobblestone street, that made Vega actually resemble someone with a Greenwich Village connection.

Released as a single that summer, which was dominated by A-ha’s “Take on Me” and other synth pop hits, “Marlene on the Wall” didn’t stand much of a chance. But Suzanne Vega tapped into something—a yearning for contemporary and more intimate music rooted in a vintage style. When the Roche sisters returned home for a visit, John Roche was reading the newspaper and asked his daughter Terre, “Have you heard of this girl Suzanne Vega? They’re giving her a lot more space in the New York Times than you.” Even without a hit single, Suzanne Vega ultimately sold more than a quarter-million copies in its first two years in the stores.

The community also soon had its first nationally high-profile rock band since the days of the Lovin’ Spoonful. Although they hailed from New Jersey, the Smithereens established a following at Kenny’s Castaways and the Other End Cafe. Playing several sets a night for minimal pay, they woodshedded and kept alive the Merseybeat tradition of pop songs hammered out with thunderous guitars. In Pat DiNizio, the band had a songwriter who effortlessly conjured sixties-AM-radio songcraft as the band blasted away behind him. When “Blood and Roses,” which had a dank, unrelenting propulsion to it, was included on the soundtrack of a teen vigilante movie, Dangerously Close, both the song and the group’s first full album, Especially for You, blew up. The Smithereens’ music wasn’t as across-the-musical-map eclectic as the Spoonful’s or the Blues Project’s, but like them, they electrified the scene. They even had an unusual connection to the past: on the Blues Project’s Reunion in Central Park, a lone voice was heard exclaiming, “Yeah!” before “I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes.” That shout belonged to Dennis Diken, the Smithereens’ drummer.

Continuing a tradition that extended back in a way to Tiny Tim, the Village of the eighties also had its own historically minded novelty act. Comprising refugees from the East Village punk and new-wave scene, the Washington Squares donned berets and striped shirts (and goatees for the men), as if they were dressing as beatniks for the annual Greenwich Village Halloween parade. The Squares—bassist Tom Goodkind and guitarists Lauren Agnelli and Bruce Jay Paskow—resurrected the folk and folk-rock classics of the past, like “If I Had a Hammer,” “Samson and Delilah,” and “I’ll Never Find Another You.” They also wrote a handful of striking originals, like Agnelli’s “Charcoal” and Paskow’s “New Generation”; the latter aimed to be the motivational call to arms that the Village hadn’t produced in decades.

Thanks to Goodkind, who knew how to hustle and attract media attention, the Squares were overnight press darlings; the trio were on MTV before they’d even made a record. Unsure if the Squares were a sincere tribute act or put-on artists, the Folk City and Speak Easy crowd welcomed them warily. But if that was what it took to lure more people back down to the Village, few could complain.

In one part of the West Village in 1980, the average monthly rent was $358, about $100 more than the typical cost of a Manhattan apartment. By the mid-eighties, that trend refused to let up. Increasingly, the Village felt less home to bohemians—or anyone aspiring to that—and more to those with eighties-fueled disposable income. Recovering from the recession, the financial sector added more than 100,000 new jobs by the middle of the decade, and the economic rebound also meant the neighborhood was becoming more exclusive and in demand. Construction projects began running wild as monthly rental rates for Village two-bedroom apartments started to creep toward $2,000, at least ten times what they had once been. Anyone interested in owning a condominium or coop there would have to lay out as much as $190,000 for a studio or $300,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. In June 1986 a townhouse on West Eleventh Street sold for $1.7 million, reportedly the highest price ever paid for a Village residence. Adding to the neighborhood’s newfangled allure, a crackdown on drug dealers in Washington Square Park in 1985 helped drive some of the mangier elements out of the fountain area.

In tandem with the cash roiling the area, Folk City once again found itself in the crosshairs. During the “Music for Dozens” rock series, Michael Hill sensed that Woliver was fretting over the teeth-rattling volume, especially when the Replacements nearly decimated the sound system. It wasn’t long before some of the residents of the apartments housed directly above the club began taking notice. Folk City’s new owners installed makeshift soundproofing on its ceiling and added comedy and theater shows to reduce the amount of music (and noise) coming from inside; some bands, like the Smithereens, purposefully played at decreased volume. Actor James Cromwell, who lived directly above the club for a year, grew accustomed to the muffled beats that would make their way into his apartment. But Virginia Admiral—the painter, archetypal Village bohemian, and mother of Robert DeNiro who owned but didn’t live in one of those loft-style apartments—wasn’t as taken with the rock and roll emanating from Folk City. The Blue Note’s Bensusan would recall that Admiral (or whomever was renting her place) “complained about it all the time.”

Repeating another scenario from decades past, the Smithereens and Vega graduated to larger venues and national tours. But this time, record executives didn’t seem all that interested in signing anyone else from the community. MacDonald was able to record his first album only when Speak Easy’s Joseph Zbeda heard he didn’t have a contract and handed him an envelope stuffed with several thousand dollars to pay for the recording costs. Despite a repertoire that showcased much of the most compelling material by the Folk City and Speak Easy pack, the Song Project still had trouble gaining traction, and personnel changes in the band doomed it to a breakup. Taking a temporary break from music, Lucy Kaplansky, the Song Project member once singled out as the rising star of the new-folk scene, returned to college in 1983 to become a psychotherapist; Devine devoted his time to the Floor Models, who kept alive the power-pop tradition in the Village.

In the eyes of the industry, it didn’t help that Warner Brothers hadn’t been able to make the Roches palatable to the masses. With Robert Fripp they’d made another, largely acoustic album, 1982’s Keep on Doing, which included their rendition of Handel’s “The Hallelujah Chorus,” along with material by Massengill (“On the Road to Fairfax County”) and Gerdes (“Steady with the Maestro”). With Fripp doubling up their voices even more this time around, Maggie’s “Losing True” was transformed into a wall of vocal sound, complete with another sinewy solo by Fripp.

For the sisters’ fourth album, the time had come to try to sell records, and after working with multiple producers, they wound up with 1985’s Another World, which blended their harmonies with glistening synthesizers and often jarring drums. The makeover had its moments: the wistful “Love to See You” had a gorgeous ache, “Weeded Out” hinted at their concerns about their place in the music world, and Mark Johnson’s “Love Radiates Around” showed how rapturous a sonically upgraded Roches could be. But it was also the first Roches album without a single song written solely by Maggie, who seemed increasingly withdrawn. After the album again failed to make the Roches pop stars, Warner Brothers dropped them, the sisters hearing the news while on tour in Europe. “It was the beginning of that realization that what you were doing was passing out of popularity,” Terre said. “We were starting to realize that things were not what they used to be.”

With its high-end ticket prices and upscale menu, the Blue Note catered to those who could likely afford luxury apartments in the area; the club even had a gift shop that sold Blue Note merchandise. Other venues weren’t quite so shrewd. Seventh Avenue South had never been a huge moneymaker, and the club began running into financial troubles—only exacerbated in 1984, when the owner of the building sold the property to people who tripled the rent. The Speak Easy and Fast Folk scene, meanwhile, was starting to feel stagnant—Brian Rose encouraged his friend Suzanne Vega to break out of it—and Zbeda would grow anxious or peeved when attendance dipped on slow nights. (“Why don’t you have Tom Paxton every weekend?” he groused to Jay Rosen, who worked on the sound system at the club.) Maria Kenny, the daughter of Kenny’s Castaways owner Pat, began working at the club and noticed the nearby cafés closing, one by one, thanks to rent increases.

In 1984 Folk City fell victim to a rent hike of its own that saw its monthly bill leap from $1,500 to $4,300. Admiral, who was well-regarded in the community, told the Times that the venue’s owners had been offered a fifteen-year lease if the space were soundproofed. But the cost of more extensive soundproofing, along with the rent increase, was proving to be prohibitive, and Woliver, Hillesum, and Lash accepted a short-term, two-year lease and began the hunt for a new location. “They decided they wanted to spend their money looking for a new place,” Admiral said to the Times. “We wanted to keep them, because they’re a Village institution, but they wouldn’t soundproof.”

As it was becoming evident that the club could shut down or be forced to find a new locale, Mike Porco, who’d retired to Lauderhill, Florida, in 1982, visited New York and took Woliver to meet Dylan, who was playing Late Night with David Letterman. In his dressing room, Dylan appeared gracious and relatively normal, even in white makeup, and offered his condolences to Porco, whose wife, Ellen, had passed away after a long illness. Seemingly aware of the club’s predicament, Dylan listened and was invited to participate in a concert being organized to commemorate Folk City’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

When that concert finally took place—in September 1985 at Pier 84, an outdoor venue on the Hudson—Dylan wasn’t on the bill. (He played only two shows that entire year, both benefits, Live Aid and the inaugural Farm Aid.) But the show brought together the older guard—Tom Paxton, Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez—with later crew such as Vega, the Roches, Massengill, and Colvin. By then, the concert was more than a celebration; it had become a benefit to help pay for Folk City’s increased rent for the remaining two years of its lease. Unexpectedly, production expenses ate up all the proceeds, leaving the club’s owners with only a few thousand dollars.

By spring 1986, the time had come for Folk City to move on. Woliver, Lash, and Hillesum settled on 82 East Fourth Street in the sometimes-squalid East Village. A former speakeasy that had been raided during Prohibition, the place could hold four hundred, a step up from their current location, and a tentative opening was scheduled for May. Those plans in place, Folk City bid farewell to its West Third Street space on Wednesday, March 26, 1986. From early evening until close to dawn, musicians huddled, sang a song or two, and drank—so much that bartender Peggy Duncan-Garner had to run across the street to the Blue Note for additional beer. Reflecting Woliver’s vision for a rebooted Folk City, musical worlds collided: members of Yo La Tengo and the Smithereens rubbed tight shoulders with Massengill, Christian, and other new-folk figures.

Finally, at 5 a.m., the doors had to close, and everyone was finally booted out after what turned into a group sing-along of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” with some of the musicians seated on the stage. The mood was downbeat but not entirely forlorn. By then, thirty years had passed since NYU had begun demolishing parts of the Village, making way for Gerde’s Folk City. Nearly thirty had gone by since Izzy Young had opened the Folklore Center, Van Ronk played at the new Cafe Bizarre, the Village Vanguard committed itself full-time to jazz, and the Sunday park hootenannies made the local papers. The scene had somehow survived it all—Sonny Rollins was back at the Vanguard that spring—and many inside Folk City that night felt as if they were bidding good-bye to an old office space and preparing to move to a new one. After all, the club had shut and reopened before, and everyone assumed it would rise again in just a few months. “We all thought they were reopening,” said Duncan-Garner. “Nobody felt that was it, that that was the end.”

Just a few months before, the Roches’ “Face Down at Folk City,” their cheeky take on the world that birthed them, had been included on Another World. Its veiled references to Jack Hardy and Duncan-Garner were there, but one line—someone on stage singing a song, but it “ain’t the latest rage”—now felt less like a wisecrack and more like an elegy to the club and the community itself. After Folk City shut its doors that night, the owners helped themselves to souvenirs, including coffee mugs, barstools, and leftover liquor. Many years before, Mike Porco had bought a bottle of artichoke liqueur, a distasteful concoction that had long sat untouched behind the bar. The bottle had seen it all, and now it too was gone.

Chapter 8

another time and place

1981–1986