Thought I'd Seen Some Ups and Downs: Bob Dylan Arrives in Greenwich Village

Ramblin' outa the wild West,
Leavin' the towns I love the best.
Thought I'd seen some ups and down,
‘Til I come into New York town.
People goin' down to the ground,
Buildings goin' up to the sky.

-- Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York

As we've blogged about before, Bob Dylan -- Nobel Laureate and towering figure in American popular music -- arrived in Greenwich Village either on January 23 or 24, 1961.

As we write in Footprints in New York, Dylan

grew up in the tight-knit Jewish community in Hibbing, his mother’s hometown. After graduating high school in 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota but only lasted one year. While he was there, he tapped into the burgeoning folk scene and began consistently using the stage name Bob Dylan. Having been a rock and roller, Dylan’s musical trajectory changed around this time when he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which, in Dylan’s words, “made my head spin.” 

In January 1961, he arrived in New York City determined to do two things: perform in Greenwich Village, the center of America’s folk music revival, and meet Woody Guthrie. By the end of his first week, he’d done both. Dylan probably got to the city January 23, the day the front page of the New York Times proclaimed it the “coldest winter in seventeen years,” a line Dylan would borrow for one of his earliest compositions, “Talkin’ New York.” In No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan’s early career, the singer remembers that first day: “I took the subway down to the Village. I went to the Cafe Wha?, I looked out at the crowd, and I most likely asked from the stage ‘Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?’” 

Dylan joins Karen Dalton and Fred Neil onstage at Cafe Wha? in 1961

Singer-songwriter Fred Neil presided over the bar’s eclectic all-day lineup. Dylan showed his chops by backing up Neil and singer Karen Dalton on the harmonica and was hired to “blow my lungs out for a dollar a day.” 

Immersing himself in the music scene, Dylan soaked up everything he heard, from live acts in the bars and coffee houses south of Washington Square to the records he’d spin at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center down the street from Cafe Wha?. In the meantime he continued to embellish his back story. In No Direction Home, Izzy Young recalls Dylan telling him, “I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, moved to Gallup, New Mexico; then until now lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota (for a little bit). Started playing in carnivals when I was fourteen, with guitar and piano. . . .” 

Later, newspapers picked up the fake biography, writing about the cowboy singer from Gallup. Stretching all the way back to the city’s Dutch pioneers, people have come to New York to reinvent themselves, to cast off their old identities and strike out in new directions. Dylan’s fanciful back story may have been an extreme case, but it was effective.

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Read the entire Dylan chapter in
Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers

 

and don't forget our first book

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City
NOW OUT AS AN AUDIOBOOK!

Postcard Thursday: Bob Dylan's Birthday

Happy 77th Birthday to Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, who was born May 24, 1941, in Duluth Minnesota. His birth name was Robert Zimmerman, and, as we write in Footprints in New York:

he grew up in the tight-knit Jewish community in Hibbing, his mother’s hometown. After graduating high school in 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota but only lasted one year. While he was there, he tapped into the burgeoning folk scene and began consistently using the stage name Bob Dylan. Having been a rock and roller, Dylan’s musical trajectory changed around this time when he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which, in Dylan’s words, “made my head spin.” 

In January 1961, he arrived in New York City determined to do two things: perform in Greenwich Village, the center of America’s folk music revival, and meet Woody Guthrie. By the end of his first week, he’d done both. Dylan probably got to the city January 23, the day the front page of the New York Times proclaimed it the “coldest winter in seventeen years,” a line Dylan would borrow for one of his earliest compositions, “Talkin’ New York.” In No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan’s early career, the singer remembers that first day: “I took the subway down to the Village. I went to the Cafe Wha?, I looked out at the crowd, and I most likely asked from the stage ‘Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?’” 

Singer-songwriter Fred Neil presided over the bar’s eclectic all-day lineup. Dylan showed his chops by backing up Neil and singer Karen Dalton on the harmonica and was hired to “blow my lungs out for a dollar a day.” 

Immersing himself in the music scene, Dylan soaked up everything he heard, from live acts in the bars and coffee houses south of Washington Square to the records he’d spin at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center down the street from Cafe Wha?. In the meantime he continued to embellish his back story. In No Direction Home, Izzy Young recalls Dylan telling him, “I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, moved to Gallup, New Mexico; then until now lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota (for a little bit). Started playing in carnivals when I was fourteen, with guitar and piano. . . .” 

Later, newspapers picked up the fake biography, writing about the cowboy singer from Gallup. Stretching all the way back to the city’s Dutch pioneers, people have come to New York to reinvent themselves, to cast off their old identities and strike out in new directions. Dylan’s fanciful back story may have been an extreme case, but it was effective.

Today, Dylan's career shows no sign of slowing down. In 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first musician to be given the honor. In 2017, he released Triplicate, a triple album of standards, many of which had been recorded by Frank Sinatra. And he continues to tour regularly, with a swing through Asia, Australia, and New Zealand coming up this summer.

This summer we'll conduct a tour of Bob Dylan's New York -- watch this blog for details.

In other news, our blog recently had its millionth visitor. Thank you all so much for your support!

* * * * Read more about NYC history in   Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Postcard Thursday: (Nobel Laureate) Bob Dylan in New York

As you may have heard, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning, which came as a shock to just about everyone. He is the first musician to be awarded the honor, and while he has long been seen as the leading figure in post-war music in America, this catapults his reputation to "a whole 'nother level."

We have a chapter about Dylan's New York in Footprints in New York, which includes a good precis of his time in the city.

As we write in the book, Dylan was

born as Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941; he grew up in the tight-knit Jewish community in Hibbing, his mother’s hometown. After graduating high school in 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota but only lasted one year. While he was there, he tapped into the burgeoning folk scene and began consistently using the stage name Bob Dylan. Having been a rock and roller, Dylan’s musical trajectory changed around this time when he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which, in Dylan’s words, “made my head spin.” 

In January 1961, he arrived in New York City determined to do two things: perform in Greenwich Village, the center of America’s folk music revival, and meet Woody Guthrie. By the end of his first week, he’d done both. Dylan probably got to the city January 23, the day the front page of the New York Times proclaimed it the “coldest winter in seventeen years,” a line Dylan would borrow for one of his earliest compositions, “Talkin’ New York.” In No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan’s early career, the singer remembers that first day: “I took the subway down to the Village. I went to the Cafe Wha?, I looked out at the crowd, and I most likely asked from the stage ‘Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?’” 

Singer-songwriter Fred Neil presided over the bar’s eclectic all-day lineup. Dylan showed his chops by backing up Neil and singer Karen Dalton on the harmonica and was hired to “blow my lungs out for a dollar a day.” 

Immersing himself in the music scene, Dylan soaked up everything he heard, from live acts in the bars and coffee houses south of Washington Square to the records he’d spin at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center down the street from Cafe Wha?. In the meantime he continued to embellish his back story. In No Direction Home, Izzy Young recalls Dylan telling him, “I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, moved to Gallup, New Mexico; then until now lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota (for a little bit). Started playing in carnivals when I was fourteen, with guitar and piano. . . .” 

Later, newspapers picked up the fake biography, writing about the cowboy singer from Gallup. Stretching all the way back to the city’s Dutch pioneers, people have come to New York to reinvent themselves, to cast off their old identities and strike out in new directions. Dylan’s fanciful back story may have been an extreme case, but it was effective.

There's much more in the book -- pick up a copy today!

* * * * Read more about NYC history in   Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Pete Seeger and the Almanac House at 130 West 10th Street

The world woke this morning to the news of the death of legendary singer Pete Seeger at age 94. Anyone who's ever taken our Dylan-themed tour of Greenwich Village has probably been dragged by James to a small house on West 10th Street to listen to him wax rhapsodic about the Almanac Singers, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger.

Seeger was born in New York in 1919 and was exposed to folk music early, later recalling (as noted in the Washington Post obituary) that he heard artist Thomas Hart Benton play "John Henry" on the harmonica in Greenwich Village. After dropping out of Harvard in the late 1930s, Seeger became a full-time singer. In the autumn of 1941, he rented the house at 130 West 10th Street to be the headquarters of the Almanac Singer, a loose collective of singers and activists he'd founded with Lee Hayes. As John Strausbaugh writes in The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village,

At various points Almanac House was home to Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Burl Ives, the actor and activist Will Geer, and Woody Guthrie. They staged hootenannies and charged thirty-five cents admission.

Later, Seeger would recall: "People came and went all the time. The cuisine was erratic but interesting, the furniture and decorations almost non-existent, the sleeping done at odd hours.... [But] the output of songs was phenomenal."

The term "hootenanny" entered the lexicon in 1946 as a gathering of folksingers; Seeger later wrote that he and Guthrie had brought the term east from Seattle. When the folk revival of the 1960s was in full steam, ABC television launched a television show, "Hootenanny," but blacklisted Pete Seeger for his connection to the American Communist Party and his contempt citation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In turn, the vanguard of the second generation folk movement--Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, The Kingston Trio--all refused to appear on the ABC show, stripping it of its credibility.

By 1942, the Almanac Singers had moved out of 130 West 10th Street, finding the $100 a month rent too high. Various other buildings in the Village were associated with the group, but it splintered during the war, with Seeger going on to form the Weavers, which found great success in 1948 with "Goodnight, Irene," selling over 2 million copies.

If you are in the Village today, stop by West 10th Street and tip your cap to Pete Seeger--a true American legend.

Here's Seeger talking about the Almanac Singers in a 2006 interview:

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Read more about the Greenwich Village folk scene in

Inside the Apple

and don't forget our next book

Footprints in New York comes out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.

Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!

 

Bow down to her on Sunday

Salute her when her birthday comes

Bow down to her on Sunday

Salute her when her birthday comes

For Halloween give her a trumpet

And for Christmas, buy her a drum.

“She Belongs to Me,” 1965

Today marks a milestone in American musical history – rock’s poet laureate, Bob Dylan (né Robert Zimmerman) turns 70 years old.

Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941; after dropping out of college, he relocated to New York City in 1961 to pursue a music career and meet his idol, Woody Guthrie. (You can read much more about Dylan coming to NYC in our blog post about Dylan from a couple of years ago.)

Dylan lived a number of places in New York over the years – on West 4th Street (which gave rise to “Positively 4th Street”), on MacDougal south of Bleecker, in the Chelsea Hotel (whose coughing heat pipes are memorialized in “Visions of Johanna” and which gets a shout-out in “Sara”), and at that “crummy hotel overlooking Washington Square” that Joan Baez so poignantly describes in “Diamonds and Rust.”

If you are looking for ways to celebrate, Patell and Waterman’s History of New York has compiled a good list of Dylan-related links, including WBAI’s 23-hour Dylan marathon.

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Read more about Dylan in New York in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Crazy Joe Gallo

Born in Red Hook, Brooklyn

In the year of who knows when.

Opened up his eyes

To the sound of an accordion.

--Bob Dylan and Jacques Levy, Joey

 

Today marks both the birth and the death of one of New York’s most famous gangsters, “Crazy” Joe Gallo.

Though Bob Dylan claimed he’d been born “in the year of who knows when,” Gallo was actually born April 7, 1929, in Red Hook. His life of crime began when he and his brothers became enforcers for the Profaci family in the 1950s. After successfully carrying out the murder of Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton Hotel, Crazy Joe asked Joseph Profaci for a bigger cut of the action. When Profaci refused, a turf war broke out between the Gallo brothers and the Profacis—a bloody fight that continued well into the 1960s even after Gallo was sent to prison for ten years for extortion and Joseph Profaci died of cancer, handing the reins of the family to Joseph Colombo.

Crazy Joe was released from prison in 1971 into a whirl of publicity. Jimmy Breslin’s book The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight—a humorous take on the Gallo/Profaci war—had been released in 1969 and filmed in 1971. In the film, Jerry Orbach—later of Law and Order fame—played “Kid Sally,” the character based on Gallo. Crazy Joe wasn’t thrilled with the performance, so invited Orbach and his wife over to dinner to set them straight. They were amazed at his knowledge of art and literature—as Marta Curro Orbach later said, “When he asked me whether I preferred Camus or Sartre, I almost fell into a plate of spaghetti.” The Orbachs quickly became some of Gallo’s closest friends, introducing him, in turn, to their friends in the world of theater and publishing.

However, the friendship was not to last. On April 7, 1972, Gallo celebrated his birthday with the Orbachs and other friends at the Copacabana. After the party broke up, Gallo, his wife, and his body guard, Pete “the Greek” Diapoulas decided to head to Little Italy for a quick bite at Umberto’s Clam House. Uncharacteristically seated with his back to the door, Gallo didn’t notice a gunman enter the restaurant until it was too late. He leapt up and ran toward the hail of bullets—probably to draw fire away from his wife—and staggered out on to Mulberry Street, where he died.

While Umberto’s still exists in Little Italy, it is no longer in its original location. The spot where Gallo was killed, at the corner of Hester and Mulberry, is now Da Gennaro. Umberto’s moved to Broome Street a few years after the murder.

Gallo’s life is not only recounted in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight and Bob Dylan’s Joey (from the album Desire), it was also made into a film called Crazy Joe in 1974 starring Everybody Loves Raymond’s Peter Boyle.

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More about Little Italy -- including a walking tour of famous and not-so-famous sites -- can be found in our book Inside the Apple, which is now available. For more information about the book and our upcoming talks and walking tours in New York, visit http://www.insidetheapple.net.

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Bob Dylan Arrives in Greenwich Village: January 24, 1961

Ramblin' outa the wild West,
Leavin' the towns I love the best.
Thought I'd seen some ups and down,
‘Til I come into New York town.
People goin' down to the ground,
Buildings goin' up to the sky.

--Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York

Though specific dates are hard to pin down in the early life of Bob Dylan, it seems likely that tomorrow, January 24, marks the 48th anniversary of the singer’s arrival in New York City. Though he would often tell people he’d hopped a freight train, the truth is that he’d arrived from Minnesota in a 1957 Impala.

Knowing that Greenwich Village was the center of the burgeoning folk scene, he immediately headed to MacDougal Street and sometime on January 24, 1961, or one of the next few days, ended up on stage at Café Wha?, which is one of the few clubs from Dylan’s earliest period that still remains in operation.

In those days, the afternoon sets at Café Wha were presided over by Fred Neil—best known today as the author of the Harry Nilsson’s hit song Everybody’s Talkin’—who both performed his own material and booked other acts. On his first day performing, Dylan accompanied Neil and Karen Dalton on harmonica. One early set—perhaps even that first day—was captured by Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah:

(Karen Dalton—even less remembered today than Fred Neil—was a popular presence on the Greenwich Village folk scene. She released two albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s before fading from public view. Dalton died in 1993 and Neil in 2001. You can hear Dalton performing It Hurts Me, Too, on YouTube.)

If you wish to go to the Village to celebrate Dylan and his impact on American music, you can stop by Café Wha (which is across the street from Minetta Tavern), but most of the other haunts where Dylan fine-tuned his act are gone. The Gaslight (where Dylan recorded the recently released Live at the Gaslight 1962) was at 114 MacDougal—in the basement—below the space now occupied by Esperanto Café. Across the street where Panchito’s now serves what they claim to be “one of the six best margaritas” in New York was once the Fat Black Pussycat. And perhaps the most famous Dylan venue, Gerde’s Folk City at the corner of West 4th Street and Mercer, was torn down in the early 1970s to make room for the Hebrew Union College.

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If you are interested in doing a Rock and Roll tour of the city that includes some of these Dylan spots—and many more—we wrote the script for a tour of famous music spots in the East and West Village. The tour, narrated by DJ Ken Dashow, is available for download at www.citylisten.com.

You can also read about Dylan and New York in the 1960s in Inside the Apple, available for pre-order today.

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