1
Markinâ Up the
Score
LOU LEVY, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded âRock Around the Clockââthen down to Jack Dempseyâs restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.
Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.
âYou look too light for a heavyweight kid, youâll have to put on a few pounds. Youâre gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharperânot that youâll need much in the way of clothes when youâre in the ringâdonât be afraid of hitting somebody too hard.â
âHeâs not a boxer, Jack, heâs a songwriter and weâll be publishing his songs.â
âOh, yeah, well I hope to hear âem some of these days. Good luck to you, kid.â
Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled upâsalesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.
None of it seemed important. I had just signed a contract with Leeds Music giving it the right to publish my songs, not that there was any great deal to hammer out. I hadnât written much yet. Lou had advanced me a hundred dollars against future royalties to sign the paper and that was fine with me.
John Hammond, who had brought me to Columbia Records, had taken me over to see Lou, asked him to look after me. Hammond had only heard two of my original compositions, but he had a premonition that there would be more.
Back at Louâs office, I opened my guitar case, took the guitar out and began fingering the strings. The room was clutteredâboxes of sheet music stacked up, recording dates of artists posted on bulletin boards, black lacquered discs, acetates with white labels scrambled around, signed photos of entertainers, glossy portraitsâJerry Vale, Al Martino, The Andrews Sisters (Lou was married to one of them), Nat King Cole, Patti Page, The Crew Cutsâa couple of console reel-to-reel tape recorders, big dark brown wooden desk full of hodgepodge. Lou had put a microphone on the desk in front of me and plugged the cord into one of the tape recorders, all the while chomping on a big exotic stogie.
âJohnâs got high hopes for you,â Lou said.
John was John Hammond, the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists, imposing figures in the history of recorded musicâBillie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Christian, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton. Artists who had created music that resonated through American life. He had brought it all to the public eye. Hammond had even conducted the last recording sessions of Bessie Smith. He was legendary, pure American aristocracy. His mother was an original Vanderbilt, and John had been raised in the upper world, in comfort and easeâbut he wasnât satisfied and had followed his own heartâs love, music, preferably the ringing rhythm of hot jazz, spirituals and bluesâwhich he endorsed and defended with his life. No one could block his way, and he didnât have time to waste. I could hardly believe myself awake when sitting in his office, him signing me to Columbia Records was so unbelievable. It would have sounded like a made-up thing.
Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was considered junky, second rate and only released on small labels. Big-time record companies were strictly for the elite, for music that was sanitized and pasteurized. Someone like myself would never be allowed in except under extraordinary circumstances. But John was an extraordinary man. He didnât make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come. He explained that he saw me as someone in the long line of a tradition, the tradition of blues, jazz and folk and not as some newfangled wunderkind on the cutting edge. Not that there was any cutting edge. Things were pretty sleepy on the Americana music scene in the late â50s and early â60s. Popular radio was sort of at a standstill and filled with empty pleasantries. It was years before The Beatles, The Who or The Rolling Stones would breathe new life and excitement into it. What I was playing at the time were hard-lipped folk songs with fire and brimstone servings, and you didnât need to take polls to know that they didnât match up with anything on the radio, didnât lend themselves to commercialism, but John told me that these things werenât high on his list and he understood all the implications of what I did.
âI understand sincerity,â is what he said. John spoke with a rough, coarse attitude, yet had an appreciative twinkle in his eye.
Recently he had brought Pete Seeger to the label. He didnât discover Pete, though. Pete had been around for years. Heâd been in the popular folk group The Weavers, but had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped working. Hammond was defiant when he spoke about Seeger, that Peteâs ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, that his relatives had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, for Christsake. âCan you imagine those sons of bitches blacklisting him? They should be tarred and feathered.â
âIâm gonna give you all the facts,â he said to me. âYouâre a talented young man. If you can focus and control that talent, youâll be fine. Iâm gonna bring you in and Iâm gonna record you. Weâll see what happens.â
And that was good enough for me. He put a contract in front of me, the standard one, and I signed it right then and there, didnât get absorbed into detailsâdidnât need a lawyer, advisor or anybody looking over my shoulder. I would have gladly signed whatever form he put in front of me.
He looked at the calendar, picked out a date for me to start recording, pointed to it and circled it, told me what time to come in and to think about what I wanted to play. Then he called in Billy James, the head of publicity at the label, told Billy to write some promo stuff on me, personal stuff for a press release.
Billy dressed Ivy League like he could have come out of Yaleâmedium height, crisp black hair. He looked like heâd never been stoned a day in his life, never been in any kind of trouble. I strolled into his office, sat down opposite his desk, and he tried to get me to cough up some facts, like I was supposed to give them to him straight and square. He took out a notepad and pencil and asked me where I was from. I told him I was from Illinois and he wrote it down. He asked me if I ever did any other work and I told him that I had a dozen jobs, drove a bakery truck once. He wrote that down and asked me if there was anything else. I said Iâd worked construction and he asked me where.
âDetroit.â
âYou traveled around?â
âYep.â
He asked me about my family, where they were. I told him I had no idea, that they were long gone.
âWhat was your home life like?â
I told him Iâd been kicked out.
âWhat did your father do?â
â âlectrician.â
âAnd your mother, what about her?â
âHousewife.â
âWhat kind of music do you play?â
âFolk music.â
âWhat kind of music is folk music?â
I told him it was handed down songs. I hated these kind of questions. Felt I could ignore them. Billy seemed unsure of me and that was just fine. I didnât feel like answering his questions anyway, didnât feel the need to explain anything to anybody.
âHow did you get here?â he asked me.
âI rode a freight train.â
âYou mean a passenger train?â
âNo, a freight train.â
âYou mean, like a boxcar?â
âYeah, like a boxcar. Like a freight train.â
âOkay, a freight train.â
I gazed past Billy, past his chair through his window across the street to an office building where I could see a blazing secretary soaked up in the spirit of somethingâshe was scribbling busy, occupied at a desk in a meditative manner. There was nothing funny about her. I wished I had a telescope. Billy asked me who I saw myself like in todayâs music scene. I told him, nobody. That part of things was true, I really didnât see myself like anybody. The rest of it, though, was pure hokumâhophead talk.
I hadnât come in on a freight train at all. What I did was come across the country from the Midwest in a four-door sedan, â57 Impalaâstraight out of Chicago, clearing the hell out of thereâracing all the way through the smoky towns, winding roads, green fields covered with snow, onward, eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, a twenty-four-hour ride, dozing most of the way in the backseat, making small talk. My mind fixed on hidden interestsâŠeventually riding over the George Washington Bridge.
The big car came to a full stop on the other side and let me out. I slammed the door shut behind me, waved good-bye, stepped out onto the hard snow. The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasnât going to try.
I was there to find singers, the ones Iâd heard on recordâDave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of othersâmost of all to find Woody Guthrie. New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.
When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but Iâd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didnât faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasnât money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didnât need any guarantee of validity. I didnât know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to changeâand quick.
The CafĂ© Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The place was a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tablesâopened at noon, closed at four in the morning. Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?
I found the place and was told that Freddy was downstairs in the basement where the coats and hats were checked and thatâs where I met him. Neil was the MC of the room and the maestro in charge of all the entertainers. He couldnât have been nicer. He asked me what I did and I told him I sang, played guitar and harmonica. He asked me to play something. After about a minute, he said I could play harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. At least it was a place to stay out of the cold. This was good.
Fred played for about twenty minutes and then introduced all the rest of the acts, then came back up to play whenever he felt like it, whenever the joint was packed. The acts were disjointed, awkward and seemed to have come from the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a popular TV show. The audience was mostly collegiate types, suburbanites, lunch-hour secretaries, sailors and tourists. Everybody performed from ten to fifteen minutes. Fred would play for however long he felt, however long the inspiration would last. Freddy had the flow, dressed conservatively, sullen and brooding, with an enigmatical gaze, peachlike complexion, hair splashed with curls and an angry and powerful baritone voice that struck blue notes and blasted them to the rafters with or without a mike. He was the emperor of the place, even had his own harem, his devotees. You couldnât touch him. Everything revolved around him. Years later, Freddy would write the hit song âEverybodyâs Talkinâ.â I never played any of my own sets. I just accompanied Neil on all of his and thatâs where I began playing regular in New York.
The daytime show at the CafĂ© Wha?, an extravaganza of patchwork, featured anybody and anythingâa comedian, a ventriloquist, a steel drum group, a poet, a female impersonator, a duo who sang Broadway stuff, a rabbit-in-the-hat magician, a guy wearing a turban who hypnotized people in the audience, somebody whose entire act was facial acrobaticsâjust anybody who wanted to break into show business. Nothing that would change your view of the world. I wouldnât have wanted Fredâs gig for anything.
At about eight oâclock, the whole daytime menagerie would come to a halt and then the professional show would begin. Comedians like Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Lenny Bruce and commercial folksinging groups like The Journeymen would command the stage. Everyone who had been there during the day would pack up. One of the guys who played in the afternoons was the falsetto-speaking Tiny Tim. He played ukulele and sang like a girlâold standard songs from the â20s. I got to talking to him a few times and asked him what other kinds of places there were to work around here and he told me that sometimes he played at a place in Times Square called Hubertâs Flea Circus Museum. Iâd find out about that place later.
Fred was constantly being pestered and pressured by moocher types who wanted to play or perform one thing or another. The saddest character of all was a guy named Billy the Butcher. He looked like he came out of nightmare alley. He only played one songââHigh-Heel Sneakersâ and he was addicted to it like a drug. Fred would usually let him play it sometime during the day, mostly when the place was empty. Billy would always preface his song by saying âThis is for all you chicks.â The Butcher wore an overcoat that was too small for him, buttoned tight across the chest. He was jittery and sometime in the past heâd been in a straitjacket in Bellevue, also had burned a mattress in a jail cell. All kinds of bad things had happened to Billy. There was a fire between him and everybody else. He sang that one song pretty good, though.
Another popular guy wore a priestâs outfit and red-topped boots with little bells and did warped takes on stories from the Bible. Moondog also performed down here. Moondog was a blind poet who lived mostly on the streets. He wore a Viking helmet and a blanket with high fur boots. Moondog did monologues, played bamboo pipes and whistles. Most of the time he performed on 42nd Street.
My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. Iâd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holidayâs and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.
Fred always tried to make a place for most performers and was as diplomatic as possible. Sometimes the room would be inexplicably empty, sometimes half-empty and then suddenly for no apparent reason it would be flushed with people with lines outside. Fred was the man down here, the main attraction and his name was on the marquee, so maybe a lot of these people came to see him. I donât know. He played a big dreadnought guitar, lot of percussion in his playing, piercing driving rhythmâa one-man band, a kick in the head singing voice. He did fierce versions of hybrid chain gang songs and whomped the audience into a frenzy. Iâd heard stuff about him, that he was an errant sailor, harbored a skiff in Florida, was an underground cop, had hooker friends and a shadowy past. Heâd come up to Nashville, drop off songs that he wrote and then head for New York where heâd lay low, wait for something to blow over and fill up his pockets with wampum. Whatever it was, it wasnât a huge story. He seemed to have no aspirations. We were very compatible, didnât talk personal at all. He was very much like me, polite but not overly friendly, gave me pocket change at the end of the day, said âHereâŠso youâll keep out of trouble.â
The best part of working with him, though, was strictly gastronomicalâall the French fries and hamburgers I could eat. At some point during the day, Tiny Tim and I would go in the kitchen and hang around. Norbert the cook would usually have a greasy burger waiting. Either that, or heâd let us empty a can of pork and beans or spaghetti into a frying pan. Norbert was a trip. He wore a tomato-stained apron, had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of clawsâthought of himself as a ladyâs manâsaving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy and visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. The kitchen was like a cave bored into the side of a cliff.
One afternoon I was in there pouring Coke into a glass from a milk pitcher when I heard a voice coming cool through the screen of the radio speaker. Ricky Nelson was singing his new song, âTravelinâ Man.â Ricky had a smooth touch, the way he crooned in fast rhythm, the tonation of his voice. He was different than the rest of the teen idols,...