Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxxii)

Another way that I thought I could possibly break into the local New York City folk music sub-culture scene or into local record industry circles, in order to get the protest folk songs and male feminist love songs that I had written onto a vinyl record, was to start singing in June of 1971 at open mikes in coffee houses or at clubs in the Bronx, in Manhattan and possibly in the other boroughs of New York City. So one Friday night in early June of 1971 I took my guitar, my harmonica and my harmonica-holder to a church basement near Jerome Avenue, that wasn’t too far from Lehman College’s campus, where, at that time, there was a coffeehouse that had a weekly open mike for musicians who wished to sing one song apiece before a live audience.

Not surprisingly--since by June 1971 large numbers of people under 30 all played guitar and hoped to earn their livings as musicians rather than as 9-to-5 wage slaves—I wasn’t the only musician to show up at the coffeehouse who wished to sing and perform.

None of the other musicians seemed to be singing topical folk songs or protest folk songs. And since the audience seemed to consist of mostly straight-looking neighborhood high school students who didn’t appear to be anti-war folks who were into Dylan or Phil Ochs very much, I decided that the song I would perform would just be the “Open Up Your Eyes” love song that I had written for Helene in late 1969.

But after I started singing into the microphone, I realized that people in the audience at the coffeehouse really seemed more interested in chatting with their friends, while the musicians who performed at the open mike sessions just provided some background music for their conversations, rather than really being interested in listening carefully to the lyrics that a musician was singing. Unless a musician who performed at this coffeehouse’s open mike session was either a friend of some of the audience members’ or some kind of already-established professional musician or celebrity, it seemed that most of the 25 people in the audience felt that they would rather chat with their friends than listen closely to what was being sung by some unknown performer.

I felt that getting some experience in singing into a microphone in front of a live audience, instead of just singing in my apartment to myself or into a cheap portable cassette tape recorder, was of some value and somewhat interesting. But I did not find it very satisfying or worthwhile to sing in front of an audience that really wasn’t that particularly interested in listening to what the songs I had written had to say.

And it struck me that just as the U.S. mass media had created a false political consciousness among large numbers of white working-class youth in the United States (so that they would not quickly mobilize politically in support of an African-American or radical feminist-led New Left Revolution in the USA in the 1970s), the same U.S. mass media had created the kind of mass consciousness among large numbers of U.S. music fans which would tend to make them closed to responding in an enthusiastic way to any of the protest folk or folk love songs that I had written, when sung by an unknown musician in a coffeehouse or small club setting--unless they had previously been able to become familiar with the songs from having heard them previously on either a vinyl record album or on the U.S. radio airwaves.

It might be conceivable that if I was willing to spend all my spare time writing new protest folk songs and folk love songs, memorizing them and performing at open mikes in coffeehouses, bars or clubs around New York City for the next 5 years, I might possibly be “discovered” by somebody in the music industry who might be interested in putting my songs on a vinyl record. But a lifestyle of lugging my guitar around each evening on weekdays and weekends to perform for free at open mikes before small crowds of mostly apolitical musicians and apolitical rock music or singer-songwriter acoustic music fans seemed like an existential trap.

The point of writing the protest folk songs and male feminist folk love songs was to help change mass youth consciousness in the USA more quickly so that there might be an African-American-led or radical feminist-led anti-imperialist revolution in the USA as soon as possible during the 1970s. The point of my activity as a creative artist was not to let myself be co-opted into a working-class person who spent all his or her evenings--when not in the wage-slave cage--running around--in a careerist way--to every open mike that gave him or her the chance to just sit around for 2 to 3 hours listening to other open mike performers; before performing for 5 to 15 minutes before an audience that was not likely to respond very enthusiastically to the songs of an unknown performer.

What performing every night before an open mike audience for the next 5 years on a steady basis might do, however, would be to give me a heavy experience in figuring out the best way to sing into a microphone before a live audience (without forgetting the lyrics to a particular song) and the best way to possibly use my voice to get an audience to want to hear more songs from me. But since my main artistic objective in June 1971 was more to get my protest folk songs on a vinyl record (with the hope that an already-established anti-war singer--like Joan Baez, for example--might then record a cover version of some of these songs) and reach a mass audience with these songs, rather than spending all my evening time developing into a more skillful performer or entertainer, immersing myself in the world of open mikes for the next 5 years was not the road I was willing to take during the 1970s.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxxi)

In early June of 1971 the block on Bleecker Street where AJ lived had not yet been gentrified and it looked like a block on which Bowery bums were more likely to hang out and live than would newly affluent yuppies or young Wall Street stockbrokers from the suburbs. Since the bell to the loft in which AJ then lived with his womanfriend or wife did not work, I had to yell on the street “Hey, AJ!” in order to gain entry into the building, before walking up the stairs to the door to AJ’s loft.

After AJ looked out the window of his loft and let me into the building, and I then walked up some stairs, I soon found myself inside AJ’s large loft. AJ and the one or two other freaks he was talking with seemed to be stoned on pot and, after I introduced myself to AJ, he quickly passed me a joint. Predictably, the vinyl album that was being played on AJ’s stereo system in the loft during my visit was Dylan’s autumn 1970-released New Morning album.

There wasn’t much furniture in the loft. But there seemed to be a lot of papers related to Dylan there and copies of Dylan’s Tarantula book. AJ’s womanfriend or wife at the time, a hip-looking woman in her 20s who would have been considered physically attractive by most men and seemed to be some kind of artist, was also in AJ’s loft at the time, although I did not converse with her.

After I mentioned that I was on welfare at the time, AJ mentioned that before he dropped out of the straight world and became a Dylanologist he had held this 9-to-5 straight job at some Manhattan employment agency. But, after seeing how the private employment agency he worked for helped its Manhattan corporate clients discriminate against African-American job applicants or ripped off the job-hunters it did find jobs for, he had felt compelled to quit that job.

Since AJ had come to feel that by 1971 there were so many freaks in the United States that “freaks were now an ethnic community.” So when I visited him in early June of 1971, AJ was hoping to get some kind of cable show airtime for a show that would have programming designed for a “freak ethnic community” audience. And, if AJ did get such a cable tv show, it seemed like he was open to having me sing the “A Millionaire” and “Livin’ On Stolen Goods” protest folk songs on such a tv show.

As far as being my “manager” for free, AJ indicated that he thought some kind of master tape that was mixed would probably be needed in order to get some record company interested in recording the protest folk songs. But he’d keep his eyes open for some music industry person who might want to record the songs at some point, and let me know if any interest developed. In the meantime, we agreed that I would mail him cassette tapes (that I recorded on my cheap portable cassette tape recorder) of any new protest folk songs that I might write over the next few years.

Still high from the joint AJ had given me when I left AJ’s loft and was back down on Bleecker Street in front of the building in which he lived, I realized that AJ seemed to be involved simultaneously in so many different Movement projects and activities that he probably wouldn’t really find much time to approach Folkways, Vanguard or Electra or some other record company about recording any of the protest songs I had written. But in June 1971, AJ seemed like both a fun guy and like someone with whom it would be fun to share some of my writing and some of the protest folk songs and folk love songs I wrote during the 1970s—even if no vinyl record album of the songs ever developed from our non-financially-based counter-cultural relationship.

Ironically, by the Fall of 1971, AJ’s Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front and the Yippies’ political/cultural freak activism had apparently attracted the attention of John Lennon, after Lennon moved from the UK to Manhattan. And the former Beatle multi-millionaire (who by the early 1970s had written “Working-Class Hero” and decided that he wanted to then write protest rock songs and attempt to now use his musical and songwriting skills to generate more revolutionary mass consciousness among his fans rather than to just entertain them in an “art for art’s sake” way) began to help bankroll some of the Yippies’ anti-war activism and concretely support and promote the anti-hip capitalist perspective of AJ’s Rock Liberation Front.

So AJ (although still interested in things like underground culture and the 1970s Weather Underground, for example) seemed to then feel that it was more politically productive to spend his limited time encouraging Lennon to continue supporting the Yippies and anti-war activism and the Rock Liberation Front in late 1971 and in 1972, rather than to spend much time in a probably doomed attempt to get the protest folk songs of unknown working-class people like myself onto some Folkways, Vanguard or Elektra vinyl record.

But, coincidentally, it was only after AJ and the Dylan Liberation Front had demonstrated at Dylan’s house in the West Village in May of 1971 that Dylan, subsequently, ended up writing a protest folk song, “George Jackson,” that protested against the African-American revolutionary political prisoner, intellectual and writer being slain by guards at San Quentin Prison in California in August 1971.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxx)

In the Spring of 1971, around the time of Dylan’s 30th birthday, the then-long-haired but beardless AJ—who was then in his mid-to-late 20s—was then a high-energy writer-activist in the Lower East Side’s anti-war, underground press, yippie movement/freak sub-culture and underground freak media world and 1970s counter-culture. AJ had been studying Dylan’s song lyrics as intensely as some of the more culturally-straight and conventional middle-class academics and professors of English at places like Columbia and Harvard then studied the poetry of poets like Robert Burns, John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, since the mid-1960s. And in the early 1970s—before there was much of a Dylan industry/Dylan studies/pop cultural studies wing set up on U.S. university campuses by the Baby Boom Generation rock music fans who ended up returning to the culturally straight bourgeois academic world to become middle-class academics and professors in order to escape the 9-to-5 work world—AJ, the creator of the Dylanology subject, knew more about Dylan and Dylan’s lyrics, by far, than any other freak or academic in the whole world.

Besides putting together the first Concordance of Dylan’s song lyrics which enabled him to discover that Dylan had apparently become addicted to heroin for a time in the 1960s (long before the mainstream media finally apparently confirmed this fact in the 21st century), AJ also had established a Dylan Archives in his Bleecker Street loft on the Lower East Side that was then the most complete source of information about Dylan and Dylan’s artistic work which existed in the early 1970s.

In the early 1970s AJ also wrote a weekly column for the now-defunct East Village Other (EVO) underground newspaper in which he exposed the way the hip capitalists in the U.S. music industry were enriching themselves in various unethical ways by ripping-off and marketing for their personal, individual profit, the anti-capitalist hippie/yippie/freak counter-culture--a counter-culture which had previously been collectively created by hip anti-capitalist, anti-war and civil rights African-American and New Left Movement activists and artists who had been involved with politically radical groups like SNCC, C.O.R.E., SDS, the Yippies and the Black Panther Party.

For daring to criticize Dylan for ceasing to write more protest folk songs for the Movement after 1965, for not doing any benefits for late 1960s revolutionary groups like the Black Panther Party and for apparently selling out his early 1960s principles in exchange for being rewarded with millions of dollars in song royalties that Dylan’s financial consultants apparently then used to purchase stock in various transnational corporations, AJ apparently enraged large numbers of loyal Dylan fans and Dylan freaks. He also apparently angered many sycophantic rock music industry publishers, editors or writers who apparently felt that no one had the right in 1971 to question Dylan’s moral integrity, since Dylan was such a “great artist” and “creative genius.” Many of the Dylan fans and Dylan freaks who, in the early 1970s, still regarded Dylan as a kind of “prophet” also felt that AJ had no right and no basis for attempting to raise consciousness among anti-capitalist Dylan freaks about the degree to which images of Dylan that the mass media was still marketing in the early 1970s were more myth than an accurate reflection of who Dylan really was.

Yet besides the freaks who detested AJ for writing uncomplimentary words about Dylan’s accumulation of wealth and financial activities and Dylan’s post-1965 political shift in his East Village Other column or for criticizing Dylan from a yippie left freak perspective (whenever AJ was allowed to get some radio airtime on WBAI and other New York City local radio stations), there were other anti-capitalist freaks on the Lower East Side (like Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, for example, as well as the freaks who hung around the counter-cultural Alternate University in the late 1960s and early 1970s) who agreed with most of AJ’s critical perspective with respect to Dylan’s post-1965 transformation. And by the time that Dylan’s 30th birthday came around in May 1971, there was a Dylan Liberation Front group that soon developed into a Rock Liberation Front group, which AJ led, that actually marched on Dylan’s house in the West Village, to protest the hip capitalist direction that Dylan and the U.S. corporate rock music industry had taken since the mid-1960s.

So around the time that AJ and his Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front had begun to make a big impact within counter-cultural circles (even getting some press coverage in the Village Voice, for example), I mailed AJ a cassette tape of protest folk songs, including the “A Millionaire” protest folk song and the “Livin’ On Stolen Goods” protest folk song (that protested against U.S. imperialism)—which I had recorded on my cheap portable cassette tape recorder in my Bronx apartment--and asked him if he felt like being my “manager” for free. Surprisingly, AJ soon contacted me and invited me to stop by for a chat at his Bleecker Street loft a few days later.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxix)

After reading the transcript of a telephone conversation between Dylan and AJ (the world’s first Dylanologist)--that AJ had recorded and Rolling Stone magazine had subsequently published—I had concluded that, from a New Left Movement point of view, AJ--in 1971--was a more principled person than was Dylan; and that after 1965, Dylan had, indeed, sold out the Movement in order to become a hip capitalist, corporate media-promoted, multi-millionaire rock star. (Or, as Anthony Scaduto’s late 1971 gossipy biography of Dylan would also indicate, “as big as Elvis,” etc.). And I had then written a protest folk song that condemned late 1960s and early 1970s hip capitalism and hip cultural rip-off artists, titled “A Millionaire,” which was inspired by AJ’s early 1971 writing and Dylan Liberation Front/Rock Liberation Front activism, that contained lyrics like the following:

“Oh, pig Nixon
A millionaire
And Bobby Dylan
A millionaire
And Rockefeller
A millionaire
And Mick Jagger
A millionaire.

“You’re such a phony
Just blowin’ out wind
Makin’ like Woody
To win your million
You made me cry
When I was a kid
But now I’m feelin’
You’re just a rich pig.

“Don’t think we fall
For that `working-class’ shit
Give us your money
And then we might talk
We’re sick and tired
Of your ego-trip
Of making millions
While raising your fist.

“Now it seems to me
It is unfair
That some men
Are millionaires
They steal their money
By various means
Yet sing us songs
To show their pity.

“I’m just a poor boy
Without any bread
I feel all people
Should make the same wage
To rip-off culture
From people oppressed
Is just as bad
As burning their huts.”

And the thought also then occurred to me in late May 1971 that perhaps if I had a "manager" it might make it easier to interest Folkways, Vanguard or Elektra in recording my protest folk songs and folk love songs. And that if I needed a "manager," in 1971 AJ would be the most politically and artistically appropriate person to be my "manager"—although, given my lack of money, I could not afford to pay any money to AJ to be my “manager.”

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxviii)

By late May 1971, I had written enough original protest folk songs-- that reflected a late 1960s anti-imperialist New Left revolutionary consciousness--and folk love songs--that reflected a male radical feminist left perspective--for some kind of vinyl record album that I felt a label like Folkways, Vanguard or Elektra might be interested in distributing.

But although I had played tenor saxophone in high school bands for three years, I no longer knew anyone else who was a musician. And I did not know anyone who might be able to get Folkways, Vanguard or Elektra interested in recording protest folk songs and folk love songs like “He Walked Up The Hill,” “Livin’ On Stolen Goods,” “Open Up Your Eyes,” “Bloody Minds,” and “Waitin’ For The People,” that I had already written by this time.

Within the Belmont neighborhood in the Bronx where I lived, the Italian-American white guys in their early 20s who hung out on the corner at 188th Street and Cambreling Street were still just into singing Dion and the Belmonts’ hits from the late 1950s and early 1960s a cappella. And they neither needed me to accompany them on a guitar nor had any interest in either listening to the kind of protest folk or folk love songs that I was then writing or to any other kind of folk music.

And the younger teenage guys whom I had heard perform at some kind of neighborhood talent contest that was held one Sunday afternoon in a local school auditorium a few months earlier were just into loudly playing cover songs of 1960s “bubble gum” rock music (that they had heard on the AM radio stations) with their electric guitars in a skillful way, in their Beatles-imitation band groups. And they seemed unaware that there had ever been such a thing as an early 1960s commercial folk music boom in the USA.

So starting out with no New York City folk music sub-culture contacts and no New York City record industry contacts and no money except my initial welfare check payment, it was hard to know where to begin in any attempt to get the protest folk and folk love songs I had written onto a record, on the radio airwaves or into the world outside of my rent-controlled slum apartment in the Bronx.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxvii)

No longer having the night clerical job at the Hunts Point Terminal Market wholesale firm in early June of 1971, however, did present me with an immediate economic survival problem: Where was I going to get the money I required to pay my unpaid $57 per month rent, my unpaid telephone company bills, my unpaid Con Ed electricity and gas stove bills and my food costs for June, July and August of 1971? So after I spent most of my paycheck from the week’s work on the night clerical job to pay for my next few weeks of groceries, I walked down to the local welfare department office, which was about 20 blocks south of my apartment near Fordham Road, and applied for home relief.

Before I had found my job as a special ed summer camp counselor the previous year, I had been rejected for home relief by the local welfare department’s long-haired and bearded, "liberal" white male caseworker/investigator, who seemed to be in his late 20’s. Apparently because New York City welfare department policy in the early 1970s was to pressure long-haired and bearded white able-bodied male hippies who were under 30 who applied for home relief to either move back to their parents’ apartments (even if they had been living on their own for years, as I had been)--by denying them home relief benefits—or to get haircuts, shave off their beards, start dressing up straight again and find some straight low-paying job in Manhattan.

But just over a year later in June of 1971, New York City was now in an economic recession, the Big Apple’s official unemployment rate was much higher than the previous year and I was now even more economically destitute than I had been in mid-May of 1970 when my first application for home relief had been rejected. In addition, since I had shaved off my beard and cut my hair shorter prior to being interviewed for the Hunts Point Terminal Market night clerical job from which I had been axed, I looked less like a white male hippie than I had looked when the welfare department caseworker/investigator had visited me in my slum apartment the previous year. So I thought that this time around my legal right for a home relief grant from the welfare department would not again be denied illegally.

But when a beardless, crew-cutted, white male, straight-looking welfare department caseworker/investigator in his late 20s or early 30s, with an Irish-American last name, appeared at my apartment door a few days after I had filled out my application for welfare at the local office, my heart sank. And after he interrogated me in a cop-like way for awhile and conversed with me about my current economic situation and anti-war ‘emancipated poverty” lifestyle philosophy, my impression was that he was resentful that the only job he was able to find after graduating from college was being a welfare department casework/investigator; and that he inwardly considered white male hippies under 30 (whether they had beards and long hair or not) who applied for welfare in New York City in the early 1970s to be just “lazy bums” who were trying to “cheat” the welfare department and avoid work—while “solid” right-wing white straight citizens like himself were stuck having to work 9-to-5 in jobs that they hated.

Yet he was still legally required to provide me with emergency assistance for at least one month, to prevent my possible eviction and possible starvation. So after he returned to his welfare department office following his investigation of my slum apartment (which was still much more sparsely furnished than the apartments of unemployed workers in New York City who were already on home relief in 1971), he did not stall on filling out the forms that were required to get the emergency food stamps and the emergency welfare check required to pay my rent and utility bills for June and July 1971 sent to me within a few days. But it was still unclear to me in early June 1971 whether or not my legal right to be placed on home relief on more than just an emergency, one-month, basis was going to be respected by the New York City welfare department.

However, when the emergency check from the welfare department and the emergency food stamps authorization letter arrived in my mailbox a few days later, I did feel a sense of economic relief. And I also felt so free of immediate economic survival worries once again that I started to again try to break into the New York City and Village music scene for a brief period in June 1971.

Freewheelin' In The Bronx 1971 (xxvi)

Since the night supervisors were apparently themselves afraid to wait for the bus in the South Bronx neighborhood at the bus stop near Hunts Point Terminal Market, they assumed that I would be grateful if they gave me a lift in their car to Fordham Road—which was on the way to their own home in a more affluent Bronx neighborhood—after work each night. But in the Spring of 1971 I was used to taking buses at night in neighborhoods like the South Bronx. So rather than feeling grateful for getting a lift home from them during the first week I worked at Hunts Point Terminal Market, I felt more that my hours of work were being extended; because I was also being subtly pressured to sit in the car with these night supervisors beyond the hours I was compelled to be with them for pay.

Once the night supervisors saw, however, that I was becoming friendly during the night shift work break with the more intellectual older worker and former radio announcer that they were hoping to replace, as my first week on the night job progressed, they apparently also quickly decided that I certainly wasn’t the night clerical worker they were looking for; especially since I seemed to be quickly forming an alliance and friendship with the older worker they had wanted to dump.

So when I reported for work on the Friday evening of my first week as a night clerk at the Hunts Point Terminal Market wholesale firm, I was handed a paycheck for 5 nights of work by the woman supervisor before work began and told that I was “no longer needed” on the night shift because “I hadn’t picked up the coding and batching system fast enough.” Although I didn’t think it was very fair to dump me after only a week, without really giving me a chance to learn what I was supposed to be hired to do, I had already become ambivalent about whether it really made any sense for me to not quit the night job trap as soon as I could. So, inwardly, I actually felt more relief than surprise, shock, anger or disappointment when I was suddenly informed that I was getting the axe so quickly from this night clerical job.