FTLGTP: Continued Collaboration

Final Stop: The Bitter End

Finally, a short walk west along Bleecker Street brings us to The Bitter End, at 147 Bleecker Street, the final stop on our tour. We end the tour here because this location is back in the heart of the Greenwich Village neighborhood. It is also a place where the punk rock artists like Patti Smith performed along with folk artists like Bob Dylan. It is a central location for the both the literary and music scenes in the Village during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It is where all of these different worlds and ideas combine and where they continue.

The Bitter End continues to play host to up and coming musical acts of all genres and on any given night you can see up to 4 or 5 groups play. The artistic and experimental vibe that was so prevalent in the Village during the early to mid part of the 20^th century is still present. That history continues to influence the musicians and artists that continue to hang out in the neighborhood.

FTLGTP: Moving across town

Stop #9: St. Marks on the Bowery

During the late 1960s, the Beats began moving over to the East Village and began to mix with some of the new New York School poets who were spending time on the other side of town. The East Village was also where the poetry scene started mixing with a new music scene and the genre of early Punk was being formed.

One way in particular that the new poets congregating in the East Village differed from their predecessors in the West Village was the focus on performance and theatricality. According to John Mellilo in his essay, “Secret Locations in the Lower East Side: Downtown Poetics 1960-1980” for Lost New York, “meaning became a process that was literally worked out—in the air, in the community, on the actual page, on the body. A swirling interdisciplinarity defined this era in New York as artists rejected any and all stable boundaries” (60).

One of the most important places in the history of early punk and the poetry that influenced it, as well as an important performance space for this new interdisciplinarity that Melillo speaks of, was St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, at 131 East 10^th Street. The Church started a Poetry Project, which continues today, that brought beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs over from the west side, as well as up and coming poets, musicians, and other pop artists like Andy Warhol.

This is where Patti Smith debuted her mix of poetry and music in 1971 when she opened for Gerard Melanga. The performance was a turning point in the connection between poetry and rock n’ roll. She read and sang her poems while Lenny Kaye played guitar behind her. It was the first incarnation of what would eventually become Patti Smith’s first album, Horses, which was released in 1975.

Philip Shaw, in his book Horses, explains how her music was new and different:

The idea of performing poetry to musical accompaniment is nothing new; it began with the Beats in the 1950s and was carried over, via Ginsberg and Dylan to the counter culture in the mid-1960s. But two things…(were) different. To begin with Smith intends to sing as well as read, and the backing is not free-jazz sax, or languid bongos, but an overdriven crudely thrashed guitar (8).

The Church continues to be a place for experimentation with art, poetry, and music. Several other punk artists performed their poetry here as well including members of the band Television.

Up Next: Two Cigarette Butts

FTLGTP: “Monday Nothing…”

Stop #7: Cedar Tavern

Along the opposite side of the park from MacDougal runs University Place. Along University Place there was one bar in particular that was central for overlap of Beats and Folk artists. It was the Cedar Tavern, originally at 24 University Place. Cedar Tavern was also popular to the visual arts crowd during the time period. Regulars at Cedar Tavern included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, members of The Fugs, and Bob Dylan.

One of the very first bands to mix folk and punk, The Fugs collaborated and borrowed much from the poets and other artists in the neighborhood including their name, which was borrowed from the pages of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Daniel Kane describes this connection in his essay, “From poetry to punk in the East Village” also for the Cambridge Companion:

Links developed between poets and punk-folkies including the band The Fugs, and—combined with the interest among young musicians in poetry and poetics from Rimbaud and Baudelaire through to Allen Ginsberg, Berrigan, Waldman, and beyond—resulted in remarkable artistic cross fertilization. Ultimately, the move from poetry to punk suggests that the period under consideration provided a fascinating challenge to conventional understanding of what constitutes “high culture,” “low culture,” and the status of the lyric as static, page-bound text (190).

This collaboration is something we see throughout Greenwich Village in both the literary and the musical movements and it seems to be vital to the kinds of artistic creativity that was produced.

(Here’s a glimpse into the music of The Fugs:)

Stop #8: Andy Warhol’s Electric Circus

Andy Warhol was particularly involved in the move to mix different kinds of art during this time period. He became the manager for the Velvet Underground and rented out the Polish National Social Hall, which he turned into the Electric Circus at 23 St. Mark’s Place, and used it as a performance space for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which included the Velvet Underground and poet Gerard Melanga.

FTLGTP: Folk Music on MacDougal

Stop #4: MacDougal Street

Cafe Wha

On the other end of the block is the Minetta Tavern at 113 MacDougal Street, which was a primary New York hangout for Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and others of the Lost Generation. Minetta Tavern and San Remo were prime spots for literary collaboration and community.

There are several other bars in this area that are important to the overlapping of the Beat culture and the up and coming Folk music scene in the 1960s. Places like Café Wha?, at 115 MacDougal Street, Gerde’s Folk City at 71 West 4^th Street, and The Fat Black Pussycat, at 130 West 3^rd St. This collaboration between the beats and the folk artists along MacDougal Street is described by Jens Lund and R. Serge Denisoff in their article, “The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions” for The Journal of American Folklore Volume 84, Number 334, “In Greenwich Village, the beats and the folk-aficionados came into contact with each other, resulting in a synthesis of attitudes and appearances” (396). Lund and Denisoff imply that not only did these writers and musicians hang out in the same area but that they started to emulate each other.

This area was the centerpiece for the urban Folk movement led first by Joan Baez and then later by Bob Dylan. These folk artists worked to move folk music from the rural areas of the United States and to make them their own. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were also vital to this process. Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl and brought the songs he learned with him to the city.

Café Wha? was famous for being one of the first places that Bob Dylan performed when he came to New York City. It is said that he showed up at the place out of nowhere and asked the owner if he could perform. His first performance there consisted mostly of Woody Guthrie songs.

Gerde’s was one of the most popular Folk venues in the area and everybody who was anybody in Folk music was playing there in the early 1960s.

Also along MacDougal Street, The Folklore Center, at number 110, was a place of inspiration and creativity for many prominent artists of the folk scene. Izzy Young founded it in 1957.  It was a central meeting place for folk artists, a place where they could experiment and collaborate.

Up Next: Washington Square Park

From the Lost Generation to the Punks: An Introduction

For my final writing assignment of college, I recently finished writing a walking tour of the East and West Villages for one of my favorite courses of my college career. It was a course called “Writing New York,” which was listed under the English Department and was taught by Bryan Waterman and Cyrus Patell, both English professors.

The walking tour I wrote tours some of the vital locations for counter culture in the West Village and East Village while discussing the collaborative nature of counter culture creation in New York City in the middle of the 20th century.

I focused primarily on the path from the Lost Generation and the Bohemians in Greenwich Village, to the Beat Poets hanging out all over the place, to the Folk Artists around MacDougal Street, and finally to the new New York School poets and punk rock musicians of the East Village.

Because I am very proud of this piece and because I love the landscape that New York provides for creative minds, I have decided to post the walking tour in increments on Nebraskan Thoughts. And thus begins my exploration, “From the Lost Generation to the Punks.” Enjoy!

Introduction:

Most of you probably know about the rich literary history of Greenwich Village. Many famous authors throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries lived in this neighborhood. Names like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Willa Cather and more are associated with these crooked streets. However, there is also a strong link between this literary culture and the music scene that also formed in the East and West Villages in the 1960s and 1970s.

Many of the popular folk and punk artists that performed regularly in Greenwich Village were greatly influenced by the writers and poets who had lived and were currently living in the area. In fact, in the case of several of the punk artists of the 1970s, they were actively part of the poetry scene as well as the music scene.

In order to understand how Punk music being played in the Village in the 1970s is linked to earlier literary movements, it is first important that we understand the culture of the earlier literary generations.

The café and club culture of the writers, artists, and musicians allowed for a collaborative atmosphere, with everyone being influenced by everyone else and borrowing ideas from each other. In particular, the music scene collaborated with and borrowed from the literary and poetry movements.

Stop #1: The White Horse Tavern

We start our tour on Hudson Street, deep in the West Village at the White Horse Tavern, at the corner of 11^th Street. This bar was a favorite spot for many members of the literary community during the early 1950s. It is particularly famous for being one of Dylan Thomas’s favorite haunts and the story is that he drank himself to death here, however, although he drank at the Tavern often, he did not drink himself to death and died of unrelated causes.

Later on, this bar became an important spot for writers like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. Musicians such as Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison also began to spend time in this establishment in the 1960s. It is also worth noting that Bob Dylan, originally Robert Zimmerman, supposedly took his name from Dylan Thomas.

Next Up: Chumley’s