A Freewheelin' Time Read online

  That night, Pete was going on about something, in his gregarious way, and commented on a woman with a good pair of legs. In response, I pointed to Mark Spoelstra up on the stage and said, That cute guy up there has a nice pair of shoulders. Pete turned it into a running joke, pointing to guys and asking me what I thought of their shoulders. Not as nice as Mark’s, I’d reply. He has a real nice set.

  When Bob and Mark left the stage Pete called out: Hey, Mark Shoulders, come meet Suze. She says you’re cute.

  I was embarrassed and Mark looked confused. A natural storyteller, Pete often told the tale for laughs, until eventually it ended up revised and expanded in several books about Bob Dylan.

  In those years Little Italy extended into the streets of Greenwich Village below Washington Square Park and Gerde’s was a hangout for local Italians, stray musicians, and Village types. Mike Porco owned it and ran the place with his brothers. Mike was a warm, generous man, and if his English wasn’t perfect his instincts were. He knew a good thing when he saw it, whether it was a struggling musician or a business deal and he was always ready to give someone a chance. I’m sure Mike knew I was underage, yet when he found out I could draw he let me try my hand at making the fliers that advertised the performance schedule and I joined the ranks of his rotating stable of fledgling artists. One of his younger brothers who tended bar spoke very little English, but he had the vocabulary he felt went with his job. Looking at me meaningfully one night as he topped a drink with a maraschino cherry, he said, Girls gotta guard their cherries.

  I learned about Gerde’s history as a folk music club from the inimitable music man and raconteur, Dave Van Ronk. Dave always knew the story behind everything, and could tell it with the veracity and aplomb required to effectively eliminate other versions.

  Izzy Young (left) and Albert Grossman at the Folklore Center

  Sometime around 1959, Israel “Izzy” Young and a friend approached Mike Porco about making Gerde’s into a club for folk music. They wanted to call it The Fifth Peg (as in the fifth peg on a banjo). Mike wasn’t aware of the growing popularity of folk music, but he was game to try something that would improve business. He did have music in the bar now and then, some jazz or blues musicians and the occasional accordion player. It never hurt, so he said sure.

  The verbal agreement was simple: Izzy and his partner would charge an entry fee and out of that they would pay the performers and for publicity, while Mike would keep the profits from the sale of drinks and food. Mike couldn’t lose, but it wasn’t a winning deal for Izzy. Word spread that there was a bar in the Village that featured live folk music, and people started coming to listen. Soon Gerde’s evolved into a destination.

  The disastrous finances made it inevitable that others more savvy in the ways of running a club would ease Izzy out. The Fifth Peg reverted to its original name of Gerde’s, to which Mike added Folk City, but most people just called it Gerde’s. (The origin of the name Gerde’s Bar and Restaurant goes back to the 1950s, when Mike bought what was then a hangout for local factory workers. He never changed the name.)

  Since Izzy Young didn’t specialize in hanging out, drinking, and smoking, he wasn’t around much in the evenings. He was the sole proprietor and founder of the Folklore Center over on MacDougal Street, a store that took up most of his time. Izzy sold books, magazines, broadsides, records, guitar strings, and anything else related to folk music and folklore. The store thrived as a gathering place for professional musicians, aspiring musicians, and folk music aficionados, with Izzy as its up-to-the-minute historian and archivist. You didn’t stop to talk to him unless you wanted to do a lot of listening. To engage with Izzy meant entering his universe, listening to his tales, and following his theories wherever they went. He never made much money at anything he did, even though he promoted many events in the world of folk music and folk dance. He was always full of information, ideas, and enthusiasms—his interests went way beyond the borders of the folk world—but he had no business acumen. No one would dispute that Izzy Young played a significant role in the rise of folk music in the 1960s.

  Broadway was considered no-man’s-land, dividing Greenwich Village from the Lower East Side (soon to be renamed the East Village). During the day, the area around Broadway and Mercer Street was bustling with small manufacturing businesses on every floor of the ornate loft buildings, but after five there was no activity anywhere except on West Fourth Street, at Gerde’s. Most of the coffeehouses and other music clubs were farther west on MacDougal and Bleecker Streets.

  The entrance to Gerde’s opened onto a small vestibule with another door that led into the place proper. The bar was straight ahead. Just to the left of the door, past a dividing wall maybe four and a half feet high, was a small elevated stage against the back wall. Directly in front of the stage were the tables and chairs with waiter service. The dividing wall continued opposite the bar, and customers there could lean over it and watch the show, drinks in hand. Sitting on a bar stool afforded a view only of the top of a performer’s head. Past the length of the bar was a door leading down a steep flight of stairs to the basement, where the food, booze, and performers were stored.

  If there were more than three people onstage at the same time, it was a crowd. It was fun to watch the bluegrass musicians choreograph their moves. They had to angle their instruments—guitar, banjo, and mandolin—just so, to be able to come together at the one microphone and sing a chorus, then separate for solos, without a collision. The music spanned a variety of genres that included, besides bluegrass, traditional ballads, folk songs in many languages from many lands, blues, and gospel. Whoever came through the doors and signed up to play could perform at the Monday night hootenannies. Gerde’s was on the bar circuit for jazz and blues artists of an earlier generation, from the forties and fifties, artists who’d encountered the legendary musicians of the twenties and thirties when they started out. Many who were playing gigs at Gerde’s were legends in their own time and carried a long history of musical information for the younger players to learn from.

  Bob Dylan played harmonica for many of the older musicians when they performed at Gerde’s Folk City: Victoria Spivey, a blues and jazz singer and pianist, and blues man Lonnie Johnson, both of whom worked with Louis Armstrong in the twenties, and Big Joe Williams, born in 1903, who probably played with every musician over the years, all the way into the sixties in New York City.

  I had a special weakness for the harmonica. I loved that bluesy wail and crying sound. When I was a child my parents played recordings of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and I was enchanted by Sonny Terry’s harmonica playing. When Bob played harmonica for other musicians he was unobtrusive, standing at the back of the little stage, yielding to the main performer but really wailing and tearing into the harp. I liked to watch him go at it.

  When he played with the veterans Bob called himself Blind Boy Grunt as a tribute to, and playful take on, the nicknames of the blues and jazz greats who preceded the young white pretenders. He had the eyeglasses for the role. After a gig at Café Lena’s in Saratoga Springs, New York, we spent a week at the home of photographer Joe Alper and his family in Schenectady, New York. At a thrift shop in town Bob found a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses with opaque blue glass lenses in them.

  At a certain point Mike Porco had asked Charlie Rothschild, who was not a musician but knew the ins and outs of the folk music world, to take over the job of booking musicians at Gerde’s. Since it had been Izzy Young’s idea to turn Gerde’s into a folk club in the first place, his replacement by Charlie resulted in a bit of a dustup. Izzy put up a sign at the Folklore Center in essence proclaiming, “Charlie Rothschild: Wanted for Theft.” Izzy was furious about the injustice; Charlie was grateful for the fifty bucks a week Mike Porco paid him to hire folksingers and to emcee, as well.

  By the time I started going to Gerde’s in the spring of 1961, the tiff was history. Mike himself was doing the hiring (with input from the club’s regulars) and most of the emcee wor
k was handled by the flamboyant Brother John Sellers and the folksinger Gil Turner.

  In between sets some of the musicians would jam with each other in the basement or, in good weather, outside on the loading dock around the corner on Mercer Street. Eventually Mike Porco or Brother John Sellers or perhaps the musicians themselves would mix up the sets onstage so they could play together for the audience. It made for great music. On those nights at Gerde’s, the cross-fertilization of different styles and musical eras forged important links in the chain of American musical history.

  John Lee Hooker was one of the blues singers on the circuit. He used to sit quietly on a stool at the bar and smile at anyone who spoke to him. He stuttered when he talked, but not when he performed. When his name was announced to play a set one night, to me it was like hearing that someone as mythic as Woody Guthrie was in the room. I had no idea John Lee Hooker was alive, let alone performing in New York City.

  Just a couple of years earlier, when I was still in high school, I’d headed to Harlem to work for the civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, who was running Youth March for Integrated Schools. Before climbing the stairs to Youth March headquarters on 125th Street, I would stop by the record store next door, a small, narrow place full of albums in wooden bins where the owner always had a record playing. One day as I walked in, I heard music that stopped me in my tracks. It was as if the store were suddenly enveloped in an intense glow, and I lost a sense of where I was, aware only of the sound coming from the speakers. I was transfixed by the thumping guitar beat and the thick deep baritone of the singer. I had never heard anything like it and I don’t think I moved an inch until the end of side 2, when I managed to ask, What was that?

  The guy behind the counter showed me the album cover, with a drawing of a truck in the grass and the name John Lee Hooker written across it. I couldn’t wait to take it home and play it for my sister. I bought it and ran up the stairs with my treasure.

  When John Lee Hooker’s name was announced at Gerde’s no one else seemed to think it was a big deal, but I insisted to everyone around me that they had to listen to him. I don’t remember what he played that night, but the room got quiet when he took the stage. When his set was over and he walked back to the bar and sat down, I overcame my shyness and went over to him, though it was a while before I managed to tell him how I first heard one of his albums and how much I loved it. Whenever John was around, I would talk with him. And when Bob and I were together, the friendship expanded. The Broadway Central Hotel, just a block or two away from Gerde’s, was the place where traveling musicians stayed, including Hooker. It became another spot for musicians to hang out and jam together.

  It took way too long for John Lee Hooker to become famous, but even though he was a shy and unassuming man, he was very smart and knew how to protect his interests.

  Decades later, when a music writer friend, Tony Scher-man, was doing an interview with Hooker, the old blues man began to reminisce about his early days in Greenwich Village with Bob and Suze. Tony told him he knew me and gave him an update. After a blues concert at the Beacon Theater in 1991 where John Lee Hooker was the headliner, his manager brought me backstage. When John saw me, he raised his hands in the air like the Healer, grinned, and said, Hey, Suze! The good old days!

  Queens

  I was born in Sunnyside, Queens, across the bridge from Manhattan. My actual birth took place in Brooklyn, though—in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital—where a sympathetic doctor took good care of young Communist women with little money who were starting families.

  My parents had moved to Queens from an apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village around 1940, shortly after they were married. Like several of their friends who had joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s and were now married with children on the way, they moved to a complex of apartments called Sunnyside Gardens specifically designed for working-class families by an architect who was the father of one of the couples. The apartments themselves were small but had back doors opening onto little gardens that were a nice draw for growing families. My parents and their friends who went to live there were on the left, but the residents in general were politically all over the map, a mix of new and old Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and religions.

  Several of our family’s friends moved away to modern homes they were building on a rural wooded lane in Rye, New York, in Westchester County. There they reestablished the left-wing community they’d had in Sunnyside, but in more luxurious homes and surroundings.

  The Rotolo family never made it to suburbia. My father was an artist but couldn’t support a family as a painter and instead found work at various factory jobs, joining the shop union or, if no union existed, organizing one. As a result, he was fired often and was on strike even more often. He felt very strongly about the importance of unions, for white-and blue-collar workers alike. Working conditions were terrible in the early half of the last century, and the fight to establish unions that could guarantee eight-hour days, eliminate child labor, and deliver a decent environment for the working man and woman was essential. So many benefits now taken for granted were fought for long and hard, and the story of this struggle has largely been ignored. It is a proud history that affected labor conditions worldwide for the better.

  My father, Gioachino Pietro Rotolo, was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1912. In the 1970s I went to Bagheria, which by then had become a suburb of Palermo and was no longer the rock pile so many poor Italians had escaped from to find a livelihood in America and elsewhere. “Rock pile” is really a misnomer. Tony Buttitta, a writer I knew in Greenwich Village who was born in 1907 and died when he was well into his nineties, was also from Bagheria. He dispelled the notion of rock pile, telling me about the many poets, writers, and artists born there who gained national fame in Italy and abroad. Most had left for someplace else, I reminded him, but I understood what he meant to convey.

  In Bagheria, the Rotolo family worked as either bottai, barrel makers for wine, or in ferro battuto, decorative iron-work. My grandfather Andrea Rotolo was in the latter trade and as a skilled iron maker found work fairly easily in the new country of America. He emigrated in the late 1890s and traveled back and forth to Sicily several times before finally settling in New York.

  My father came to the United States in 1914, when he was two, with his mother, his older brother, Filippo, and his older sister, Francesca. They joined his father, who had already established a home for them in a brownstone at 321 Sackett Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood where many other Italian immigrants had settled. Today the area is known as Carroll Gardens.

  Gioachino, Joachim or Jack in English, chose to go by the name Pete, which was the translation of his middle name, Pietro. He grew up speaking Sicilian at home and English everywhere else. His mother, Marianna, acceded to her children’s wishes that she use their American names and called her youngest son Jack. I still remember her at his funeral years later, standing at his graveside as the first shovelful of dirt hit his coffin, calling quietly, Jack, Jack…

  A skilled dressmaker, my grandmother found work in the garment industry even though she didn’t speak fluent English. She worked hard, as did the many other immigrants who came to America during the European immigration boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was fortunate not to have worked in the sweatshops of lower Manhattan, where the disastrous conditions resulted in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in which so many young Italian and Jewish women died. Instead she worked in the Garment District, farther uptown, where the conditions and pay were better.

  My grandparents did well. Their oldest son, Philip, became an engineer; Frances was an executive secretary (now her title would be executive assistant); and their youngest, Pete, my father, was an artist who won a scholarship to Pratt Institute, unusual in those times for the son of an immigrant family.

  My father always said that no job is worth doing if it is not worth doing well, and to never undervalue the importance
of work. His dedication to these beliefs as a young man led him to the writings of John Reed. Sometime during the Depression he joined a John Reed Club, and there he found the Communist Party. His commitment to the importance of union organizing began then. When he met my mother, he proposed to her with the words “I think I need to set up a picket line around you.”

  My parents, Pete and Mary Rotolo, 1940

  He became a union organizer. That was his duty, his “Communist” work. He rarely painted, yet he did get a few editorial illustration jobs for the New York Times and other periodicals. After he died my mother told us that he had turned down an offer to teach art at a school in upstate New York but had let her know about it only after the opportunity had long passed.

  My parents had been radicalized by the class differences they saw firsthand, but especially and irrevocably by the fate of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants involved with the anarchist movement who were accused of a robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. After a tumultuous trial and worldwide attention to their case, they were put to death seven years later. Books, plays, movies, and songs have been written about the prejudices of the presiding judge, the unfairness of the trial, and the terrible anti-immigrant, antiradical climate of the time. Growing up, both my parents were influenced by the terrible prejudice against Italian immigrants, and the injustices surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti story.

  My mother was an editor and columnist for L’Unità, the American version of the Italian Communist paper of the same name. She was paid very little, if anything, and times were very hard for my parents, especially with two children. During our childhood, my sister and I were sent to live with my mother’s relatives outside of Boston when times were especially difficult. We were separated; Carla would be placed with one set of relatives, and I’d go to another. I remember being frightened by these stays away from home. The relatives who took me in were loving and attentive, but because I was a very shy and overly sensitive child, I was not easily comforted.