The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Some of you who have made Bob Dylan's CHRONICLES VOLUME ONE a bestseller might pick up on this book; Van Ronk covers some of the same territory as Dylan, only he got there first and he's more capacious, Whitman to Dylan's Hart Crane. Props to Elijah Wald who hand-crafted this material from a bunch of Van Ronk's monologues. It reads like a book and you'll hardly know it wasn't. The detective writer and creator of Matt Scudder, Lawrence Block, adds a preface that does the job efficiently and well.
What a life he had! (The singer died in 2002.) In the chapters devoted to his youth, Van Ronk paints us picture after picture, of the memorable individuals he met in the age of the first folk revival. In San Francisco he encounters the nutty Jesse Fuller, who had once been the folk-singing protege of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. In New York he shares a stage with Odetta, whose powerful voice could fill all of Manhattan when she let it loose. The truth is that being a folk singer in the late 1950s wasn't very much fun, and Van Ronk believed in getting paid for his singing and playing, so he was denied a space by the coffeehouse owners who could put on all the entertainment they wanted for free, and so he started organizing the musicians properly. All of this is fascinating to read about. Those of you who enjoyed Christopher Guest's folk revival send up A MIGHTY WIND will howl with recognition as Van Ronk lays into the "crewcuts in drip-dry seersucker suits" of the period such as the Kingston Trio. "There was an obvious subtext," he writes, "to what these Babbitt balladeers were doing, and it was, `Of course, we're really superior to all this hayseed crap-but isn't it cute?' This attitude threw me into an absolute ecstasy of rage. These were no true disciples or even honest money-changers. They were a bunch of slick hustlers selling Mickey Mouse dolls in the temple. Join their ranks? I would sooner have been boiled in skunk piss." Yowzer!
He's funny also about the truth that, although he was a tried and true Bohemian anarchist, he sure wasn't getting laid very much. In the pre-Pill age, he says, nobody was. "And the fact that we were a pretty scuzzy bunch might have had something to do with it."

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir

Get 20% OFF

Click here for more information about The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir