introduction

Come Gather ’Round

To draw on music terminology, this book emerged from an intro and a coda. Its genesis was the fall of 1978, when I arrived in Greenwich Village to start my freshman year at New York University. Growing up in northern New Jersey, in a house with a view of the Manhattan skyline some twenty-five miles away, it was impossible not to think about the city. Bus rides into New York, to attend a concert at Radio City Music Hall or Carnegie Hall or see a movie that hadn’t made it to the suburbs or hunt down the plethora of used-record stores, only reinforced its allure. Even as we read about the city’s downward economic spiral, it still felt like the place to be, alive with arts and thrills.

Settling into my college dorm—on East Tenth Street and Broadway, down the block from the renovated Hotel Albert, a onetime way station for musicians—I sensed that the heyday of the Village music world had peaked. The giants from the previous decade were rarely if ever listed in the Village Voice club ads, and some had even passed away.

But starting on my first night in the city—which included a pilgrimage to the area’s leading and most eclectic venue, the Bottom Line—music clearly remained woven into the fabric of the neighborhood, even if the material was frayed. Other landmark clubs I’d heard about, like Folk City and the Village Vanguard, were still open for business and presenting acts whose names were familiar to me. One could easily spend infinite hours, as I did, flipping through bins of used and rare vinyl in the seemingly countless record stores south of Fourteenth Street. There I found copies of out-of-print LPs by Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, the Blues Project, and other Village-connected legends I’d read about but rarely heard, even on the FM radio of the time. My roommates and I could walk along Bleecker Street and hear music drifting out of the Bitter End, the Village Gate, or the recently opened Kenny’s Castaways. Each week’s edition of the Voice devoted page after page to ads for those and other venues. NYU offered classes in folk music and guitar, both of which I took. The newsstands that seemed to inhabit every street corner had racks stuffed with magazines devoted entirely to music, even to specific genres.

In the fall of 1981, as part of my journalism degree, I enrolled in a class on magazine writing. Pitching my professor on a story about an apparent folk revival in the Village, I found myself embedded in the scene as much as an outsider could have been. That season, a new club, Speak Easy, had opened in the back of a falafel restaurant on MacDougal Street. Drifting between that space and the long-standing, Bob Dylan–associated Folk City around the corner, I heard what amounted to the next generation of songwriters by way of early performances by Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega, and others. To my shock and awe, I found myself standing next to or even talking with new and vintage musicians and hearing tales of Ochs, Hardin, Odetta, and, of course, Dylan, still its most famous graduate. At Folk City or Speak Easy, I would glance at the bar and see Dave Van Ronk, Danny Kalb, or a relative newcomer like Steve Forbert hanging out there. Sometimes I summoned up a degree of courage to speak with one of them, but I was just as often intimidated. I observed a few sessions of a songwriters’ workshop, the Songwriters Exchange, at the Cornelia Street Café and caught a weekend afternoon set at the Village Vanguard. Sixties legends like Tom Paxton and Eric Andersen would periodically return to town and play one of those clubs, and I was fortunate to catch some of those as well.

As I began my career as a music journalist, I continued to pop into all those clubs over the decades that followed, and I remained in the Village for almost twenty years. Cut to many, many years later, shortly before the coronavirus made the Village, and nearly every other place, shut down temporarily. When I was working on a profile of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott for Rolling Stone in the summer of 2019, he and I wandered the streets he still knew well, even as he approached the age of ninety. Strolling along MacDougal Street, he paused and reminded me that a particular set of stairs led to what was once the Gaslight Cafe. As we entered what was now one of the stylish wine bars and restaurants in the area, Elliott started talking up the maître d’ about the night Johnny Cash stopped by and also vividly recalled its long-ago wall decor. The employee had no idea what Elliott was talking about, and we soon left. A few months later, I made my way to what used to be the Village Gate and was now another music venue, Le Poisson Rouge. But as I zigzagged my way through streets once teeming with live-music venues, all I found were banks, drugstore chains, head shops, and more upscale restaurants.

Of the landmark venues that had embodied the musical spirit of the neighborhood, the Village Vanguard, the Bitter End, and the Cafe Wha? were still alive and holding down the musical fort (and, as of this writing, still are). The space once home to Village Gate has continued as a live-music venue, LPR (now short for Le Poisson Rouge). In late 2023 the Cafe Wha?, under new management, presented a historically minded tribute to Dylan, Van Ronk, and Joni Mitchell to salute an era gone by.

In recent years the scene has also been immortalized in other media. Ethan and Joel Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis used Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, written with Elijah Wald, as its starting point and even integrated artwork from his apartment in one of its sets. It wasn’t remotely a strict biopic and infuriated many who knew Van Ronk, who saw the film as too bleak and depressing. But it drew attention to that era, especially among those born decades later. As much of a fairy tale as it could be, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel also re-created the Gaslight Cafe, a historic gathering spot and workplace, and reminded at least some who watched the series that that venue had existed in the first place.

Still, my return trips to the neighborhood only reinforced the sense of a music community that was, at best, on life support. The action was now in Brooklyn or other parts of town. What happened? Why had such a vibrant and vital music center been reduced to this? The time to tell that story had arrived, at least for me.

First, a few explanations. Adhering to age-old maps of the city, I limited this book to the area from Fourth Avenue to the Hudson River, east to west, and Fourteenth Street to Houston Street, north to south. One could quibble about such designations: does Greenwich Village extend to Canal Street, as designated by Local Community Board 2? For my purposes, I stuck with the heart of the Village. Hence you won’t find much here about the East Village scene and particularly CBGB, which has been chronicled in many other books. The West Village was a saga all its own.

As I was pulling together a time line of music-related events in the Village dating back more than a century, the year 1957 announced itself as a pivotal moment when the scene as we knew it began to coalesce. It also became apparent that it all began to crumble in the mid-eighties, starting with the shuttering of Folk City. One of the few legends who was there at the beginning and stayed right through to the bitter end, no club-reference pun intended, was Dave Van Ronk, that bear-like titan of Village vernacular music. As I was reminded during my research, his many guitar students and protégés included Maggie and Terre Roche of the Roches and Danny Kalb and Steve Katz of the Blues Project. Each act embodied a particular period in Village music history: Van Ronk its early, formative days; the Blues Project the amplified Village of the mid-sixties, when many musicians electrified a once largely acoustic scene; and the Roches (with their sister Suzzy later) the renewed jolt in the scene the following decade. A million musicians came in and out of the Village, or so it seemed, but the interconnected stories of Van Ronk, the Blues Project, and the Roches provided the narrative thread I sought. It would be impossible to include every musician who played there, and an entire book could be devoted to each genre and era that made its way in and out of the Village over the decades. My goal was to trace the arc of the larger story and give the reader a sense of the flavor of each period, with venues, club owners, and accompanying interconnected musicians to match.

Those talents, their peers, and the many who preceded and came after were connected in other ways. Starting with its storied contributions to literature, Greenwich Village clearly attracted bohemians, misfits, and outsiders. In modern parlance, it was a safe space for those who didn’t fit in elsewhere or sought to reinvent themselves. It also seemed to attract those who, like the neighborhood itself, stuck with their convictions, refused to be compromised, and would only begrudgingly consider the marketplace beyond the Village. Even when they did, the results could be unnatural or unsatisfying. The collapse of the Village music world, that oasis of nonconformity, also spoke to the rise and fall of bohemia itself around the country—its many venues now symbolically occupied by banks or chain drugstores.

During my many reporting and research trips to the neighborhood—to see live music, to unearth documents in libraries and in private collections, to meet with local icons in the apartments in which they still lived—the mythic Village still announced itself. I saw Christine Lavin and David Massengill at the Bitter End (part of the annual, multi-arts Village Trip festival), guitarists John Scofield at the Blue Note and Kurt Rosenwinkel at the Village Vanguard, and an afternoon jam at Smalls, the basement jazz club that was a later and vibrant addition to the area. I saw the aftermath of a post-pandemic rave in Washington Square Park that, like the infamous 1961 “beatnik riot,” involved ugly skirmishes with police. I could still observe singers or musicians in the park, sometimes even near the fountain that had once helped birth the scene. All were welcome reminders that the Village as we’d known it still hovered—and with any luck, could possibly rise up in song once more.