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bar in the afternoon, and Monk would be there with his musicians, rehearsing and working out new tunes. Beer was ten or fifteen cents in the afternoon, and you could sit and listen to Monk and Coltrane and that band. As icing on the cake, off to the side there was an old-time telephone booth with accordion doors, and every now and again the band would take a break and somebody would go in there and roll a joint. Around five or six o’clock, when the prices changed, the band went home to get ready for the evening’s show, and we would go into the telephone booth, and in the cracks of the door would be roaches. Those guys did not smoke lemonade; they had really good dope, so we would collect all these roaches and make new joints out of them, and get bombed out of our birds, basically on the house.
    There was actually a lot of good music around that you could hear for free. I remember hearing Alexander Schneider conducting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in Washington Square Park. And then, of course, there were the folksingers. Thanks to my Virgil, Rochelle, I had been introduced to the Sunday afternoon hootenannies in Washington Square at the outset of my descent into the Village. However, any interest I might have had in folk music had gone by the boards as soon as I cast my lot with the jazz fraternity, because if there was one thing that all jazz musicians could agree on, it was that folk music was irredeemably square. We thought of it as “hillbilly shit,” a bunch of guys who didn’t even know how to play their instruments and just got by with “cowboy chords.” The little I heard while passing through the Square on Sundays confirmed my newfound snobbishness. It was essentially summer camp music, songs these kids had learned at progressive camps that I came to think of generically as Camp Gulag on the Hudson. The sight and sound of all those happily howling petit bourgeois
Stalinists offended my assiduously nurtured self-image as a hipster, not to mention my political sensibilities, which had become vehemently IWW-anarchist. They were childish, and nothing bothers a serious-minded eighteen-year-old as much as childishness. So for a couple of years I avoided the place like the plague, for fear of contamination. If I had to pass anywhere in the vicinity, I would walk through as quickly as possible, obviating any possibility that I might get sucked in by something like “Blue Tail Fly” and shortly find myself doing the hora around the fountain and singing “Hey Lolly, Lolly Lo.”
    Eventually, though, I came to realize that there were some very good musicians operating on the fringes of the radical Rotarian sing-alongs. People like Tom Paley, Dick Rosmini, and Fred Gerlach were playing music cognate with early jazz, and doing it with a subtlety and directness that blew me away. I had heard that kind of playing before, but only on old 78s that I had picked up by chance while searching for jazz discs. At that time you couldn’t just go out and buy an LP reissue of people like Mississippi John Hurt or Robert Johnson. In fact, the LP format had been introduced only a few years earlier. (I still have RL 101, the very first Riverside ten-inch record, a thing called Louis Armstrong Plays the Blues . At first I was very annoyed to find that instead of Louis solo, it was him backing blues singers like Chippie Hill and Ma Rainey. Then I started to listen and liked it very much.) If I wanted to find a lot of the older jazz stuff, I had to go out and look for used 78s. There was a place on 47th Street, the Jazz Record Center, which we called “Engine Joe’s,” and it was a treasure trove of jazz and jazz-related music of all sorts; it had writing on the stairs as you went up, saying, “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” which the mouldy figs misquoted as “from Bunk to junk.” There would be these stacks of records that you could look through, and some cost as much as ten bucks, but there were also some for twenty-five cents. They