A Freewheelin' Time (3 page)

The entrance to Gerde’s opened onto a small vestibule with another door that led into the place proper. The bar was straight ahead. Just to the left of the door, past a dividing wall maybe four and a half feet high, was a small elevated stage against the back wall. Directly in front of the stage were the tables and chairs with waiter service. The dividing wall continued opposite the bar, and customers there could lean over it and watch the show, drinks in hand. Sitting on a bar stool afforded a view only of the top of a performer’s head. Past the length of the bar was a door leading down a steep flight of stairs to the basement, where the food, booze, and performers were stored.

If there were more than three people onstage at the same time, it was a crowd. It was fun to watch the bluegrass musicians choreograph their moves. They had to angle their instruments—guitar, banjo, and mandolin—just so, to be able to come together at the one microphone and sing a chorus, then separate for solos, without a collision. The music spanned a variety of genres that included, besides bluegrass, traditional ballads, folk songs in many languages from many lands, blues, and gospel. Whoever came through the doors and signed up to play could perform at the Monday night hootenannies. Gerde’s was on the bar circuit for jazz and blues artists of an earlier generation, from the forties and fifties, artists who’d encountered the legendary musicians of the twenties and thirties when they started out. Many who were playing gigs at Gerde’s were legends in their own time and carried a long history of musical information for the younger players to learn from.

Bob Dylan played harmonica for many of the older musicians when they performed at Gerde’s Folk City: Victoria Spivey, a blues and jazz singer and pianist, and blues man Lonnie Johnson, both of whom worked with Louis Armstrong in the twenties, and Big Joe Williams, born in 1903, who probably played with every musician over the years, all the way into the sixties in New York City.

I had a special weakness for the harmonica. I loved that bluesy wail and crying sound. When I was a child my parents played recordings of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and I was enchanted by Sonny Terry’s harmonica playing. When Bob played harmonica for other musicians he was unobtrusive, standing at the back of the little stage, yielding to the main performer but really wailing and tearing into the harp. I liked to watch him go at it.

When he played with the veterans Bob called himself Blind Boy Grunt as a tribute to, and playful take on, the nicknames of the blues and jazz greats who preceded the young white pretenders. He had the eyeglasses for the role. After a gig at Café Lena’s in Saratoga Springs, New York, we spent a week at the home of photographer Joe Alper and his family in Schenectady, New York. At a thrift shop in town Bob found a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses with opaque blue glass lenses in them.

A
t a certain point Mike Porco had asked Charlie Rothschild, who was not a musician but knew the ins and outs of the folk music world, to take over the job of booking musicians at Gerde’s. Since it had been Izzy Young’s idea to turn Gerde’s into a folk club in the first place, his replacement by Charlie resulted in a bit of a dustup. Izzy put up a sign at the Folklore Center in essence proclaiming, “Charlie Rothschild: Wanted for Theft.” Izzy was furious about the injustice; Charlie was grateful for the fifty bucks a week Mike Porco paid him to hire folksingers and to emcee, as well.

By the time I started going to Gerde’s in the spring of 1961, the tiff was history. Mike himself was doing the hiring (with input from the club’s regulars) and most of the emcee work was handled by the flamboyant Brother John Sellers and the folksinger Gil Turner.

In between sets some of the musicians would jam with each other in the basement or, in good weather, outside on the loading dock around the corner on Mercer Street. Eventually Mike Porco or Brother John Sellers or perhaps the musicians themselves would mix up the sets onstage so they could play together for the audience. It made for great music. On those nights at Gerde’s, the cross-fertilization of different styles and musical eras forged important links in the chain of American musical history.

John Lee Hooker was one of the blues singers on the circuit. He used to sit quietly on a stool at the bar and smile at anyone who spoke to him. He stuttered when he talked, but not when he performed. When his name was announced to play a set one night, to me it was like hearing that someone as mythic as Woody Guthrie was in the room. I had no idea John Lee Hooker was alive, let alone performing in New York City.

Just a couple of years earlier, when I was still in high school, I’d headed to Harlem to work for the civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin, who was running Youth March for Integrated Schools. Before climbing the stairs to Youth March headquarters on 125th Street, I would stop by the record store next door, a small, narrow place full of albums in wooden bins where the owner always had a record playing. One day as I walked in, I heard music that stopped me in my tracks. It was as if the store were suddenly enveloped in an intense glow, and I lost a sense of where I was, aware only of the sound coming from the speakers. I was transfixed by the thumping guitar beat and the thick deep baritone of the singer. I had never heard anything like it and I don’t think I moved an inch until the end of side 2, when I managed to ask, What was that?

The guy behind the counter showed me the album cover, with a drawing of a truck in the grass and the name John Lee Hooker written across it. I couldn’t wait to take it home and play it for my sister. I bought it and ran up the stairs with my treasure.

When John Lee Hooker’s name was announced at Gerde’s no one else seemed to think it was a big deal, but I insisted to everyone around me that they had to listen to him. I don’t remember what he played that night, but the room got quiet when he took the stage. When his set was over and he walked back to the bar and sat down, I overcame my shyness and went over to him, though it was a while before I managed to tell him how I first heard one of his albums and how much I loved it. Whenever John was around, I would talk with him. And when Bob and I were together, the friendship expanded. The Broadway Central Hotel, just a block or two away from Gerde’s, was the place where traveling musicians stayed, including Hooker. It became another spot for musicians to hang out and jam together.

It took way too long for John Lee Hooker to become famous, but even though he was a shy and unassuming man, he was very smart and knew how to protect his interests.

Decades later, when a music writer friend, Tony Scher-man, was doing an interview with Hooker, the old blues man began to reminisce about his early days in Greenwich Village with Bob and Suze. Tony told him he knew me and gave him an update. After a blues concert at the Beacon Theater in 1991 where John Lee Hooker was the headliner, his manager brought me backstage. When John saw me, he raised his hands in the air like the Healer, grinned, and said, Hey, Suze! The good old days!

Queens

I was born
in Sunnyside, Queens, across the bridge from Manhattan. My actual birth took place in Brooklyn, though—in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital—where a sympathetic doctor took good care of young Communist women with little money who were starting families.

My parents had moved to Queens from an apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village around 1940, shortly after they were married. Like several of their friends who had joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s and were now married with children on the way, they moved to a complex of apartments called Sunnyside Gardens specifically designed for working-class families by an architect who was the father of one of the couples. The apartments themselves were small but had back doors opening onto little gardens that were a nice draw for growing families. My parents and their friends who went to live there were on the left, but the residents in general were politically all over the map, a mix of new and old Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and religions.

Several of our family’s friends moved away to modern homes they were building on a rural wooded lane in Rye, New York, in Westchester County. There they reestablished the left-wing community they’d had in Sunnyside, but in more luxurious homes and surroundings.

The Rotolo family never made it to suburbia. My father was an artist but couldn’t support a family as a painter and instead found work at various factory jobs, joining the shop union or, if no union existed, organizing one. As a result, he was fired often and was on strike even more often. He felt very strongly about the importance of unions, for white-and blue-collar workers alike. Working conditions were terrible in the early half of the last century, and the fight to establish unions that could guarantee eight-hour days, eliminate child labor, and deliver a decent environment for the working man and woman was essential. So many benefits now taken for granted were fought for long and hard, and the story of this struggle has largely been ignored. It is a proud history that affected labor conditions worldwide for the better.

My father, Gioachino Pietro Rotolo, was born in Bagheria, Sicily, in 1912. In the 1970s I went to Bagheria, which by then had become a suburb of Palermo and was no longer the rock pile so many poor Italians had escaped from to find a livelihood in America and elsewhere. “Rock pile” is really a misnomer. Tony Buttitta, a writer I knew in Greenwich Village who was born in 1907 and died when he was well into his nineties, was also from Bagheria. He dispelled the notion of rock pile, telling me about the many poets, writers, and artists born there who gained national fame in Italy and abroad. Most had left for someplace else, I reminded him, but I understood what he meant to convey.

In Bagheria, the Rotolo family worked as either
bottai,
barrel makers for wine, or in
ferro battuto,
decorative iron-work. My grandfather Andrea Rotolo was in the latter trade and as a skilled iron maker found work fairly easily in the new country of America. He emigrated in the late 1890s and traveled back and forth to Sicily several times before finally settling in New York.

My father came to the United States in 1914, when he was two, with his mother, his older brother, Filippo, and his older sister, Francesca. They joined his father, who had already established a home for them in a brownstone at 321 Sackett Street in Brooklyn, a neighborhood where many other Italian immigrants had settled. Today the area is known as Carroll Gardens.

Gioachino, Joachim or Jack in English, chose to go by the name Pete, which was the translation of his middle name, Pietro. He grew up speaking Sicilian at home and English everywhere else. His mother, Marianna, acceded to her children’s wishes that she use their American names and called her youngest son Jack. I still remember her at his funeral years later, standing at his graveside as the first shovelful of dirt hit his coffin, calling quietly, Jack, Jack…

A skilled dressmaker, my grandmother found work in the garment industry even though she didn’t speak fluent English. She worked hard, as did the many other immigrants who came to America during the European immigration boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was fortunate not to have worked in the sweatshops of lower Manhattan, where the disastrous conditions resulted in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in which so many young Italian and Jewish women died. Instead she worked in the Garment District, farther uptown, where the conditions and pay were better.

My grandparents did well. Their oldest son, Philip, became an engineer; Frances was an executive secretary (now her title would be executive assistant); and their youngest, Pete, my father, was an artist who won a scholarship to Pratt Institute, unusual in those times for the son of an immigrant family.

My father always said that no job is worth doing if it is not worth doing well, and to never undervalue the importance of work. His dedication to these beliefs as a young man led him to the writings of John Reed. Sometime during the Depression he joined a John Reed Club, and there he found the Communist Party. His commitment to the importance of union organizing began then. When he met my mother, he proposed to her with the words “I think I need to set up a picket line around you.”

My parents, Pete and Mary Rotolo, 1940

He became a union organizer. That was his duty, his “Communist” work. He rarely painted, yet he did get a few editorial illustration jobs for the
New York Times
and other periodicals. After he died my mother told us that he had turned down an offer to teach art at a school in upstate New York but had let her know about it only after the opportunity had long passed.

My parents had been radicalized by the class differences they saw firsthand, but especially and irrevocably by the fate of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants involved with the anarchist movement who were accused of a robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1920. After a tumultuous trial and worldwide attention to their case, they were put to death seven years later. Books, plays, movies, and songs have been written about the prejudices of the presiding judge, the unfairness of the trial, and the terrible anti-immigrant, antiradical climate of the time. Growing up, both my parents were influenced by the terrible prejudice against Italian immigrants, and the injustices surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti story.

My mother was an editor and columnist for
L’Unità,
the American version of the Italian Communist paper of the same name. She was paid very little, if anything, and times were very hard for my parents, especially with two children. During our childhood, my sister and I were sent to live with my mother’s relatives outside of Boston when times were especially difficult. We were separated; Carla would be placed with one set of relatives, and I’d go to another. I remember being frightened by these stays away from home. The relatives who took me in were loving and attentive, but because I was a very shy and overly sensitive child, I was not easily comforted.

One of my father’s illustrations for the
New York Times

We moved from Sunnyside when I was about three, to another working-class Queens neighborhood, Jackson Heights, populated predominantly by white families from different backgrounds, including Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Italian. My childhood recollections originate in this new neighborhood. The complex was called Garden Bay Manor, or, as my mother referred to it, Garbage Bay Manure in Jackson Frights. She frequently expressed her frustrations about living in Queens, which she felt was the outback.

The buildings were faux Tudor brick two-story attached apartments with basements. The long row of buildings faced each other from the back with a parklike space in between that was a haven for all the kids in the neighborhood. There were no back doors leading to it, and the grounds weren’t landscaped like a park or a playground. Instead it was an open communal area with trees and grass and a scattering of benches in the center walkway. To get to the park you walked to the end of the long row of apartments and rounded the corner.

We lived on the ground floor somewhere in the middle. My father set up an electric saw in the basement of our building and made nearly every piece of furniture we had.

This was the 1950s, the height of the McCarthy era. I grew up watching my older sister trying hard to fit in where we so obviously did not belong. She attempted for a time to make herself over into the mode of the girls in the neighborhood and to fight against the way she grew up. She wasn’t ashamed of how our family lived and what we believed; she was just at an age when it was important for kids to belong, to be like everyone else. We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 33
¹
/
₃
long-playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn’t own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms.

Most families in the neighborhood went to a church or a temple, to Sunday school or to Hebrew school. My sister and I were raised with no formal religion, but we were taught to accept the beliefs of others. We were brought up not to believe in the superiority of any culture or religion over another but rather to take people as they were, as individuals.

I tried my best. The Catholic girl next door attempted to save my heathen soul and teach me about God, telling me God was everywhere, saw everything, and knew everything. She said that it was important to bow your head with every utterance of the name Jesus. I would challenge this God who was everywhere to come out from behind the prickle bushes to shake hands, and I would cruelly repeat JesusJesusJesus until she got dizzy from nodding her head so much.

The Jewish kids were somewhat more accepting, but a few of their parents made a point of ignoring me. They would say hello to the other children and not acknowledge my presence at all, either because I was the only goy, or shiksa (as they called me), in the group or perhaps because they knew of my parents’ politics and were wary of associating with Reds and their offspring.

Outsider status was inevitable. Culturally we were Catholic, but my parents had long ago left the church for the idealistic, as opposed to the hardcore Stalinist, wing of the American Communist Party. The only thing that passed for a religious education was sitting in my father’s lap while he paged through a big book of Renaissance Italian paintings with many pictures of the Crucifixion. I know I must have asked why that man was nailed to the cross—and no doubt my father told me.

When my older sister was an infant our Sicilian grandparents managed to sneak off with her under false pretenses to their local church to have her baptized. After that, my parents never left me alone with them while I was a baby.

At the time I finished elementary school and Carla was starting high school, we moved several blocks away to the second floor of a small two-story attached row house owned by the Shills, fellow Communists, who were doing a good deed by charging us an affordable rent. This was a better situation overall. The Shills had two daughters younger than we were, a TV set, and a finished basement, in addition to a house full of books. It was a Commie kids’ refuge of sorts. I put on plays in the basement, painting the scenery on large sheets of paper and taping them to the walls. I lip-synched a production of
Hans Christian Andersen,
using an album of the songs from the movie starring Danny Kaye. My father encouraged me, and when
West Side Story
opened in 1957 he took me to a matinee performance at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway.

My memories of Queens reflect my general unhappiness as a child. I just never fit in and even if I’d tried, as my sister had, I would have failed; the other kids just thought I was weird. I found solace in books and poetry and in making storybooks for myself filled with characters I created from an invented world. The good memories come from the culture I lived within, being around interesting adults from different backgrounds, all kinds of music, and all those books. Though we were economically working class and money was always an issue, we had a rich cultural upbringing that I relished; maybe that is what sustained me, compensating for the bad stuff later on. The relative wretchedness that we go through as wee ones notwithstanding, it is as adults that the real horrors of life are fully realized.