With Greenwich Village firmly in the limelight, thanks to the new Dylan biopic, Liz Thomson casts an eye on an original Broadway production, “The Greenwich Village Musical” which played until Covid shut it down. It’s now revived on disc with a reimagined 30 song set which tells the story of “a group of singer-songwriters who came to Greenwich Village to find camaraderie and, hopefully, artistic success.”
Following weeks of excitement, pre-publicity, reviews and fan commentary from the US, “the Dylan movie”, “A Complete Unknown”, is finally in British cinemas. It’s a great film, very watchable, and anyone interested in the 1960s folk scene, of which one locus was Greenwich Village, should see it. Director James Mangold has repeatedly said it’s not a biopic but that is how those unfamiliar with the real story will take it. The film plays very fast and loose indeed with chronology and facts, and with the lives and contribution of the many musicians and friends whose lives intersected with Dylan’s. Director and subject had several meetings, so we must assume the narrative and the dramatis personae were bent to Dylan’s will.
Anyway, what better time to explore the milieu of real 1960s Greenwich Village – “the Village”; no one gives it its full moniker – of which there is not one single establishing shot in the movie. Not even the Arch and Washington Square Park, which was the gathering place for the folkies – to such an extent that the city tried to ban folk music. Izzy Young of the Folklore Center organised a protest, leading 3,000 folkies, including Dylan, on a march to the Park with their guitars. One group sat in the fountain, the regular Sunday-afternoon gathering place, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved”. In the end, the folkies won!
A key moment in Dylan’s career was his September 1961 season at Gerdes Folk City, as support to the then more-famous Greenbriar Boys. In the movie, the scene is made utterly absurd by the insertion of Pete Seeger as MC and Joan Baez (with two best-selling albums already under her belt) topping the bill where the Greenbriar Boys should have been. Aficionados will recognise many of the figures crowded into the room: Manny Greenhill, Baez’s manager, sitting quietly while Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager (desperate to add Baez to his own roster), hustles his way around. Robert Shelton, wearing wire-rimmed specs (for which he’d have been far too vain), stands scribbling the notes which would inform his celebrated New York Times review which, in just a few days, would transform Dylan’s life.
Many celebrated musicians launched their careers at Gerdes, with its red-checkered tablecloths and candlestick chianti bottles. It was among the mighty handful of clubs that were shaping forces in the history of popular music: Liverpool had the Cavern. Cambridge, MA, had Club 47, which Baez put on the map. New Orleans had Preservation Hall, Los Angeles the Troubadour. New York City had the Cotton Club, the Village Vanguard – and Gerdes Folk City. Doc Watson, Rev Gary Davis, Jean Ritchie, Bonnie Dobson, and Richard Thompson are among those who recorded live albums there. As Baez said: “Gerdes Folk City was the heart of it all. It was the ultimate of hip. It was the pure thing.” However, while Baez met Dylan at Gerdes in April 1961, she played there only once – at owner Mike Porco’s birthday party in 1975, the first night of the Rolling Thunder Revue.
In 1980, Porco who famously took the under-age Dylan to get his cabaret card, sold the club to Robbie Woliver, his soon-to-be wife Marilyn Lash, and Joseph Hillesum. Among their achievements before developers finally stepped in was an all-star 25th anniversary concert, grainy film of which can be found on YouTube. (Dylan of course didn’t show.)
For some years Woliver and and his co-writer Bernadette Contreras worked on a juke-box musical celebrating the club. It debuted to some acclaim, collecting 10 Broadway World awards. Then came Covid. Two things became clear: theatres would be dark for a long time and, crucially, jukebox musicals are expensive. So the couple used the pandemic to return to the drawing board. “We had 25 songs in the play, and it would make it impossible to enter festivals and launch the play with those rights’ concerns, costs and timeline,” Woliver writes in his excellent notes to the soundtrack. “But the biggest driving factor was that we remembered the core purpose of the show – to give a glimpse of the life of a group of singer-songwriters who came to Greenwich Village to find camaraderie and, hopefully, artistic success. We needed a new organic original playlist. And over the next two years, we developed a new version of the play with 30 original songs and a new cast for the recording.” In the manner of many major musicals, the plan is for the soundtrack to be a stepping stone to the stage show.
“Folk City: The Greenwich Village Musical” tells the story not only of Gerdes but of the Village, and the times. And not only the music but the societal shifts of that momentous decade, over which Vietnam and civil rights (both largely absent from “A Complete Unknown”) cast a very long shadow. What happened in the Village – as Woliver points out, “a 0.289 square-mile neighbourhood” – changed the world forever. It was a remarkable era, and the musical legacy lives on. The Village – once a predominantly blue-collar Italian neighbourhood – is itself now affordable only to trust-fund babies, rich businessman and movie stars. “Thirty dollars pays your rent/On Bleeker Street” sang Simon and Garfunkel (also Gerdes alums) in 1964. Bohemia is sadly no longer affordable.
Woliver had started out as a lyricist and now he returned to his roots, working through the Covid ether with collaborators (including Bernadette Contreras, with whom he co-wrote the play) and auditioning performers on Zoom. The show’s seven musicians, some of whom had performed in the stage version, each play a character representing a facet of the developing folk scene: Ernie, as the hoot night MC, always searching for The Next Big Thing; Jazz, the jaded beat-poet-waitress-bartender-cynic; Dean, in thrall to the blues; Brian, the wannabe Woody Guthrie… For some – like Dylan himself – folk is merely a convenient bandwagon on which to hitch a ride, their hearts lay elsewhere. The opening number encapsulates the burgeoning scene:
Greenwich Village
It is where I was raised Blue-collar doo wop
But now that’s all changed
Beatniks and folkies
Taking over my town
It all looks so different
As I look around…
Come down to The Village
You’ll see such a sight
It’s the younger generation
In artistic flight
Come down to The Village
Snap to it, dig the beat
Welcome to a new world
Bongos on every street
Snap to it
There’s a club—Folk City
Filled with smoke and song
Singers crooning “Fare Thee Well”
And you can sing right along…
It’s all a clever pastiche, witty and stylish, the lyrics carrying the Village story (“Pass that hat and pick a card/ Belt it out or fall apart/Pluck some strings and feed those dreams/ You want to be The Next Big Thing”) while the music perfectly captures the era. It’s fun to spot the deft references – ‘Walk Right In’ in ‘The Village’, ‘Silence is Golden‘ in ‘Love at Third Sight‘ and The Weavers’ songbook in ‘Stand Tall’. As the folk gives way to folk rock, ‘California (The State I’m In)‘ looks west, with echoes of the Mamas and The Papas and Scott McKenzie. When Dean heads to a hoot the night before shipping out to Vietnam he sings ‘Let’s Hear It for Me’, a nifty take on Country Joe’s ‘Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die‘, all soft shoe shuffle and brittle barbs. ‘Stars, Baby’ takes us into druggy, mid-Sixties Nirvana, a sitar adding to the vibe. ‘Never Been Taken This High‘ from “Karen’s” new record, echoes Mavis Staples, while Brian, deep in the jungle and no longer gung-ho about the war, takes us into Doors territory with ‘Dear Friends’. He comes home to a country increasingly ambivalent about Vietnam, his old friends marching and preaching peace and love: ‘We Must Become One’.
The times have changed, to coin a phrase, and so has the Village. As Folk City closes, Karen, now a star, returns for the final concert, singing the powerful ‘I Belong Here’, a big gospel number featuring a swirling Hammond of which Pop Staples would be proud. The ensemble gathers for the finale, ‘It’s A Shot‘, reflecting on their shared past – their dreams, their successes and failures, love lost and found, and inevitably some tragedy.
It’s an absurd-sounding comparison, but “Folk City: The Greenwich Village Musical” is as successful in telling the story of Gerdes and the Village folk scene as “Mama Mia” is in creating a story around the ABBA songbook, a feel-good confection that saw off early naysayers, of which I was one… until I saw it. A more low-key but closer-to-home comparison would be “Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie”, which began life at the American Repertory Theater but made it to the UK for a tour and enjoys a steady afterlife. The big difference is that Woliver, Lash and their confrères composed a set of songs that carry a real story while setting our toes tapping. I didn’t see the stage version of “Folk City”, but I wish I had, and I hope I soon will. It deserves success. The songs are new, yet also familiar, in the way that folk song always is – because the writing is so skilful. Everyone sings and plays well, and a few names will be familiar to those who follow the current Americana scene: R O Shapiro, Judah Frank, Abby Dormer among the singers; Lili Añel, a Gerdes alum and Ronnie D’Addario, who played with the Clancy Brothers and Judy Collins, are among the composers.
Of course it’s available on all the usual streaming sites – but buy the album, two CDs and a terrific set of fully comprehensive notes. The artwork’s great too! And “Folk City: The Greenwich Village Musical” is a theatre piece for our times, reminding us of a period of optimism in the face of Cold War peril and a group of people who wanted to use music to help change the world. We need that optimism – that determination, that spirit – and that music now, more than ever.
“This machine kills fascists” as Woody told us.
Liz Thomson is the author of “Joan Baez: The Last Leaf”, and the revising editor of Robert Shelton’s biography “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home”. She is the founder of The Village Trip, an annual festival celebrating Greenwich Village.