On one night alone, the Café Wha? featured Josh White, Shel Silverstein, and Judy Henske. The sheer number of great artists you could see at any given time in the Village in those days was astounding. The articles were surprisingly dull – mostly neighborhood politics and drama that now seem as distant and unimportant as the high society blatherings that fill the society columns of Gilded Age papers.īut the ads were something else. One day, after looking up whatever antique murderer I was covering that day, I noticed that the filing cabinets contained a couple of reels of The Village Voice from the early ‘60s and decided to give them a look, just for fun. You see who was appearing in the night clubs, what movies were playing in long-lost theaters, scandals that never became movies, and all the other ephemera that makes the world in the background of the big news. As the pages scroll by, you immerse yourself in lost society. And scrolling through those reels is like time traveling. Plenty of old papers are digitized now, but if I’m researching some old Chicago story, I could miss out on something critical if I don’t also check the Chicago American, the Democrat, the Post, the Press, the Journal, the Times, the Record-Herald, the Chronicle or the Mail. I spend a lot of time dwelling in the past – as a tour guide and historian, I do a great deal of work in the microfilm room at the library. But even when they tell me their stories, it can still seem like a whole other world from the distant past, all trace of which should have vanished by now (And, yes, I imagine my teenage stepson feels the same when I talk about the 80s, even though he listens to hair bands all the time). I meet and hang out with people from the fringes of that world now and then. I may have seen Dylan dozens of times, and others from those days a handful, but sometimes it seems like a jolt to me to think how many are still around.
The same can seem true to me of those people from the old Greenwich Village folk world. When those liner notes were written, guys like McTell and all the people on the Anthology of American Folk Music probably seemed like they came from another century, and I’ve heard it said that most of the people hanging around the Folklore Center in the early 1960s never stopped to think that any of them, let alone most of them, might still be alive. The place seemed like a relic from another time – from the “Old, Weird America.” Only it was still here. Now and then someone at the hospital would put in an order without giving a phone number or specifying which building they were in, which led to some adventures in a grim complex of cheerless, largely abandoned buildings once known as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. At the time, I was delivering pizza in Milledgeville, Georgia, and the hospital where he’d breathed his last was part of my route. I also enjoyed knowing what they didn’t: that he’d passed away in the late ‘50s.
I found it terribly amusing that they’d put out an album without knowing if the artist was dead or not. In it, that gave a brief biography of McTell, then noted that they weren’t really sure, but it “seemed likely” that he was now dead. Twenty years or so ago, I bought a Blind Willie McTell CD that reproduced the liner notes from a vinyl edition that had come out in the ‘60s or ‘70s. And the same is true for me, even though I wasn’t there in ‘62 or ‘74 at all. Maybe it always did when American Graffiti came out plenty of critics noted that 1962 seemed like far, far longer than twelve years ago. It seems as though ’63 was a whole lot further in the past.
It’s strange, but finding a Dylan setlist from a long-lost gig in 1963 seems like it would be infinitely harder than finding one from, say, 1974. Adam’s popped up here a couple times, writing about shows in 1984, 1999, and 2001, but today he goes way further back to explore a forgotten 1963 Gaslight Café show he found buried in the Village Voice archives.
Today’s newsletter is a guest entry from Adam Selzer. Town Hall 1963, shortly after when Dylan might have popped up at the Gaslight
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