’60s Folk Music? Terri Thal Was in the Rooms Where It Happened
Terri Thal’s My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me offers another valuable informed reflection on the handful of years in the early 1960’s when New York’s Greenwich Village became the epicenter of folk music.
It was a sparkling moment wherein new and old joined black and white, saint and sinner, city and farm, rich and poor to remind us what a wide and often wonderful range of music is created and performed by the folk.
Thal was there in every sense of the word. She was married to Dave Van Ronk and managed a guy named Bob Dylan, the “Dave” and “Bob” of the book’s title. For years the Village apartment where she lived with Van Ronk became a kind of marijuana-fueled Algonquin Round Table for folk artists from Joni Mitchell to Paul Simon, as well as dozens of others less famous and equally important in shaping the moment.
My Greenwich Village (McNidder & Grace. $32.95) does not, however, focus primarily on Bob, Dave or the music, which has been covered in numerous other books, many of them fascinating. As the first word of the title telegraphs, the real storyline of this book is the life of the author — particularly but not exclusively in the early 1960s.
If that sounds self-indulgent, it’s not. For starters, Thal has led a pretty interesting life, revolving around what she calls her twin passions for folk music and social justice.
Equally important, we better understand a time, be it historically fraught or relatively calm, by learning how the people in it went about their daily lives.
While it’s true that kids don’t want to hear Grandma and Grandpa rattle on about the olden days, wouldn’t it be interesting to read a retrospective diary from a craftsman’s wife in the 15th century? Or a teacher or a farmer or a cleric in the early 1900s?
Routine and mundane as things might unfold day to day, collectively they form a story, and one imagines that’s part of what impelled Thal, now in her 80s, to chronicle hers.
Like most writers, she clearly thinks in terms of whittling facts, moments and events into a narrative. My Greenwich Village ties the people and occurrences of her life together, in a sense sorting it out.
The people she has known along the way, then, become characters in her story. She doesn’t psychoanalyze Dylan. She recalls how she, Dave, Bob and Suze Rotolo, who was Bob’s girlfriend and Thal’s pal, played penny poker or had a frequent breakfast date on Sunday mornings.
Her anecdotes run toward charming, which doesn’t make them unrevealing — like a discussion with Simon over whether it was harder in high school for Thal as a tall girl (5-foot-11) or Simon as a short boy. Spoiler alert: “Short boy” won.
She acknowledges some tension and conflicts among her characters: Dylan’s fallout with Phil Ochs, Van Ronk’s fury when Dylan recorded Van Ronk’s meticulously worked-out arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” before Van Ronk could record it himself. She says she didn’t know why Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary would not speak to her.
She never warmed up to Albert Grossman, who signed Dylan away from Thal before Dylan hit the big time. He made her uneasy, suggesting he exuded a chilly Machiavellian aura while acknowledging he promoted Dylan in a way she probably could not have done, if only because she was more invested in the music than its rewards. By the late 1960s she was withdrawing from the game, feeling too much of folk music had devolved from compelling stories into bad self-indulgent love songs.
When it comes to Dylan, she speaks fondly of their friendship and muses somewhat sheepishly about the many nights she and Van Ronk lectured Bob and Suze on socialist and Trotskyist politics. Dylan, she allows, probably ignored most of it. She thinks “Mr. Tambourine Man” was his best song and notes that he was the only one of their many apartment visitors who brought wine.
Thal’s Greenwich Village is not the hornets’ nest of intrigue, jealousy and agendas that some writers, and the 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis, have suggested permeated the early-1960s folk scene. While the downbeat Llewyn Davis drew elements from Van Ronk’s autobiography and Thal acknowledges that artists like Dylan and Ochs had ambitions beyond the Gaslight and Folk City, she says almost all the players she knew shared a pleasant camaraderie.
Those many nights of impromptu gatherings at the Van Ronk apartment, in her memory, were characterized mainly by laughing, drinking, eating, talking music, listening to music and smoking marijuana, which was then a daring legal transgression.
She portrays the Village’s assortment of bars, clubs and basket houses as congenial spots where the thrill came from hearing a new young talent like Dylan, Tom Paxton or Maggie and Terre Roche.
Through her eyes we see Van Ronk rise from a kid who loved guitars and the blues to an artist with a distinct style who knew he would never be a mainstream star, but could make a decent living playing music. Thal recounts a few of his quirks — their bills were put in her name, because he didn’t trust banks or financial institutions — and generally paints him as a passionate and funny guy with whom she remained friends even though they eventually divorced because “we were turning each other into nervous wrecks.”
Professionally, Thal faced her share of hurdles as a woman in the male-dominated music world. Some men hit on her, others dismissed her. She faced many of the same hurdles after she left the music world for jobs where she could help promote social justice.
She recounts a night several years ago when she was arrested on a DUI — a lapse she calls inexcusable — and spent a night in jail. After this first-hand view of how women are treated in lockup, she found positions where she could promote more humane protocol and basic decent conditions for imprisoned women.
While Thal doesn’t chronicle every detail of her life, she talks about her parents, her adolescence, her love life, her Jewish heritage, her relationships outside the music world and other diverse threads that, looking back, feel woven together. The instinct by which she convinced a club owner to book Dave Van Ronk feels not entirely unrelated to the instinct by which she convinced prison officials it was in everyone’s best interest to consider the plight of an incarcerated young mother.
Most books on the Greenwich Village folk scene focus, logically enough, on the music in that scene. My Greenwich Village describes living in that scene. It turns a few brief years, now many decades gone, into a story that feels fresh today.
