The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 edition] by Dave Van Ronk

Author:Dave Van Ronk [Van Ronk, Dave; Wald, Elijah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306822179
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After my Bay Area experience, LA was like going from zero to sixty in 0.1 seconds. Phil’s advance report had not been an exaggeration, and within a week of arriving I had more work than I could handle. Weekdays I was playing at the Insomniac on Hermosa Beach, and on the weekends I was at the Unicorn, Herbie Cohn’s place on Sunset Strip. The Unicorn had a garden around the back, and I used to have to stand out there under some kind of fucking tree, which I hated, but the bread was good. As for the Insomniac, it was right across the street from Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse, so as a side benefit I had the opportunity to catch some great jazz between sets.

To be working seven nights a week was incredible to me. In a sense it was the first real test of my career plans, of whether I truly wanted to be a professional, full-time musician. And the answer was yes, without question or reservation. It also provided a lot of incentive to develop my music, build up my repertoire, all that kind of thing. It was an absolutely essential education, because you can practice playing guitar in your living room, and you can practice singing in your living room, but the only place you can practice performing is in front of an audience. Those old coffeehouses did not have to shut down early like the bars did, so they would stay open as long as there were paying customers, and you would wind up working four or five sets a night. I think that is one of the things that set the folksingers of my generation apart from the performers coming up today. There are some very good young musicians on the folk scene, but they will get to be fifty years old without having as much stage experience as I had by the time I was twenty-five. As a result, they will naturally mature much more slowly than the Dylans and Joni Mitchells and I did. We had so much opportunity to try out our stuff in public, get clobbered, figure out what was wrong, and go back and try it again. It was brutally hard work, but that was how I learned my trade: by working in front of an audience hour after hour, night after night. You can hear the difference immediately if you listen to my two Folkways albums.

The only drawback, from my point of view, was the fear that people back in New York might hear that I was playing in coffeehouses. My compatriots and I had always believed that there was no life form more protozoan than a coffeehouse folksinger. Coffeehouse folksingers were squeaky-clean optimists who brushed their teeth eighty-seven times a day, wore drip-dry seersucker suits, and sang “La Bamba.” So back home, if you got known as a coffeehouse folksinger, you lost many, many points. It was an embarrassment, but I tried to shrug it off: I was singing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.