Chronicles - Bob Dylan [24]
Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it — like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come” — but you don’t know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it — you’re set free. You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score. It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic, but it’s really not like that. It isn’t like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived — your eyes don’t spring open and suddenly you’re very quick and sure about something. It’s more deliberate. It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are — it won’t do any good. It’s a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door — something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it.
Mike Seeger had that effect on me. I’d seen him recently up at Camilla Adams’s place. Camilla was an exotic, dark haired lady, a full bodied woman who looked like Ava Gardner. I used to see her in Gerde’s Folk City, the preeminent folk club in America. Gerde’s was on Mercer Street near West Broadway at the edge of the Village, an uptown type club not unlike the Blue Angel, but it was downtown. It booked mostly nationally known folksingers with records out and you needed a union card plus a cabaret card to work there. On Monday nights, which were called Hootenanny Nights, unknown folksingers could perform. One of those nights, I was in there and I met Camilla. From then on, I knew her a little bit. She’d usually be with the type of guys that looked like private detectives. She was a superb picture of a woman, close friends with Josh White and also Cisco Houston. Cisco had a terminal disease and he would be doing some of his last few performances at Folk City and I was there to hear him. I’d heard him a lot on the Woody Guthrie records and also on his own records, all the cowboy songs, lumberjack and railroad songs and bad man ballads. He was a perfect counterpart to Woody and had a soothing baritone voice — had traveled extensively and worked all the towns with Woody, made records with him, went to sea with him on a merchant marine ship during World War II. Cisco, handsome and dashing with a pencil thin mustache, looked like a riverboat gambler, like Errol Flynn. People said he could have been a movie star, that he once turned down a starring role opposite Myrna Loy. Burl Ives, who did go on to become a movie star, and Cisco had played together at migrant camps during the Great Depression. Cisco also starred on his own TV show on CBS but it was during the McCarthy era and the network had to let him go. I knew all about him. Cisco was sitting with Camilla during a break in his set, and she introduced me to him, told Cisco that I was a young folksinger and sang a lot of Woody’s songs. Cisco was gracious, had a dignified air about him, talked like he sang. He didn’t need to say much — you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it. I’d watched him perform and even though he was a hair’s breadth away from death, you suspected nothing. Camilla was having a get-together for him later in the week, a bon voyage party, and she invited me to come by. She lived in a large apartment on 5th Avenue near Washington Square Park on the top floor of a Romanesque mansion.
Though I didn’t know it, later she might have been influential with the owners of Gerde’s Folk City, Mike Porco and his brother John, in hiring me for a two-week booking, opposite John Lee Hooker. Because