Chronicles - Bob Dylan [105]
Paul Clayton occasionally played sets down here, too. Paul got all his versions of songs by adapting transcriptions from old texts. He knew hundreds of songs and must have had a photographic memory. Clayton was unique — elegiac, very princely — part Yankee gentleman and part Southern rakish dandy. He dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare. Clayton traveled regularly from Virginia to New York and back, and we got to be friends. His companions were out-of-towners and like him, a “caste apart” — had attitudes, but known only to themselves — a non-folky crowd. Authentic nonconformists — scufflers, but not the Kerouac types, not down and outers, not the kind that run the streets whose activities could be recognized. I liked Clayton and I liked his friends. Through Paul I met people here and there who said to me it was okay to stay at their apartments any time I needed it, and not to worry about it.
Clayton was good friends with Van Ronk, too. Dave Van Ronk, he was the one performer I burned to learn particulars from. He was great on records, but in person he was greater. Van Ronk was from Brooklyn, had seaman’s papers, a wide walrus mustache, long brown straight hair which flew down covering half his face. He turned every folk song into a surreal melodrama, a theatrical piece — suspenseful, down to the last minute. Dave got to the bottom of things. It was like he had an endless supply of poison and I wanted some…couldn’t do without it. Van Ronk seemed ancient, battle tested. Every night I felt like I was sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument. Dave sang folk songs, jazz standards, Dixieland stuff and blues ballads, not in any particular order and not a superfluous nuance in his entire repertoire. Songs that were delicate, expansive, personal, historical, or ethereal, you name it. He put everything into a hat and — presto — put a new thing out in the sun. I was greatly influenced by Dave. Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It’s not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine.
Van Ronk’s voice was like rusted shrapnel and he could get a lot of subtle ramifications out of it — delicate, gentle, rough, explosive, sometimes all within the same song. He could conjure up anything — expressions of terror, expressions of despair. He also was an expert guitar player. All that, and he had a sardonic humorous side, too. I felt different towards Van Ronk than anyone else on the scene because it was him who brought me into the fold and I was happy to be playing alongside him night after night at the Gaslight. It was a real stage with a real audience and it was where the real action was. Van Ronk helped me in other ways, too. His apartment on Waverly Place had a couch I could crash on any time I wanted to. He also showed me around the regular haunts of Greenwich Village — the other clubs, mostly jazz clubs like Trudy Heller’s, the Vanguard, the Village Gate and the Blue Note, and I got to see a lot of the jazz greats close up. As a performer Van Ronk did something else that I found intriguing.
One of his patented dramatic effects would be to stare intently at somebody in the crowd. He’d pin their eyes like he was singing just to them, whispering some secret, telling somebody something where their lives hung in the balance. He also never phrased the same thing the same way twice. Sometimes I’d hear him play the same song that he’d done in a previous set and it would hit me in a completely different way. He’d play something, and it was like I’d never heard it before, or not quite the way I remembered it. His pieces were perversely complex, although very simple. He had it all down and could hypnotize an audience or stun