BOOKS

THERE is a ghost in David Browne’s history of New York’s folk district, Talkin’ Greenwich Village. For a while, the whole place revolves around this skinny kid in corduroy; then he disappears, only to reoccur in almost phantasmagorical form. He sits in on harmonica at The Bottom Line with Muddy Waters, drops by at The Other End to catch Patti Smith, and is spotted as the brightest star on a Thursday night at Folk City, sitting beside Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. And there he is at an early concert by Lucinda Williams, mumbling, “Keep in touch.”

“Needless to say,” Browne writes, “she didn’t hear from him again, at least for many years.” And yet the sightings continue. “When his friends Levon Helm and Rick Danko were playing the Lone Star Cafe, Dylan, in a cashmere coat and fur hat, wandered in during their soundcheck. In his first time playing with them since The Band’s farewell Last Waltz show, he joined them for both their warm-up and their full set, playing what Helm would call ‘a rather liquid’ version of Hank Williams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and a medley of ‘Willie And The Hand Jive’ and ‘Ain’t No More Cane’. As Helm would write later, Dylan was then ‘out the door, into the night.’”

There is, of course, more to Greenwich Village than Dylan, but his appearances help illuminate the intensity of the thing that happened there throughout the 1960s (and sporadically ever since). Browne – a biographer of CSNY and the Grateful Dead – found his way into the story almost by accident. Arriving as a student at NYU in 1978, he pitched a story on the folk revival of the early 1980s (Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega) for his journalism degree.

The more he looked, the more the spectres came to life. Aside from Dylan, the book’s guardian angel is Dave Van Ronk, the musician who bridged the Village’s jazz period and the folk scare. Van Ronk learned tenor banjo when he realised that the old, weird songs of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music were easier to play than the jazz which had first captured his attention. A figure of myth now too, Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir informed the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. He remains an irascible character in Browne’s telling.

Going back further, composer David Amram – still around, aged 94 – illuminates the Village’s bohemian jazz period of the late 1950s, when it was possible to observe John Coltrane on the sidewalk eating berry pie. The Village, he says, “was a gigantic 12-step programme of people considered total losers and failures and disgraces because they were pursuing something unrealistic and more or less deemed worthless by society. But they were doing it with a vengeance.”

The Village itself comes and goes, a victim of its own success and its proximity to the financial district. Other musical revolutions have a moment. There is the rude explosion of the New York Dolls, observed by David Bowie in full Ziggy garb; punk festers along the Bowery at CBGB. The Stonewall riots of 1969 define the gay rights movement; the Village People turn that into a joke.

Perhaps the greatest monument to self-consciousness occurred in 1982, when the Speak Easy launched a Bob Dylan Imitators Contest. Rumours that Dylan might attend prompted a queue all the way down MacDougal Street to see contestants in five categories: Folk-Protest Dylan, Amphetamine-Rock Dylan, Post-Motorcycle-Accident-Voice-Change Dylan, Born-Again Dylan, and Freestyle Dylan. The stakes were heightened when Dylan’s office decided to film the event, editing the Battle Of The Bobs into 30 minutes, which – rumour has it – the actual Bob enjoyed.

IN The Harder I Fight The More I Love You, Neko Case describes a childhood of “bottomless loneliness” in which music is a refuge. There is no sugar-coating.

There’s a disastrous performance at the Grand Ole Opry, in which she is told, in classic style, that she will never play in Nashville again. An encounter with Charlie Louvin (of The Louvin Brothers) goes wrong when he is revealed as “a creep and a racist”. Touring, she says, includes “moments so lonely they become like personal national parks”.

It’s a tender, poetic memoir haunted by Case’s fractured relationship with her mother who, astonishingly, fakes her own death. She then returns, claiming she had gone away to die of cancer of which she was now cured – none of which is true. It is small comfort for Case when she discovers the word to describe this cruel deception: pseudocide.

Greenwich mean: the irascible Dave Van Ronk at NYC’s Gaslight Cafe, June 1964

BRIAN ENO’s What Art Does – a collaboration with Dutch artist Bette A – reads like a powerpoint presentation. It would convince no art sceptics.

Open-minded rubes may be comforted by a gnomic approach which locates art in earrings, haircuts and the announcements of a bus driver. Play, Eno suggests, is how children learn; art is how adults play. Or, more obliquely: “Art shepherds change.” Nice for the shepherds, confusing for the sheep.

ALASTAIR McKAY

REVIEWED THIS MONTH

TALKIN’ GREENWICH VILLAGE: THE HEADY RISE AND SLOW FALL OF AMERICA’S BOHEMIAN MUSIC CAPITAL DAVID BROWNE HACHETTE, £28