Peter Stampfel’s latest as-usual ingenious slap-dash collaboration, Hey Hey It’s the Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, proves that (at age 74) it’s never too late to go indie rock. As in, this record confused me after one listen but now has me spinning around the home office and wondering whether snubbing “Jersey Shore” was a mistake. And also, it has me digging through various Stampfel-associated arcana, always finding more Holy Modal Rounders records to go slack-jawed or wire-haired about, revisiting old friend Have Moicy!, nodding along with the boundless jukebox of American musical history that comprises Stampfel’s solo records. But one barely released CD from a few years past that came with an edition of the late lamented all-things-Rounders Irish fanzine Blue Navigator (which I’ll talk more about in a second) set me on a quest to find out about Herr Peter’s Antonia.
Stampfel’s “inamorata” is what Robert Christgau called Antonia (born 1939, let’s pretend she only has one name like Madonna, not her real one, Barbara Ann Goldblatt), which captures her allure but doesn’t indicate exactly why she sets off stars in the eyes of those who knew her. So I did my best with limited resources to find out. Pregnant at 16 and on her own not long after that, she became a scenestress of the lower Manhattan folkie scene at that crucial moment in the early 60’s when sulty guitar strummers started absorbing rock and roll attitudes. Stories and relationships abound: Antonia was best friends with the brutally gifted notorious wastrel Karen Dalton, she refused to sleep with Dylan because he had beer breath, etc etc. Peter Stampfel moved in with her (on the same day he helped move out her previous boyfriend) in 1962 and Antonia quickly and deliberately introduced Stampfel to Steve Weber, thus birthing the once-and-forever Holy Modal Rounders. (She and Stampfel would separate in the latter 1970’s, and Stampfel would clean himself up but Antonia would keep the upper East Side apartment they inherited from Dalton.)
Antonia’s proximity, her personal connections and her Mad magazine sexuality make her a signal character, if perhaps not quite the doyenne, of the Greenwich Village folkie dystopia, but her legacy is her writing. She wrote (often co-wrote) short stories that have surfaced through the years, some in conjunction with Rounders record releases and many frankly pornographic. Much more importantly, she wrote (often co-wrote) a crucial clutch of Rounder-related tunes: “Griselda”, “Bird Song” (as close as she ever came to a hit), “Livin Off the Land”, “God, What Am I Doing Here”. Read these lyrics separate from their music now and you appreciate an artist with a keen eye for stories about common, wacky folk and with the insight that carnal desire is often messy and wet.
I learned these and many more details of Antonia’s life mostly through John McFadden’s lovably low-budget Bear Suit Follies, which collects various essays, historical recollections, short stories, and song lyrics (she continued to write long after her separation from Stampfel, with whom it seems she remained amicable). McFadden is her long-time friend, dating back to an evening hosting the early Rounders when they were a full band playing a gig at McFadden’s alma mater, Bucknell University. He’s also a clergyman these days, and he holds back some of the most salacious of Antonia’s writings. They must be pretty salacious, because “Wicked Arabella”, the short story he prints (co-written with Stampfel and initially accompanying the Rounders’ Alleged In Their Own Time) is basically just a lurid description of an evening of statutory rape. McFadden wraps Bear Suite Follies up into an implied narrative that Antonia became everyone’s favorite hipster big sister.
And she must have been, but in between the lines there is more to it. Details of Antonia’s life remain enigmatic to a person like me who knows about her mostly through murky printed details. Sure, we might not deserve to know how Antonia and Stampfel fell out exactly. But Antonia doesn’t seem to have ever held a paying job and royalties from a few Rounders songs couldn’t cover the rent on a Manhattan apartment, even a rent-controlled one– how’d that work out? And Antonia is fondly remembered by all, but she was also on anti-psychotics for long stretches, and they don’t give those to you for good behavior.
And those anti-psychotics were probably necessary largely due to Antonia’s long-standing methamphetamine use, which evidently continued almost right up to the time that her family moved her to Florida and into an assisted-living facility in her mid-60’s, where I suppose she still is now. McFadden’s book goes up to 2007, and the last mention of her I can find is from 2012, when she was still to her good fortune alive and well. (Antonia deserves her own Wiki page, can somebody get to that?) To get a sense of what meth did to her, one has only to look at how it affected her physical appearance, as evidenced in Bear Suit Follies. Because pictures of Antonia from her early 20s reveal a woman of striking, almost unbearable beauty— straight blond, almost white hair, full, thick lips, big teeth, comely eyes. By her 60s, that young beauty is long lost, Antonia is unrecognizable: her teeth are gone, she’s got rotten hair sticking at angles, her face is a mess. She still has a lovely, life-engulfing smile though. Bear Suit Follies doesn’t shy away from Antonia’s drug issues, but you can’t emphasize the consequences they had on her too much: I mean, not many people these days end up in an assisted-living facility in their mid-60s.
And yet Antonia’s art is underappreciated, and you should pay attention when you play your Rounders records to which songs bear her authorship. Or skim through Bear Suit Follies, which contains lyrics she wrote from her teenage years onward—substantial stuff, and it’s a shame more of them haven’t found a way to be recorded.
Or better yet, find that Blue Navigator issue I was telling you about (Antonia Tribute, #9, from 2006) and, can it be, still available from Jeffrey Frederick’s website. Much of what is said about Antonia in this issue gets reprinted in Bear Suit Follies, but the accompanying CD, Antonia’s 11, is one of a kind: This is Peter Stampfel’s tribute to Antonia, his versions of her songs, a few you know, some you might have heard about (that one where they are doing something to sailors in Chinatown), and some that would be new to anyone. I’ve always figured that Stampfel has so many songs memorized because he truly understands how great the songs in his head really are—it’s impossible for them to fade like most memories do. And plenty of his head’s songs are Antonia’s. I wish there was more information included about why Stampfel chose these particular songs to represent Antonia’s gifts, but maybe he just wanted the collection to speak for itself—it’s a relatively relaxed (by Stampfel standards) set, many of the songs evidently freshly recorded for this release, and leans to the elegeic side (cf. “Going To See The King”). But rarely did the Rounders record songs as sadly beautiful as the lullaby “Laura the Horse” or the dreamy “Float Me Down Your Pipeline”. It’s a shame this CD hasn’t seen a wider release, just as it is a shame that we don’t have a fuller accounting of the story of the person who became Antonia. There is great tale here, and an important lesson as well.
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk
By Ray Pagett
“I needed something to play for club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. Everybody said, ‘Go away.'”
Before Albert Grossman, Terri Thal was Bob Dylan’s first manager. Though, as she would be the first to admit, she was no Albert Grossman. Closer to a friend helping a newcomer get gigs, just as she was doing for her then-husband Dave Van Ronk. Dylan writes about her in Chronicles:
Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics — not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. Intellectually it would be hard to keep up. If you tried, you’d find yourself in alien territory. Both were anti-imperialistic, antimaterialist. “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,” Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
During her six months as his manager, she made one huge contribution to Dylan’s recorded history. Looking for something to bring to club owners outside of NYC to convince them to book him, in September 1961 she recorded what would be become known as The First Gaslight Tape, one of his first concert recordings (the very first of a “regular” concert, since both Indian Neck and Riverside were special events). A recording Dylan fans have treasured for decades—even if the bookers at the time didn’t care.
Even after the manager bit ended, she remained friends with Dylan for a few years, and with Suze Rotolo for decades longer. She also remained close to Van Ronk even after they separated, after, as one chapter in her memoir My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me titles it, “Eleven Years and One Month.”
I spoke to Thal about those early-’60s Village days and what managing a 20-year-old Bob Dylan entailed. Plus I wanted to get her take on A Complete Unknown as someone who was actually there. “I’m not looking dispassionately at history,” she explains. “I’m looking at portrayals of friends.”
Thal and Van Ronk, August 1963, photo by Ann Charters
I have a lot of very specific questions but I’m going to start with a super broad one: What did you think of the movie?
I thought the movie was pretty good, which surprised me, because I am a very literal person. When I look at movies, I really want to look at biography, and this is not biography. It’s biopic, where the producers create an arc and move to whatever conclusion they want.
Did the early scenes, especially the Greenwich Village scenes, feel true to your experience?
The feeling, the tone, yes. I think they captured a lot of it quite well. Coffeehouse scenes, Village streets. That’s not exactly what it looked like, but it doesn’t matter.
I was curious about the coffeehouses specifically. Did they actually look like Gaslight and Gerde’s?
It was close enough. It was the feel rather than, did the Gaslight have those kinds of light fixtures, or were the tables in that scene arranged in three rows front to back the way the Gaslight tables were arranged? I don’t even remember what the Gaslight tables looked like. It had the look of the inside of a club.
But, depending on what scenes you’re talking about, I have problems with a lot of it, because I’m not looking dispassionately at history and saying, “Oh, somebody changed the history.” I am looking at portrayals of friends—and, in a way, portrayals of me, even though I’m not in it. It almost isn’t even a question of accuracies or inaccuracies, but of changes or distortions of people.
Dave is in the movie briefly a couple times. Did you know going in that there would be a Dave Van Ronk character?
I did. I saw the movie twice. The first time I didn’t even realize that that guy was David. It just went right by me. I think he was there once later in a party. I saw somebody with hair hanging down like David, so I guess that was Dave.
He’s in there very early on, telling Bob where Woody Guthrie’s hospital is. Plus that one line later at a party.
My feeling about that is, and this is a little difficult to explain, but Bob is on his way into New York to meet his hero. His hero is somebody who is part of a world that he’s going to leave. He’s coming into the folk music world, which he is going to leave for a different musical world. Dave is there to greet him before he even gets there. Dave is never seen again. The way David was set up, to me, it was like saying, “This guy is part of the world that Dylan is going to leave, which is a failing world.” I thought that the way it was done was insulting to Dave.
The only really political scene is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is portrayed I think quite well. They show the fear. People were really, really scared that night. They were terrified that they weren’t going to be alive the next morning. That the whole thing was going to just be gone. The movie shows Bob working in the Gaslight that night with a very small group of people riveted, listening to him. Then Joan Baez running to be with him because Suze is away.
Aside from the Joan piece, Dave was working in the Gaslight the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The audience was small; Dave usually packed the Gaslight. People didn’t go out that night. They didn’t go to hear musicians. It was a small crowd, but the small crowd were people who were riveted listening to David, as they are shown riveted listening to Bob in the movie.
I think that it was insulting for them to replace David. It was like Dave didn’t exist.
You’re saying that was Dave’s story, playing the Gaslight during the Cuban Missile Crisis, not Bob’s?
I was there. It was my story too. A piece of my life is erased in some way. I wasn’t a performer, but it was an important night in my life. It was an important night in the life of anybody else who happened to be in that room. They didn’t have to do that.
You mentioned there wasn’t too much politics in the movie. One scene I got more out of having read your book right beforehand is when the Suze character [named “Sylvie” in the film] encourages him to be more political, to get more into activism. There’s some line like, “You don’t need to be singing songs about the Dust Bowl. There’s issues happening right now you can write about.”
He did to a certain extent, in his own way. As a songwriter, Bob evolved brilliantly. He started by writing rapportage, whether it was about past events or present events. He moved into writing metaphor, which no one else was doing, or not doing well.
The movie, however, totally ignores the whole Civil Rights movement. It just ain’t there. That’s what I went back to see. I went back to see the movie because I said, “Am I really correct? Did this movie simply skip that whole thing?” This was years of really important political conflicts that were going on. It did show him singing at the March on Washington, which was an important event.
You were there right?
I was at the March. Dave was supposed to sing. He got sick, but he urged me to go. I was up on the platform, not because of who I was, but because of Dave.
Bob was not a political person in my terms. I was a committed, active Marxist. Our friends in the folk music world weren’t, for the most part. That was another really important part of my life and Dave’s life. But Bob was not uninvolved with what was going on. He did go South at one point. All of this was just totally ignored. It’s like it didn’t happen. In the movie, he comes to New York, he lives at a distance from this changing, growing Civil Rights movement. He goes to where a lot of people regard as its pinnacle, the ’63 March on Washington, and that’s it.
One line from your book I thought was interesting was that he would come to your apartment and you and Dave would tell him all this political theory, what you were passionate about. You felt the theory part he was uninterested in. It was more specific events that resonated for him. The story of Hattie Carroll, say, rather than concepts about Marxism, socialism, capitalism.
I didn’t know anybody from the folk music world who was really interested in the Marxist stuff that Dave and I spouted. That really wasn’t part of it. There were people who had been part of left-wing movement years ago; even they weren’t that interested in it anymore.
In Chronicles, when Dylan writes about you, he says a version of the same thing. He writes, “She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics. Not so much the political issues but rather the theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics.” It goes on for a little while.
Did he say Nietzschean or Marxist?
“Nietzschean politics.”
No. No way. I couldn’t tell you anything about Nietzsche.
The anecdote he shares after is about you two walking by a store. He’s saying how you’re anti-materialist and you say, “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener. Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
I read that.Did I say that? I have no idea. I could have.
Let’s rewind a little bit. In terms of your own story, talk about how you entered the Village folk scene and how you met Dave, before Bob even comes into the picture.
I backed into it through left-wing politics. I went to Brooklyn College, and when I was in college I actively sought out organizations that were left-liberal. I went to socialist meetings every Friday night, and all of the left-wing organizations met in the Village. I had been going to the Village with a high school friend even before that. I had heard some of the folk music in the Square on Sundays so I had a little bit of that background. I was very young.
Are we talking late ’50s now?
We’re talking mid-’50s. I graduated from high school in June ’55. I’m going to these socialist meetings in the Village in ’56, early ’57. I am accosted and interviewed and grilled by the FBI. I tell them to go away.
Just for going to the meetings, the FBI is on you?
All I was doing was going to meetings. I knew a lot less about the organizations they were asking me about than they did. This was the tail end, during the McCarthy period. I remember these guys walked up to me on the street. They said, “Terri,” and they showed me their FBI cards. Without even blinking an eye, I looked at them and I said, “I won’t name names.”
During the McCarthy period, people were summoned to Washington and asked to name people they knew who were involved in the Communist Party. I only knew people in socialist organizations, not the Communist Party.
Anyway, I was going to these meetings, and the world was very small back then. There were only a few hundred people in it. The socialists knew the folk singers, knew the science fiction people, knew the visual artists. Everybody hung out in the Village. That’s how I backed into folk music.
I met David at a science fiction party. We talked for a while. I didn’t see him again for several months, and then I ran into him in the Figaro, which was a coffeehouse that everybody I knew hung out in. We were together for another 11 years.
What precipitated you becoming his manager?
David hated business. David wouldn’t set foot in the bank. When we started to live together, I had to talk him into being on the checking account. He hated that. He just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
He would just be keeping all his money hidden somewhere?
He didn’t have any money! There was nothing to keep. Starting a checking account was wishful thinking.
He had this gig in a new club somewhere not too far from Philadelphia. [The club] was bombing; it wasn’t attracting an audience. It was pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to get paid, because they weren’t making any money. We called his manager. His manager said, “Work out the gig.” It was a perfectly reasonable thing to tell him. Work out the gig, and then we’ll…what? We’ll sue? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the adage “you sue a beggar and you get lice.”
But he did it. He worked out the gig. He didn’t get paid. He fired his manager because he was pissed with him. Why did he hire me? I don’t know. I was there.
How do you learn the ropes? You’re not a manager, until suddenly you are.
You wing it. It was not such a big deal then. There weren’t an awful lot of commercial managers around. You had Albert Grossman, who was an up-and-coming commercial manager. You had Harold Leventhal, who was a very experienced, incredibly honest manager in New York. You had Manny Greenhill in Boston. Basically, in the beginning, I was a booking agent. I just called clubs and got gigs. It really was trial and error.
I was not the kind of manager who tried to change his music or the way my clients looked or acted or teach them stagecraft. I just took them as they were. Some people sent their clients to learn how to dress better or speak better. I didn’t do any of that.
When I managed, a good deal of what I did was PR. My clients had a ton, given the time, of publicity. I did an enormous amount of public relations for them. I had interviews, I had press coverage, everywhere they went.
What does public relations look like in the early ’60s? You’re writing press releases? You’re inviting reporters to shows?
At that point, it was both. I looked up who and what newspaper or what magazine would be interested in folk music. There were damn few people, of course. I had lists of names. I had phone numbers. I called them. If I went to another city, I met them. I did all that shit that a good PR person I thought was supposed to do, which was personal. I didn’t just send press releases. As a matter of fact, I barely even knew what a press release was.
I remember, I think it was 1964, there was a thing called the New York Folk Festival. David did the blues concert. He brought in Chuck Berry, who had gotten out of jail a while before and had not been around for very long. There was a guy who did PR. I saw the press releases and I said, “Oh, that’s what they do.” I had just always done letters and phone calls and personal shit.
Were journalists generally interested in a new folk artist?
No, they weren’t. By ’64, ’65, there was some interest. Before that, outside of New York, it was rough. It really was. I put a lot of time and work into that, and I was good. When I stopped managing, I did public relations for not-for-profit organizations for years.
Where you pitching Robert Shelton, or was he plugged in enough on his own?
He was around. He was very aware of what was going on in the folk music world. It wasn’t a question of nagging him very much. He knew who was there.
Was Bob your second client after Dave?
Yes, he was. That was ’61. I had just started to work with Dave.
There’s a scene in your book where Dave has seen this kid out in one of the clubs, and he comes back to the apartment and calls him a “fucking genius. Then you go out and see him and you agree. What about that early phase of Bob Dylan made you and Dave think he was a “fucking genius”?
People ask, and my answer is always, “I don’t know.” He stumbled a little bit and he looked cute and he doffed his cap and he walked and acted a bit like Charlie Chaplin. He was not a great guitarist. He was not a great singer, but something– I can’t put my finger on it, what there was about him.
It wasn’t only Dave and me who thought that. Within weeks, that guy started to become the most photographed folk singer in Greenwich Village. Other folk singers were more enthusiastic about him than they were about anybody else.
This is even before he’s writing his own songs too.
Yes, those first months. This wasn’t in the rest of the country or the rest of the East Coast, where he wasn’t yet known. This was in the Village.
How do you go from being a fan to being his manager?
He says to me one day, “Would you get me gigs?” We talk about it. I say, “Do you want me to manage you?” He says, “Yes.” We work out a verbal arrangement. Never occurred to me to ask him to sign a contract. I wasn’t that professional yet.
Initially, all I’m going to do is try and get him some work because he has to earn a living. I needed something to play for potential employers and club owners, so I cut a tape at the Gaslight. I took it to Philadelphia and I took it to Boston and I took it to Saratoga Springs. Everybody said, “Go away.”
When you say “took it,” are you making copies and mailing it out? Are you physically showing up to people’s offices?
I went to Boston. Richard Farina and Carolyn Hester were married at that time, and they were playing Springfield, Massachusetts, and then Boston. I went with them and I brought this little cassette and I played it for people. Philadelphia, I may have sent the cassette, or I may have gone down there when David was playing Philadelphia.
Everybody said, “Go away,” and so I went away. He did not come across well yet on tape. I was able to get him gigs in a couple of bars in New Jersey. I haven’t a clue how I did that.
Was it a proper show you recorded the Gaslight tape at?
It was a show; there was an audience. I think it was an evening that we set up as a booking, but I honestly wouldn’t swear to it.
There are six songs on the tape. Was that his typical repertoire around the time?
Yes, it was. Dave came on and did the chorus of “Car, Car.”
It’s funny that everyone’s passing on this tape because all these years later it’s so beloved and famous among Dylan fans.
Back then, no one was interested
It’s got “Song to Woody” on it, which I think a lot of people consider his first major composition. The movie treats it that way.
I think the tape is very good for what it is and the sounds on it. I have the original tape which will go up for auction one of these days. The sound is stunning. Because it’s such an old tape, I thought the sound would’ve dissolved, but it’s incredible. It’s just gorgeous
The Incredible String Band built a considerable following, especially in the British counterculture, with their albums The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter,Wee Tam and the Big Huge. They became pioneers in psychedelic folk and, through integrating a wide variety of traditional music forms and instruments, in the development of world music.
The musician celebrates the 50th anniversary of Morrison’s Astral Weeks with a reimagining that draws out its latent jazz energy
I remember as a kid regularly going into the West End and spending all of my money on records – so much so that I wouldn’t have my bus fare home. I had a nice hi-fi system so all the local kids would come round to hear the latest albums. It was a ritual: we would sit on the sofa and play the whole thing. We’d want to know what the album was saying and we’d take it all in, from the liner notes to the artwork.
Astral Weeks wasone of those albums that had been floating around my mind in bits and pieces for years. I’d heard odd tracks, like Madame George or Cyprus Avenue, but I’d never sat down and heard it in its entirety. That was until two years ago when a friend, Colm Carty, approached me with the idea to do a whole concert of Astral Weeks. I went away and immersed myself in the record for about a month. I’m a late-night person, so I would come home after a gig at around 3am when the adrenaline was still firing, I’d stick it on and I really started getting into it.
There was a freshness. It felt like Van Morrison could’ve recorded it yesterday, even though this year marks its 50th anniversary. When something is good, it works at any time. I was fascinated by the background of the musicians – jazz artists like the drummer Connie Kay, who came from the improvisational Modern Jazz Quartet – and I liked this idea of music coming from people you wouldn’t normally associate with that genre [ . . . ]
L-R: Unknown, Suze Rotolo, Terri Thal, Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk