This week we welcome David Browne, a senior writer at Rolling Stone, to talk about his book Talkin' Greenwich Village & to explore the musical history of Greenwich Village from its heyday in the 50s & early 1960s through to it's decline in the 80s.
Many of the areas venues were originally jazz venues hosting the likes of Billie Holiday, John Coltrane & Charles Mingus & many legendary venues appear in Greenwich Village at the dawn of the 60s including the Village Vanguard, Gerde's Folk City, The Folklore Centre,
We touch on the likes of Peter, Paul & Mary, Woody Guthrie, Fred Neil, Phil Ochs & Dave Van Ronk all of whom passed through the area. Joan Baez arrived in Greenwich Village already signed to Vanguard having built a following in Cambridge, MA.
Not long after Bob Dylan also appears in the area & is signed to Columbia within a year, in early 1962. Bob achieves a quantum leap on his second album Freewheelin' which follows in May of 1963 & we discuss how this material is received in the coffeehouses & clubs of the village when Dylan first starts bringing it in.
At this point Dylan's songs are more well known than he is, Peter, Paul & Mary having scored a huge hit with 'Blowin' In The Wind' selling over 300,000 copies in the first week.
A little later Simon & Garfunkel are briefly in the area playing the coffeehouses but they soon move on once signed to Columbia.
The arrival of the The Beatles in the US in early 1964 changed things & many left the folk scene as the it started to dissipate - although the village had several brief periods of renaissance - one when the New York Dolls breakthrough while playing regularly in the area & Bruce Springsteen also played a series of legendary shows at The Bottom Line in the 1970s.
In the early 80s Gerde's Folk City hosts the likes of Sonic Youth, The Minutemen, The Replacements, Violent Femmes & Husker Du for a brief but fondly remembered period.
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