January 24: Dylan Needs a Place to Crash

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