The Bleecker Street Tapes
By Bruce Pollock

Introduction

 61 West 10th Street
107 Thompson Street
50 East 8th Street
162 West 13th Street

Those are the places I lived in Greenwich Village between 1966 and 1975, years that coincided with my marriage, the Jerome Lowell DeJur writing award from City College, a bachelor’s degree, a staff writing job at ROCK magazine, the Deems Taylor Award (for my articles in ROCK) and my first published book, In Their Own Words: Lyrics and Lyricists, 1955–1974 (Macmillan, 1975).

I’d been frequenting the Village since 1964, when I worked as a copy boy at Fairchild Publications on 12th Street and Fifth Avenue and often took my lunch in Washington Square Park, surrounded by like-minded furry individuals. Bob Dylans of our block, we were, testing our mettle on the hallowed stomping ground of our idol. At the fashion trade magazine W, I spent much of my time typing song lyrics and short stories for the delight and edification of whoever happened to be looking over my shoulder — if not my boss.

My first experience in the newspaper trade, at the New York Post, was similar. I made the acquaintance of Susy Szekely, writer of the Teen Time advice column. She claimed I was the staff Bob Dylan expert and passed along a letter she’d received from a rabid Dylan fan. I wound up having a date with the girl — we saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Suzy herself wound up interviewing Dylan for the Post and then became the editor of Hearst’s Eye magazine, where she gave me my first writing assignment, a review of Mike Bloomfield’s first album with the Electric Flag.

By then (or soon after), my friend Richie and I were fixtures at the Tuesday night hoots at the Gaslight Café on MacDougal Street, as well as frequent drop-ins at the Night Owl (down the block and around the corner on West 3rd) and the Au-Go-Go (down the block the other way and around the corner on Bleecker Street) and the Garrick below it (or above it), where Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention held the fort for an entire summer, occasionally fronted by the lovely and talented Uncle Meat (a.k.a. Essra Mohawk).

Hosted by the formidable bearded folksinger Dave Van Ronk, the Gaslight hoots were our introduction to the music that would dominate the period, at least within the friendly confines of Greenwich Village (which soon became our home, courtesy of another Gaslight regular who sublet us his apartment on West 10th Street in 1965). It was at the Gaslight where I first saw many of the artists I would later interview for books, magazine articles and newspaper columns between 1972 and 1994. And it was on a bench in Sheridan Square in 1967 that I composed more than 300 song lyrics.

The interviews and articles collected here speak for themselves, about the highs and lows of the era as experienced by those on the ground, just as the music they gave us still speaks to a dimming memory as frustrating as a dream lost to the daylight.