Interview #27: David Browne

Talking Greenwich Village & the Beats

WE HAVE JUST reviewed a book by David Browne, one of the best of the current crop of US rock historians, this time turning his attention to a uniquely fertile musical community in New York City.

David Browne, a senior writer at Rolling Stone who has issued acclaimed biographies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead and Sonic Youth among others, has now produced a fine portrait of Greenwich Village.

Talkin’ Greenwich Village – an evocative title in itself though Browne says he is unaware of any actual such song existing with that name – expertly trawls the twentieth-century for people and places in that downtown neighbourhood where jazz and poetry, folk and blues, found a largely welcoming home.

Rock and the Beat Generation spoke to the author as his well-received account, released through Hachette, heads for the bookstores…

Simon Warner: What a phenomenal piece of research! How many interviews did you conduct for the project?

David Browne: Thank you. All told, from musicians, their relativdes, club owners and scene makers to current and retired New York City officials, the tally added up to about 150. I had no idea that number was that high until I compiled the sources and acknowledgements list for the book.

There were easily another 50 people I had hoped to reach, but some of them passed away while I was working on the book and others ran up against my deadline. There are never enough interviews! But I’m grateful for those I did get to meet and speak with.

SW: Was this more of a challenge than writing a band biography, something you have excelled at in the past?

DB: Absolutely. Talkin’ Greenwich Village was the most daunting book I’ve ever done in terms of its structure. I knew the arc of the story going into it: the origins, rise, heyday and gradual crumbling of this pivotal music scene. How exactly I would tell that story was another question.

I created a document with any and every notable event, from club openings or closings to famous gigs to the dates people arrived in the area, and kept adding to it. It ended up being 60 pages. Then I just threw myself into the research and began tracking down and interviewing anyone I could, and figured I’d see where it all landed.

Dave Van Ronk was going to be a key character, I always knew – he was there in the beginning and until his death, and it’s possible to trace the different eras of the scene through him. But when I learned that members of the Blues Project and then Maggie and Terre Roche were among his students and/or protegees, I realized I had a narrative ink to the different eras.

All the significant events were written on postcards and I moved them around on my office floor so that I would other genres or events in and out of that character-driven narrative. But it was a massive, often infuriating, puzzle, and there were still many days when I was nearly tearing my hair out. Hopefully it reads seamlessly.

SW: Is there anyone you wished had been alive or available to add to your gallery of conversations?

DB: So many. I was able to speak with the Blues Project’s Danny Kalb before his death in 2022, and luckily I was also able to spend time with Happy Traum, who passed away this summer. But during the course of the research, we lost key players like Len Chandler (the Black, Ohio-born folksinger who was part of the Gaslight world with Dylan, Van Ronk, Tom Paxton and others), Joe Marra (who ran the Night Owl), Patrick Sky (musician and friend of Van Ronk’s), Alix Dobkin (singer-songwriter and wife of Gaslight manager Sam Hood), Roger Sprung (one of the earliest musicians to play the Sunday afternoon jams in Washington square Park), Ella Solomon (who co-ran the Café Au Go Go with her husband Howard), and Bill Lee (Spike’s father and bass player on many early folk records).

I had reached out to some of those people before they passed, eerily enough. All those passings were another reminder that an era was drawing to a close.

SW: There is clearly something of a rise and fall narrative to your story. How would you characterise the Village in 2024? Does it exist in actuality or only in the historical imagination?

DB: Good question. I made numerous trips back to the Village over the three-plus years I worked on the book. On any given night, especially weekends, you’d think the old days were still with us. Streets like Bleecker and MacDougal can be packed and bustling. A few of the legendary venues (the Bitter End, the Café Wha?, the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note) are still open. Of course, then you realize that most of those crowds are in search of bars and restaurants, since so little live music is being made in the area now.

But the fact that all those people are still drawn to that neighborhood says something about its mythology and its continued pull all these decades later. Geographically and to an extent politically, there’s still no comparable district in the city; the Village is still a village within Manhattan. The Covid-era raves in Washington Square Park, which resulted in police action, were also a reminder of the way the neighborhood had its share of tensions. Now we just need more music venues!

SW: Are you related by any chance to Jackson Browne? I noticed in the New York Times in September, he credited Kerouac as a catalyst for 'These Days', a Village classic for various reasons…

No, but I do recall meeting him about 15 years ago when I was covering the rehearsals for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary concerts in New York, and we both chuckled at our mutual memory of some people mispronouncing our name as ‘Brownie’ in our youths.

SW: The Beats, even more so the beatniks, have walk-on parts in your urban drama. Have you personally taken an interest in that group of mid-century writers and their influence as reader or follower, journalist or historian, biographer or music critic?

DB: I remember reading Dennis McNally’s Kerouac bio, Desolate Angel, many years ago and being fascinated by his story, his heyday and his decline in later years. I caught up with On the Road right after and loved how near-journalistic it can be. With almost of my books, I’m reminded of the intersection between the Beats and music.

When writing my Jeff Buckley book, Dream Brother, I heard more about the night Jeff recorded a version of ‘Ulalume’ for Closed on Account of Rabies, an Edgar Allan Poe tribute album. Ginsberg was in the studio with Jeff and producer Hal Willner and coached Jeff with the reading and recording. Both Buckley and Ginsberg died shortly afterwards.

The Beats came up constantly while I was researching my Grateful Dead bio, So Many Roads, with the late Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow sharing hilarious stories of Neal Cassady’s time at the communal Dead house in Haight-Asbury.

Sonic Youth were huge fans of those writers and, as I recounted in that book, Goodbye 20th Century, made a pilgrimage to meet William Burroughs at his house in Lawrence, Kansas. Those writers were such heroes and archetypes for several generations of rockers.

See also: ‘Book review #32: Talkin’ Greenwich Village’, October 14th, 2024