Deep In The Urban Folk Revival Minute-With New York’s Washington Square Circa 1964 In Mind

CD Review

By Zack James

Washington Square Folk Songs, various folk artists live or in studio, 1999 

 

Nobody was quite sure what to make of Seth Garth when he went off the rails, became a folkie, got caught up in what the musicologists called the urban folk revival of the early 1960, the folk minute as he would later refer to it when it was superseded by the British bad boys invasion, folk rock and acid rock later in the decade. What all the guys around his corner, Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Riverdale, being behind the curve, behind the Seth curve had called a “beatnik.” What did they know of beatniks except the stuff they saw Maynard G. Krebs-caricatured on television or seen in some goof magazine with kids from New Jersey wearing black everything on weekend foragings in the Village. No, Seth, and he would the first to tell you, was not a beatnik, was not draw to the remnants of that scene as it filtered down to teenage corner boy society. Could, as the guys around the corner said, give a rat’s ass about poetry except as a futile exercise in English class. And could give an equal rat’s ass about cool ass Charlie Parker-Dizzie jazz which the “beats” dug since he was almost a chemically pure example of the child of rock and roll that every parent worried to perdition about before they got the situation under control (by flooding the yellow-backed record companies with angry letters of complaint about the savage music they were producing which were turning their children into, into sex fiends).   

Everybody was surprised, really surprised when Seth started listening to stuff like Where Have Al The Flowers Gone and some old corny stuff traditional music they called it like Stewball they had all laughed, including Seth, at in seventh grade music class when Mr. Lawrence tried, might and main, unsuccessfully to ween they off their devotion to rock and roll. And here was Seth acting like the ghost of Mr. Lawrence saying that he grooved on old prison convict Lead Belly’s Good Night, Irene. Fortunately for him nobody then cared enough, gave a rat’s ass about his new turn since there were more important things about Seth that kept him in corner boy favor. Things like having the confidences of most of the girls in school who would tell him things they would not even tell their best girlfriends, sex stuff of course when they spotted a boy they might like to take a run at and Seth would act as the go-between.    

So Seth was something of an enigma, a guy that had always been hard to figure out, a guy who you wouldn’t figure looking at his slender scrawny built, his now slightly too long hair (too long by Mrs. Garth’s standards anyway), his jut-jawed face and his odd-ball blue eyes in a brown-eyed world as a corner boy. As a guy who was as likely to harbor felonious thoughts as he was at attempting to figure out his place in the new trends in music in youth nation as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. He had been the first, along with the acknowledged leader of the Jimmy Jack corner, Johnny Blade, to “terrorize” the jewelry and department stores in downtown Riverdale with his trail of “clips,” you know “five-finger discounts,” ah, come on, you know petty larceny. First, as well, to pull a midnight creep along with Johnny and a couple of other guys into the Mayfair swells section of town to grab whatever was pawn worthy, you know, breaking and entering in the nighttime, hell, burglary. Was said as well to have been part of an armed stick up of poor Jimmy Jenkins the night gas jockey at Eddie’s Esso Garage on Trover Street which he never denied and which went in to the annals as urban legend around town.

None of these events ever caused him legal trouble but neither did it figure he would go folkie on the boys. Yeah, Seth was a walking contradiction, a guy who kept his own counsel, a guy who kept those evil thoughts always lurking below the surface in check enough to avoid the law. A guy he met later one night in Harvard Square when that area was a hub of the emerging folk scene, a guy named Markin, who lived in North Adamsville a dozen towns over from Riverdale had called it “keeping the wanting habits in check.” See Markin, like Seth, was from hunger, had grown up poor and so he sensed what Seth could only sputter out before Markin called his hurts and bruises by their right name. So it was always a battle between Seth’s “better angels of his nature” and those endless “wanting habits.” In the end they did Markin in and almost got Seth as well.               

Just then though Seth was all hopped up on the folk scene, sensed that that was where the music was heading for the part of youth nation that wanted to break out of the boxes. Boxes Seth was desperate to break out of himself. See along with that larcenous sulking heart he was trying to make his mark in the world, trying for what some wag later would call his “fifteen minutes of fame.” He wanted in his better moments to be a music critic knowing early on that he had no marketable musical talents by voice or instrument but had an ear and eye for trends. That desire held him in check for a while, allowed him to mix with a lot of people, New York intellectuals, music school denizens, college professors, small record company producers, Jewish kids from New York transplanted to the college scene around Boston when that was a cottage industry who in an earlier time he would not have given rat’s ass about.

The folk turn had all started one night, one late Sunday night, when Seth had been trying to find his favorite rock station, WMEX, out of Boston on his transistor radio (which he had stolen from Radio Shack including the batteries) and it had come in all fuzzy, what he would later find out would be airwave interference by stronger radio station signals. As he turned the dial he heard an odd song, a song called No Regrets by a guy named Tom Rush (whom he would see in person and interview many times later) which caught his attention. Then a couple of other songs that he knew were not rock songs until the announcer, the DJ, came on and identified them as Where Have All The Flowers Gone by Pete Seeger and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds and then identified himself as Bill Marlowe host of the Bill Marlowe Folk Hour (although it was actually a two hour show) out of WMAR in Providence, a college station of some sort. That night the whole thing started for Seth, he started drawing in his mind that this was his niche, or his opening to that critic’s profession that he was looking for.      

This radio station WMAR didn’t always come in every Sunday, it all depended on those frantic vagrant airwaves but came in enough that Seth got a sense of what kind of music he was interested in (and would be sure to go the next day to Slappy’s Record Store downtown and look in the small “folk” bin and grab what he could grab (still working the “clip” when he could. Later he would get his folk materials at Sandy’s outside of Harvard Square but by then he had called a truce to his larcenous ways and actually paid for the records). More importantly Bill Marlowe would announce during his show the various folksingers and folk clubs, you know coffeehouses, and when and where they were playing. That had led to his first foray into Harvard Square to the Club Nana to see Big Bill Bloom in the days before he had made it big on the folk scene. Also the place where he had met the doomed Markin.           

But Harvard Square was only a stepping stone of sorts, an outpost although an important one, since the epicenter of the folk world really was in the Village in New York City as the coffeehouses there turned almost on a dime from long lines waiting outside “beat” poetry and jazz venues to the new folk craze which was just then starting to form its own long lines at certain clubs like the Gaslight where a few years before guys and gals, folksingers were used to put people to sleep and insure that they would leave quickly so the next entourage of poetry and jazz devotees could be ushered in. And that was how one Friday night he met Cindy Sloan, how he subsequently took his first of many trips to the Village then and later in college when he got a few free-lance assignments to cover some lesser artists working to perfect their acts that guys like Lenny Samuels and Benny Gold didn’t want to sully their critical facilities covering.  

This Cindy was a folksinger, had a pretty good voice, and was a freshman at NYU who had come up to Cambridge one weekend to do a gig, perform in an “open mic.” Places like the Club 47 and Club Nana were strictly for the professionals, for those who were getting paid to perform no matter what the pittance the cash-strapped club owners working on close margins could foist off on them. Seth though met Cindy at the Club Blue, then unlike later when Dave Von Ronk’s presence gave it the cache to move up the folk food chain because Nick Cave let Dave run up a tab and not pay for his booze, a lesser club where the draw was no cover charge and as long as you had a coffee, or some drink, in front of you that allowed you to stay in that seat. In short a cheap date which many guys, including Seth, prayed for when they were checking girls out, some of who made that love of folk music a condition of their interest unless the chick was really foxy then other more obvious factors came into play. The other draw was that the performers, all amateurs from hunger, got to perform a three song set to perfect their art (or got the thumb’s down which meant playing out in the mean streets with passersby purposely avoiding you andyour tin cup like you were some cripple or something in front of the Coop or worse in the lifeless dungeon of the subway where you competed with the noise from the on-rushing train which you usually lost). After each performer was done “the hat” was passed around and that was the way money, if any, was made that night by the performers.            

Now Cindy, all regulation long-ironed straight hair a la Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi, peasant blouse, skirt, short as was getting to be the style, and the equally regulation sandals had a lovely voice, did a lot of high soprano Baez and Judy Collins old Child ballad covers and after her set got several dollar so in the scheme of things did pretty well for herself. But there were a million Joan Baez wannabes then and Seth thought that Cindy would be hard pressed to make a career out of her avocation. That was one of his first insights into what the folk music deal was all about, what it was all about from a critic’s standpoint. About who had “it” and what they were going to do about it. Of course when Cindy had finished her set and had for no known reason sat down at Seth and his friend Jack Callahan’s table he made no mention of that observation. Rather he went to work pumping her for all the information he could get from her about the folk scene in the Village and the scene in Washington Square near NYU where on an given Saturday or Sunday many young men and women were trying out their skill sets for the passing audiences (the hat or cup or guitar case as always in front for any stray donations). Also as was his nature when attractive girls, folkies or not, were around he flirted with her like crazy. That night he stayed with her in her friend’s Cambridge apartment where she was crashing for the weekend. That night they just endlessly talked and it was that night Cindy invited Seth down to see her in New York (they would not get under the sheets until later when they were in her dorm room off of Washington Square).              

That is how one Seth Garth became knowledgeable about the Washington Square folk scenes, plural since there was something of a division between those who were stuck in maybe the 17^th century with old-timey ballads and those who wanted to fiercely proclaim some social or political message via the lyrics they were writing like crazy to make sense of the 20^th century world the others were clueless about, and why he had first-hand experience with many of the artists who graced this CD. As for Cindy, she and Seth saw each other occasionally that year until he graduated from high school and she moved on to some other college guy, but as he predicted, she tried for a few years to break into the paying folk performer milieu but then gave it up and returned to her career as a biologist. A very good one from what Seth heard when he ran into one day when he was on assignment for The Eye.