Chapter 6
The hired guns of Bob Dylan ... Basket house cases ... The politics of lyrics ... How can we tell the singer from the song?
JAC: What had begun with Judy Collins was beginning to spread. Folk singers turned to writing their own songs, and those who didn't looked to those who did.
It was John Sebastian's observation that the overwhelming success of the big commercial folk acts following the Weavers—the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Limeliters; the Brothers Four—had used up the traditional material. All their imitators (and there was truly a tidal wave of five-string banjo players, a hundred-year flood) meant too few traditional songs being worn out. The umpteenth time you hear 'Wake Up, Wake Up, Darlin' Cory,' it puts you to sleep. Here was where Paul Rothchild's insight made so much sense: the crucial importance of new songs.
Folk singers writing songs was not new. The early modern creators, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, wrote from life. That was their power. Even the folk purists who clung to the belief that any truly "authentic" folk song sprang from unknown traditional sources were caught up by 'Goodnight, Irene' and 'This Land Is Your Land.'
Singer-writers like Richard Fariña and Ian and Sylvia Tyson were adding to the growing body of new music. Then Bob Dylan arrived in New York, barely into his twenties, without the life experiences of a Leadbelly or a Woody Guthrie, upon whom he clearly modeled himself. But he did have—and in depth—the power of his beliefs, a burning itch to set the world right and a prodigious gift for couching his truth in language of power and felicity. Dylan forever ended the argument about who wrote folk songs. Pete Seeger had it right: Folks did. And Dylan nailed it.
Izzy Young in his Folklore Center
JAC: The Village scene was a few square blocks of clubs, bars, red-sauce Italian restaurants that had been family-run for generations, and, of course, the coffee houses.
Izzy Young's Folklore Center, a few steps above MacDougal Street, was a storefront with a rough assemblage of records, sheet music, instruments, strings, capos, and the odd-lot necessities of the urban folk singer, displayed according to Izzy's cockeyed logic. Izzy was one of those unforgettable characters of whom everybody was fond but also wary. Maynard Solomon and I pretty much kept him in business by granting him ridiculously generous terms of payment. "Izzy," we begged, "if you sell it, please pay for it." The rent would come due and Izzy would be just a bit short of cash, and you know who got paid first. But Izzy knew all of folkdom and the Center served as Musician's Central Station.
Just a few doors south was a heavy hangout bar, the Kettle of Fish. The Kettle was sawdusty, dimly lit, comfortable, and much beloved for its turmoil. It did not have live entertainment, so it was uncontested terrain, and it became a community watering hole. I remember one night when Dave Van Ronk, John Sebastian, Richard Fariña, Tom Rush, Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan all showed up. At the Kettle you could always find out what was or might be happening, and to be on the safe side you checked in, like knocking on wood.
The Kettle was the hub, and from there you fanned out and sampled the action. The Gaslight was directly downstairs, it was just a short walk to Gerde's Folk City, the Village Gate, the Bitter End, and on and on.
PAUL SIEBEL: I lived in a walkup at 139 Thompson Street, just below Houston, right next to the Catholic Church; I remember those church bells going off. I was from Buffalo, which was a closed scene. I thought I'd just better get out of there with my guitar. I headed for New York. For a while I worked in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn, but I gravitated to the Village. I was making forty-some dollars at the baby carriage factory, and I would save my money and go see a double bill in the Village, which would be, like, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Mississippi John Hurt, and that would be a magical night.
I would be wearing Levi's, a lot of denim. I couldn't afford good boots. Definitely a wide belt with the Levi's, though. Fancy buckles were a problem because they scratched the back of your guitar. I have a picture of myself wearing a belt with the buckle on the side, around my hips, so it wouldn't scratch. I think Jerry Jeff Walker actually gouged a hole in the back of his guitar because of heavy buckles. Another thing that was worn—I didn't, I'm proud to say, and I won't mention any names—but guys would wear a little leather pouch with a drawstring hanging from the belt, and they would keep finger picks and guitar picks and sometimes dope paraphernalia, a little pipe and some Zig-Zag rolling papers.
I was a folkie, but there was a lot of overlap. When a Dylan album came out, or a Beatles album, the kids would line up outside the record stores. If they heard that it was coming out on Thursday, they'd start on Wednesday night, and there'd be thousands of them. Reporters would be down interviewing them.
Being in the Village was kind of the epicenter of all that. In fact, it would get so crowded on the streets at night that the police would block off Bleecker Street and West 3rd and MacDougal and not let cars drive through.
There was dope on the streets. You could be pretty casual about it. I can remember the cop on the beat, Jack, and the other good-looking one, looked like a movie star, asking us, "Please smoke a little farther down the street"—if the captain went by they'd get in trouble. The stuff was just all over. In everybody's apartment. All the girls used it, just about everyone I knew, they would have the fixings in some wooden bowl sitting on the coffee table, with posters on the wall. In fact the mothers of MacDougal Street were protesting, "Do away with the coffee houses," because it was corrupting youth. Well, it was. You bet. Why else would anyone be there?
When you're in your early twenties, it was nice. It wasn't crazy dangerous like today, between the dope and the violence. Then it was just pretty much kids. It was us, and what we'd snobbishly refer to as the uptown crowd, people slumming or just trying to hang out in the Village, some people who were closet guitar players: "I know a few chords, listen to this," and they'd go into 'They Call The Wind Maria' or something.
BOB GIBSON: The guys who originally got involved in running the coffee houses were not altogether savory. One of these reasons they opened coffee houses was to avoid the police department cabaret permit ban on those who had been convicted of felonies or drug arrests or things like that. They did not have to have a police permit to sell coffee, tea, or mulled cider.
Paul Siebel "Jack-knife Gypsy" EKS-74081
PAUL SIEBEL: You could go down the street and hear singing several houses away because there was a rickety kind of amplification. They had guys who would stand outside, usually quite colorful characters, some of them had done some time, and they were called drags, because they dragged the streets to get people to come in. They would usually dress quite spectacularly. They were the first guys I remember wearing extremely long hair, shoulder length or longer, earrings, tattoos, that sort of thing.
These places were called basket houses. The performers weren't paid. You would do a set and do a basket pitch: "This is my last song, and at the end of the song we're gonna pass a basket. I would appreciate anything from a joint to the color green, I like the color green."
I was hired at the Four Winds by Charlie Chin, a Chinese-American guy. I quit my job at the baby carriage factory the next day. I worked at the Four Winds for more than a year, five or six sets a night. Of course you fought for the spot, and to hold it. You didn't want to lose it, but on the other hand you wanted other good players to share the night, to help pull people into the place. I worked through the lean times, which was the winter when it snowed and blowed, and sometimes you and your girlfriend and the other performers would be the only ones in the club, and you'd maybe only get two or three dollars in the basket, maybe make five dollars a night. But other times we would do very well. Sometimes the girls would make a hundred in a night, and I can remember making sixty and seventy, and my God, that's all we were paying a month for rent.
Richie Havens, I remember seeing him in a place called the Zig-Zag. I also worked with Peter Tork—he played a long-neck banjo and sang kind of silly things, like this thing called 'Elmo,' which was an alligator that went down the drainpipe. He said he had to get out of New York, nothing was happening for him, he was gonna go to California, and he did, and he turned into a Monkee.
MICHAEL OCHS: Everybody was in this ten-block radius. It was dirt cheap. It didn't cost anything. Almost any kid could afford it. Most places there was no cover charge, maybe a two-drink minimum.
The Pete Seegers, the Oscar Brands, the Ed McCurdys would still be playing, and it would usually be a mixture. Ed McCurdy would be the headliner and Patrick Sky would open for him, or Oscar Brand would be the headliner and they'd have Phil Ochs opening for him.
The old Night Owl Cafe, everybody used to hang out there a lot. It used to be Tim Hardin singing, and behind him would be Freddie Neil playing guitar, Peter Childs second guitar, John Sebastian playing harmonica; he wasn't a singer yet. They would go from a Bo Diddley tune to a Freddie Neil tune, back to some classic rock and roll. I saw Hardin play four hours straight one night and he didn't open his eyes once. Talk about heroin—
PAUL SIEBEL:—As far as shooting heroin, no, not me, but it was around us, we had to wade through it, and we knew junkies.
Fred Neil "Bleecker & MacDougal" EKS-7293
ARTHUR GORSON: Freddie Neil was a junkie, unfortunately, but still those Freddie Neil records were incredible.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: Fred was an interesting cross. He went around the South with his father, who was stuffing jukeboxes. I think Fred was essentially a pop songwriter. Remember, he had Number-1 songs.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: He was on Elektra. For my sins I had to produce him. He was a brilliant songwriter and a total scumbag. The forerunner of the unreliable performer, the original rock flake. We'd book recording sessions and he'd show up or not show up. I mean, here's a guy who wrote 'Candy Man,' which Roy Orbison had a hit with, and the day he finished writing it he went to the Brill Building and sold it to about twenty different publishers for fifty bucks each. This is not a nice man. Here's a guy who would go to Izzy Young and say, "Izzy, I've got a gig tonight and I don't have a guitar." Izzy would say, "Freddie, you owe me for about twenty guitars, but I love you, here's another twelve-string." And Freddie would go to the club fucked up, he was always fucked up—I've watched this on about ten occasions—couldn't get the guitar in tune, pick it up and smash it to smithereens on the stage. A guitar he didn't own.
JAC: Elektra signed many singer-songwriters, some of whom were kinder and gentler, others more strenuous and political. It was the nature of the times. The world was in the Village and the Village was the world.
ARTHUR GORSON: It had to do with social protest, Malcolm X, civil rights, and then the scene around MacDougal Street and the people that come and go.
I had been working in the civil rights movement in the South as a field organizer, and then with striking coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky. It was romantic, Robin Hood-like. There was a lot of turmoil, violence. We ended up raising money to support the movement by doing concerts, mainly in Greenwich Village, and then we were bringing folk singers down to Hazard—Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins. And people started writing songs about all that.
Tom, Phil, and Judy were all on Elektra. So Elektra had a good share of the energy of the time. It was one of the leading companies that captured that moment in New York that generated fabulous singer-songwriters.
In a way these newer artists were folk singers by default now. I mean, there was the traditional Woody Guthrie, but a lot of them wanted to be Buddy Holly. Phil Ochs's favorite songwriter was Merle Haggard. And there was something in the air that was common among all these people. The singer-songwriter movement was a radical break, both in substance and philosophically, just like rock and roll was a radical break with soft music of the Forties and Fifties. It was also a radical break in terms of how the artists viewed themselves—as the source of everything, no longer the slaves of the record company and the publishers and all the rest. Certainly the idea of a songwriter having his own publishing company was very radical, it wasn't something that had really happened before. They all wanted to control everything, down to what the album cover looked like. Everyone thought of themselves as geniuses, and as very broadly talented. They read the newspaper, they were involved with talking to politicians. It was a very lively time. And they were very much a part of that time. So it was a revolution in more than one way. The artists desired to control their destiny.
Which made traditional record company dealings more difficult. And now here is Elektra, which wasn't a traditional record company, which was also finding its way. Jac, musically and philosophically, was a risk-taker. He was facing forward. Elektra was the label of choice to be on; in terms of energy and spirit, it was the place to be.
JAC: We had quite a singer-songwriter stable: Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, David Blue, Fred Neil, Mark Spoelstra, Hamilton Camp.
The "Ramblin' Boy" LP, EKS-7277
JOHN SEBASTIAN: Tom Paxton was a strong writer from the get-go, who was drawing on an older tradition. In other words, he really came more from the Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger tradition than someone like Fred Neil.
OSCAR BRAND: Tom, in the creative world, is one of the best. One of the sharpest ears. He wrote beautiful songs. And a really charismatic figure. You'd look at him and say, "That's not charisma," but you'd feel it. You'd feel the kind of brightness, sharpness, that he had right from the beginning.
ED McCURDY: Ha. I used to think that if Paxton had three hands, one would be over his ears. I used to refer to him as the young Narcissus. He came to me once and asked me what I thought of his singing, really. And I said, "For a young man who considers himself a cocksman, you sing with less balls than anyone I know." And that shocked him. But he's probably the best writer-singer, not singer, but certainly the best writer-singer in the business. I put his creative capacity over almost all of them. Because he's continuous, he does it all the time.
JAC: Tom Rush was not yet into writing. Like Judy Collins, he was a fine interpretive singer with superb taste, an ear for great new songs, a warm engaging voice, and a killer guitar.
"Tom Rush" EKS-7288
ARTHUR GORSON: Tom's album "The Circle Game" represented a certain moment in history, because we had a scene of singers and songwriters. There were songs everywhere and everyone trading songs, and Tom was able to draw from that material. So the "Circle Game" album has the first Joni Mitchell songs recorded, the first Jackson Browne songs recorded, and James Taylor. Brand-new material, never heard, by songwriters that weren't really known, beautiful songs.
JAC: You always want to know how your artists are going down with live audiences, and what you could be doing to get them more exposure. I was forever in the clubs, checking the action, looking for inspiration. One night when Tom Rush was playing the Bitter End, the plumbing in the men's room failed and we had to use the women's john. On my visit to the stall I came across this graffiti: "Tom Rush is an easy lay." And right below this fascinating revelation, in a different hand, some disappointed groupie (or, who knows, maybe a defender of Tom's virtue) had written, "Oh, no, he's not."
JAC: One of the most promising, puzzling and troubled of Elektra's singer-songwriters was Phil Ochs. Phil was a committed folkie and became an extremely effective political voice. His songs were bold and to the point.
STEVE HARRIS: He went for the jugular.
LARRY HARRIS: Tom Paxton was like a velvet blanket, like a tropical balmy breeze. He could make you think about issues without standing up and coming to attention. Phil made you stand up and come to attention.
MICHAEL OCHS: Phil was a great organizer. He was the first person to try to organize all the musicians, try to organize strikes to get them paid an actual wage, instead of just passing the baskets.
ARTHUR GORSON: I managed Phil.
MICHAEL OCHS: Arthur was heavily involved in the civil rights thing. He got really badly beaten up, almost got killed a couple of times. And Phil really respected Arthur because he had the courage to do that.
ARTHUR GORSON: Phil and I formed a publishing company called Barricade Music. "A Revolution in Songwriting" was our campaign. We were ambitious, we were political, but we weren't greedy. It wasn't about money yet, it was all about doing anything to reach a new audience. And it was all about the competition between our office, meaning the Ochs office, and the Dylan office.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Ochs was in a league by himself. With Tom Paxton, he was the most important topical songwriter. After Dylan, I mean. Everything was after Dylan.
GEORGE PICKOW: I have some film that I shot at a party at Alan Lomax's house. Clarence Ashley is in it. Doc Watson. The New Lost City Ramblers. Mike Seeger. John Cohen. Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Peter La Farge and Muddy Waters. Roscoe Holcomb. Maria Muldaur—Maria D'Amato at the time, you see her dancing. And Bob Dylan was sitting there getting high on marijuana through the whole evening, but he had just signed with Albert Grossman, and Grossman told him, "Don't let anybody record you or take your picture at all unless they talk to me," so he's not on film.
Dylan at Newport 1963
ARTHUR GORSON: In the Village you had an art scene, a rare art scene. Dylan and Ochs and David Blue and Eric Andersen and a whole bunch of others were writing songs about similar topics. They weren't imitating each other, they were coming from a similar inspiration, a similar cultural moment, it was blowing in the wind. It was like Paris at the turn of the century, and yet it wasn't. In Paris there were a lot of equals. The Village was a scene where there were a lot of equals and one giant. Everyone was braving a new path, but Dylan and his output stunned the rest of the world.
JOHN SEBASTIAN: Suddenly here was this great new songwriter, and it was like everyone else was all ready made to receive his work and get it out there. Would I credit Dylan with the hybridization of folk song and rock and roll? No. It wasn't, like, if you didn't get it from him and then go on, you didn't receive the Holy Cross or anything. But this is not to minimize his importance to songwriters as a songwriter. In this, he loomed absolutely the largest. The strength and breadth of his writing during that period, it just eclipses everybody.
ARTHUR GORSON: I don't think Dylan stole other people's ideas from around the table. He stole Woody Guthrie, he stole traditional ballads—
JAC:—Listen to Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Song" on Folkways, and then to the collected works of Dylan—
ARTHUR GORSON:—But the one complaint that Phil Ochs and other people never voiced was, "Dylan just stole my song." What Dylan was writing about was experiential things about people on the street. I mean, "You've got a lot of nerve to say you're my friend," all those lines, and everyone would sit around and think they knew everybody in the song, a song that they might be thinking about writing, and they would say, "Damn, he wrote it before me."
We would be at the Kettle, and David Blue and Eric Andersen would be there, and the Gorson office would be there, me and Phil Ochs and Tom Rush, and in comes Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan, and this is like the killers coming in, with Bobby Neuwirth, who was the hired gun of Albert Grossman and the cutting edge of Dylan, like Dylan's hired killer with words. Neuwirth was a singer-songwriter, but not developed at that point. He was so sharp and so recklessly brilliant, and also so frustrated. So there they would be, and everybody would go at each other. They called it rapping. It was a very clever scene. Mainly sitting around being really tough on each other, tearing each other's songs apart: "Man, you can't use that word, I use that word"—that type of thing. And everyone would go away and the next day come back with new songs, and be criticized and torn apart again.
BOB NEUWIRTH: It was pretty much dog eat dog, heavy fire.
PAUL NELSON: Phil told me this story. He had spent weeks writing 'Changes,' which was sort of away from his usual topical themes, and he was pretty proud of this song. Dylan dropped over to his apartment and Phil wanted to play it for him, and Dylan said, "Oh, yeah, here's something I just knocked out in ten minutes, tell me what you think." And it was 'Like a Rolling Stone.' Phil worked on his song for two months, and this guy bashes out 'Like a Rolling Stone' in ten minutes on the way over to your house. That was the position they were all in.
PAUL SIEBEL: Yes, Dylan was the center, and everyone watched and followed him. I was at the Gaslight one night to see Judy Henske when Dylan walked in. The Gaslight had a strange seating arrangement, with benches. I was sitting facing the stage, and one of the dishwashers who was into the folk scene was sitting facing me, facing the back, and we were sitting there talking quietly, and all of a sudden he said, "He's here." His words: "He's here." Dylan came in with Al Grossman and sat in one of the booths, and I remember Judy Henske asking him to come up on stage and sing with her, and he wouldn't. And a few minutes later she got off, and Dylan was there a while, and within twenty or thirty minutes that little club was just stuffed, packed, jammed with people. All the Who's Who of the folk scene. And Dylan went up on stage and sang two songs that he hadn't recorded yet, 'It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)' and 'Tambourine Man.' None of us had ever heard those songs before, and he was like twenty feet in front of me. The most electrifying moment, I think, ever. And after he got through he just got up and everyone left . . .
MICHAEL OCHS: Phil always wanted to be as good as Dylan, but I don't think he ever believed he could be better, because Dylan was the Shakespeare of the Sixties, and Phil was always in Dylan's shadow.
BOB NEUWIRTH: And Dylan had enormous drive and energy and focus. I mean, he didn't get there by accident. He was career-oriented.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: Phil definitely had a Dylan phobia. And Dylan, and some of the people who were around Dylan, who were very tough, like Bobby Neuwirth, would put Phil down. They were very competitive.
JAC: It didn't do to criticize Dylan's songs to his face. Phil said 'Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window' wasn't going to be a hit, which it turned out not to be. But with Dylan, truth in criticism was no defense. When Phil gave his opinion, he was riding in Dylan's limo, and right then and there Bob ordered him out onto the streets of Manhattan. That's a diagnostic story in more than one way. It could have been a verse in a Dylan song—or in a song by somebody else about Dylan. Or it could have been a chapter lead in a biography of Phil.
Phil Ochs "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" EKS-7287
ARTHUR GORSON: Phil was an artist who wanted to be a star, and he had a tremendous degree of ego, and felt that he had a message. He was insanely driven.
JAC: He was very confused about what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be, and, most poignantly, who he really was.
OSCAR BRAND: The one thing he wanted was to be a national hit. But this he couldn't be, because his songs themselves preempted a small area and therefore precluded a large audience.
JAC: Every time Phil came to the office, he would inquire about his sales figures, as if they could give him validation.
STEVE HARRIS: The man did sell out Carnegie Hall.
ARTHUR GORSON: Phil would sing anywhere. He would go and play even if it cost us money. He would put every penny into getting to another town or another country. Then he would lose his tickets before he'd get to the airport and then get to the airport and lose his contact lenses, and then lose the piece of paper which told him what hotel to go to.
MICHAEL OCHS: He was very ingenuous. And he treated his fans that way, too. I mean, we'd be racing to catch a plane and somebody would stop him to ask a question and he'd stop and start talking to them. And it wasn't star to fan; if somebody was saying something that was interesting to him, he would stop and discuss it. He always came off as a guy you'd really like. He couldn't stand his own company, couldn't stand solitude. He always had to be around people. He would come back from a grueling six-month tour, drop his bags off at the house, run out, call Judy Henske, go visit Judy in Pasadena, then go visit someone in Hollywood. He just would never stop.
ED McCURDY: Ochs was a horrible singer, but with great charm, a very honest straightforward approach. He was a very nice man until he got hung up. I had a heart attack in Bryn Mawr and he happened to be in the neighborhood, so he came and finished the date for me, came out and visited me. We became quite friendly. Then he got into the booze and became very nasty.
JAC: We kept him on Elektra for three of the six albums we could contractually claim, and then he asked to be released because he felt we weren't doing enough for him. In a way that was true, because by then—and this is getting ahead of the story by several years—the whole music scene was shifting away from what Phil did, or at least what he did best, which was the topical political song. With fewer people listening, his personal devils took over.
MICHAEL OCHS: He was your typical person who can't face their own problems, so wants to live for the problems of others. I think his greatest wish would have been to have been shot on stage. To become a martyr for the cause. He was very depressed. There was a family history of manic depression, and basically, I think, Phil egged on the manic-depression thing, because he thought you have to suffer to create—the old artistic thing. I think he egged it on worse than it had to be, frankly.
Phil Ochs leans on the Establishment
TOM PAXTON: Phil was one of the most tortured people I have known personally. I think there was real disease there. For one thing, alcoholism, in a rampant stage. And clinical depression.
The last time I saw Phil, he was sitting on the stoop outside the Bitter End, and I had just come to work, and he called my name and we talked for a minute. He had some portable radio that he had obviously just bought and clearly would lose before the night was over. He said, "Let's go get a drink." I said, "Great, let me go put my guitar away." But I never came back out, because he was in terrible shape, and I just didn't want to be involved in what the rest of that evening was going to be about. Besides, I had to work.
OSCAR BRAND: I saw Phil the night before he died. He'd been up and down, but he said, "I'm really in the groove, I'm working like a dog, writing hundreds of new songs, I'm going back to California." And the next day he hanged himself.
MICHAEL OCHS: The last four months, I talked to him at least once a week, and he kept saying, the same question over and over again, "Will the songs survive, Michael? Will my songs survive?" And I would say, "Of course they will, Phil."
ARTHUR GORSON: For some years there was an annual Ochs tribute in New York. It was interesting to see all the young folk singers singing Phil Ochs songs. And Sean Penn wanted to play Phil in a movie.
