Article updated June 26, 2018 by Dave Read
Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 Coen Brothers movie based on Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, inspired me to tell the story of a few encounters with Van Ronk over the course of almost 25 years. We met at the Rusty Nail Saloon, Sunderland, MA twice in the mid and late 1970s and then did an interview before a concert at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY in 1999.
I had been turned on to Van Ronk my first week at college in 1967, when an upperclassman told me that I looked like him. I hadn’t heard of Van Ronk, so I borrowed his copy of Gambler’s Blues, and loved it right off the bat. Before long I added Gambler’s Blues and Dave Van Ronk Sings the Blues to my record collection, which already held 5 or 6 Bob Dylan LPs.
I wasn’t aware of the relationship between Dylan and Van Ronk until I read Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, by Anthony Scaduto several years later. In it, Scaduto reports that Dylan recorded Van Ronk’s version of House of the Risin’ Sun without asking permission. Even to a Dylan freak, that seemed pretty rude. In the fall of 1975, both of them made appearances in my neck of the woods – Van Ronk played a mid-week show at the Rusty Nail Saloon in Suderland, MA and Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue played back-to-back shows in Springfield.
Beside Dave Van Ronk at the Rusty Nail Saloon
The latter was announced about one week in advance and the rumors were that Dylan’s musical cronies were showing up and playing. Van Ronk’s concert was a couple days before and so when I arrived and saw him sitting alone at the bar, I was excited to say hello and ask if he’d be appearing with Dylan later that week.
He had a glass of whiskey in front of him and was holding his guitar in his lap, slowly moving his palm along it, as if he were warming it up. I said hello, told him I was a big fan, and asked about the Dylan shows. His reply, made in a polite and not unfriendly manner, was that he didn’t want to talk about Dylan. Oops, I thought, and left Van Ronk alone with his pre-concert routine.
I thoroughly enjoyed the show, surprised that he was so entertaining, with a dimension of personality that I hadn’t noticed listening to the records. But I couldn’t help myself later, seeing him getting ready to leave the club; after saying great show, nice to meet you, I asked him to verify Scaduto’s House of the Risin’ Sun report. Dave stopped in his tracks, stared into the vacuum of my eyes, and said, “I told you I do not want to discuss that man.”
Besides feeling like an idiot, and not a litle rude myself, that was all the verification I needed. I attended both Rolling Thunder Revue shows in Springfirld, but didn’t get a chance to run the story by Dylan.
Meeting Dave Van Ronk again
The second meeting occurred 3 or 4 years later, by which time I had made the acquaintance of young woman who became an ardent fan, even though she bore no resemblance to Dave Van Ronk, none whatsoever. Since she also was a guitar player, her esteem may have been more genuine than mine, a mere doppelganger. We got to the club early and saw Van Ronk by himself at the far end of the bar, just the same as before. Instead of approaching with a head full of ideas, this time I was content to introduce my friend to Dave, and tell him that she was a guitar player too. He seemed genuinely charmed and within a few minutes, the three of us were sharing a booth close to the stage.
My recollection of the ensuing three hours is a little fuzzy, except that it was about as much fun as you could have, newfound friends, talking and laughing over round after round of whiskey. He did 3 or 4 sets and eventually the show had the feel of a conversataion between him and her. He ended with a charming dedication to her, but I cannot recall if it was Teddy Bear’s Picnic or Chicken is Nice?
During the 1980s, I saw him again at various clubs in the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. Those shows were before full houses and neither the opportunity nor the inclination to approach Van Ronk presented itself again. He did seem to be aging poorly, though.
Dave Van Ronk concert and interview
By the late 1990s, I’m writing a music column in a local newspaper and running a website, which credentials were enough to get me into a concert that he would be giving at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse in Albany, NY. We did a telephone interview from his Greenwich Village apartment the day before. (Interview with Dave Van Ronk.)
I brought a tape recorder and a camera to the concert, but didn’t get much use out of either. The camera jammed up so I only got a couple eerie double exposures, and I left the tape recorder alone because I didn’t want to be intrusive. Instead, I scribbled notes furiously in the dim light as Dave gave a brilliant 2+ hour concert, which could’ve doubled as a lecture on the history of music in America. And Garth Hudson was in the house, to do a few songs by himself and to accompany Dave on accordian on a few others.
Dave was hale and hearty, appearing way better than he had in the 80s. It’s none of my business, but maybe he’d quit drinking? That was the last time I saw Dave Van Ronk. The sadness of his untimely death in 2002, however, is assuaged by several factors:
- He was at the top of his game late in life;
- He’d received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP);
- He got props from Dylan in Chronicles, Vol. 1;
Also of consolation is the fact that his posthumous CD, “Dave Van Ronk…and the tin pan bended and the story ended,” seems like a replica of the concert he gave at the Eighth Step Coffeehouse. Here’s hoping that Inside LLewyn Davis turns out to be deserving of it’s association with the story of Dave Van Ronk, whose influence extends far beyond the tenure and jurisdiction of the Mayor of MacDougal Street.
