more about the book here
If ever there was a time-travel ticket to a past and a place that you knew so well you could still see the sun glinting through the tree leaves, hear the din of the eateries as you walked by, and, most important, still hear the music that actually defied any given time or place, it would be David Browne's book, Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital. That's because Browne has a way of writing, an eye for detail, a penchant for commentary, that draws you in to fill the background you in one way or another actually experienced, or, what Marshall McLuhan called "cool".
Yeah, I sang doo-wop in Washington Square Park with my acapela group The Transits in the early 1960s, and then my folk-rock group The New Outlook a few years later (Ellie Greenwich and Mike Rashkow heard us uptown one Sunday afternoon in Central Park, and signed us to Atlantic Records, after changing our name to The Other Voices), but the way I really got to know the village was finishing up my BA in Journalism at NYU, then going a few blocks up to the New School for an M.A., then back to NYU for my PhD in the 1970s. (I even managed to write three pieces for The Village Voice just before all that, my sum-total career as a music journalist.)
Turns out David Browne and I could have passed each other in the street -- David arrived to pursue his BA in Journalism at NYU in 1978, and I left, thankfully finished with school, in 1979 -- or bumped into each other going in and out of the diner southeast of the park. But David stayed focused on the Village and its clubs and their music, to the present day, while I pursued music on the radio, MTV, iTunes, and anyplace I could hear it, and only came to the Village with my wife to eat in a great Italian restaurant near Houston Street, or go shopping at Balducci's.
And Talkin' Greenwich Village is one of the results of Browne's passion -- he's written more than half a dozen other books about popular music, and writes for Rolling Stone -- and delivers a cornucopia of vignettes, insights, and are what in effect mini reviews of dozens of artists. You know, I always judge a book by how well it treats a subject I know something about. My wife and I were/are devoted fans of Phil Ochs -- I consider his "The Crucification" right up there with the very best songs that Dylan wrote -- and Browne not only got everything right in his discussion of Ochs and his life in the Village (with an intermission in California) over the 1960s and 70s, until he took his own life the year my wife and I got married (we went to the Memorial Concert for Ochs that Browne also aptly describes), but I also learned something from his description of Ochs. It's become hard-wired into Ochs's story that he was broken when Dylan did not include him in his Rolling Thunder tour. But Browne provides a missing piece of the story, telling us how Ochs badgered Dylan, when Dylan was first beginning to put together the group that would tour. Which means, it's not quite true that a callous or jealous Dylan simply didn't include Ochs on the tour.
But in addition to, I don't know, at least vignettes of 50 artists spread across 8 chapters and an Epilogue teeming with information -- Browne lists every interview he did for the book in its Bibliography -- he focuses on two artists, Dave Van Ronk, and the Roche Sisters (and, also of course, Bob Dylan), and makes them, in effect, centerpieces and guides to what Browne is telling us happened in these magical decades. I only saw Van Ronk once (at the Phil Ochs 1976 Memorial Concert at the Felt Forum) and the Roche Sisters only on YouTube. But Browne's accounts of Van Ronk and of the Roches across the decades amount to mini but in-depth biographies of the two, and make Talkin' Greenwich Village irresistible reading just on their own.
But lest you think everything in this book is as serious as Ochs, or even Dylan, Browne also has a knack for the kind of detail that will make you chuckle, or even laugh out loud. Seeking the name of a song on one of The Blues Project's just-recorded albums, the response to the person who's writing down the titles is "'What song? You mean Steve’s song?' To [Steve] Katz’s chagrin, 'Steves Song,' complete with a missing apostrophe, became the title." Or, "when Orbison and Ronstadt huddled in his dressing room, [Jerry] Brown [then Ronstadt's boyfriend], waiting patiently outside, finally began pounding on the door: 'Let me in! I’m the governor of California!''' Or, "the worst [performers in this Village venue] were booed or heckled. When asked if one contestant should be booted off the stage, [owner] Porco grumbled, 'No, I think we should shoot him.'”
Of course, no volume is perfect, and I'll tell you the one thing I missed in this New York Public Library of a book. I was a big fan of The Blues Project, and to this day I find myself humming or singing to myself "Cheryl's Going Home". The song was written by Bob Lind (who wrote "Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love"), who does a pretty good job singing it. But the Blues Project rendition, with those piercing guitar notes, and their interplay with organ, is something else. Browne tells us almost as much about The Blues Project, Danny Kalb in particular, as he does about Van Ronk, the Roches, and Dylan. But not a word about that elusive heart-breaker Cheryl. I guess she was already home and out of sight.
But every page of this pulsating encyclopedia of whirling words is worth reading. The fall of Greenwich Village and its clubs and taverns and whatever you want to call them brought tears to my eyes, because David Browne had made it seem like a beloved living organism, a mini gaia of music just several blocks long. My only really lasting regret about this book is that it wasn't ten times longer. As it was, it's 400 pages went by too quickly, because I just couldn't put the book down.
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Check back here at the end of the month for my upcoming interview with David Browne.
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in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover
