Greenwich Village

Eric talked a lot about Greenwich Village.  He said it had a small European city feeling and was dotted with small pizza shops.  There were lofts for rent and the artists had moved in. 

Washington Square was a large park inside Greenwich Village.  It was surrounded by coffee houses and hotels.  There was the Bitter End, Gerde’s Folk City, the Dragon’s Den, Café Figaro, Art Ford’s Night Owl, The Hotel Earle and the Greenwich Hotel. 

Washington Square Park is where a convergence of every kind of musician took place.  Every Sunday tons and tons of people who picked a guitar or a banjo would be playing their music around the huge fountain that had no water.  Folk, bluegrass, jazz, and cultural music filled the air.  There was a steel band from the Islands and Armenian music.  Folk music was at its height and Washington Square Park was the place to be.  Eric said, “You could run in twelve different directions and find something new and exciting.  A good time was had by all.”

Eric spent his time maintaining a profile of picking, always picking - scales, arpeggio’s, chords, and always listening.  The more he listened, the better he got.  He said, “I copied a particular style and stuck it into a frame of reference for later on with the intent or will to improvise with it.”  If he wanted to improve his chops he could hang out with guys like Roger Sprung, Eric Weissberg (The Tarriers), and Marshall Brickman.

On a record player Eric would listen to and play along with his idols . . . Big Bill Broonzy;, Tampa Red, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller and especially Lightning Hopkins.  Eric spoke of an “infection” he got from the black rhythms and the complicated finger picking styles or the complicated originally African rhythms brought down through a “four-four mood or other meters.”

Having enough money to survive was always a concern.  There was enough money for food but never enough for rent.  He slept on couches in the lofts.  Other fellow musicians would take him in basically.  He used to stay at Teddy Fitzgerald’s place a lot.   Teddy ran the In and Out Club on MacDougal Street.  Peter, Paul and Mary and Albert Grossman would eat dinner there.

 

Or if Eric earned a little extra money he rented a room at the Hotel Earle or the Greenwich Hotel.  There was also the University Place Hotel.  The Hotel Earle was a place where a person would live if they were only in New York for three months or so on business.

Eric said that the Earle Hotel was a real flew bag.  In the olden days it must have been a beautiful hotel.  It cost $150.00 a month to stay there.  The smoke on some of the five floors was like pea soup – hashish smoke.

If Eric didn’t have enough money and didn’t connect with someone’s couch, then he stayed up all night in a coffee house on “speed.”  But most of the time he went to parties, dope parties where he stayed and crashed.  It was party time.  Eric also house-sat for a month here or two weeks there.

Eric was in the Village and part of a group, The Highland Three.  He was playing on stage and sharpening his skill.  He started with smaller audiences and built his way up to larger ones (where they had very good sound systems and he felt competent to be there.)

When Eric first arrived in New York he contacted Bobby Gibson who had a talent agency along with his brother Jimmy.  They were working out of the Bitter End and looking around for a little storefront.  Gibson was booking acts for himself and others.  He booked The Highland Three into the Dragon’s Den, Gerdy’s Folk City and Art Ford’s Night Owl. 

They were actually playing around town as was another group called the Halifax Three, formed by a soon-to-be Mama and Papa member, Dennis Doherty.  There was another group called the Big Three with (Mama) Cass Elliot, Jim Hendrix and Tim Rose.

The Dragon’s Den was very small, like a cubicle.  They passed a basket through the crowd that sat in small chairs and ordered espresso while watching the acts.   Dino Valenti had a regular act there that was like a freight train.

At Art Ford’s Night Owl Eric played along with the Modern Folk Quartet comprised of Eddie Ho, Cyrus Faryar, Jerry Easter, Tad Diltz and Chip Douglas.

Gerdy’s Folk City was a club that managers would break their acts from.  Albert Grossman broke Bob Dylan there.  Sunday night was hootenanny night.  Hoot night.  Audition night.  Arrange to be put on the schedule and anyone who wanted to sing could get up and perform.

Eric would go to Washington Square Sunday morning, then to a club to sit in with an act, and then to Gerdy’s on Sunday night.  On Monday night it was the Bitter End.

The Bitter End on Bleeker Street was the final breaking point for an act.  The act was polished and ready to record and go on tour.  The club was formerly called the Cock N’Bull until Freddie Weintraub and his friends took it over.  They changed it from a coffee house atmosphere to a nice stage, nice background of red brick, nice lights and a good sound system.  They featured acts like Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, the Tarriers, Odetta, the Kinston Trio, the Journeymen, Freddie Neil, Leon Bib, July Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Eric would also go to the Bitter End on Sunday afternoon and play with the best guys who were picking in the United States: Freddie Neil, Bobby Gibson, Dave Van Ronk, Henry Bradley, Buzzy Linhart, Hugh Romney, David Crosby, and Jim (Roger) McGuinn.

Here’s a typical stage situation Eric described:  “I’d be on the stage and Freddie Neil would be on a barstool playing “hunchback” guitar.  Lance Wakely would be there as well as Bill Lee, the bass player.  Things would be getting hot, then Gibson would come out of the back room and as soon as he would get on stage and started singing the vocal duets with Freddie, the place would start to go nuts.  Not only the young adolescent girls would go nuts, but that the spirit was moving the whole crowd.  The whole house.  And then maybe Cass would come up on stage, or maybe Odetta.  “Hey, come on up.”  Five or six people were on stage all blowing fast and hard country blues and singing gospel numbers.  A combination of anglo-saxon white gospel against country negro blues.  Everything really worked.”

On Monday night at the bitter End you could see three groups as well as a comic and a star solo signer.  Comics fit in excellently.  Mort Saul, Lenny Bruce, Wood Allen, Bill Cosby and Hugh Romney would entertain.

Hugh Romney used to be a sharp comedian who did Lord Buckley type material.   Eric played with him at the Land of Odin.  Hugh Romney went out to San Francisco with the Be-ins, acid trip and flower-people.  Then he bought a bus and become the Wavy Gravy of the Merry Pranksters. 

Lord Buckley influenced all of the comedians.  He was a comedian from the 50’s and performed and did a lot of albums that were essays in a comic style .  For example: “and Moses was making his trip through the desert and he was leading the people, and the people were rebelling against Moses and Moses says to  God . . . What shall I do?  Bham.  Wham.  A voice came out of the sky with thunder and rockets and Moses said, Who art that:  and the voice said, I am the Nazzzzz.  Follow me to the mountains of eternal bliss . . . “  He was doing satirical, poetic, comedic, monologue in a very hip style.  On a lot of occasions when he would play the clubs, Harry the Hipster would accompany him (Harry Gibson).  He would play a musical interlude during the monologue.

When Wavy Gravy would do his skits at the Land of Odin he would do a couple of pieces in the style of Lord Buckley and Eric created guitar sound effects behind his routine.

Freddy Neil had an apartment over by Sheridan Square where Eric and he would practice.  They wrote a couple of songs together, one of which was called Nashville Twist.  Then twelve other tunes that remain unrecorded.  They were just hanging out, practicing lyrics and creating new tunes.  They’d play “”Blue’s On the Ceiling,” “Cocaine,”   Eric said that some of the changes in “Cocaine” were nice, like C to the E to the F and so on.  Good songs to sing, melodic.  They’d do rhythm things with Juan Serrano and Tim Hardin .  “Heavy shit”. 

 Eric described being on a rooftop in Manhattan with  Dino Valente and Marscellus.  Two or three ladies would go strut by like out of the West Side Story.  “Walking New York City with little pinner joints, real fast walks, and crystal meth.  They’d strut to 46^th St and then to the roof.  We’d all be together on the rooftop playing great music.  Like Freddie Neils’s tune “I Was Standing on the Corner of Bleaker and MacDougal, and “Didn’t Know Which Way to Go.”

Eric received a review in Que Magazine while playing at Art Ford’s Night Owl with Freddie Neil.  They received two standing ovations.  Outside people could see through a big glass partition.  “The air was so thick with smoke from grass that you could cut it.  The cops walked around in the blizzard.  They were always taking a little change here and a little graft there”.

The parents were all afraid to let their kids go into the Village, yet into the Village they came.  There was a Jewish girl named Shelly Kowalski who lived in Brighton Beach.  Every Monday night Shelly and her girlfriends would come in and sit around a table and look up at the acts and pick out their stars, the ones they liked.  Nothing is happening in Brighton Beach but the young Jewish girls can see their favorite star in the Village.  Eric went home with her once when he was sick and her Mothers gave him Matzah ball soup and he got well.  He hung around for awhile, then he was back at it.

The first time in the recording studio recording on a real album was with the Halifax Three which was composed of Dennis Doherty, Pat La Croix and Dick Burns.  They were recording for Epic Records.  The Halifax Three came down from Toronto looking for a banjo and guitar player.  Pat La Croix couldn’t play and Dennis and Dick could only strum.  After seeing Eric with the Highland Three, they encouraged him to come and play with them in Toronto.  They said they had work at a couple of clubs (Bohemian Embassy and the Colony Club) and they knew how to sneak him into Canada without a working visa.

There was no grass at all in Toronto, nothing but booze, booze, booze everywhere.  They had a different type of bar in Toronto that impressed Eric . . . one side for men and the other for ladies.  Now and then you could see a woman who was a guest of a man on the man’s side and vice-versa.

At the Village Corner Club Eric saw Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker play for the first time.  He also saw Gordon Lightfoot as a young man in a checkered suit.  Also Amos Garrett, the only other American Instrumentalist.

At the Colony Club Eric saw Ronnie (the Hawk) Hawkins and the Nighthawks which later were to be called “The Band.”

So they played the Colony, the Bohemian, and the Fifth Peg (a plush folk music club).  There was Juan Serrano, the Flamenco guitarist, and David Troy, who used to be lead singer with the Diamonds (“Little Darlin”).

A little while later Dennis Doherty joined a group called the Mugwumps, which also contained soon-to-be Mama Cass Elliot.

Ian Tyson was impressed with Eric’s five-string banjo work.  He asked him to join Ian and Sylvia.  They were handled by Albert Grossman who worked as an independent producer and was getting together with John Court from International Talent Association (ITA).  Ian and Sylvia recorded for Vanguard Records.  Maude (Sylvia) sang some blues.

The Mariposa Folk Festival was held outside of Toronto, Ontario.  It was big and beautiful farming country.  The Canadian people live exactly like the American people do.  EricI was the only American guitarist to play at a Canadian folk festival.  It meant something to him. “ I was a competent banjo player.  I played at the Topanga Canyon banjo contests against all the greats, played at the Ashgrove, played all the places that were happening.  The kids, the college kids, loved the bluegrass.  Kingston Trio was passé.  Let’s get into singing bluegrass.  I had the banjo out and was doing my thing”.

Eric did a couple of workshops there at the Mariposa Folk Festival.  He played with Ian and Sylvia on stage.  Their music was very dynamic and vocal.  “The people were very, very beautiful”.  “”Four Strong Winds” was a hit in Canada.  “Someday Soon” would be soon.  Eric said, “Sylvia was honest and meaningful.  Ian was downright serious about his country picking.  Ian always told me that there is a real big difference between the strummers and the pickers”.

After the Mariposa Folk Festival, They went on to play the Newport Folk Festival.  Joan Baez was the head of the ’63 festival.  Dylan was playing his songs, Donovan was there.  The old-timey traditionalists were there.  Actually, they all were there.  The thing to do was to head for upstate New York.  Eric said, “I felt good about it.  I was playing with Ian and Sylvia and I was playing at the festival.  I spent hours and hours of time playing arpeggios and trying to do the blues guitar like Mississippi John Hurt or John Lee Hooker . . . the things that sounded good.”

“A good time was had by all.  Protesting, civil rights, being in love – it was the place to be.  Heavy.  The expansion of your consciousness with the important  thing.  Mini-macro New York summer scene.  Like a dream of people with painted faces marching through the weeks, which turn into months, and then years, with a constant feeling of love and happiness.  The be-ins, the situation with the folk music – it was so fantastic and beautiful.  It seemed like everything had shut down . . . politically, the magnificence, the warmth, the drugs of it, all with colorful pictures."

  

“More people getting into the influence of ‘got some music to sing,  got some national heritage, Americana, in the most happening city in the world’.  And we are it.  The people are looking at us.  The people are looking at Judy Collins, Bobby Dylan, Joan Baez, the Halifax Three and the Journeymen”.

“Our music is exciting.  It contains protest, bluegrass, folk . . . our music jumped all over everyone in the world.  The Russians and Chinese picked up on it.  Their teenagers listen to our music, not their propaganda”.