Dylan and Dave's Excellent Adventures

By John Platt

The memoir is an honorable literary form, which has been cheapened recently by quickie books from instant celebs like Jessica Simpson. Last fall, however, Bob Dylan set a new standard for a musician's memoirs with his quirky and captivating Chronicles, Volume One and won a National Book Award in the process. Now comes The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a memoir from the late Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald. It covers a lot of the same turf as Dylan's book — specifically early 60's Greenwich Village — yet from a decidedly different perspective.

Where Dylan is impressionistic, crafting vivid images and portraits of people who crossed his path, Van Ronk is more straightforward, offering the story of his life from his childhood in Queens through his scuffling days in the Village in the late 50's, the "Great Folk Scare" of the early 60's, and the decline of that scene by the end of the decade. (It may be revealing that the Van Ronk book has an index, while Dylan's doesn't.) Dylan is the genius, and like all geniuses he has remained self-absorbed. The experiences he recounts in Chronicles are all filtered through the prism of his restless self. Van Ronk was the self-deprecating curmudgeon with the great heart and a sense of history.

Not that Van Ronk is dry in any way. Elijah Wald began his collaboration with Dave in the last year of his life. "The original plan," as he explains in the afterword, "was for us to work together, with me doing historical research and a good deal of the writing, and Dave providing the flavor and the first-person slant." Unfortunately, Van Ronk developed colon cancer and died in February, 2002, before they could finish. Wald sought out interviews Van Ronk had done over the years (including ones with Pete Fornatale, Vin Scelsa, and me) to fill in some of the blanks. In the end, he has captured Van Ronk's distinctive voice beautifully, finding the prose equivalent to that gravelly, sardonic delivery.

Van Ronk was famous for being a voracious reader and holding forth knowledgeably on any number of subjects. So we get his opinions on the "mouldy figs" of traditional jazz and folk, the socio-political background of Greenwich Village, the proliferation of folk clubs like the Fifth Peg (later Folk City) and the Gaslight, encounters with (and analyses of) great bluesmen like Jesse Fuller, the Rev. Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and much more.

There are several humorous episodes involving Albert Grossman (like Van Ronk an oversized character), who had moved from Chicago (where he owned the Gate of Horn) to New York. Grossman approached Van Ronk about joining a trio he was forming with Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers. When Van Ronk demurred, Grossman recruited Noel Paul Stookey instead. "Peter, Dave, and Mary would have died the death of a thousand cuts," Van Ronk says. "I would have stood out like a sore thumb, vocally, visually, you name it. And I suppose I would have had to change my name as well. Still, every time I look at my bank balance…" Later, after Grossman was managing Dylan (having lured him away from Van Ronk's wife Terri, who had been booking him), he came to Van Ronk with a proposition: he will guarantee him $100,000 a year in bookings if he will agree to wear a helmet with horns onstage and call himself Olaf the Blues Singer. "He was completely serious," Van Ronk recalls, "and I think if I had gone along, he would very likely have done it—not because it was a good idea, but just to prove that I had my price. He died without ever knowing it was $120,000…"

As for Dylan, there's plenty about him in The Mayor of MacDougal Street, just as there's plenty about Van Ronk in Chronicles. By the time Dylan arrived in New York in January, 1961, Van Ronk was already, in Dylan's words, "the king of the street." He had released several acclaimed acoustic blues albums, and he was running the hootenannies at the Gaslight. One of the wonderful early passages in Chronicles describes Dylan meeting (and being intimidated by) Van Ronk at Izzy Young's Folklore Center. Another time, relating a debate he and Dave had about the Civil War, Dylan contrasts Van Ronk's Marxist point of view with his own. "One thing about Van Ronk," he writes, "what he said was never dull or muddy." Later he refers to Van Ronk as "the grand dragon" and says "he came from the land of giants."

For his part, Van Ronk acknowledges that "Bobby's experience and memories of that time would be quite different from mine, because I was at least making a living. Bobby was doing guest sets wherever he could…He was cadging meals and sleeping on couches, frequently mine." From the first time he saw him at a daytime hootenanny at the Café Wha?, Van Ronk appreciated what set Dylan apart and took his contradictions in stride. Along with a place to crash, Van Ronk is said to have provided Dylan with exposure to historians and political thinkers, which Dylan absorbed, as he did everything. In his memoirs Van Ronk remains modest about that, as well as his role in setting up Robert Shelton's career-making New York Times review of Dylan's performance at Folk City.

There was a famous falling out over Dylan's decision to record without permission Van Ronk's arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun" on his first album, but that was eclipsed by the Animals' hit version. In the avuncular way that allows him to refer to Dylan as "Bobby," Van Ronk singles out Dylan and Phil Ochs as special talents in the circle that included Tom Paxton, Eric Andersen, and Patrick Sky, among others: "Bobby was very sensitive to mood, and he probably expressed that better than anyone else. Certainly, that was Phil's opinion. Phil felt that Bobby was the true zeitgeist, the voice of their generation."

When Dylan's career took off and record labels started snatching up folksingers, it raised the ante for everyone in the Village. As Dylan writes in Chronicles, "Everybody was looking for openings." To Van Ronk, it wasn't a shock when Dylan became a rock star. "The shock was how it changed the scene….Bobby is not the greatest songwriter in history, but he was far and away the best on our scene, and whether we admitted it or not, we all knew that." 

These days, we tend to romanticize the Village of the 60's as a folk Camelot, but Van Ronk remained clear-eyed about it. As he told Pete Fornatale on the radio in the 80's, "Most of the music was garbage. The musicianship is better now. Isaac Newton said of the Greek mathematicians, ‘I stood on the shoulders of giants.' You can also get a hand up by standing on the shoulders of pygmies."

I never knew Dave Van Ronk all that well, but I'll always cherish the conversations we had in radio studios, at parties, and backstage at concerts. Reading The Mayor of MacDougal Street is like an invitation to sit enthralled at one of his famous gourmet dinners at his apartment on Sheridan Square. You can almost hear the wheezing asthmatic laugh that punctuated his stories. You'll just wish they'd never end.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald is published by Da Capo Press. There is a companion CD called The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a collection of rare and unreleased recordings made between 1957 and 1969, which has been released on Rootstock Records. There will be a reading of excerpts from The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Elijah Wald, Tom Paxton, and others at Barnes & Noble at Sixth Avenue and 8th Street in Greenwich Village on Wednesday May 18th at 7:30pm.