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Chapter 5: River of Ice
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I suppose what I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road-looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it, looking for what Allen Ginsberg had called the "hydrogen jukebox world." Maybe I'd lived in it all my life, I didn't know, but nobody ever called it that. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the other Beat poets, had called it "The kiss proof world of plastic toilet seats, Tampax and taxis." That was okay, too, but the Gregory Corso poem "Bomb" was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better-a wasted world and totally mechanized-a lot of hustle and bustle-a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn't going to pin my hopes on that.
Creatively you couldn't do much with it. I had already landed in a parallel universe, anyway, with more archaic principles and values; one where actions and virtues were old style and judgmental things came falling out on their heads. A culture with outlaw women, super thugs, demon lovers and gospel truths . . . streets and valleys, rich peaty swamps, with landowners and oilmen, Stagger Lees, Pretty Pollys and John Henrys-an invisible world that towered overhead with walls of gleaming corridors. It was all there and it was clear-ideal and God-fearing-but you had to go find it. It didn't come served on a paper plate. Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.
Folk music was all I needed to exist. Trouble was, there wasn't enough of it. It was out of date, had no proper connection to the actualities, the trends of the time. It was a huge story but hard to come across. Once I'd slipped in beyond the fringes it was like my six-string guitar became a crystal magic wand and I could move things like never before. I had no other cares or interests besides folk music. I scheduled my life around it. I had little in common with anyone not like-minded.
I gazed out the second story window of the fraternity house overlooking University Avenue through the green elm trees and slow-moving traffic, low hanging clouds . . . the birds were singing. It was like a curtain was being lifted. It was early June and a fine spring day. There were just a few other guys in the house besides my cousin Chucky, and they hung around mostly in the mess hall, a kitchen in the basement that ran the length of the building. They had all recently graduated from the university and were working at odd jobs for the summer-were waiting to move on. Most days, they sat around playing cards and drinking beer in torn tee-shirts and cutoff jeans. Cocksmen. They paid me no mind. I saw that I could easily come and go and nobody would bother me here.
First thing I did was go trade in my electric guitar, which would have been useless to me, for a double-O Martin acoustic. The man at the store traded me even and I left carrying the guitar in its case. I would play this guitar for the next couple of years or so. The area around the university was known as Dinkytown, which was kind of like a little Village, untypical from the rest of conventional Minneapolis. It was mostly filled with Victorian houses that were being used as student apartments. School life wasn't in session, so these were mostly empty. I found the local record store in the heart of Dinkytown. What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record right then and there, even borrowing the hammering-on style.
With my newly learned repertoire, I then went further up the street and dropped into the Ten O'Clock Scholar, a Beat coffeehouse. I was looking for players with kindred pursuits. The first guy I met in Minneapolis like me was sitting around in there. It was John Koerner and he also had an acoustic guitar with him. Koerner was tall and thin with a look of perpetual amusement on his face. We hit it off right away. We already knew a few of the same songs like "Wabash Cannonball" and "Waiting for a Train." Koerner had just gotten out of the Marine Corps, was an aeronautical engineering student. He was from Rochester, New York, already married and had gotten into folk music a couple of years earlier than me, learned a lot of songs off of a guy named Harry Webber-mostly street ballads. But he played a lot of blues type stuff, too, traditional barroom kind of things. We sat around and I played my Odetta songs and a few by Leadbelly, whose record I had heard earlier than Odetta. John played "Casey Jones," "Golden Vanity"-he played a lot of ragtime style stuff, things like "Dallas Rag." When he spoke he was soft spoken, but when he sang he became a field holler shouter. Koerner was an exciting singer, and we began playing a lot together.
I learned a lot of songs off Koerner by singing harmony with him and he had folk records of performers I'd never heard at his apartment. I listened to them a lot, especially to The New Lost City Ramblers. I took to them immediately. Everything about them appealed to me-their style, their singing, their sound. I liked the way they looked, the way they dressed and I especially liked their name. Their songs ran the gamut in styles, everything from mountain ballads to fiddle tunes and railroad blues. All their songs vibrated with some dizzy, portentous truth. I'd stay with The Ramblers for days. At the time, I didn't know that they were replicating everything they did off of old 78 records, but what would it have mattered anyway? It wouldn't have mattered at all. For me, they had originality in spades, were men of mystery on all counts. I couldn't listen to them enough. Koerner had some other key records, too, mostly on the Folkways label-Foc'sle Songs and Sea Shanties was one that I could listen to over and over again. This one featured Dave Van Ronk, Roger Abrams, and some others. The record knocked me out. It was full ensemble singing, hard driving harmonic songs like "Haul Away Joe," "Hangin' Johnny," "Radcliffe Highway." Sometimes Koerner and I sang some of those songs as a duo. Another record he had was the Elektra folk songs Sampler with a variety of artists. That's where I first heard Dave Van Ronk and Peggy Seeger, even Alan Lomax himself singing the cowboy song "Doney Gal," which I added to my repertoire. Koerner had a few other records-some blues compilations on the Arhoolie label where I first heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson.
I listened a lot to a John Jacob Niles record, too. Niles was nontraditional, but he sang traditional songs. A Mephistophelean character out of Carolina, he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely a switched-on character, almost like a sorcerer. Niles was otherworldly and his voice raged with strange incantations. I listened to "Maid Freed from the Gallows" and "Go Away from My Window" plenty of times.
Koerner said that I had to meet a guy named Harry Webber and through him, I did. Webber was an English literary professor, a tweed wearing, old fashioned intellectual. And he did know plenty of songs, mostly roving ballads-stern ballads, ones that meant cruel business. I learned one called "Old Greybeard," about a young girl whose mother tells her to go kiss a man who has been arranged for her to marry and the daughter tells the mother to go kiss him herself . . . that the old greybeard is now clean shaven. The song is sung in first, second and third person. I loved all these ballads right away. They were romantic as all hell and high above all the popular love songs I'd ever heard. You could exhaust all the combinations of your vocabulary without having to learn any vocabulary.
Lyrically they worked on some kind of supernatural level and they made their own sense. You didn't have to make your own sense out of it. I used to sing another one, too, called "When a Man's in Love," where a boy in love feels no cold-he'll go through frosted snow to meet his girl, get her and take her to some silent place. I was beginning to feel like a character from within these songs, even beginning to think like one. "Roger Esquire," another song learned from Webber, was about money and beauty tickling the fancy and dazzling the eyes.
I could rattle off all these songs without comment as if all the wise and poetic words were mine and mine alone. The songs had beautiful melodies and were filled with everyday leading players like barbers and servants, mistresses and soldiers, sailors, farmhands and factory girls-their comings and goings-when they spoke in the songs they entered your life. But there was more to it than that . . . a lot more. Beneath it I was into the rural blues as well; it was a counterpart of myself. It was connected to early rock and roll and I liked it because it was older than Muddy and Wolf. Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from . . . Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.
Folklorist singers came through the Twin Cities also and you could learn songs from them, too-old-time performers like Joe Hickerson, Roger Abrams, Ellen Stekert or Rolf Kahn. Authentic folk records were as scarce as hens' teeth. You had to know people who had them. Koerner and some others had them, but the group was very small. Record stores didn't carry many of them, as there was very little demand. Performers like Koerner and myself would go anywhere to hear one by anybody we thought we hadn't heard. We once went over to St. Paul to somebody's house who supposedly had a 78 record of Blind Andy Jenkins singing "Death of Floyd Collins." The person wasn't at home and we never got to hear it. I did hear Tom Darby and Jimmy Tarleton, though, at the house of somebody's father who had owned an old copy of one of their records. I always thought that "A-wop-bop-a-loo-lop a-lop-bam-boo" had said it all until I heard Darby and Tarlton doing "Way Down in Florida on a Hog." Darby and Tarlton, too, were out of this world.
Koerner and I were playing and singing a lot together as a duo, but we each did our own thing separately. As for myself, I played morning, noon and night. That's all I did, usually fell asleep with the guitar in my hands. I went through the entire summer this way. In the fall, I was sitting at the lunch counter at Gray's drugstore. Gray's drugstore was in the heart of Dinkytown. I had moved into a room right above it. School was back in session and university life was picking up again. My cousin Chucky and his buddies had all moved away from the fraternity house, and the fraternity members, or would-be fraternity members, soon reappeared. They asked me who I was and what I was doing there. Nothing, I wasn't doing anything there . . . I was sleeping there. Of course I knew what was coming and quickly grabbed my bags and left. The room above Gray's drugstore cost thirty bucks a month. It was an okay place and I could easily afford it.
By this time, I was making three to five dollars every time I played at either one of the coffeehouses around or another place over in St. Paul called the Purple Onion pizza parlor. Above Gray's, the crash pad was no more than an empty storage room with a sink and a window looking into an alley. No closet or anything. Toilet down the hall. I put a mattress on the floor, bought a used dresser, plugged in a hot plate on top of that-used the outside window ledge as a refrigerator when it got cold. I was sitting at the counter at Gray's one day-winter had come early-wind howled across the Central Avenue Bridge outside and a carpet of snow was beginning to form on the ground. Flo Castner, who I'd known from one of the coffeehouses, the Bastille, had come in and sat down beside me. Flo was an actress in the drama academy, an aspiring thespian, odd looking but beautiful in a wacky way, had long red hair, was light skinned, dressed in black from head to foot. She had an uptown but folksy demeanor, was a mystic and transcendentalist-believed in the occult power of trees and things like that. She was also serious about reincarnation.
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