A Freewheelin' Time Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map Key

  Map of Greenwich Village

  Backstory

  Part One

  Portrait

  Folk City

  Queens

  Death

  Beginnings

  Identity

  Leaving Home

  Sideswipes

  After Effects

  In the Name of Love

  Precious Time

  The Street

  Denizens

  Behind the Music

  Words and Music

  Downtown

  Particular

  Self-Titled

  Southern Journey

  Part Two

  Italy and Indecision

  Re-Entry

  Art and Influences

  Record Time

  Art and Music

  Brecht

  There but for Fortune

  Hide and Seek

  Woman Troubles

  Time Out of Mind

  Not Dark Yet

  Reflections

  Art Is Work

  Habits

  Part Three

  Restart

  Cuba

  Avenue B Mob

  Cambridge

  Fluctuations

  Slum Goddess

  Summer

  Don’t Look Back

  Wrap

  Endnote

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  Copyright

  For Luca

  so he will know

  and Enzo

  who always did

  “Who are we,

  if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

  Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.”

  ITALO CALVINO,

  Six Memos for the Next Millennium

  * * *

  1 GERDE’S FOLK CITY

  N.E. CORNER OF W.4TH & MERCER

  2 GASLIGHT

  118 MACDOUGAL BETWEEN W.3RD & BLEECKER, EAST SIDE OF STREET

  3 KETTLE OF FISH

  118 MACDOUGAL BETWEEN W.3RD & BLEECKER, EAST SIDE OF STREET

  4 THE BITTER END

  BLEECKER, BETWEEN LAGUARDIA & THOMPSON, NORTH SIDE OF STREET

  5 WHITE HORSE

  567 HUDSON AT 11TH STREET

  6 LIMELIGHT

  SEVENTH AVENUE SOUTH, BETWEEN BARROW & BLEECKER, EAST SIDE OF STREET

  7 RIVIERA

  SHERIDAN SQUARE, SEVENTH AVENUE SOUTH, AT W.4TH, N.W. CORNER

  8 THE BAGEL

  W.4TH, WEST OF SIXTH AVENUE, SOUTH SIDE OF STREET

  9 THEATRE de Lys

  121 CHRISTOPHER AT BEDFORD

  10 SHERIDAN SQUARE PLAYHOUSE

  SEVENTH AVENUE SOUTH BETWEEN GROVE & BARROW, EAST SIDE OF STREET

  a 185 EAST 3RD STREET

  BAILEYS’ APARTMENT, BETWEEN AVENUES A & B

  b 190 WAVERLY PLACE

  VAN RONK’S APARTMENT, BETWEEN W.10TH & CHARLES

  c WAVERLY PLACE APARTMENT

  BETWEEN MACDOUGAL & SIXTH AVENUE

  d 129 PERRY STREET

  BETWEEN GREENWICH & WASHINGTON

  e ONE SHERIDAN SQUARE

  AT APEX OF BARROW, W.4TH, & WASHINGTON PLACE

  f 161 WEST 4TH STREET

  BETWEEN CORNELIA & JONES

  g 106 AVENUE B

  CORNER OF 7TH STREET ON AVENUE B

  h 309 EAST HOUSTON

  BETWEEN CLINTON AND ATTORNEY, SOUTH SIDE OF STREET

  i 344 WEST 12TH STREET

  BETWEEN GREENWICH & WASHINGTON

  j 196 WEST 10TH STREET

  BETWEEN W.4TH & BLEECKER

  * * *

  BACKSTORY

  I MET BOB DYLAN in 1961 when I was seventeen years old and he was twenty. This book is a memoir of my life as it intertwined with his during the formative years of the 1960s.

  I’ve always had trouble talking or reminiscing about the 1960s because of my place close to Dylan, the mover and shaper of the culture of that era. The kind of adulation and scrutiny he received made that conversation awkward for me. He became an elephant in the room of my life. I am private by nature, and my instinct was to protect my privacy, and consequently his.

  I was writing a bit before we met—poems, little stories, observations—and I kept at it while I was with him. The writings served the same purpose as the sketchbooks I kept—except that these were verbal drawings:

  Memory

  It isn’t you baby, it’s me and my ghost and your holy ghost.

  There is a saying about one’s past catching up with them

  mine not only did that, it overran the present.

  So tomorrow when the future takes hold

  I’ll be sitting in the background with the Surrealists.

  Though I no longer remember what triggered those thoughts, recorded in January 1963, reading them in the present gives me an eerie feeling of prescience. In so many ways my past with Bob Dylan has always been a presence, a parallel life alongside my own, no matter where I am, who I’m with, or what I am doing.

  Dylan’s public, his fans and followers, create him in their own image. They expect him to be who they interpret him to be. The very mention of his name invokes his myth and unleashes an insurmountable amount of minutiae about the meaning of every word he ever uttered, wrote, or sang.

  As Bob Dylan’s fame grew so far out of bounds, I felt I had secrets to keep. Though I kept my silence, I didn’t relish being the custodian of such things. Time passes and the weight of secrets dissipates. Articles are written and biographies are churned out that trigger memories only because they are often far from the reality I knew. They tend to be lackluster yet fascinating in their fantasy. I acknowledge that memory is a fickle beast. Fragments of stories stride in and out; some leave traces, while others do not.

  Secrets remain. Their traces go deep, and with all due respect I keep them with my own. The only claim I make for writing a memoir of that time is that it may not be factual, but it is true.

  In these times, seeing Bob Dylan’s life and work and the people he was close to documented or fictionalized on film, on display in museum exhibits and other commemorations in all categories, only intensifies the feeling I have of possessing a parallel life. It is an odd sensation to see myself on the screen, under glass, and written about in books, forever enshrined and entombed alongside the Legend of Dylan.

  When I look at the pictures and hear the songs I also see and hear the story behind them. A still photograph morphs into a home movie and a scrawl on a page evokes a scene in a room or on a street. I hear a laugh coming from somewhere off to the side…

  It has taken me many years to allow my parallel lives to converge. But there will always be a space between the image and the reality because ghosts live there and they cannot be contained under glass. Over time I have learned to be more at ease with the holy fascination people have with Bob Dylan. A song, a poem, a book, a film, an exhibit are simply representations of a period, a place, a person. And because memory is the joker in the deck I try not to take the representations of the past too seriously. Life goes on for those who live it in the present. Nostalgia, cheap or otherwise, is always costly.

  I see history as a reliquary—a container where relics are kept and displayed for contemplation. So much has been written about the sixties that the more distant those years become, the more mythic the tales and the time seem to be. Facts and statistics are pliable. Truth and accuracy are truly Rashomon-like. Each story is true from the teller’s perspective; the weight shifts
. My decision to add my relics was not an easy one. Hindsight meddles with memory, after all, so the best I can do in writing about those long-ago years is to try to make them recognizable.

  The stories I tell are about my place within that time and about the early years that made me who I was when I migrated from Queens, New York, to Greenwich Village. The backstory has to be considered: where my family came from, who they were, and all the other bits and pieces that make a person whole. I reminisce to the best of my ability.

  Since I was born in one of the boroughs of New York City, the concept of coming to the city to find (or lose) oneself doesn’t apply. But it was to Greenwich Village that people like me went—people who knew in their souls that they didn’t belong where they came from. I was drawn to the Village with its history of bohemia—where the writers I was reading and the artists I was looking at had lived or passed through. Their spirits led the way, showed me the road, and named the place. I got on the subway.

  The 1960s were an amazing time, an eventful time of protest and rebellion. An entire generation had permission to drink alcohol and die in a war at eighteen, but it had no voting voice until the age of twenty-one. Upheaval was inevitable. Talk made music, and music made talk. Action was in the civil rights marches, marches against the bomb, and marches against an escalating war in Vietnam. It was a march out of a time, too—out of the constricted and rigid morality of the 1950s. The Beats had already cracked the façade and we, the next generation, broke through it.

  Traveling with the past within us, we were ready to roll into the future. It has now become a historical time made up of many personal stories, songs, and sidebars. There are many reliquaries from that era in American life. This is mine.

  Part One

  Preamble

  Love:

  Excitement anticipation big joy big bang big bliss big white-hot sizzle in the gut.

  A person in love appears perfectly normal within his or her own parameters of normal.

  Nothing seems out of the ordinary other than a noticeable shift to a lighter mood. But the inner personality is ecstatic—jumping about pumping the air with unrestrained happiness—shouting big gusts of glee.

  A photo Bob gave me not long after we met

  Portrait

  In the 1960s Bobby wore a black corduroy cap, with the snap on the brim undone, over his head of curly khaki-colored hair. His clothes were sloppy and didn’t fit his body well. He wore shirts in drab colors, chinos and chunky boots, which later gave over to slimmer-fitting jeans and cowboy boots. I slit the bottom seams on his jeans and sewed in an inverted “U” from an older pair so they would slide over his boots. He is wearing them on the cover of the Another Side of Bob Dylan album. My solution was a precursor of the bell-bottoms that came on the market not too long afterward.

  He had baby fat, and Dave Van Ronk, already a well-known folk musician dubbed the Mayor of MacDougal Street, loved to tease him about the way he looked. As a folksinger, he advised, Bob had to develop and present an image to the outside world, his future public. Such things might have been talked about in jest, but in truth they were taken quite seriously. Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image meant everything. Folk music was taking hold of a generation and it was important to get it right, including the look—be authentic, be cool, and have something to say. That might seem naïve in comparison with the commercial sophistication and cynicism of today, but back then it was daring, underground, and revolutionary. We believed we could change perceptions and politics and the social order of things. We had something to say and believed that the times would definitely change.

  Bobby had an impish charm that older women found endearing, though my mother was immune. He was aware of it and used it when he could. But in general he was shy around people. He had a habit of pumping the air with his knees, a kind of marching in place, whether standing or sitting—all jumpy. Onstage he did it in time to the music. He looked good, despite his floppy clothes. He had a natural charisma, and people paid attention to him.

  At the height of his Woody Guthrie phase, he talked through his teeth and when he laughed he would toss back his head and make a cracking ha ha sound or a small ha, with fingers covering his mouth. His walk was a lurch in slow motion. He had a touch of arrogance, a good dose of paranoia, and a wonderful sense of the absurd.

  It was very important t him at that time t write as he spoke. Writin like speech an without havin any punctuation or t write out the word to.

  We got on really well, though neither one of us had any skin growing over our nerve endings. We were both overly sensitive and needed shelter from the storm. But Bobby was also tough and focused, and he had a healthy ego. The additional ingredients protected the intense sensitivity. As an artist he had what it took to become a success.

  We hadn’t been together long when we went to Philadelphia with Dave Van Ronk and his wife, Terri Thal, for a gig she had booked for the two of them at a coffeehouse. When Bobby got up on the stage, he stood straight with his head slightly back and his eyes nowhere and began to sing “Dink’s Song,” a traditional ballad I had heard sung before by others. I watched him as he sang:

  If I had wings like Nora’s dove

  I’d fly ’cross the river to the one I love

  Fare thee well oh honey,

  Fare thee well

  He started slow, building the rhythm on his guitar. Something about him caught my full attention.

  He pushed out the lyrics as he hit the strings with a steady, accelerating drumlike beat. The audience slowed their chattering; he stilled the room. It was as though I had never heard the song before. He stilled my room, for sure.

  In those early years Bob Dylan was a painter searching for his palette. He had in mind the pictures he wanted to paint; he just needed to find the right color mix to get him there. He savored all that was put before him, dabbing his brush here and there, testing, testing, adding new layers and scraping old ones away until he got what he wanted. He would delve into ideas—latch on to them with incredible intensity and deliberate their validity. He had an uncanny ability to complicate the obvious and sanctify the banal—just like a poet. Some hated that about him because they felt he was putting them on, scrambling their brains, which he was. It was his way of examining and investigating what was on his mind. It worked for me, even when he made me nuts at times, because I liked to ponder other possibilities too, to find the bit that made a thing that was smooth suddenly produce a bump.

  One evening we went to Emilio’s on Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street, a restaurant that was a fixture in what was then still an Italian neighborhood. It had a lovely outdoor garden in the back that compensated for the stereotypical food. Bobby was all fired up about the concept of freedom. What defined the essence of freedom?

  Were birds really free? he asked. They are chained to the sky, he said, where they are compelled to fly.

  So are they truly free?

  Folk City

  Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past.

  I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t
half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

  A drawing I did of Pete Karman

  Before I actually met Bob I was sitting with my friend Pete Karman at the bar one night at Gerde’s watching Bobby and Mark Spoelstra play. Pete was a journalist at the New York Mirror. Back then there were seven dailies, as I recall, and the Mirror was right up there with the best of the tabloids.

  Pete was a fellow red-diaper baby, as the offspring of Communists were called, who lived in Sunnyside, Queens, where I’d been born. He had gone through traumatic times, his parents having been jailed during the McCarthy era. His father was a Yugoslav seaman who had jumped ship as a young man. Left without papers, he also couldn’t get any because he had been born in Austria-Hungary, a nation that went out of business after World War I.

  Pete’s parents were involved with other Yugoslavs in the American Communist Party when a woman they knew informed on them. They were jailed for about six months under threat of deportation, although there was no country that would take them. Shortly after their release, Pete’s father died of a heart attack. Pete, a junior high school student, was home alone when two policemen rang his doorbell to give him the news. A few years later he met my older sister, Carla, and they became close friends. During those years he spent a lot of time at our Queens apartment talking politics with my mother and soon was part of the family. When I was living by myself at seventeen, house-sitting an apartment in the Village, my mother delegated Pete to be my surrogate guardian and asked him to keep an eye on me. I had been living pretty much without any parental supervision since my own father had died three years earlier, but since Pete took me into bars I saw no need to chafe at his guardianship. In those days the legal drinking age in New York was eighteen. Underage girls could get into bars without being carded as long as an older guy accompanied them: Pete was my passport to legality.