“I once thought the biggest I could ever hope to get was like Van Ronk. But it’s bigger than that, now, ain’t it? Yeah, man, it’s bigger than that. Scary as all shit.”
—Bob Dylan, c.1964
By the mid-1960s the Village scene was going stronger than ever, but something had been lost as well. More and more people were moving away, buying houses in Woodstock or wherever, and there was less feeling of camaraderie.* You could tell where things were headed when Andy Warhol and his “beautiful people” showed up at the Gaslight. That towhead was like a vulture—when he appeared, you knew the fun was over.
All things considered, we hung on longer than we had any right to expect. Once the big money came in, the changes were inevitable. Rents went up, costs went through the ceiling, and how much can you charge for a cup of coffee? It used to be that people would just hop on the subway, go down to the Village, wander into a club and see who was playing, and if they didn’t like what they heard, they’d walk out and catch somebody else. When the clubs started having to charge admission, you couldn’t do that anymore.
In the meantime, the music itself was changing very rapidly. The folk revival had largely been a reaction to the pop scene of the 1950s, which was so insipid that we were driven to seek out alternatives. It was either that or “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” (Of course, there was also Little Richard and Chuck Berry, but by the late fifties they were out of the picture, replaced by Fabian and Blue Hawaii. In any case, to someone weaned on jazz, even the good rock ’n’ roll seemed pretty simplistic, and once the corporate machine took over, we dismissed the whole genre as pinhead music.) In the 1960s we got a new wave of pop, with people like the Beatles doing genuinely interesting and creative work, and that was a very different situation. So basically we had our moment and then the scene moved elsewhere. Some of us made a lot of money, and a lot of us made some money, and a few became stars, and a few got hurt. In retrospect, I think it was a very good, productive period, though not as important as some of the participants would like to believe. I remember one time Phil came back from a recording session, and when I asked him how it had gone, he said, “How did it go? I’ll tell you how it went. We have just changed the entire course of Western music!” And he was serious. That is an extreme example, but it gives an idea of the feeling that was going around.
In fact, looking back on that period, very little of what got put down had much permanent value. There was a genuine artistic impulse, but the paradigms were flawed, and if you compare it to what was happening on Broadway in the 1930s, that scene was infinitely more creative and important than ours. The forms that were accepted as part of the folk matrix were too limited, both technically and in terms of staying power, and the ideology of the scene allowed for a great degree of sloppiness, which meant that nobody had to push themselves. Most of the songwriters were writing well below their abilities, and people who were capable of learning and employing more complicated harmonies and chord structures confined themselves to 1-4-5 changes. Some of them were enormously talented, but they were like an enormously talented boxer who insists on fighting with one hand behind his back.
The result was that we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell—but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington. Some very good songs came out of that period and some very good entertainers, but there has been no period in human history when there have not been good songs and good entertainers.
I do not believe that there is such a thing as progress in the arts. They peak, they decline, they hit a plateau, and it is often impossible to say why a certain period produces great work and another does not. I am a Marxist and a materialist, but I have never been able to convince myself that there is an economic interpretation that would explain Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson all being on the set at the same time. In retrospect, one can formulate theories about that, or the confluence of American writers in Paris in the 1910s, or the period in Chicago in the twenties when you could go into one club and hear Jimmy Noone, another and hear Benny Goodman, or King Oliver, or Louis Armstrong, or Jelly Roll Morton. The Village in the early 1960s was like that, and I could argue that at the same time the economic situation in this country was probably the best it has ever been in history, but I cannot show a connection. Maybe it was just sunspots. In any case, we were lucky, and we knew it.
Most of the books that have been written about this period do not really capture the feel of it, at least in part because so many of the people who were involved are not able to talk about it honestly. A lot of them are bitter because they have not done as well as they hoped to do, for one reason or another, and they look back at the people who did better and think: “That should have been my success. I was robbed, I was cheated.” So they talk about how much was stolen from them, how they were screwed, how all their friends fucked them and turned their backs on them. But all of that is after the fact. Nobody except a handful of real paranoids felt that way at the time.
Back then, we weren’t all clawing over each other’s bodies, trying to fight our way to the top. Mostly we were having the time of our lives. We were hanging out with our friends, playing music, and sitting around at all-night poker sessions in the room upstairs from the Gaslight. Win, lose, or draw, there was always something absolutely ridiculous happening, and we were laughing all the time—when we weren’t fighting or brooding drunkenly. It was very mercurial.
For me, one of the great things about that period was that I could make a living without leaving the Village. I was working weeks and weeks on end in clubs that I could walk to, so my living room was my dressing room, and I could even go home between sets. I was listening to music that interested me, and making music that interested my friends, and I felt that I belonged to a community of singers, songwriters, performers who were really cooking. It was very exciting, and yeah, we had our jealousies—when somebody got too big a piece of the action, all of us felt, “How dare that son of a bitch . . .”—but that was not the dominant mood of the period. There was a lot of money around, and we all wanted a taste, but for a few years the trickle-down theory was actually working—the only time that has ever happened, in my experience—and it did not get particularly mean or petty except in the case of people who had not liked each other to begin with.
Personally, I was doing very well, thank you. I wasn’t making Dylan’s kind of money—that’s corporate wealth, the gross national product of El Salvador, and very few of us made anything like that. But I must have spent three or four years without ever being in a subway, which for a New Yorker pretty much sums it up. It was the kind of situation where if there was something I wanted and I didn’t have the money, I could just make another record or do an extra gig. That was when I acquired my collection of primitive art, as well as books, records, not to mention enjoying a lot of fabulous meals and parties. We were all living wie Gott in Frankreich, indulging our various whims. Some people bought houses in the country, some built recording studios, some developed expensive drug habits. Almost none of us bothered to hoard any money; it was all too unreal. Every time you went out for a couple of drinks, you would hear that someone had just signed a contract with Columbia or Warner Brothers for mucho buckos, and suddenly another town house was being renovated on Commerce Street. It was like a rolling bonanza.
Dylan’s success sparked the real explosion, but he was part of a broader phenomenon. In terms of the mass audience, Peter, Paul, and Mary had two hits with Bobby’s songs before he even got on the charts. Dylan made it as a popular music figure on the coattails of Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Byrds, and other people who were doing covers of his songs, and as late as 1964 it was still pretty hard to sell him to anyone but the cognoscenti. He was a difficult artist, from the mainstream point of view, so when he took off, it was really a case of overdue recognition.
As for the charge that Bobby was “selling out” when he stopped writing protest music, or when he went electric, it makes no sense in the context of that moment, because there was no reason to think that there would be any buyers. It never occurred to me that he was scuttling his artistic vision in a cynical grab at fame and fortune, and if he had been, I would have been very dubious about it working. I was at Newport in 1965, when he plugged in for the first time onstage, although I missed the famous incident and did not hear about it until the next morning, by which time there were already 212 different versions of what had happened. It was certainly the big news of the moment, but I had no sense that the musicians felt that Dylan was betraying us or betraying folk music. Some of us liked what he was doing and some of us didn’t, but our judgment was a musical judgment, not a political or a sociological judgment. The question was, Does it work musically?*
Myself, I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. And I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them. It is like the old socialist I knew who was an editor of a newspaper in the early 1960s: A bunch of New Leftists marched into his office and presented him with a set of nonnegotiable demands, insisting that he change this, that, and the other thing about what he was printing. He listened to them as long as he could stand it and then just said, “I’ve been a socialist for fifty years. Do you know what you’re going to be ten years from now? You’re going to be dentists.” It was the same with the fans who got bent out of shape about Bobby’s going electric. They were all very pure and self-righteous, but forty years later Bobby is still out there making music, and they’re all dentists.
The point is that categories such as “folk” and “blues” are inherently limiting, and any serious musician tries to steer clear of them as much as possible. Listeners and record companies want to fit you into these neat little boxes, but as a performer you need to be open to all the possibilities around you and to use whatever tools are appropriate for the job at hand. In my own case, I was typed as a blues singer back in the 1950s and have had to come to terms with the fact that no matter what I sing, most people will continue to think of me in those terms. But I concluded quite early on that I was essentially a saloon or cabaret performer. A lot of my material comes out of the blues tradition, but overall I have more in common with someone like Peggy Lee or Blossom Dearie than I do with Mississippi John Hurt or the Reverend Gary Davis. So when Dylan became a rock star, it was not really a shock to me—or more precisely, the shock was not musical. The shock was how it changed the scene.
We had all been hanging out on MacDougal Street, singing for one another and for a small group of devoted fans, and suddenly one of us had hit the mass market. The result was that a lot of people who had never been greedy in their lives began having visions of El Dorado. Dylan was one of ours and he had struck gold, and everybody thought that they could get rich, too. There were essentially two reactions. The first was jealousy, variations on “Why him?” and “He copped this from me; he stole that from so-and-so.” Of course, we had all been stealing from each other all along, but it had never mattered, because we were all in the same situation. We had been playing for tips and sleeping on floors, and when one of us suddenly could get a suite at the top of the Plaza, naturally that hurt.
The other reaction, which was even more damaging, was “I’m gonna be next. All I have to do is find the right agent, the right record company, the right connections, and I can be another Bob Dylan!” Yeah, sure you could. All you had to do was write “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—for the first time. That was what Bobby had done, and none of the rest of us did that. Bobby is not the greatest songwriter in history, but he was far and away the best on our scene, and whether we admitted it or not, we all knew that. Still, there were a lot of poor slobs who were working very hard and in some cases producing very good music, and who were getting nowhere at all. So it is not surprising that some of them got awfully bitter—I cannot deny that at times I felt a pang myself.
Meanwhile, the sycophants appeared, crowding around and telling us how wonderful we were. I don’t think that even the most vain among us really liked them, but when someone comes up and says, “Boy, you’re so great,” it is certainly better than the alternative and has an obvious seductive quality. Dylan drew more than his share of this attention, and after a while a sort of hierarchy was established of knights of the round table, princes of the blood, all paying court to the emperor with the long, bushy hair. And because of who he was, that became a pretty nasty scene. Bobby had always been kind of paranoid, and now he felt that he had to surround himself with people he could trust. But it was not reciprocal; he never felt that he had to be trustworthy himself. He was always testing the loyalty of the people who were near him, and it could really get vicious at times. There was this group around him—David Blue, Victor Maimudes, Bobby Neuwirth, and various others—and they would back up whatever he said, including when he chose to turn on one or another of them.
For myself, I consider it fortunate that Bobby and I reached our parting of the ways fairly early. Shortly after his third or fourth record had come out and gone diamond or whatever, he was holding court in the Kettle of Fish, and he got on my case and started giving me all of this advice about how to manage my career, how to go about becoming a star. It was complete garbage, but by that point he had gotten used to everybody hanging on his every word and applauding any idea that came into his head. So I sat and listened for a while, and I was polite and even asked him a couple of questions, but it became obvious that he was simply prodding and testing me. He was saying things like “Why don’t you give up blues? You do that, and I’ll produce an album on you; you can make a fortune.” He wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I finally pushed back my chair and said, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?” And I walked out.
That was that, thank God, and while I have seen Bobby off and on over the years, and we are always perfectly cordial, we were never close again. I decided just to go about my business, and to let him and his spear-carriers do whatever they wanted to do. Because I could see what was happening to people who let themselves get caught up in that scene.
As for the star-making rap, I had already heard versions of that from Albert Grossman, but Albert was a good deal funnier about it and he had the track record to back it up. Still, in essence it was the same routine, and the point was to prove that everybody has a price. Albert was a great fan of The Magic Christian, Terry Southern’s novel about a man who does things like filling a swimming pool full of sewage and offal with some $100 bills mixed in, just to prove that people will dive in. So he came up to me one night and said, “Look, I have a proposal for you: I’ll arrange all your bookings, and I’ll guarantee you $100,000 a year. You can pick your own material, sing anything you want. You just have to make one change in your act: I want you to wear a helmet with horns on it, and change your name to Olaf the Blues Singer.” He was completely serious, and I think if I had gone along, he would very likely have done it—not because he believed it was a good idea, but just to prove that I had my price. He died without ever knowing that it was $120,000 . . .
The truth is that I was by no means immune to the lure of money, and I say that without any shame. I deeply mistrust the notion that musicians or other artists are “selling out” when they make a sound commercial choice. A lot of people who have grown up to be stockbrokers or dentists feel that they have abandoned their youthful ideals, and it is very important to them that their idols remain pure, as proof that there is purity somewhere out there in the world. Apparently, musicians don’t have to make a living; only dentists and stockbrokers have to do that. So when someone comes up to me and says, “I admire you because you stuck to your guns, you never sold out,” my temptation is to say, “Listen: I’ve been standing on 42nd Street, bent over with my pants around my ankles for thirty years.” Obviously, there are things I am willing to do and things I am not willing to do, but the bottom line is that I have a certain set of skills and I have done the best I can with them, and if the cards had come up differently and I had had more mainstream success, that would have been very nice.
For a while there, it seemed quite likely. The people who run the music business are always on the lookout for a trend. When the Beatles came along, there was a momentary panic: “What’s going on? Here we’ve been selling Pat Boone all these years, and all of a sudden this happens! How can we retool the assembly line?” They had scouts combing England from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall for any Englishman with an electric guitar, and then there was an audible sigh of relief when they managed to manufacture the Monkees: “Whew, we got it licked. Now we can manufacture groups, package them with a good, reliable system of interchangeable parts, market it, and we’re all gonna get rich, baby.” That’s the way their logic works, and when Dylan hit, they all descended on the Village. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, and since Dylan was kind of weird looking and had that scratchy voice, they were open to the idea that there might be other stars out there who did not fit the standard pattern. So for a moment it seemed genuinely possible that just by doing more or less what we were doing already, any one of us might suddenly wind up a millionaire. Naturally, all kinds of people got their heads twisted out of shape and began making desperate grabs for the brass ring, and I was no exception.
I had nothing against rock ’n’ roll—it was a perfectly reasonable extension of some of my favorite music. I had always loved Fats Domino, whom I considered the master of understatement, and Little Richard, who was the master of overstatement. I thought the Beatles were sweet and amusing and had some very interesting ideas, especially when George Martin got involved. And I loved Frank Zappa and the Mothers, who were working for a while at the Garrick on Bleecker while I was playing upstairs at the Café Au Go-Go. Frank was the best amphetamine guitar player I ever heard, and he was also such a marvelous lunatic, one of my favorite people. So I was open to a lot of the new sounds that were coming through, and for a while I actually became kind of fascinated by the possibilities inherent in electronic music—though in the end I came to the conclusion that the most efficient and advanced instruments are still the ancient ones. I enjoyed fooling around with tape loops and weird electronic gizmos the same way I enjoyed fooling around with jugs and kazoos, but neither can keep my interest like a good guitarist or trumpet player.
I resisted the temptation to form a band for several years, because I have always preferred to work as a soloist. I really enjoy going mano a mano with my audience, and after doing it for so long, that is the way my mind works. Still, by about 1967 I was beginning to feel like the only kid on the block who didn’t have an Erector Set. Everybody I knew was going electric and getting rich and famous, and they all had thousands of dollars in their pockets and were eating at La Grenouille and smoking Larañagas, and it was embarrassing. And there were the record execs, with pens in their hands, saying, “Put together a rock band and you too will have Cuban cigars, eat Caspian caviar, and smoke ganja from Afghanistan.” Who was I to shovel shit against the tide of history? I have always believed that nothing is too good for the working class, and here was a chance to put my beliefs into practice. So I called up my old buddy Dave Woods, and we formed the Hudson Dusters.
Dave is one of the finest musicians I have ever known, a versatile jazz and blues guitarist and a deft and cunning arranger. (I have been playing what is essentially his guitar chart for “Come Back Baby” since the late 1950s.) With the Hudson Dusters, our idea was to make a pile of money while exploring some of the untapped musical possibilities inherent in the standard rock band lineup. On the second point, I think we succeeded surprisingly well. Dave is one of the hardest-working men I ever met, and with me cheering him on, we indulged our love of Charles Ives and made a polytonal rock ’n’ roll record. We were doing things like arranging songs simultaneously in two keys, with the chorus in both keys, resolving into key A, then returning to the chorus and this time resolving into key B. In retrospect, I can see why that didn’t sell, but at the time it seemed like a stroke of genius.
The band was excellent, with Dave and me on guitar, Pot (Phil Namanworth) on keyboards, a guy named Rick Henderson on drums, and Ed Gregory, a sometime associate of Jimi Hendrix who is the best goddamn bass player that ever walked the face of the earth. I felt like a kid with a new locomotive and a basement full of track, and that remains one of the few albums of mine that I enjoy listening to. Among other things, I managed to cut a couple of vocals that I am particularly proud of—though that was a matter of luck more than planning: We were recording between tours, so although I had come down with a hideous case of flu, we couldn’t cancel the session. As a result, I went into the studio sick as a dog, and somehow the flu had an effect on my voice that was as if someone had been messing with the octave valve. All of a sudden, I had an entire falsetto register that normally was not there. I started to sing, and I was going up and up and up, and I was still getting the notes, so I thought, “Whoopie!” and cut “Dink’s Song”—technically the best piece of singing I have ever done on record—and a couple of other numbers. We finished up the session, and when I got into the cab to go home, I had to write out my address, because I could not say a word.
My record label at that point was Verve/Forecast, and for once I had a guy at the company who was really behind me. I also had a song that was an absolute, no-question, sure-fire hit. Joni Mitchell was living in New York by that time, and we were spending quite a lot of time together, and I had concluded that she was the finest songwriter on the set. Both as a person and an artist, she presented the unusual combination of a very determined personality working in tandem with a kind of ethereal quality. Her songs were always carefully crafted, but the artistry was often very subtle. I would have missed some of their finest points if I had not actually read the lyrics, because when you heard her sing them, these marvelous effects would just drift past you, and it was only when you saw them in print that you realized how much work went into them. But there were also songs that were obvious masterpieces from the first time you heard them. One day we were sitting around, and she played me “Both Sides Now,” and I immediately knew I had to record it. Our only disagreement was about the title. It was clear to me that the feeling of the clouds was a sort of motif, running all through the song, and I thought she should call the song “Clouds.” Naturally, she refused; she liked her title, and she stuck to her guns, and I stuck to mine. So when I recorded the song, I called it “Clouds (from Both Sides Now).” The next year, she recorded it with her original title—but she called the album Clouds.
With a song like that, I knew I simply couldn’t miss. Woodsy and I put together a nice, subtle arrangement (based on a riff we copped from the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday”), and I sang it very plainly, so people could really hear the lyric. My man at Verve smelled a hit, and he got on the phone to all the disc jockeys around the country, prepared a big ad campaign and the whole nine yards. The idea was to break it slowly, one market at a time, get it on the radio and let it build, then jump on the wave as it began to crest. Everything went perfectly for a month or so—it was moving up the charts in Cleveland, in this town, in that town—and then Judy Collins came out with her version and promptly sold eight billion copies, and that was that.
Basically, it was the luck of the draw: I had a high pair, drew three cards, and came up with nothing. It did not help that MGM, which was the parent company of Verve/Forecast, was already well on its way into bankruptcy, though I did not have any idea of that at the time. They were MGM, goddammit—who knew that a year and a half later they would be auctioning off Dorothy’s ruby slippers?
In any case, that was my shot at the rock world, and I found it an uncomfortable match. I remember one gig in particular, an early-morning TV show in Philadelphia called something like Aqua-rama. It was one of those teenage dance shows like American Bandstand, only their gimmick was that they shot it in an aquarium, with huge tanks of fish all over the place. They did not have the facilities to do live music, so I had to lip-synch, which I had never done before and swore never to do again. I try not to phrase my songs the same way twice, so if I were going to lip-synch properly, I would have to listen to my record over and over and memorize the way I had happened to sing it on that day, and I can imagine nothing more boring. So there I was, moving my mouth out of sync with the music, and all these kids were gyrating around—we didn’t really play dance music, but they were there to boogie and would have danced to an amplified cricket. And as each couple went past the camera, they would flip it the finger. Then we had a bit of banter with the host—I remember saying, “Actually, I only came here to see the piranha, but you’ll do”—and trucked off to the next lousy club date.
Maybe if we had kept plugging away, or if we had had better representation, or this, that, or the other thing, we would eventually have gotten somewhere, but I shortly concluded that it wasn’t worth the effort. For one thing, I was going broke because the clubs weren’t paying any more for the band than they did for me as a single, but the expenses were five times as high. Meanwhile, I was feeling more and more constricted by having to fit myself into an ensemble. I was used to being able to chop and change my sets as I went along, and having to do the same goddamn songs every night was excruciating. So what with one thing and another, the Dusters disbanded and I went back to doing what I did best.
The record companies did not give up on me for another few years. I bounced from Verve to Polydor and from there to Cadet, and they gave me impressive recording budgets, and we worked out some pretty interesting arrangements, with strings and horns and what all. I enjoyed that, at times, and it gave me a chance to do some material that I would not have otherwise done—everything from Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” to “I Want to Go Back to My Little Grass Shack in Kealakakua, Hawaii”—though I also was coaxed into doing some arrangements that even at the time seemed overblown and buried the material. In any case, in another few years the Folk Scare was well and truly over, and the major labels had figured out that I was never going to sell a million records, and they stopped coming around.
That was not a particularly pleasant feeling, and I felt frustrated for a while, but then I adjusted to the situation. In a way I was lucky, because the people who arrived between 1963 and 1968 thought they had found Fat City, and when the money dried up, it was a terrible shock—some of them haven’t adjusted to this day. Since I had gotten into the business before there was any money to speak of, it was relatively easy for me to come to terms with the thought that what goes up must come down. What is more, I have always been something of a doom crier and had been predicting grass growing on MacDougal Street for years, so when the scene shut down, I felt the satisfaction of a Seventh Day Adventist on the day the world really does come to an end. And as a Village resident, I enjoyed being able to walk down the street without having to fight my way through the hordes of tourists.
I had to tour a little more than I liked, but between the concerts and some teaching I was making a reasonable living playing the music I loved, and that was a hell of a lot more than I had expected when I started out in this business, or than my education or my family background would have led anyone to predict. So for the last thirty years I have been fighting a reasonably successful holding action, and as the Irishman who fell off the Empire State Building said as he passed the forty-first floor, “So far, so good.” I am still making my own musical choices, and people have kept coming to the shows and buying the records. There are perhaps two hundred people in the country whose musical opinions I really care about, and most of them like my work, and that was the object of the exercise from the get-go. Being a musician—even a good musician—is not a ticket to ride. It’s a job, and at times it can be very hard work. But then someone will come up and say, “Hey, Dave, I heard you in 1962 in Samarkand,” and that’s nice. I never made a fortune—as a matter of fact, I have often been deeply in debt—but dammit, this is what I wanted to do, and I have been able to do it for almost fifty years, and I haven’t had to do anything else, and what more can I ask? I wanted to be a musician, and I am a musician, and that’s what it’s all about.
*I never understood why everybody wanted to move out to Woodstock. I liked the Village, and I still like it, and I would not like to live anywhere else. The country is a city for birds.
*There’s a story that Pete Seeger got all bent out of shape and actually tried to cut the cables with an ax, but as I understand it, what was bothering him wasn’t the fact of Dylan going electric; it was the sound system. The mix was dreadful, and you couldn’t hear Dylan’s voice, all you could hear was the band. Paul Butterfield’s outfit had problems with that, too, during their set.