Early Music Scene
Imagine one night you head over to your favorite coffeehouse The Gaslight Cafe where you catch the end of a poetry reading when a young singer gets up on stage with his guitar and a funny contraption around his neck holding a harmonica. He introduces himself as Bob Dylan. He begins playing a Woody Guthrie song in a style that is unique and captivating, sounding both old and modern simultaneously. You sit and listen mesmerized.
The waitress, Mary, comes over and asks if you need another coffee and suggests you check out another club, ‘The Bitter End’ to catch a performance of her trio; Peter, Paul and Mary.
As Bob exits the stage, next up is a smoky, soulful vocalist Richie Havens who begins to perform. Soon you head down the street to Gerdies Folk City with some friends you just met where you hear a duo singing beautiful harmonies that fills the room with melancholy. They are called Simon & Garfunkel.
It may sound like a music lover’s dream come true but it’s just another night in Greenwich Village 1963. No one can possibly know then, the incalculable influence that this bohemian community will have on music and culture for decades to come. Every major musician from the sixties will make a pit stop in the Village at some point to live, perform or to soak up the creative magic in the air.
Free thinkers gravitate towards communities where they can live affordably, are accepted to create themselves, and where creativity flourishes. Never is that more evident as in this story of 1960’s Greenwich Village. While the location still exists the mindset has evaporated.
So what happened to the folk movement in Greenwich Village? Why did this freewheelin’ eccentric community collapse into just another gentrified dystopia? To figure that out, let’s look at how the prolific music community of Greenwich Village came to be, what changed and how it collapsed.
Greenwich Village was a beatnik enclave until many of the writers left for California in the late 1950’s. Dave Van Ronk stated: “The beatniks hated folk music. The real beats liked cool jazz, bebop, and hard drugs… But in the eye of the media, folk music and beatniks were one and the same. So a lot of people came to the Village to see the beatniks and they ended up seeing folk music.”.
Cafes Filled with Music
Most clubs held a weekly hootenanny night, in which unknown, up and coming musicians were given the opportunity to show their stuff onstage. At the basket houses, they passed the basket for coins for the folkies. Café Flamenco, The Commons, Gerdie’s Folk City, The Gaslight, Café Bizarre, Café Wha? The Bitter End, Café Figaro or The Village Gate opened their doors to new music.
When Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in January 1961 he was a Woody Guthrie fan and even visited him in upstate New York while he was in hospital treatment for Hodgkin’s Disease. When Bob brought back a signed note from Guthrie that said “I ain’t dead yet”, it gave Bob a level of credibility around the Village. Bob sang Woody Guthrie dustbowl ballads and many other traditional folk songs initially at coffee houses such as The Gaslight, Cafe Wha? and The Bitter End. Bob Dylan was also often found at Folklore Center owned by Izzy Young, soaking up anything he get his hands on at the cultivated store where rare folk records, books, line music and photographs were found by folk aficionados and up and comers.
Change is in the air
In 1963 ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ is released and soon Bob Dylan and Joan Baez perform at the march on Washington along with Peter, Paul and Mary from Greenwich Village.
Bob had played Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and 64 and although he had moved on from the Greenwich Village folk scene he agreed to play the 1965 festival. On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band and roared into a blistering version of “Maggie’s Farm”. At least half the crowd was astonished and booed him while the other half cheered him on.
While some booed him, others threatened to cut the cables from the electric band that was backing him. The reaction to his performance was controversial and downright spiteful.
On July 29, four days after Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording “Positively 4th Street”. The lyrics contained images of vengeance and have been interpreted as Dylan’s put-down of former friends from the folk community he had known in clubs along West 4th Street.
