"Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan: You were so much older then"
[Fifty-six years ago, to the consternation of many (including Pete Seeger), but not all in the crowd, Bob Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival. A few weeks later, I was there at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium when Dylan did it again; there were many in the crowd booing, but not all. Here's my Dylan story.]
It has been quite some time since singer/songwriter Bob Dylan tried to disabuse Ed Bradley of CBS’ 60 Minutes of the notion that he was the voice of a generation; claiming he wasn’t a spokesperson for anything, and, that he “never wanted to be a prophet or a savior." All he really wanted to do was have a family, be a good husband and a good father. Fair enough.
Whether Dylan wants to cop to it or not, there is no denying he was a voice – a major voice but certainly not the only voice (think Phil Ochs) – of a generation. His songs were clarion calls for social justice and a more humane world. His words brought to life victims of oppression, from Hattie Carroll, the Maryland maid brutally killed by an upper-class Baltimorean, to Davey Moore, the boxer killed in the ring, from Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader shot down outside his Mississippi home, to Hurricane Carter, the wrongly imprisoned fighter.
I never met Bob Dylan, but we might have crossed paths in the early sixties. In my mid-to-late teens, I spent a lot of Saturday afternoons in Greenwich Village, visiting my father, who owned a bar and restaurant located inside the Hotel Earle (now called the Washington Square Inn) on the corner of Waverly Place and MacDougall. Sometime during the afternoon I’d walk around the Village. I’d spend a little time hanging out by the fountain in Washington Square Park, but I never got involved in any of the master-class chess games going on. And, I didn’t frequent any of the folk venues that had popped up around the Village. I’d pick up a copy of The Villager and The Village Voice, tuck them under my arm, and feel smugly at home when a tourist would ask me for directions.
I was in Greenwich Village to visit my father. In the mid-fifties, my parents became one of the first families in our Bronx neighborhood to divorce. My dad, Leo, who changed his last name to Berk (“for business reasons”) had re-married and moved into an apartment building on Christopher Street. On many a Saturday afternoon, I’d walk the two blocks from our Gerard Avenue and McClellan Street apartment to the 167th Street/Grand Concourse station (one stop from Yankee Stadium) and take the “D” train down to the West Fourth Street station. From there, it was a short walk to 103 Waverly Place.
The Waverly Lounge was an extraordinarily ordinary place – a bar and restaurant that was out of its time. While the times were a changing, the Waverly Lounge was decorated like a Tin Pan Alley oasis. As a young kid, the most exciting thing about going there was having the chef (a fabulous cook from Sweden) make me hamburgers and French fries, and then give me the green light to dish out all the ice-cream I wanted.
Later, when I became more interested in Village life, I still spent most of my time in the restaurant. For most of my father’s life, he dreamt about being in show business. His uncle, Joseph Greenwald, an actor who appeared in a number of Broadway shows including Golden Boy, once promised him a trip to Europe. The trip never happened. My grandfather refused to let him go. Instead of the stage, my dad went to work painting signs at the Ganz Brothers midtown Manhattan stationary store.
As a young man growing up in the Lower East Side my dad wrote Minstrel Shows for the Boys Club. He went to as many movies as he could and skipped school to do so. On one of our last walking tours of the Village and its surrounds in the late 1970s, he told me how he’d hang outside one of the theatres that used to dot 14th street: “Two kids could get into the theater for a nickel,” he said. “So I’d stand outside the theater yelling, ‘I’ve got two, who’s got three.’ When I found a partner, we’d both go in.”
The Waverly Lounge was indeed a bar out of its time. When my father first took it over in the early 1950s, he turned it into the consummate piano bar. He had several terrific piano players in the early days, but it wasn’t until Laurie Brewis arrived from London – a dainty-looking fellow who seemed to know every show tune that had ever been written – and began to play there, that the Waverly Lounge found its character.
While the social and political landscape was rapidly changing outside the bar – transitioning from Bohemian/Beatnik to Hippie culture – the Waverly Lounge was a safe harbor for many. The regulars were a mixture of mostly white professionals – some artists, a sprinkle of journalists – and a fair share of closeted gays and lesbians. While it wasn’t The Stonewall Inn, it wasn’t Joe’s neighborhood saloon either. It was a place where people could relax, knowing that they would be treated decently, and wouldn’t get hassled by the police. (I’ve long thought -- without concrete proof -- that my dad must have been paying someone off, someone at the local precinct to guarantee the bar’s tranquility.)
As I got older, I began waiting tables and serving drinks. Late in the evening, when the crowd was well lubricated, my dad would chip in with a tune or two. His most requested number was “The Trolley Song.” No matter where he was in the bar he wouldn’t disappoint – he always made it back to strike the bell at just the right time. My dad’s repertoire was pretty eclectic and included some pretty darned esoteric stuff. One of my personal favorites was an old World War I anti-war song called “Keep Your Head Down Fritzie Boy if you want to see your Father in the Fatherland.”
In 1969, during Abbie Hoffman’s visit to the University of Kansas, I interviewed him for our underground newspaper, The Vortex (named after Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra”). Hoffman appeared at Allen Field House -- where Wilt Chamberlain had made his first appearance in a Kansa University uniform some 13 years earlier -- and spoke to thousands as part of a benefit for our newspaper. I believe it may have been the first time he pulled out an American flag handkerchief and blew his nose in front of such a huge crowd.
The following day, after a night of Hoffman’s story telling, smoking weed, drinking and hooking up with one of the locals, several of us jumped into Dick’s VW van to take him to the Kansas City Airport for his trip home. Since I was interviewing him, I turned on the tape recorder and we began our hour-long, intense but rambling conversation. When I returned home and tried to transcribe the tape, I discovered that the only thing that could be heard were the sounds of the VW van belching its way along the highway; Hoffman’s voice had been swallowed up by an engine in distress. But I had a centerfold to fill, so I recreated the interview as best as I could. I‘m sure I missed a lot of what Hoffman said, so I made up a bunch of it. Journalistically speaking, it was not my finest hour. As a tribute to my father, I headlined the piece “Keep Your Head Down Fritzie Boy…”
In the early 1970s, my dad lost the Waverly Lounge: The chef lost his leg to diabetes; Charlie, the assistant chef, fell down a flight of stairs and never returned to the kitchen; Earl, the waiter, got cancer and passed away; Joe the bartender fell, or may have been pushed, from a high-rise lower-Manhattan window and died; and Laurie Brewis died of a burst appendix after being misdiagnosed at a local hospital.
Despite these tragic events, my dad had a few chances to save the business. He was asked if he was interested in turning over the back room to folks interested in staging weekly folk music events. He turned them down without thinking twice.
While that seemed a bit pigheaded, it was even a bit stranger since Joan Baez and Bob Dylan had stayed at the Hotel Earle, and may have even popped into the bar once in a while.
All these memories ran hard against each other when I began reading Bob Dylan’s book, Chronicles. I read the first hundred pages in a flash: Dylan was talking about times past and the places that I used to inhabit. Even though I wasn’t there with him, there was a tangible link to the same streets and the same sounds of the city.