New York’s Greenwich Village is a compact sanctuary that has attracted a legion of visionaries and non-conformists who had an outsized influence on 20th-century culture – on alternative lifestyles, progressive politics, and the arts, especially music. Within the maze of coffeehouses, nightclubs, and watering holes on its narrow streets, the legends-to-be of folk, jazz, and rock coalesced into tight-knit communities that birthed sound innovations that continue to resonate.
Veteran music journalist David Browne has expertly chronicled this community’s sprawling history and impact in a new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village. Browne is well-equipped to take on this task. Presently a senior writer at Rolling Stone Magazine, he authored acclaimed biographies of musicians including Sonic Youth, Tim and Jeff Buckley, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. This longtime tri-state New Yorker also witnessed some of the many watershed moments that transpired during the book’s pivotal epochs – from the 1950s folk jamborees and turbulent rock and jazz revolutions of the 1960s to the no-holds-barred punk 1970s to the all-too-brief folk music revival of the 1980s. Based on 150 interviews with notables like Judy Collins, John Sebastian, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Suzanne Vega, and Terre and Suzzy Roche, Talkin’ Greenwich Village lends this saga the epic scope it has long deserved.
As far as music goes, the heart of Talkin’ Greenwich Village is Brown’s telling of folk music’s emergence and later re-emergence in “The Village”. The throughline is the mercurial and magnanimous Dave Van Ronk. Known as “the Mayor of Greenwich Village”, Van Ronk was a massively talented guitarist and rafter-rattling singer who helped guide many of the stars who emerged through the 1980s – from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Blues Project to Shawn Colvin and the Roches. A jazz-loving, sometimes merchant seaman and guitar teacher to many, Van Ronk would have limited commercial success but go on to inspire the uncompromising folkie character featured in the Cohen Brothers’ acclaimed 2013 film Inside Llewelyn Davis.
Folk began to seriously percolate in the Village in the 1950s, with the opening of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center, Gerde’s (later Gerde’s Folk City), the Gaslight Café, Café Bizarre, and the Kettle of Fish, the before- and after-gig hangout dubbed “bohemian mecca” by the New York Daily News. Another prime scenic catalyst was the fountain in Washington Square Park. This was the site of weekly hootenannies that drew multitudes of folk aspirants, including Dylan, Joan Baez, and Happy Traum. When the city government attempted to halt the Sunday music gatherings, it touched off the so-called “Beatnik Riot”. By the fall of 1960, more than 50 clubs and coffeehouses would serve folk music to locals and curious tourists out to catch a beatnik sighting.
Naturally, Browne reserves a healthy space for Bob Dylan’s momentous arrival in 1961 and periodic returns in the 1970s. We learn that the second floor above the Gaslight Café was where Dylan would “snog.” It’s also where he penned his classic of nuclear annihilation, “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. This was whacked out on a typewriter lent to Dylan by his sometimes roommate, the poet Hugh Romney, who later became the famed Woodstock Festival emcee and peace activist Wavy Gravy. The author highlights the many who claimed to have introduced Dylan to his superstar manager, Albert Grossman, and the move from faithfully covering traditional folk songs to creating original material spurred by Dylan’s success. This would lead to hits with Dylan covers by artists like Peter, Paul and Mary, and Judy Collins and the emergence of a new wave of talented songwriters, including Tom Paxton, Eric Anderson, Tim Hardin, Phil Ochs, Fred Neil, and Sylvia Tyson.
Browne also illuminates the African Americans who were integral to the Village’s early folk scene. These include the singer Odetta, guitarist Bruce Langhorne, bassist Bill Lee (father of director Spike Lee), Dylan’s producer Tom Wilson, singer-turned-actor Louis Gossett Jr., and Richie Havens, who made his living painting portraits of tourists.
Eventually, folk music would go electric, as told through the emergence of two Village powerhouses: The Blues Project and the Lovin’ Spoonful. The Blues Project fused the power of rock with Chicago-styled electric blues led by fleet-fingered guitarist Danny Kalb and organist Al Kooper. Lovin’ Spoonful would hone their act with endless gigging at the Night Owl Café on West 3rd Street, the current home of Bleeker Bob’s Records. The Lovin’ Spoonful would emerge as a top-selling singles act in 1965, led by a jug band refugee/singer-songwriter John Sebastian, one of the only figures in Talkin’ Greenwich Village born and raised in Greenwich Village. In their wake would come other homegrown rock bands. These included the Blues Magoos, the Youngbloods, and the Velvet Underground, who would be fired from the Café Bizarre for playing too loud and weird.
By the summer of 1967, many of the most notable names in NYC’s folk scene would leave the Village. Dylan moved to Woodstock, John Phillips moved to Los Angeles, and songwriter Fred Neil moved to Florida. With the lifting of the cabaret card system, rock would arrive in earnest in 1967, with bands like yhe Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Cream taking up residencies at the Blues Project’s home club, the Café A Go Go. Thanks to Browne’s book, I discovered “Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman“, a circa 1968 tune by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood that humorously captures the folk music backlash arising at the time.
Browne’s dive into the Village’s jazz scene is less bulky but equally intriguing. He provides a history of Max Gordon’s Village Vanguard morphing from a venue for magicians and comedians to the site where classic live albums by John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans were waxed. Also chronicled are historic nights at other important jazz outposts, including The Five Spot, the Village Gate, and the Brecker Brothers-owned Seventh Avenue South, the go-to for the then-emerging jazz fusion genre.
As New York faced a budget shortfall and heightened crime in the 1970s, Browne recounts the birth of punk via eye-opening performances by the New York Dolls (“a battered bridge and tunnel Rolling Stones”) at the ill-fated Mercer Arts Center, the former site of a theater where John Wilkes Booth performed “Julius Ceasar” the year before he shot Lincoln. There’s also a humorous clash between the old guard and the new when Happy Traum fistfights with punk poetess Patti Smith and her accompanist, Lenny Kaye, at the Metro Café. Naturally, the well-trod scene at Hilly Crystal’s CBGB is also covered.
The 1974 opening of the Bottom Line injects some big-name professionalism into Greenwich Village during its darkest days, with memorable performances by acts like Bruce Springsteen and Dr. John. With the opening of Kenny’s Castaways on Bleeker Street, new youngbloods with a folk flavor will emerge, including the Roches, Willie Nile, and Steve Forbert. The Cornelia Street Café and Speak Easy will become home to songwriter cooperatives that produce the first recordings of artists like Shawn Colvin, Christine Lavin, Caroline Mas, David Massengill, and Suzanne Vega. The latter will break into the charts with hits like “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” spurring both success and jealousy among peers not seen since Dylan’s meteoric rise.
Talkin’ Greenwich Village also includes some intriguing detours into gay club culture in the Village, starting with the “tea rooms” of the 1920s like Howdy Club and Eve’s Hangout, where drag performances flourished. There’s also a look at latter-day spots like Reno Sweeney’s, a gay-leaning cabaret that helped launch the careers of Bette Midler and Peter Allen.
Economics killed Greenwich Village’s position as a home for young artists. Browne recounts how West Village rents went from an average of $285 per month to $2,000 in a few short years in the early 1980s, with the bohemians being usurped by deep-pocketed Wall Streeters. The Bottom Line, Kenny’s Castaways, and CBGBs were gone by the early aughts. Seventh Avenue South would become a gynecologist’s office, and the Lone Star Café would become a theme restaurant.
David Browne’s sprawling opus ends where it began, with Dave Van Ronk. The unofficial Mayor of Greenwich Village would pass in early 2002. In June 2004, the street by his longtime rent-controlled apartment off Sheridan Square would be re-named in his honor.