IZZY IZ 85 YEARS YOUNG

photograph © Birgitta Olsson

 Today (March 26, 2013) is the 85th birthday of Israel Goodman Young, widely known as Izzy Young. Here is the substantial entry on him in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Young, Izzy [1928 - ]

Israel Goodman Young was born in New York City on March 26, 1928. He grew up working in his parents’ Brooklyn bakery and first encountered folk music in 1945 when on impulse he joined Margaret Mayo’s American Square Dance Group. He attended Leadbelly’s last concert in New York City in 1949, and the concert at his funeral a few months later. He dropped out of Brooklyn College in 1950 and in the mid-1950s met the eminent folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, whose encouragement steered him toward folk revival activity, starting by compiling a 15-page listing of rare publications.

            He was the founder of the Folklore Center, at 110 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village, which he opened in March 1957 after cashing in a $1000 insurance policy to pay for the lease. ‘I had about $50 in the bank,’ he said later, ‘and I had a batch of books I put up on the shelves and a few records, and I started doing business from the first minute.’ The idea of the place was to supply the would-be folk musician’s needs: records, sheet music, second-hand guitars, strings, capos, Sing Out! magazine and more.  It was also, perhaps inevitably, a place for like-minded Villagers bump into each other and hang out, especially in a back room ‘with a pot-bellied stove, crooked pictures and rickety chairs’, as Dylan describes it in Chronicles. ‘Some people,’ he recalls, ‘picked up their mail there.’

            Dylan’s descriptions of Young and his Folklore Center are, in a book of great vivacity and detail, especially vivid. He begins by hinting at their importance to him, saying that he started avoiding the Café Wha in the afternoons and hanging out at the Center instead. ‘The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institution.’ The back room with the stove, he says, had ‘old patriots and heroes on the wall, pottery with crossed-stitch design, lacquered black candles’ and ‘was filled with American records and a phonograph. Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them’ and even thumb ‘through a lot of his antediluvian folk scrolls… Extinct song folios of every type  -  sea shanties, Civil War songs, cowboy songs, song of lament, church house songs, anti-Jim Crow songs, union songs  -  archaic books of folk tales, Wobbly journals, propaganda pamphlets…’ (Young gave him pamphlets on Joe Hill to read, after Dylan asked who Hill was.) The center was ‘the citadel of Americana folk music… a crossroads junction for all the folk activity you could name and you might at any time see real hard-line folksingers in there… I saw CLARENCE ASHLEY, Gus Cannon, MANCE LIPSCOMB, TOM PALEY, Erik Darling hanging around in the place.’ It was here that Dylan first encountered DAVE VAN RONK, stepping in off the snowy street to look at a Gibson guitar.

            Young himself was ‘an old-line folk enthusiast, very sardonic and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect, wore wool slacks, skinny belt and work boots, tie at a careless slant. His voice… always seemed too loud for the little room. Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good natured. In reality, a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold.’ Not everyone found him so good-natured: he often showed a short temper, occasionally a physically violent one, and could be intractable in nursing small imagined slights.

            At some point Young started writing a news-snippets and gossip column for Sing Out!, called ‘Frets and Frails’, and kept a journal in which, invaluably in retrospect, he logged the comings and goings of his musician-customers  -  including Bob Dylan.

            (Examples: ‘September 23, 1961: Met Bob Dylan 3am this morning on the way to a JACK ELLIOTT party at 1 Sheridan Square…Terry Thal now a manager. Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and someone else.’ ‘January 26, 1962: Passed Dylan on the street, he said to me that he “didn’t know why so many things are happening to me.” I said that he did.’)

            JOHN BAULDIE described him as ‘a loud, disorganised, big-hearted folk enthusiast’ at whose center Dylan spent a lot of time, ‘looking at records, music, trying out instruments, meeting people and, later, writing songs in the back room on Izzy’s old typewriter. One of them, the unreleased “Talkin’ Folklore Center”, was specially composed on March 19, 1962 as a fund-raiser.’ The previous October, when Young was interviewing Dylan for his journal, Dylan mentioned another composition, ‘California Brown Eyed Baby’, which he said he was performing at the time.

            Dylan credits Young with fighting city hall to allow music in Washington Square Park, and in general fighting against ‘injustice, hunger and homelessness’. More personally, though, he credits Young with having played him particular records as suggested pieces of repertoire for him, and even being so trustworthy that Dylan told him truths about his own family (a rare thing indeed).

            It was also Young who, at ALBERT GROSSMAN’s prompting, promoted Dylan’s first real concert, at the Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4, 1961  -  at which Bob performed 21 songs, finishing with the two of his own he would record later that month for his début album, ‘Song To Woody’ and ‘Talkin’ New York’ . . .  to an audience of 52. Young was not a great businessman, as Dylan comments: ‘Young as beseiged with bill collectors and dictates from the landlord. People were always chasing him down for money, but it didn’t seem to faze him.’

            He’s likely to have been one of those Dylan hit out against later, in ‘Positively 4th Street’. By 1965 Young was highly critical of Dylan’s move away from overt political songs, and he wrote a piece in the first issue of the radically underground East Village Other, published that October, after being angered by the absence, at an anti-war rally, of all Albert Grossman’s artists. Looking back over Dylan’s earlier years he saw them anew: ‘…everyone conveniently forgot that he allowed Columbia Records to delete “John Birch Society Talking Blues” from his second album. This was soon after he swore that Columbia would have its way over his dead body. (I was hoodwinked… into arranging an abortive protest march… Dylan and management pulled a no-show on our six brave marchers.)’ He added that Dylan copyrighted work that ‘reflected accurately’ that of ‘poets from Patchen to Ginsberg’ and ‘no-one complained’; that he went to England, ‘picked up marvelous morsels’ and then ‘left the poets and England behind.’ He added: ‘There seemed no heights to which Dylan could not attain. He had only to meet the right person. If he could only meet Malraux he could write treatises on civilization’. And so on. Young said in 1992 that he sent this article to Dylan before it was published, and that Dylan ‘always said it was the best single article ever written on him’.

            In the fullness of time, Young was back on board the Dylan bus, giving a warm and generous interview to JEFF ROSEN for the MARTIN SCORSESE film No Direction Home, in which he appears. One story he tells in the film, however, is untrue. It was not Young but BOB YELLIN of THE GREENBRIAR BOYS who tried to get Maynard Solomon to sign Dylan to Vanguard  -  he took him a tape  -  and the remark Young has Solomon making about not signing ‘freaks’ does not ring true as the speech of the gently-spoken, good-humoured Solomon.

            When Chronicles appeared, Young was thrilled and gratified by Dylan’s detailed, affectionate recall. ‘No matter what else Dylan has done his starting point has always been folk music. He never leaves folk music and he never will.’ And: ‘The book he promised to write, with a chapter on me, in July 1962 has finally come true!’

            Young handed over the Folklore Center to Rick Altman in 1973, moved to Sweden and there opened the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm. He and it are still going.

           

[Bob Dylan: Chronicles, 2004, pp.18-22; Joe Hill pamphlets p.52. Izzy Young background detail in part from Ronnie D. Lankford Jr., All Music Guide, seen online 5 Oct 2005 at www.icebergradio.com/artist/499028/izzy_young.html. Izzy Young journal extracts Judas! no.12, Huntingdon UK, Jan 2005 p.53; article ‘Bob Dylantaunt’, East Village Other vol.1, no.1, NYC, Oct 1965, republished Judas! no.10, Jul 2004, pp. 87-88; response to Chronicles, written 20 Jun 2005, Judas! no.14, Jul 2005, p.34. John Bauldie, ‘Village Walking Tour’, online 5 Oct 2005 www.interferenze.com/bcs/villagesights.htm.]

DAVE VAN RONK: 10 YEARS GONE

Dave Van Ronk died ten years ago today (10 February 2012). He's an important figure. This is a large part of the entry I wrote on him in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

David Ritz Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1936, grew up partly in Queens, attended Richmond Hill High School, sang in a barbershop quartet at 13, dropped out of high school at 15, joined the Merchant Marines, learnt the ukelele, loved jazz, moved to Greenwich Village, and became a professional musician in 1956. He discovered pre-war blues via ‘a chance encounter with a recording of ‘Stackolee’ made by Furry Lewis’, as Van Ronk said himself: ‘Taking it to be a form of Jazz, in which I was primarily interested, I made some further investigations and discovered a whole field of music…. and so, having only such singers as Furry Lewis, King Solomon Hill and Leadbelly for models, when I tried to sing these songs I naturally imitated what I heard and, if I couldn’t understand a word here or there, I just slurred right along with the singer. At that time, nobody listened to me anyway.’

They soon did. He became a Washington Square regular and an established figure in the Village, recording, performing and keeping an open house several years before the young Bob Dylan came to town, slept on Dave’s couch, got Dave’s future wife Terri Thal to be his first manager, learnt some of Dave’s repertoire, stole some of Dave’s repertoire and generally looked up to him as the singer who ‘reigned supreme’. Except of course financially. He was almost always on small, worthy record labels. Hence his famous wry remark: ‘Other entertainers record for money; I record for Prestige.’

This is his friend Elijah Wald’s summary: ‘Dave Van Ronk was a founding father of the 1960s folk and blues revivals, but he was far more than that. For one thing, he was a marvelous raconteur, one of the funniest and most quotable figures on the Village scene…. Dave honed his tales along with his music, while holding court in cafes, bars, and from his apartment on Sheridan Square. As a musician, mentor, and barroom philosopher, his influence was so great that the block he lived on was recently renamed Dave Van Ronk Street. This is an honor that would have made him particularly happy, because much as he loved music, he loved the Village almost as deeply. From the time he moved there in the early 1950s until his death…he never considered living anywhere else.’

(He lived on MacDougal in the late 1950s, moved to 15th for a while after getting together with Terri, then ran back to the Village, specifically to Waverly Place, holding court there through the 1960s; he moved to Sheridan Place when he broke up with Terri, and lived there for the rest of his life. The ‘Dylan’ apartment was the one on Waverly Place.)

Van Ronk more or less invented the milieu of the young white city folk-blues, and though he wrote little material of his own, the entire East Coast singer-songwriter oeuvre would have been different without him. He set very high standards of guitar-playing, not least in demonstrating what richness of instrumentation could be achieved on the lone guitar. His own guitar mentor had been Rev. Gary Davis but Van Ronk made what he learnt his own, bringing a more modern consciousness to finger-picking without any loss of complexity or imaginative dexterity.

When people write, as they often do, of what tender guitar work he puts alongside his ‘rough voice’, they are half right: they’re right about the guitar. But the voice is not merely ‘rough’ - often there’s nothing rough about it at all. To listen to Van Ronk is to hear is one of the most resourceful, subtle, alive voices ever put on record. Hear his early cover of Dylan’s ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ - here is a great artist, communicating as directly as Dylan himself, his tone a unique mix of keening and shimmer.

It’s only very rarely indeed that someone cuts through as strongly and exhilaratingly as he can. Danny Kalb wrote that ‘Dave Van Ronk’s sound was unafraid, funky and a joyous challenge…. The challenge was, I think, to go for it all the way, and don’t look back.’ Tom Waits said: ‘In the engine room of the NY Folk Scene shoveling coal into the furnace, one Big Man rules. Dog faced roustabout songster. Bluesman, Dave Van Ronk. Long may he howl.’

Kalb’s ‘unafraid, funky…joyous’ describes the voice far better than Waits’ ‘howl’; but Waits’ affectionate portrait suggests the large man’s energy and impact around town while also putting his finger on one of the reasons why Bob Dylan ‘made it’ in a way that Van Ronk never could. Look at photos of the two of them together in the early ’60s and, a decade on, at the Friends of Chile Benefit Concert. Dylan is the lithe, sexy, charismatic one; Van Ronk is the awkward, fat-faced one with sweaty armpits and a beer gut. But if he didn’t have the right image for national celebrity, nor the songwriting ability, nor the killer instinct, no matter: he had everything else. He was an unforgettable live performer, a stratospherically gifted guitarist, an all-time great singer, a shrewd observer of other people (including of Dylan), a generous host whose place was where everyone came for all-night poker games, abrasive talk and good cheer, and with all this, he was also a figure of gravitas - a great man. In Chronicles Volume One, Dylan’s vivid, detailed portrait of Greenwich Village when it was new to him contains no other portrait half as long, half as warm, half as fulsome or half as respectful as of Dave Van Ronk.

Van Ronk was always shrewd and honest about Dylan. They fell out in a major way just once, and he said so: ‘We had a terrible falling out about “House of the Rising Sun.” He was always a sponge, picking up whatever was around him, and he copped my arrangement of the song. Before going into the studio he asked, “Hey Dave, mind if I record your version of Rising Sun?” I said, “Well, Bobby, I’m going into the studio soon and I’d like to record it.” And later he asked me again and I told him I wanted to record it myself, and he said, “Oops, I already recorded it myself and I can’t do anything about it because Columbia wants it.” For a period of about two months, we didn’t speak to each other. He never apologized, and I give him credit for it.’

Van Ronk was just as transparent about the younger musician’s stories and myth-making (or lies, as some call it), again stepping back and seeing it in the round, and speaking for others as if all were as generous-minded: ‘We accepted him not because of the things he had said he’d done but because we respected him as a performer. The attitude of the community was that it was all right, it was cool. He gets on stage and delivers, and that’s fine. His pose didn’t bother us. Nobody was turned off by it. Whatever he said offstage, onstage he told the truth as best he knew it.’

Van Ronk’s perspective was wide enough, too, that he could see sides of Dylan beyond the folkclubs. This, for instance, is accurate and at the same time very much his own judgment, independently arrived at: ‘Bobby is very much a product of the Beat Generation. Dylan really does belong in a rack with Kerouac. You are not going to see any more like him. Bobby came into Beat poetry just at the very tail end. He towers above all of them, except perhaps Ginsberg. But Bob was a latecomer and will have no successors, just as his namesake had no successors.’ Every bit of that is extremely shrewd, and there are few who have dared venture, in plain terms like that, that Dylan ‘towers above’ all those revered Beats.

...In the filmed interview with Van Ronk given to...Dylan’s office for the archives, and made available for use in Scorsese’s No Direction Home, the big bear-like figure, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, has become the mellow, shy, silver-stubbled, bronchitic, self-deprecating man with a laugh that makes the viewer laugh, a vulnerability that is touching (again, a strong contrast to that most steely interviewee, Dylan himself) and a generosity of spirit, a fondness for Dylan and an appreciation of his contribution to a whole musical community - all of which makes him one of the film’s most fragile yet valuable contributors: still, after all these years, giving out and being real.

‘Even now,’ wrote Danny Kalb, ‘I can almost hear him laughing freely and deeply, unfortunately still smoking those damn cigarettes, even as we, his friends left behind, weep and celebrate him at the same time.’

His many recordings cover a long, long period and vary enormously. If a ‘best’ has to be specified, then it is probably the work of the early 1960s that captures it most powerfully: yet whatever you pick out you’ll find yourself more than amply rewarded.

Dave Van Ronk died of complications arising from his cancer, in hospital in New York City, on February 10, 2002.

[Van Ronk quotes from various unfootnoted sources. ‘Dave Remembered’, Danny Kalb, 2002, online 14 Sep 2005 at http://members.aol.com/silvastr/danny/danny.htm (no longer working a link, 2012). Elijah Wald (to whom thanks for some information) quoted from the website page promoting Van Ronk’s memoir, edited with Wald & completed by him after Van Ronk’s death, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a Memoir, New York: Da Capo, 2005; quote seen online 14 Sep 2005 at http://elijahwald.com/vanronk.html#whiff.]