by Lawrence Bush on January 23, 2012
On his first afternoon in New York City on this date in 1961, Bob Dylan played two or three songs as a walk-on performer at the Café Wha? and then asked the audience for a place to spend the night. Café Wha?, owned by Manny Roth (the uncle of Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth) and still located at 115 MacDougal Street, also gave its stage to a young Jimi Hendrix (playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames) in the spring of 1966; Hendrix was signed and whisked away to Europe for his first tour, which yielded his first, astounding record. Bruce Springsteen’s band The Castiles played the Café Wha? a few months later, at a no-alcohol concert for teens; the band ended up playing some thirty shows there, most of them daytime shows with other bands, which makes the Wha? the only New York City venue at which Springsteen’s band performed. Others who got a start there were Woody Allen, the Velvet Underground, Peter, Paul & Mary, Lenny Bruce, Kool and the Gang, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. Manny Roth, now 92, hosted a reunited Van Halen at his club on January 5th of this year. “
“Last time I stood on a stage this low, we had to have the car back by midnight.” —David Lee Roth
by Lawrence Bush on September 27, 2011
Tuli Kupferberg, co-founder of the Fugs and a beloved beat poet, songwriter, anarchist activist, and primitive cartoonist, was born in New York in a Yiddish-speaking household on this date in 1923. Kupferberg’s books included Beatniks; or, The War Against the Beats, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, 1001 Ways to Live Without Working, and Teach Yourself Fucking, a collection of sardonic cartoons. He and poet Ed Sanders formed the Fugs in 1964, a band described by the New York Times as “perhaps the most puerile and yet the most literary rock group of the 1960s, with songs suitable for the locker room as well as the graduate seminar.” Among the songs Tuli wrote for the band was “Morning, Morning,” later covered in handsome style by Richie Havens: “Morning, morning, feel so lonesome in the morning./ Morning morning, morning brings me grief.” He died at 86 in 2010.
“Starshine, starshine,/chills the moon upon my cheek,/Starshine, starshine,/Darling, kiss me as I leave.” —Tuli Kupferberg
by Lawrence Bush on August 29, 2011
Bob Dylan’s sixth album, Highway 61 Revisited, was released on this date in 1965. The album was named for the interstate highway that runs from his birth state of Minnesota to such musical cities as St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, and was an important road of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. The song list included Dylan’s best-known song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” as well as the title song, which begins with a retelling of the Biblical “Akedah” (sacrifice of Isaac): “Well, God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be putting me on . . .’” Rolling Stone magazine named the album the 4th greatest rock and roll release of all time (and “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest rock song of all).
“Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country.” —Bob Dylan
by Lawrence Bush on August 10, 2011
Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” became a #1 hit on this date in 1962. Sedaka, born in Brooklyn in 1939, had a Sephardi father and Ashkenazi mother (the family name is a variant of “tsedoke,” the Jewish word for charity). His childhood friend, Howard Greenfield, collaborated as a lyricist with Sedaka in writing numerous songs in New York’s Brill Building, alongside such powerhouse songwriters as Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Neil Diamond, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Paul Simon, and Laura Nyro. Sedaka also founded the Tokens, a doo-wop band that had a hit with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” after Sedaka had left them. His own peak as a performer came between 1959 and 1963 with hits that included “Calendar Girl,” “Right Next Door to an Angel,” and “Happy Birthday, Sweet 16.” Sedaka and Greenfield also wrote hits for Connie Francis (“Stupid Cupid”), Gene Pitney (“It Hurts To Be in Love”), The Captain and Tenille (“Love Will Keep Us Together”), and several other performers. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983.
“The public loved The Beatles’ style. So my career was over. People used to walk up to me in the street ‘Didn’t you use to be Neil Sedaka?’” —Neil Sedaka
On his first afternoon in New York City on this date in 1961, Bob Dylan played two or three songs as a walk-on performer at the Café Wha? and then asked the audience for a place to spend the night. Café Wha?, owned by Manny Roth (the uncle of Van Halen vocalist David Lee Roth) and still located at 115 MacDougal Street, also gave its stage to a young Jimi Hendrix (playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames) in the spring of 1966; Hendrix was signed and whisked away to Europe for his first tour, which yielded his first, astounding record. Bruce Springsteen’s band The Castiles played the Café Wha? a few months later, at a no-alcohol concert for teens; the band ended up playing some thirty shows there, most of them daytime shows with other bands, which makes the Wha? the only New York City venue at which Springsteen’s band performed. Others who got a start there were Woody Allen, the Velvet Underground, Peter, Paul & Mary, Lenny Bruce, Kool and the Gang, Joan Rivers, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. Manny Roth, now 92, hosted a reunited Van Halen at his club on January 5th of this year. “
