Folk City at 50: The advantages and disadvantages of being the youngest person at a show

It was a little after moving to New York that I decided pretty definitively that although most things about the city were pretty cool, something was surely missing. Something had evaporated that New Yorkers in other eras, in other times had taken for granted because they had it in abundance. I’m talking about (what else?) folk music.

Bob Porco felt the same way. Though, unlike me, he was actually in a position to do something about it, being the son of Mike Porco, the founder of what was probably the greatest folk music club of all time, Gerde’s Folk City-the place where Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary and Simon & Garfunkel all got their start. The original Gerde’s at 11 W. 4^th St. burned down in 1970, but the venue was moved to a different location before closing for good in 1987. It’s arguable, but probably true, that there hasn’t been anything like it since. Bob spent years tracking down the old guard for a 50^th reunion show, and the fruits of his labors could be seen earlier last month at the Village Underground, a basement venue right around the corner from Gerde’s original Greenwich Village locale.

“[It was] the first honest-to-god folk club in the Village,” wrote legendary local folkie Dave Van Ronk of Gerde’s in his memoir “The Mayor of MacDougal St.”  Van Ronk himself was resentful that Mike Porco had taken over the business from Izzy Young, the proprietor of the legendary Folklife Center. I wondered if Van Ronk, who died in 2002, might have let bygones be bygones if he’d been able to see the community reunite to celebrate both the venue and the artists who played there.

The performance clipped steadily along with only one song allowed per artist, a format I wish was more common. Happy Traub of the New World Singers played “Buckets of Rain,” a sensitive tribute to Dylan, whose spiritual presence in the room lent a kind of ghostly energy to the night.

Why does it seem like every folk band in the early ’60s had to have some whimsical name with the word “singers” tacked onto the end of it? Besides the New World Singers, there was the Almanac Singers, the Rooftop Singers, the Serendipity Singers-at least Van Ronk and Peter Stampfel broke the mold with their Jug Band Stompers and Holy Modal Rounders.

Then there were Terre and Suzzy Roche with their ethereal close harmonies. The sisters’ Christmas album held an honored place in the collection of my holiday-music-obsessed father. The Roches also got their start at Folk City a little later, in the ’70s and ’80s. For their performance at the Village Underground, they went meta, playing “Face Down at Folk City” (“When you came in here / you were looking so pretty / with your Dracula cape and your bat / What a pity”). This spoke to an era of Folk City that I wasn’t particularly sorry to have missed.

At one point, probably sometime around ancient comedian Steve Ben Israel’s set, someone tapped me on the shoulder. The guy standing near me was close to my age, so I suspected this was going to be some lame attempt at a pickup, the premise being that we were the only young people in the room and thus destined to be together. I tried to think of a strategy to politely blow him off.

“What brings you here?” asked the young man, whose name turned out to be Jason Keis. I told him I write a folk column for The Faster Times. He proceeded to tell me, after apologizing for being more or less wasted, not that my clothes would look great on his bedroom floor, but that he needed my support in helping establish an area in Washington Square Park to be known as the Eternal Circle in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the arrival of (who else?) Bob Dylan. Of course, I gave him my card and told him to e-mail me, telling him we’d discuss it when he was sober.

Vince Martin then sang a tune a cappella. Martin, who sang and wrote with Fred Neil (“Everybody’s Talking,” “Another Side of this Life,”) for a brief period in the late ’50s, is best known for his hit with the Tarriers (“Cindy Oh Cindy”). I don’t remember what he sang, but the mere fact that he was up there was impressive. In fact, I had tried to contact Martin for an interview last year when I was working on an article about the city’s folk scene for a grad school class. I needed an elder statesman. I supposed I never had a chance-being me, the only ways I know to get in touch with artists are through MySpace or their publicists. But Martin doesn’t need any PR, and why the hell would he bother with MySpace?  I’m an amateur. On the other hand, Bob Porco’s phone tree is probably an unbroken line reaching all the way back to Fred Neil. There are lines and channels in this city unknown to us youngsters, and they might very well remain that way until the last connections are uprooted. Martin, for his part, was born Vincent Martinello in Brooklyn in 1938, and has never left, except for a brief sojourn down South to Coconut Grove, Fla. I’m fairly sure that at this point anybody with a legitimate need to know him already does.

The following afternoon, after recovering from his hangover, Keis sent me an e-mail detailing his project, which had begun to run into some difficulty. It seems the Parks Department was reluctant to allow Keis to raise the million of dollars that would be needed to designate the Eternal Circle, especially for an artist who’s still alive, though more or less unreachable. Meanwhile, back at the Village Underground, there was probably a hootenanny still going on-or so I have to assume. After all, there was one going on when I came in the day before, and it was still going on when I left.