REVIEW BY Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, University of Arkansas
We’re told “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but that’s where we start, it’s where meaning begins.
The one for Terri Thal’s My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me is telling. On it, we see three people walking down a Greenwich Village street. Their expressions reveal a semblance of naturalism, betraying different levels of bemusement. Smack center and in the foreground, head tilted down, with what might be the beginnings of a smirk: Bob Dylan. Behind him, and to the right, Dave Van Ronk looks like he is giggly or at the tail end of a good laugh. Behind them both and to the left Terri Thal looks to the side, maybe saying something, or at least conveying something to an absent other – in this case Suze Rotolo who has been cropped out of the original picture. After a quick look, the viewer might assume that the book is about the central figure displayed here – Dylan – certainly not Thal who seems to recede and blur.
I don’t know what inspired this choice of cover, but at least part of the logic must have been commercial: Dylan sells books. This logic must have also been behind the book’s title, which boasts his name prominently, even if he – unlike Van Ronk – is not really a central figure. By sharing title space with two men and through the marginalization of Thal’s image, the author appears somewhat diminished.
Crass commercialism aside, the cover also foreshadows a tension throughout the book. Although Thal self-assesses as an independent, tough woman it’s often hard to see her separate from her many attachments. This is clear from the start. Chapter 1 (“Where I Came From”) begins with a quote she attributes to John Wynn: “‘you were the first woman we knew who had balls’” (1). Wynn’s comments were, as Thal tells us, a testament to her singularity in the 50s and 60s folk scene: she was not an “object” as so many women were, “but a participant in a world of music, excitement, political passion, and fun.” This is a testament to an undoubtedly forceful personality and unrepentant individualism, but her story, which culminates with her arrival on the folk scene, is also a testament to the ways the strictures of patriarchy mitigate or partly subvert agency. In almost the same breath as her initial introduction, she explains that after meeting Van Ronk, she struggled to carve out her independence, having invested her “personal self into Dave’s career.” This was a core problem that, it would seem, she never completely overcame. Although she was at times the breadwinner, Thal’s career trajectory was initially tied to him – she got her start as his manager before she went on to manage other folk acts. Moreover, Van Ronk appears at various points as her protector. In a sexist village scene, it was helpful to have Van Ronk’s “tacit assumption that I should be included anywhere I wanted to be.” (93).
Of course, this is a memoir and as such the author expects the reader to care about her most. She starts with her earliest days in Brooklyn where she seems to have had a relatively stable, more-or-less loving household. However, she is forthright about tensions with her mother: she doesn’t remember receiving a maternal hug, or being told “I love you.” Moreover, Thal seems to have initially assimilated some of her mother’s pessimism. She recalls how her mother had never wanted to have a girl because “being a woman stinks.” She believed they always ended up being screwed (93). Thal reveals more than once how she herself did not want to be thought of as a woman, how, at first, her desire for being thought of as a man frayed relationships with other women, and even how, at least once, her will to reject feminine stereotypes ensured she would make a bad business decision. Although her publishing company, Obscure Music, held the copyright over some of Van Ronk’s music, she did not seek to collect royalties after they divorced because she wanted to establish her independence at all costs.
She might have achieved independence, but Thal’s book is about belonging. In her late teens she started to explore her identity by becoming immersed in social causes, first with her participation in the Young Socialist League and then with so many acronyms to come. In an interesting section, she reveals that she had been surveilled by the local police force and even the FBI. She tells of a day in 1957 when FBI officers stopped her, presumably to get information about other socialists. She was spooked by the fact that they knew information about her sister and her family and was scared when they threatened to tell her parents about her left-wing activities. In 1960, when she was part of the American Committee for the Fourth International (later the Workers League), her phone was tapped. There were further incidents such as this until the 1980s.
Despite challenges, Thal was not, and is not, deterred from activist movements. She has consistently believed in and has been insistent on various socialist ideologies, which revolved around a simple philosophy: “every man, woman, and child on this planet should have enough food, water, shelter, healthcare and basic amenities to live comfortably.” But these objectives were most fulfilling and most practical in complex social settings, in structured collectives. And thus the quasi-trauma of separation from the Trotskyist Workers League, which had become restrictive and singularly dogmatic: “Without an organization, even though I still had the Marxist tool, I felt lonely and politically insecure” (162).
Much of Thal’s book unfolds relationally. Her story is as much about whom she knew as who she is. Perhaps most bizarrely, in a sort of appendix, she simply provides a list of people she knew in the ‘50s and ‘60s (189-194). Aside from this (long) list, we have other more narrative lists describing the kids she taught during a stint as a substitute teacher, neighborhood friends, and, of course, all those she hung out with during her years in the folk scene – clients, performers, and house guests.
The Village folk-scene comes off as tight knit. Pushing back against the Coen Brothers’ representation of the period in their Inside Llewyn Davis, Thal rejects the notion that the Village was unpleasant and cutthroat. “Both before and while there were places to work in New York, the folk music world was professionally and personally supportive” (86). There was an aura of respect among fellow-travelers manifest in clubs where performances were held in almost rapt silence (mostly) out of an unwritten code of etiquette and respect. The sites of these performances, especially the coffee houses “really were a community” (92).
How did women fit into this community? Thal insists that the folk scene was not infected with the grossest forms of misogyny – she says it was not a “sexist scene” (86). Elsewhere she says that there was no “discrimination” against women. At the same time, however, she notes how the few women who were part of that folk movement were thought of differently. For example, “there was sort of an assumption that there were factors distinguishing the female folk singers from one another in ways that were never considered for the men” (101). Unlike male performers, women (Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, Joan Baez) had to be pitted against each other, a dynamic that I wish Thal had described further.
Thal explains that, unlike what people might assume or believe, sexual exchanges were not the ways to climb up the ladder. Still, just beneath the surface there might have been a form of harassment (as we would call it today) that was part of the scene. She tells us that Carolyn Hester told her many stories about how other performers insistently propositioned her. She also speaks from personal experience about an encounter with Clarence Hood – a manager of The Gaslight – who had asked her “to have a sexual interlude.” Though she refused, he was insistent. She eventually ran away in horror, telling Van Ronk “the fucker tried to get me to go down on him” (96). She insists, though, that it was not a professional exchange, or that it did not imply a possibility of professional benefit; he was so forward “because he was drunk and he happened to be there and I was sexually appealing” (96).
There are moments where Thal reveals how segregated things could be. This is most obvious in the severe gender imbalance she mentions almost in passing. But in other, perhaps less profound ways, she describes a fair share of exclusive petulance. Thal recalls how she and Van Ronk would occasionally go to the American Youth Hostel to make some music, but looked snidely upon those outdoorsy, square dancing folks. Van Ronk called them “Wee people” (50). The East-West divide was also part of that culture as Thal recalls that Van Ronk hated the idea of California, “woo woo land,” though he eventually had to head there to make some cash. Funnily – though I don’t think this was the intent – Thal reveals that they didn’t restrict themselves to the Village, but she remembers that there was not much need to go to midtown or uptown Manhattan, a distance that apparently seemed like an excursion in those days. Less amusing is the fact that the folk scene was complicit in restructuring and, arguably, destroying a former way of life as clubs marginalized and even excised the Italian-American community that had once populated the Village.
Out of the many, Thal shines a (brief chapter-long) spotlight on Bob Dylan. Overall, he comes across as a creature both immured in and resistant to the culture he plopped into after his Minnesota years. He sought friendship from Van Ronk and Thal, but he never warmed to their political slant – though they tried. He was earnest in his musical interests, but sometimes seemed aloof.
Thal rehearses some well-known stories about Dylan that (to this reader) function as reminders that the folk world could be less than respectful and more cutthroat. There are, predictably, thefts: Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” for his first record and Paul Clayton’s (copyrighted) “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” for Dylan’s own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” In the same column of jerkish behaviors, Thal speculates about the Dylan-Ochs sometimes-nasty rivalry, which she concludes (following Van Ronk’s analysis) was “less about who was a better songwriter than about who was going to become rich and famous” (136).
In what is ultimately a splotchy set of reminiscences, perhaps the most interesting and compelling bit has to do with managing Dylan. She explains how hard it was – at the very start at least – for people to take Dylan seriously. When she went to Manny Rubin, owner of the Second Fret in Philadelphia, he asked “‘Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitation?’” (139). When she went to Club 47 in Cambridge, they said “‘He’s too freaky for a folk music audience’” (140). Thal scrambled and did get him gigs, sometimes to uninspiring results. But even amid relative failures, she oversaw a period during which Dylan honed his craft before being “discovered” by John Hammond of Columbia records.
Perhaps most important for the history books, during this hustling period, she was the one who recorded the famous Gaslight demo, which later became a coveted bootleg.
In the end, Thal avoids sentimentalities. Dylan, after his first record contract, told her he was going to be managed by Albert Grossman, something she had mixed feelings about, but supported. (Dylan had not told her that he had gotten a contract with Columbia at the time). She reflects on how Dylan increasingly lost touch with the Village gang, how some have accused him of being ungrateful. Thal disagrees. When someone moves from one job to another, colleagues seldom stay in touch. That’s just how it goes.
Ultimately, Dylan barely matters, what matters is Thal’s important place in the Village folk scene during its most vital phase. Still, her story seems underdone. Her descriptions of the times are surface-level, often in the form of, as mentioned before, lists or quick anecdotes. At some points the book feels like a resume of jobs completed. To be sure, there are moments of bracing honesty: her brief discussion of geriatric sex, for example, and her to-the-point assessment of various situations. But overall, I closed the book thinking that there was probably more to it.
This memoir is a valuable historical document. It is a first-hand account of Thal’s experiences at a pivotal moment in American history; it is, more broadly, a chronicle of a life well-lived. But historical documents need not conform to the highest ideals of their specific genres; all that matters is that they exist.
