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WORK TITLE: Talkin’ Greenwich Village
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.david-browne.com/
CITY: New York
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COUNTRY: United States
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LAST VOLUME: CANR 309
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 19, 1960; married; wife’s name Maggie (an editor).
EDUCATION:New York University, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Music journalist, editor, writer. Music & Sound Output magazine, editor and writer; High Fidelity, editor and writer, 1988; New York Daily News, staff reporter and music critic, 1988-89, columnist; Entertainment Weekly, music critic and writer, 1990-2006; Rolling Stone, senior editor, 2008—; Men’s Journal, contributing editor, 2011-13.
AWARDS:Music Journalism Award for an article on the cultural significance of the music of John Tesh, 1996.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, New York, New Republic, Blender, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and Wired; contributor to websites for National Public Radio and the Huffington Post. His works have been translated into multiple languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and editor David Browne was born May 19, 1960. A graduate of New York University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in journalism, he serves as a senior editor for Rolling Stone magazine and is a regular contributor to various other periodicals, including the New York Times, New York, Blender, Spin, and Wired. He writes regularly for the Huffington Post website, and his reviews can also be found on the website for National Public Radio. In 1990, he joined the inaugural staff of Entertainment Weekly. He has also written a regular column for the New York Daily News about the independent rock scene. In 1996, he was awarded the Music Journalism Award for criticism, for his writings on the cultural importance of the music of John Tesh. Though Browne continues to write about a wide range of topics, his primary focus remains music journalism. In addition to his regular endeavors, he has written several books, including Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley; Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars, and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme; and Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth.
Browne’s book Amped is something of a departure for him, as it focuses on a topic other than the music business. The world of sports, however, from a pop cultural point of view, is still very much a big business that has developed a mammoth marketing machine to help keep its players in the public eye, so in this way is very similar to other areas of the entertainment industry. Browne chooses to focus on some of the sports that have become popular in recent years, taking attention and endorsements from more traditional team sports and creating an audience for activities such as competitive skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX bike racing, and motocross. Where sports such as baseball, football, and basketball emphasize both individual talents and the ability to play and strategize in a team setting, these new activities are much more about the skills of one person and emphasize traits such as individuality, creativity, and a certain disdain for both the rules and the norm. The stars in these sports therefore present a very different type of image and, because of their popularity with companies interested in signing athletes to represent their products, also send a very different message to the target customers. Many of these athletes are therefore reluctant to tie themselves to certain kinds of endorsements, feeling the products themselves will have a negative impact on their own images.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews, writing about Browne’s accounting of this new situation, dubbed the book “an informative look at the uneasy interface of alternative sports and corporate America.”
Goodbye 20th Century
Goodbye 20th Century takes a look at the music and career path of the alternative group Sonic Youth. He discusses at length the roots of each of the band’s members, paying particular attention to guitarist Thurston Moore and his experiences during the 1970s in New York, where the punk music scene was a major influence. He also looks at how the California art world played a part in developing bassist Kim Gordon’s skills. Browne traces the history of the couple, their eventual meeting with Lee Ranaldo—another guitarist—and how they came to find their succession of drummers. Over the course of the book, Browne discusses the band’s constant battle between their desire for monetary success and their desire to remain faithful to their musical style. Reviewers expressed mixed reactions to the work, while acknowledging that the band and its drawn-out career make for a difficult subject.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews opined that “Browne’s recounting is awash in factoids that swamp the narrative.” However Zane Ewton, writing for the Curled Up with a Good Book Web site, remarked: “Browne does a commendable job unearthing the various personalities within the band as well as the characters outside of the band. He also does not rely on digging up the dirt—there is no dirt to be dug.”
So Many Roads
Profiling the members and music of the Grateful Dead in So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead, Browne combines interviews with biography and critical analysis. Browne met with the surviving members of the band, as well as early fans and managers. The author focuses on pivotal periods in the band’s evolution, from its early days to its massive popularity and then to its later years. By highlighting specific periods over the course of the band’s lifetime, Browne offers insight into the shifting friendships within the band, finding that the drugs and partying did not particularly affect the band’s musical output. The author also finds that, contrary to popular opinion, the Grateful Dead remained musically relevant for several decades.
Discussing his approach to the band’s biography in the Wall Street Journal Online, Browne told Alan Paul: “One of the major challenges of writing a book about the Dead at this point in time is bringing something new to the table. Lately, I’ve become a huge fan of micro-histories … that focus on one specific historical period of time. … I flashed back to the micro-history style and, with the help of my wife Maggie, an editor, thought this could be a way of bringing something new to telling the Dead’s saga: using in-depth descriptions and reporting on specific key or representative days to paint a fresh portrait of the band.” Praising the result in Kirkus Reviews, a critic called So Many Roads a “righteous testimonial to the anarchic goodness that was the Grateful Dead” as well as “one of the better books on the band and welcome reading in this 50th anniversary year.” Derek Sanderson, writing in Library Journal, was also impressed, calling the volume a “very well-told history,” and noting that “it’s hard to imagine a better book for a Dead neophyte to start with.” According to Journal Sentinel Online correspondent Jim Higgins, “Browne’s an unabashed fan of the band’s music, but he’s also unafraid to point out weak spots and bad behavior.” Thus, he continued, “ So Many Roads offers an engaging account of an idiosyncratic American musical institution.” In the words of Parade Web site reviewer Nancy Berk: “While the historical implications of the legendary band are explored and highlighted, So Many Roads feels more like a beautiful and intriguing documentary than a history lesson. What better way to celebrate an iconic band?”
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Browne switched to a different iconic band with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup. Inspired by the group’s fiftieth anniversary, Browne conducted interviews with the musicians and their friends to write a comprehensive biography of the group. This includes chronicling everything from the group’s famously turbulent history to their various friendships and relationships, homes and recording studios. Browne also had access to unreleased music and documents, making his book a treasure trove suitable even for the most knowledgeable of fans but also a panoramic look at the music industry for those less familiar with the group.
“A fun and fast-paced music history,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They called it an “authoritative chronicle” of a band that “galvanized a generation.” They praised Browne for his “meticulous detail” and his success in “weaving together the careers and talents of each musician.” The result is the “most comprehensive biography of the group to date.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews agreed, describing the book “an excellent portrait of a troubled partnership.” They remarked that Browne seemed to have spoken with “nearly every living soul” who knew the band, although they pointed out that Neil Young and Stephen Stills refused to sit for an interview. The review also acknowledged that fans of the group may find the book “disenchanting” for how it portrays the behind-the-scenes conflicts.
Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital returns to Browne’s stomping grounds of New York City and particularly the small Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village. The Village was known as one of the pivotal launching pads for the folk music of the 1960s, although it was a jazz center well before that. Browne charts the history of the neighborhood from 1957, as the folk scene was congregating, to 1986, when that scene was drying up. Again, Browne conducted numerous interviews with musicians, club owners, and others who saw the neighborhood and its music scene first-hand. This included everyone from Judy Collins to Sonny Rollins and later stars like Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin. In an interview with Best Classic Bands, Browne spoke about how “pulling it together into a narrative was the biggest challenge” and how he was inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. The result is a portrait of a place and time that was pivotal in American culture.
“A detailed, abundantly populated chronicle of a storied place and its creative, outspoken, driven inhabitants,” wrote a contributor in Kirkus Reviews. The result for them was “animated social history.” Writing in Library Journal, Genevieve Williams described the book as a “thorough and thoroughly human history of a unique locale and era.” She noted that Browne emphasizes the neighborhood’s “sense of community” and its “persistence through decades of transformation and hardship.” Peter Keepnews, in the New York Times Book Review, called the book “impeccably researched, elegantly written, and consistently fascinating.” His only critique was that Browne largely overlooked the jazz part of the neighborhood’s music scene, which Keepnews argued was a critical part of what made the Village the music center it was.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Entertainment Weekly, March 9, 2001, “The Write Stuff: Read between the Lines with EW Scribes David Browne, Jim Mullen, and Lori L. Tharps,” p. 8; January 25, 2002, review of Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley, p. 97.
Hollywood Reporter, June 16, 2005, “Buckleys Resonating with Producer Houston,” p. 16.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2004, review of Amped: How Big Air, Big Dollars, and a New Generation Took Sports to the Extreme, p. 523; April 15, 2008, review of Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth; May 15, 2011, review of Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970; April 1, 2015, review of So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead; March 1, 2019, review of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup; August 15, 2024, review of Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital.
Library Journal, December 1, 2000, Caroline Dadas, review of Dream Brother, p. 138; October 1, 2004, James Miller, review of Amped, p. 89; May 15, 2008, Matthew Moyer, review of Goodbye 20th Century, p. 104; May 1, 2015, Derek Sanderson, review of So Many Roads, p. 76; September, 2024, Genevieve Williams, review of Talkin’ Greenwich Village, p. 85.
New York Times, June 24, 2011, Scott Timberg, “Why 1970 Deserves Its 15 Minutes of Fame.”
New York Times Book Review, November 24, 2024, Peter Keepnews, “Village Voices,” review of Talkin’ Greenwich Village, p. 15.
Publishers Weekly, June 7, 2004, review of Amped, p. 42; January 30, 2006, “Da Capo’s Ben Schafer Bought World Rights to Entertainment Weekly Music Critic David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century,” p. 8; April 7, 2008, review of Goodbye 20th Century, p. 57; March 4, 2019, review of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, pp. 71+.
Xpress Reviews, June 10, 2011, Jim Collins, review of Fire and Rain.
ONLINE
Best Classic Bands, https://bestclassicbands.com/ (September 9, 2024), Jeff Tamarkin, author interview.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (January 29, 2009), Zane Ewton, review of Goodbye 20th Century.
David Browne website, http://www.david-browne.com (December 19, 2024).
HarperCollins Web site, http://www.harpercollins.com/ (January 29, 2009), author profile.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (January 29, 2009), author profile.
Journal Sentinel Online, http://www.jsonline.com/ (April 24, 2015), Jim Higgins, review of So Many Roads.
National Public Radio Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (January 29, 2009), author profile.
Parade, http://parade.com/ (May 8, 2015), Nancy Berk, review of So Many Roads.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://blogs.wsj.com/ (March 8, 2016), Alan Paul, author interview.*
David Browne is a senior writer at Rolling Stone and a longtime music journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Spin, the New Republic, and numerous other outlets. After graduating from New York University with a degree in journalism, he worked as a staff music reporter at the New York Daily News. For 16 years, he was the music critic at Entertainment Weekly, where he worked as a roadie for Kiss, shared a bagel with Leonard Cohen in Cohen’s Montreal home, and spent time on the tour buses with Coldplay and the Black Crowes and with James Taylor at his Berkshires home. A contributing editor and then senior writer at Rolling Stone since 2008, he has written cover stories on Whitney Houston, Bob Dylan, Adele, Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman in addition to hundreds of articles and reviews.
Browne is the author of eight books: Dream Brother (2001), a dual biography of the late musicians Jeff and Tim Buckley; Amped (2004), a history of extreme sports; Goodbye 20th Century (2008), a biography of the pioneering indie band Sonic Youth; Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970 (2011), about the confluence of music and politics during that under-chronicled year; So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead (2015), a major biography of the legendary band that includes new interviews with band members, friends and former employees, along with access to documents from the Dead archives; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup (2019), a deeply reported chronicle of the iconic counterculture band; and Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice (2019), a collection of the late Jeff Buckley’s journals and writing that he compiled and co-edited with Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert.
Browne is also the author of The Spirit of ’76 (2014), a mini-book on Kindle Singles about the ground-breaking events of that year in America.
Dream Brother, a steady seller for nearly 18 years, has been translated into French and Italian and is regularly cited as the definitive biography of Jeff Buckley, complete with access to friends, family, and archival material. Goodbye 20th Century was hailed as “an expressway to the soul of the influential band” by Vanity Fair, “a rollicking, epic biography” by Salon, and “compulsively readable” by Publishers Weekly. It has also been published in the UK, Germany and, soon, Japan. Fire and Rain was called “a worthy addition to anyone’s collection of such music histories” (Associated Press) and “one of the most entertaining and informative books of the year” (NPR). So Many Roads has been hailed as “an education and revelation even for the seasoned Deadhead reader” (Steve Silberman, best-selling author of NeuroTribes) and a book with “broader context and significance” (The Washington Post). His CSNY tome was called “the most comprehensive biography of the group to date … an authoritative chronicle” by Publishers Weekly and “one of the great rock and roll stories (New York Times Book Review).
His latest book is Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital (Grand Central, September 2024). It is the first panoramic history of the now-mythical community that fostered several generations of music icons and became a safe space for misfits and iconoclasts. The book is based on interviews with more than 100 musicians, club owners and observers from its earliest days (Judy Collins, Herbie Hancock, Tom Paxton, Sonny Rollins, John Sebastian, Carolyn Hester, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and members of the classic band the Blues Project) to those who emerged during its last great era (Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin, Terre and Suzzy Roche, Steve Forbert, actor/musician Christopher Guest). Browne also uncovered previously unseen documents and recordings, including efforts to curtail folk singing in Washington Square Park in the ’60s that led to the “beatnik riot” and how the FBI and city government tracked Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, and others. Publishers Weekly called the book “a vivid account” and noted that its “evocative prose enlivens this captivating ode to a storied chapter of pop culture history.” In a starred review, Kirkus calls Talkin’ Greenwich Village a “detailed, abundantly populated chronicle of a storied place.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, not far from Bruce Springsteen territory, Browne lives and works in New York City.
David Browne
Senior Writer
David Browne is a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone, where he contributes deep-dive reports, reviews and profiles on music. He is also the author of seven books, including biographies of Sonic Youth, Jeff Buckley, the Grateful Dead, and, most recently "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup."
Author David Browne on His New Book on the Greenwich Village Music Scene
by Jeff Tamarkin
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In his fascinating and meticulously researched new book Talkin’ Greenwich Village, subtitled “The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital,” veteran author and music journalist David Browne chronicles the history of the New York City neighborhood that has given a home, over several decades, to countless important musicians working within myriad genres. It arrived via Hachette Books on September 17, 2024, and is available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.
As the promotional copy of the book states, “Although Greenwich Village encompasses less than a square mile in downtown New York, rarely has such a concise area nurtured so many innovative artists and genres. Over the course of decades, Billie Holiday, the Weavers, Sonny Rollins, Dave Van Ronk, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, and Suzanne Vega are just a few who migrated to the Village, recognizing it as a sanctuary for visionaries, non-conformists, and those looking to reinvent themselves. Working in the Village’s smoky coffeehouses and clubs, they chronicled the tumultuous ’60s, rewrote jazz history, and took folk and rock ’n’ roll into places they hadn’t been before.”
Browne conducted more than 150 new interviews with artists whose careers flourished in the Village—from singer-songwriters like Vega, John Sebastian, Shawn Colvin, Suzzy and Terre Roche, Arlo Guthrie and Eric Andersen to jazz greats Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock to members of classic rock bands like the Blues Project—and took a deep dive into the history of the many venues that hosted these artists. Browne also recounts the often-tense politics that at times threatened the thriving downtown music scene and, according to the promo copy, “the racial tensions, crackdowns, and changes in New York and music that infiltrated the neighborhood.”
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Browne is a senior writer at Rolling Stone and author of eight books (on subjects including Jeff Buckley, the Grateful Dead, Sonic Youth, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). He was previously a staff reporter at the New York Daily News and music critic at Entertainment Weekly.
Best Classic Bands spoke with Browne about Talkin’ Greenwich Village and the music scene at the heart of the book.
David Browne (Photo by Maeve Browne, used with permission)
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Best Classic Bands: Why did you want to write a book about the history of the Greenwich Village music scene, and how did you unravel such a complex, vast story with so many tributaries?
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David Browne: I actually first had the idea for this book a few decades ago, when I took note of the domino effect of so many Village clubs shuttering: Folk City, the Lone Star Café, the Village Gate and on and on. This was not only after I had spent time as a reporter at the Daily News and spent quality time in those clubs and so many others in the area. It was very startling and signaled something profound. For whatever reason—other projects—I put it on the back burner, but the project returned to life thanks to two return visits in 2019. For a story on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott for Rolling Stone, we did a walking tour of the area around Bleecker and MacDougal [Streets], which reminded us both of all the long-gone venues (Jack has a great memory, too). A few months later, I once more wove my way through Village streets on the way to a Thurston Moore show at [the club] LPR, and walking past clubs that were now restaurants or banks or drug stores, it became doubly clear that the neighborhood was hardly a music neighborhood anymore and only a few of its famed venues (the Bitter End, Village Vanguard, Café Wha?, the Blue Note) survived. A 2020 RS story I wrote on the life and death of David Blue, an early Village stalwart, also inspired me to finally dive into the book. And when the pandemic lockdown hit that same year, who knew how many of the still-standing clubs would even survive? The timing just felt right.
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From the start, I knew the arc of the story I wanted to tell—the seeds, rise, heyday and gradual crumbling of the scene between the ’50s and the ’80s—and dove into the research, interviewing anyone who was still with us, reading or re-reading old books and articles, and starting a document, an ongoing timeline of anything and everything significant (club openings and closings, significant or forgotten shows, etc.). Pulling it together into a narrative was the biggest challenge. I was partly inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s epic The Warmth of Other Suns and the way she followed the journey of Black Americans from the South to other parts or the country in the last century. I wondered if I could approach my book in a similar manner. I bought a pack of index cards and wrote some of those events on each and moved them around on my floor, making sure I returned to certain pivotal characters (like Dave Van Ronk or the members of the Blues Project) from time to time to ground the story in some central figures and employ them as windows into particular Village eras. That part of the work drove me crazy at times, but I’m hoping the work paid off and the narrative is easy to follow.
Why did the Village become such a magnet for musicians, and are there shared characteristics of artists who flock there?
I think part of it was its history, the way the Village had long attracted writers, artists and poets dating back to the 1800s. It was a symbolic neighborhood. I think the relative compactness of the area also played a part, especially once more coffeehouses and clubs started opening at the dawn of the ’60s. Whether you were a musician or a fan, you could literally go to, say, the Gaslight, cross the street for a gig at the Café Wha or Commons or walk around the corner and find the Bitter End or the Gate. There were a batch of nightspots in midtown, but nothing similar existed in any other part of town. As far as shared characteristics, I think what connects many of Village musicians, in whatever genre, was their devotion to integrity and a lack of compromise. Whether it was Dylan, Van Ronk, the Blues Project, the Roches, Suzanne Vega or many others, these are people who weren’t averse to having a hit record but wanted to do it on their terms and with their identities intact. I’m hoping that tradition will be passed along to the next generation of artists who gravitate there in the future.
Watch rare footage from the Gaslight Poetry Cafe from 1962, including Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary
You’re a New Jersey guy but you lived in the Village starting in your college years. What was your own first-hand first impression of the music scene there, and what was happening at the time?
As a high school kid in northeast Jersey in the late ’70s, my first impression of the Village music scene were those amazing things called “used record stores”! A fellow music-head friend and I heard there were a slew of them in the Village, where you could bring in your unwanted vinyl, trade them in and buy new records! So that’s what we did. I remember discovering Second Coming Records on Sullivan Street and only getting maybe $10 for a huge pile of LPs I carted in on a NJ Transit bus. Not the bounty I expected, but I bought one or two records there; one of them, if I’m remembering correctly, was Roger McGuinn’s Peace on You.
Related: When Jimi Hendrix was a Village staple
When I moved into my freshman NYU dorm in 1978, I sensed that the mythic ’60s were over and that you weren’t going to see Phil Ochs (who had recently died) or Dylan or most of that gang anymore. But I also remember walking around the neighborhood with my new roommates the first night we moved in and passing by the Bitter End, Kenny’s Castaways and the Gate and realizing there was still a scene of sorts, and plenty of other record stores too. I went to my first show at the famed Bottom Line that fall—Dr. John with opening act Alicia Bridges of “I Love the Nightlife” fame. Even though that club was only four years old at that time, the experience felt like attending music church, and the same with a jazz brunch I caught one afternoon at the Vanguard. Every Wednesday morning I’d buy the Village Voice and check out the club ads, and I began taking notice of a new batch of singer-songwriters playing at Folk City and saw the Smithereens at the Other End Café soon after. It wasn’t the ’60s, but I felt that the scene was still vibrant and had plenty to offer.
Dylan’s 1963 album cover, with girlfriend Suze Rotolo, shot on Jones Street in the Village
For a lot of people of a certain age, the Village will always be associated with folk music made by troubadours with acoustic guitars—Dylan, Ochs, Eric Andersen, Richie Havens, Van Ronk, etc., and later on, people like the Roches and Steve Forbert. But you make a point of explaining that there was always a lot more than that going on, especially a whole jazz scene centering in venues like the Village Vanguard. Why do you think the Village appealed to such a variety of artists?
This is one of the aspects of the Village’s music legacy that also separates itself from those in many other cities—its eclecticism. I was reminded of this as I paged through week after week of Voice club ads starting in the late ’50s. I could cite dozens of examples, but one weekend in 1965, you could have seen Phil Ochs and Eric Andersen at the Gaslight, Ornette Coleman at the Vanguard, Coleman Hawkins at the Five Spot, and Dick Gregory and Arthur Prysock at the Village Gate. The fact that the Village was somewhat off the beaten path, a world unto itself, also helped foster all these artists in different genres: It felt like a place where you could go not just to reinvent yourself (sometimes with a new name!) but also ply your trade and try out a new story-song or a free-jazz romp to a small, discerning crowd. Once the music business began turning its gaze to the Village and sending A&R people down there, well, that didn’t hurt either in terms of the area’s allure.
Watch Richie Havens perform “Handsome Johnny” at the Bitter End in 1967
There was also a vibrant rock scene there starting in the ’60s—bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Blues Project, the Fugs, etc. How did that come about and was it separate from the folkie thing or was it all pretty much one big happy family?
The electrification of the Village was one of the most fascinating parts of the story to me. Everyone thinks it all started with Dylan at Newport in the summer of ’65, but in fact, Village folkies had already started plugging in months before that, a list that includes Tim Hardin, Jesse Colin Young, John Sebastian and the Spoonful, and the late, great Danny Kalb and what became the Blues Project. Even proud acoustic picker Happy Traum, with whom I was privileged to spend hours before he passed away this summer, briefly had a rock band. Dylan was cutting the half-electric Bringing It All Back Home in early ’65, but he wasn’t alone in exploring the new possibilities.
Watch the Blues Project perform “Steve’s Song” in 1967
Part of the motivation was success and the impact of A Hard Day’s Night in ’64. And you can’t blame anyone back then for wanting to branch out and maybe play to more than people than 50 at the Night Owl or some basement club. And look at all the great art that came from Village musicians plugging in: all those enduring records by the Spoonful, the Youngbloods and the Blues Project among them.
One of the reasons I focused on the Blues Project—aside from their wonderful music, especially the Projections album—is the way the band embodied the tensions that sprang from that literally charged period. The gifted [Blues Project keyboardist/vocalist] Al Kooper aside, the other members were grounded in folk, blues or jazz; several of them even took guitar lessons with Van Ronk. But the friction between Kooper, who yearned for the band to have a pop hit, and Kalb, who preferred they stick with classic blues and honor the masters, came to embody the clash between purity and commercialism that ricocheted through the Village at the time. Could you have a hit record while staying true to yourself? Were all those tourists and out-of-towners suddenly invading the neighborhood good or bad?
Listen to a rare live recording of the Lovin’ Spoonful at the Night Owl Cafe
Is there one individual artist you consider the King or Queen of Greenwich Village music, someone that is intrinsically associated with that scene? An unsung hero of the Village, perhaps? And why that person?
I always knew I had to include Dave Van Ronk, but the more I researched his life and impact, it became clear that he really did live up to his unofficial title as the Mayor of MacDougal Street. Van Ronk may not be totally unsung, but some people may not fully realize what an impact he made and the breadth of his legacy. His story was interwoven with the scene itself. He moved to the Village in the mid ’50s and, unlike many who came after, like Dylan, never left; he still lived there when he died in 2002. He was there when the coffeehouses started popping up, he was there when those places were harassed by cops or the Mob or the neighborhood, he was there when Dylan arrived, he was there when everyone plugged in (and started his own short-lived rock band too), he was there when it petered out in the early ’70s, and he was there when a new generation of troubadours brought it back to life in the late ’70s (he was involved with the Speak Easy club that fostered Vega, Shawn Colvin and others). He was also a guitar teacher or mentor to Danny Kalb, Maggie and Terre Roche, Christine Lavin and many more. And his records, while not exactly commercial due to his bark of a voice, are largely wonderful and encompass folk, jazz, blues and rock, the range of Village music itself. As a result, his life and work is threaded through the narrative.
Watch Dave Van Ronk perform “Green, Green Rocky Road” live
You conducted over 150 new interviews for the book. What were some of the new things that you discovered about the Village music scene, and do you have a favorite interview out of all those? Also, who, among those that have died (or didn’t grant interviews), would you most like to have spoken with?
Thanks to New York City archives, I learned more about the infamous [1961] “beatnik riot” in Washington Square Park and the ways in which the city was intent, in one way or another, on squashing hootenannies in that park. I gained more insight into the city’s cabaret laws and how they hampered the Village scene (no drums!), as well as more about the tensions between the Italian-Americans in the area and all those kids and venues who invaded their neighborhood. I learned more about the infamous movie whose success paved the way for the Speak Easy and more about the challenges the Roches faced when they ventured outside of the Village. (Booed by Boz Scaggs fans? Who knew?) I learned about the connection between the closing of Folk City and Robert De Niro’s mother and the very personal back story behind Vega’s “Luka.”
Watch Suzanne Vega sing “Luka” on the David Letterman show
Of those who passed, I was sorry to not be able to interview Len Chandler, the Ohio-born Black singer and guitarist who was an integral part of the Gaslight scene and had first-hand encounters with racism in the Village. We spoke a bit when I started, but he was having health issues and passed away while I was in the midst of the book. I also would have loved to have spoken with Joe Marra, who started the Night Owl, and Alix Dobkin, one of the first Village musicians to come out. Both passed away during my research, along with Patrick Sky, Ian Tyson (whom I had already interviewed a few times in my career) and others. Fortunately, I was able to spend time with both Danny Kalb and Happy Traum before they passed, and I valued my time with both of them.
Greenwich Village has always been about change but there are some things that never change. There is still a very active live music scene there. What is most similar about today’s Village and the classic era and what has changed the most?
What’s clearly changed is the way in which most of the spaces that housed the clubs are now drugstores, banks or swanky restaurants. But every so often when I was there on a weekend afternoon or evening, a reminder of what it had once been, and could be again, resurfaced. One afternoon this past winter, I popped into an afternoon jam session at Smalls, a jazz club that opened in the ’90s and is, in the grand Village tradition, in a basement. Sitting there listening to young players swap solos gave me hope that the music aspect of the Village could come to life once more, someday.
David Browne. Da Capo, $30 (480p) ISBN 978-0-306-90328-1
Drawing on archives of folk rock band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as well as new interviews with the band members' friends and fellow musicians, Browne (Fire and Rain) delivers an authoritative chronicle of the rise of the short-lived folk rock quartet, whose songs, such as "Woodstock" and "Ohio," galvanized a generation. In meticulous detail, Browne describes the making of the band's self-titled debut album that launched the trio of David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash in 1969, and the several hits that followed after Neil Young joined them in 1970 for the recording of Deja Vu. Weaving together the careers and talents of each musician (with the Byrds, Crosby's "harmony parts encased each song in a warm glow"; "Stills wrote and sang pleading or cautious love songs" while in Buffalo Springfield; "Nash's high register blended with [CSNY's] lower tones"), Browne illustrates the genius each artist brought to the group, as well as the obstacles that drove them apart--particularly Stills's arrogance and Young's unpredictability and aloofness. By 1971, the band split up; it came together only twice more to record as CSNY for 1988's American Dream and 1999's Looking Forward. In what is the most comprehensive biography of the group to date, Browne compiles a fun and fast-paced music history. Agent: Erin Hosier, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Apr.)
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"Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 9, 4 Mar. 2019, pp. 71+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A578584238/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59ef3b75. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Browne, David CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG Da Capo (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 4, 2 ISBN: 978-0-306-90328-1
A warts-and-all--mostly warts--look at the legendary musical group.
Judging by Rolling Stone contributing editor Browne's (So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead, 2015, etc.) latest book, it's altogether improbable that all four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young should still be alive and perhaps even more improbable that they smoothed out their feuds and egomania enough to record together for so long. The story begins with David Crosby and Stephen Stills plotting to lure Graham Nash from the Hollies. Characteristically, the three can't agree on where they first sang together, but it appears to have been a Hollywood street outside a club where the British band was playing in February 1968. Stills emerges in these pages as a stern taskmaster given to running the trio--and, intermittently, quartet, with the addition of fellow Buffalo Springfield alum Neil Young--as a military outfit, staying up with chemical help for days at a time to get exactly the right sound down on tape. For his part, Nash often figures as peacemaker and go-between, although Browne makes it clear that the peace-and-love avatar has both an ego and a temper. Throw the head-in-the-clouds Crosby into the mix, and it's a perfect recipe for volatility--and magic. The author appears to have talked to nearly every living soul with a part to play in the band's long career, except for Stills and Young, who disagreed on nearly everything about the group but came together in keeping mum. Says Crosby, meaningfully, "We had a good band. It was easy. I made a good paycheck. But we had gotten to the point where we really didn't like each other." Though the narrative takes some of the bloom off the Flower Power rose, it also celebrates those fine moments when the band merged to make such epochal songs as "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" and "Ohio."
Fans of CSN(Y) may find this disenchanting, but Browne delivers an excellent portrait of a troubled partnership.
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"Browne, David: CROSBY, STILLS, NASH AND YOUNG." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A575952222/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49439d56. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Browne, David TALKIN' GREENWICH VILLAGE Hachette (NonFiction None) $32.50 9, 17 ISBN: 9780306827631
Reviving New York's spirited music scene.
Browne, a senior writer atRolling Stone and biographer of many music notables, including Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, draws on a wealth of interviews and archival sources to create a teeming history of Greenwich Village from 1957 to the 1980s. By the late 1950s, venues like the Village Vanguard, Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, and the Half Note already were famous for jazz, while folk singers drew crowds in Washington Square Park. Soon, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, and Judy Collins, among many others, took the stage in coffeehouses and clubs, drawing throngs of fans. On a snowy night in 1961, a "funny, fumbling, somewhat chubby kid" who called himself Bob Dylan appeared at Cafe Wha?, one of many young upstarts hoping to make a name for himself in New York. "As disparate as the talent in the Village was--oceans of difference between Van Ronk's gruffness, Dylan's bristling wheeze, Collins's purity, and Paxton's smoothness, to cite a few--one thing bound them together," Browne writes. "Theirs was music neither as stuffy nor as straitlaced as that of the balladeers who'd preceded them" on those same stages. Dylan was especially influential, with original compositions that inspired others to write their own pieces rather than rework traditional songs. Browne recounts the genesis of groups (Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Roche sisters); the agents who managed them; and the rivalries, love affairs, and musical hits that transformed their careers--in turn, transforming the Village. He recounts, as well, the "wall of segregation" that kept folk music largely white and the government surveillance that threatened the community. Steeped in music culture and lore, Browne offers a detailed, abundantly populated chronicle of a storied place and its creative, outspoken, driven inhabitants.
Animated social history.
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"Browne, David: TALKIN' GREENWICH VILLAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504648/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c09a4e6a. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Browne, David. Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital. Hachette. Sept. 2024. 400p. ISBN 9780306827631. $32.50. MUSIC
Almost three-quarters of a century has passed since Greenwich Village's rise to prominence as a cultural juggernaut. Yet, its longevity, capacity for reinvention, and musical fertility have never really been rivaled anywhere else in the United States. Browne (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup) seeds his narrative with significant anecdotes, serendipitous meetings, and local politics, against the backdrop of four decades of American history. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, the Village turned out a veritable who's-who of jazz and folk musicians. Reputations were made or enhanced on the venues' stages, many of which became legendary, from the Village Vanguard to CBGB. Browne's emphasis on the sense of community, that community's persistence through decades of transformation and hardship--up to and including September 11--and its lightning-in-a-bottle nature brings home what made the Village so special. Much of the material is based on over 150 new interviews Brown conducted (with Judy Collins, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Suzanne Vega, Arlo Guthrie, Shawn Colvin, and others). VERDICT A thorough and thoroughly human history of a unique locale and era. For fans of American folk, jazz, and New York City.--Genevieve Williams
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Williams, Genevieve. "Browne, David. Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 85. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808228735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c1492b87. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
In his latest book, the Rolling Stone writer David Browne tracks three decades of folk, blues, rock and jazz below 14th Street.
TALKIN' GREENWICH VILLAGE: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital, by David Browne
In March 1961, Newbold Morris, New York City's recently appointed parks commissioner, wrote in a memo that he had been ''shocked'' by what he saw and heard on a Sunday visit to Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. The park had long been a weekly gathering place for folk singers, and permits for those gatherings had long been routinely granted. But Morris expressed concern about ''these fellows that come from miles away to display the most terrible costumes, haircuts, etc., and who play bongo drums and other weird instruments attracting a weird public.''
A few days later, another city official noted that there had been ''written complaints from citizens or organizations regarding these folk singing groups.'' And in April, a request for a permit from the Social Folk Singing Group -- headed by Izzy Young, whose Folklore Center on MacDougal Street had become the nerve center of the growing folk revival -- was denied. That denial prompted an organized protest in the park, which led to arrests. ''Folk Singers Riot in Washington Sq.,'' a New York Times headline declared.
Beyond the park, the Village, already a home for misfits and outsiders of all stripes (Newbold Morris didn't know the half of it), was also becoming known as a place to hear folk music -- Folk City had opened the year before, and a coffeehouse scene was starting to develop -- and had been known for a while as a place to hear jazz. As David Browne makes clear, music in the Village faced, and would continue to face, obstacles -- political, economic and otherwise -- but it has endured.
Browne begins his story in 1957 and ends it in 1986, the year Folk City left its West Third Street location for a planned move that never happened. As a history of folk, rock and blues in the West Village in the second half of the 20th century, ''Talkin' Greenwich Village'' is impeccably researched, elegantly written and consistently fascinating. Unfortunately, it has a jazz-size hole in the middle.
By 1958, Browne writes early on, jazz ''was becoming the dominant genre in the neighborhood.'' Later, in a passage about the opening of the jazz club Seventh Avenue South in 1977, he observes that ''jazz had played a prominent role in the scene for decades.'' But in a book that purports to paint the big picture, those comments amount to not much more than lip service.
Important Village jazz spots like the departed Bradley's and Sweet Basil and the still-standing Blue Note are barely mentioned. Even the Village Vanguard -- still in business after almost 90 years, and certainly one of the best-known jazz venues in the world -- gets short shrift. Browne does acknowledge that the Vanguard was the site of celebrated live albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans, and he does refer to it as ''iconic,'' but he has disappointingly little to say about it beyond that. In contrast, the history of Folk City -- a nondescript Italian restaurant that became a nightclub and quickly evolved into a showcase for, among many others, a young Bob Dylan -- is recounted in loving detail.
It's not that I would have wanted less about Folk City; or about the other quintessential Village rooms Browne writes so well about, including the Gaslight, the Cafe Au Go Go and the Bottom Line; or about performers like Dave Van Ronk, the Roches and of course Dylan, who shook up the Village almost from the day he arrived in 1961, and whose return to the city and the neighborhood in 1970, after a long absence, was greeted as the latest harbinger of a renaissance for a scene that had experienced its share of ups and downs. (Happily, Browne also finds room for less well-known but equally important acts like the Blues Project, a bracingly high-energy band that played regularly at the Cafe Au Go Go and seemed primed for a rise to rock stardom that, for various reasons, was not to be.)
But jazz played a much bigger role in making the Village ''America's bohemian music capital,'' as the subtitle puts it, than this book suggests. It could simply be that Browne, a senior writer at Rolling Stone and the author of books about Sonic Youth, the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, isn't all that interested in jazz. I get it; musical taste is subjective. But there's a rich story here that goes all but untold. Maybe it should get a book of its own.
In those fleeting moments when Browne does write about jazz, his perspective can be a bit skewed. To cite one example: It makes sense that Van Ronk, the mercurial, larger-than-life singer and guitarist who was a mentor to countless folkies, is a central figure in his narrative. But does it make sense to refer to the great bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, a longtime mainstay of the Village jazz scene who makes little more than a cameo appearance here, as ''the Van Ronk of jazz''?
Browne ends ''Talkin' Greenwich Village'' with an epilogue covering the years 2002 to 2004, when the Bottom Line closed, Van Ronk died, and a street in the Village was renamed in his honor. The tone is elegiac: ''Perhaps,'' Browne writes, ''the evisceration of the scene was inevitable.'' But, although the golden age may be over, there is still music to be found in Greenwich Village. I couldn't help thinking of an old joke:
The Village isn't what it used to be -- but then again, it never was.
TALKIN' GREENWICH VILLAGE: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital | By David Browne | Hachette | 381 pp. | $32.50
Peter Keepnews is an editor at The Times.
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PHOTO: An evening of music at Folk City in 1961, when it was on West Fourth Street. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR15.
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Keepnews, Peter. "Village Voices." The New York Times Book Review, 24 Nov. 2024, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817362479/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03c12fae. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.