A Tour of Bob Dylan’s ‘Complete Unknown’-Era Greenwich Village, With Day-One Fan Peter Wolf

At first, Peter Wolf — best known as the limber-limbed solo artist and former lead singer of the J. Geils Band — may not seem like a day-one Bob Dylan fan who saw some of the legendary bard’s earliest New York concerts and witnessed his meteoric rise in the early ‘60s, first-hand.

But that experience and many others in Wolf’s remarkable life are recounted in vivid detail in his new book, “Waiting on the Moon.” It’s billed as a memoir and basically is, but Wolf intentionally didn’t want to do a same-old rock autobiography. Instead, its chapters are more like a series of cameos with the incredible people he’s known over the years: There are chapters on or featuring Dylan, Muddy Waters, John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, Alfred Hitchcock, Tennessee Williams, Lou Reed, David Lynch and more.

As Dylan himself writes in the book’s jacket blurb, “This book reads like a fast train and you’ll get a glimpse of everyone passing by through the windows. Characters that have crossed Pete’s path who he’s known up close and personal. A diverse crowd, one you wouldn’t think belong in the same book: Marilyn Monroe with a scarf on her head sitting next to him in a movie theater, Muddy Waters, Faye Dunaway, David Lynch the filmmaker, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jagger, Tennessee Williams, Merle Haggard.”

Wolf, 79, who is unusually self-deprecating for someone with his history, tells Variety, “I didn’t want to write a typical musician’s memoir, where they might just say, ‘We played with Chuck Berry.’ Well, what was Chuck Berry like? Was he friendly? Was he unfriendly? Did he rehearse? Not rehearse? So that’s what I tried to do: Make this book about how I first happened to hear [Dylan], playing at the Folklore Center record store; how Lou Reed was playing tiny clubs with the Velvet Underground but said, ‘We’re going to be as important as the Beatles and the Stones’; and what Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were like.”

The book is filled with amazing tales, but there’s little question that the Dylan chapter is the most historic, and serves almost as a companion to the first hour of the Oscar-nominated biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” While only in his mid-teens at the time, the Bronx-born Wolf was a die-hard denizen of the legendary Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s. He frequently rode the subway downtown, got off at West 4th Street and hit the clubs, coffee houses and other venues — the Gaslight, the Kettle of Fish, Gerdes Folk City, the legendary Folklore Center — that helped launch or amplify the careers of Dylan, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk and others, and served as proving grounds for the following generation of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Roger McGuinn, David Crosby and many more.

The Folklore Center was where he first heard Dylan, not long after the bard first arrived in New York early in 1961, singing behind a curtain toward the back of the store, which was owned by the legendary Izzy Young.

“I was browsing through a record bin one afternoon when I heard a voice that caught my ear from behind the thin half-closed curtain separating the front of the store from the back,” Wolf recalls in the book. “I went back toward the curtain to listen more closely, attracted to the unusual style of this voice.” He asked a friend in the store who the singer was.  

“‘Bobby,’” the friend replied. “‘Bobby Dillon.’”

He might have gotten the spelling wrong at first, but as he heard more about the 20-year-old singer and began to see him perform around the Village, Wolf was astonished to learn that not only his sister — who’d encountered the young Dylan through mutual friends as a college student in Wisconsin — but even his father already knew him. The Folklore Center was a magnet for political progressives like Wolf’s parents, and upon seeing the cover of Dylan’s first album (which was released 63 years ago yesterday), the elder Wolf said, “That’s Bobby, Izzy’s friend. What a character that guy is. He’s a hoot!”

His son’s response is perhaps the most classic quote among many in the book: “‘Dad, you know Bob Dylan?’”

Wolf would see Dylan perform many times over the coming years, including late one night at the Gaslight when Dylan sang “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” possibly for the first time in public, as well as larger shows at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Forest Hills Stadium as his fame skyrocketed. He even, as an inebriated teenager, saw Dylan reading a newspaper outside a restaurant and asked him for “the truth,” prompting a response, reminiscent of Dylan’s withering comments in the 1966 “Don’t Look Back” documentary, that Wolf recreates in fluent Dylanese in the book. (The pair became friends years later, and still are.)

Rather reluctantly, he also included some chapters about his own life and career, both with the J. Geils Band and solo — at least partially to pave the way for his next solo album. “I have a new record about 80 percent finished,” he says, “and I figured that if I dedicated myself to writing the kind of book that I would find interesting, it might expand the audience.”

So he sought advice from a friend who’d written a book, which brought forth another story, this one from his early days with the J. Geils Band.

“We were playing in New Jersey after we’d hooked up with [notorious manager] Dee Anthony, who was kind of known to be associated with a lot of wise guys,” Wolf recalls. “We’re playing this place called the Sunshine, and it’s pretty funky. There’s these two guys standing there, like this, talking to each other,” he continues, folding his arms in a tough-guy pose. “Anyway, the show ends and they come over — and it was Bruce [Springsteen] and Steven [Van Zandt, years before they became famous]. They were coming to talk to us because they got our first album and really dug it, and we reconnected a few years later after Bruce hooked up with [longtime manager] Jon Landau, who I’d known for years.

“We’ve remained friends,” he continues, “and he came over to my house when I was thinking about writing the book. I asked what advice he had. He said, ‘You gotta really, really, really want to do it. And then, once you decide you really want to do it, you got to make sure you really, really, really want to do it.’ And believe me, when that time came, it was good advice.”

Wolf was kind of enough to take a couple of hours on a sunny March afternoon to point out the landmarks of the heyday of Greenwich Village folk some six decades ago — or, rather, what they are now.

The first stop on this tour is the Little Red Schoolhouse, still located on Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue …

“My parents were very political, and the Little Red Schoolhouse was a place where progressive parents sent their kids. There, I got to see what I was told was one of the last two performances by Woody Guthrie, and I went to a special private concert with Pete Seeger with about 20 people. I was maybe 8 or 9 years old at that point. So folk music was something I grew up with. We had Leadbelly records in our house, my uncles fought in the Lincoln Brigade [of American anti-Fascist volunteers] during the Spanish Civil War, and Woody Guthrie had a great album of songs of the Spanish Civil War. [Music on folk labels from the ‘40s and ‘50s like] Asch Records, Stinson Records, Folkways Records were all around my house. Folk music was political music, so you had Theodore Bikel, Burl Ives and people like that, and then came the [anti-communist firebrand Senataor Joseph] McCarthy era and things started changing.

“My mother’s nickname was ‘Pinky’ because she was a pinko!,” he continues, using the slang of the era for a communist. “The FBI made visits to our apartment, and they let it be known that they were the FBI: They’d question my mother, ‘What were you doing at so-and-so place, who else was there?’ When you hear about the fear that Republicans are feeling about speaking against Trump now, multiply it by ten times and that’s what the fear of the McCarthy era was like. Because if you were branded a ‘red,’ you were out of work. And of course, that was the beginning of the career of Roy Cohn,” a lawyer who worked with McCarthy and, late in his career, represented the young Trump.

We walk east down Bleecker toward MacDougal Street …

“The folk scene was here, in this neighborhood, on [the west] side of Washington Square Park. There were great Italian bakeries around here, lots of coffee houses …” (we enter Porto Rico Coffee, founded in 1907), “This looks exactly the same.”   

We turn up MacDougal toward the site of the Folklore Center, originally at 110, the Kettle of Fish (114), and the Gaslight (116)…

“Here was the Kettle of Fish, that’s where I first met Bob.” The pair, both accomplished painters, discussed art during their first meeting, “and here” — he points at what is now a 7th Street Burger outlet — “was the Folklore Center, and here…” we eventually find the stairs leading to a basement bar, next to the entrance of 116, “was the Gaslight.”

He continues, “This is where I first heard Bob perform ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.’ I think it was the first time he performed it in public — I’m not positive. [Folk luminaries] Dave Van Ronk, Buffy Saint-Marie, and David Cohen, who was then David Blue, were in the room. It was not very crowded — he came in late and performed three or four songs, and one of them was ‘Hard Rain.’ I was so inspired I made a painting that night called ‘Hard Rain,’ with imagery from the song.”

Surprisingly, Wolf had not seen “A Complete Unknown” at the time of this interview, but he has seen another film that vividly evokes the era: “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the Coen Brothers’ 2011 story of a fictional folk singer based on Van Ronk, who was a cornerstone of the scene.

“They really got the lifestyle of the era right,” Wolf says. “The loneliness, the traveling, hitch-hiking — it was safer then, and if people saw you had a guitar they’d pick you up, ‘Where are you playing?’ — sleeping on couches, the smallness of the audiences, doing gigs for very little pay. They had the transient, solitary aspect of folksingers of those years, and it was a very incestuous community.

“Because it was nothing like what happened with rock and roll, where you had a dressing room and a rider — nobody in folk music had a rider!,” he scoffs. “You might have some room behind the bar to get ready, and actually there was an area of Gerdes downstairs where people would hang out, lots of guitar cases around. But you showed up, wrote your name down, ‘You’ll be on at 10.’ You played and then sat in the crowd and watched Dave Van Ronk or Buffy Saint-Marie or whoever was on next.”

We walk further up MacDougal, past Café Reggio and other cafes …

“There were a lot of these kinds of coffee houses that served cappuccino, but there were no neon signs like this. Oh, and here is the Café Wha?, where Bob played basically in the afternoons for tips, they would pass around a hat. Jimi Hendrix played there [in his pre-fame days]. But, for me anyway, it was more of a commercial place, a place where tourists would go to hear folk music.”

We make a left down Minetta Lane, to a building that is now apartments …

“And this was the Fat Black Pussycat, the name comes from a W.C. Fields movie,” Wolf says. The venue still exists as part of the Comedy Cellar in a different location, on West 3rd Street. “That’s where my dad and Izzy Young would go out. Tiny Tim was there a lot, he became a really close friend of Bob’s — I think they met somewhere out in the Midwest, when Tiny Tim was touring. He was known around the Village as a character who played these old songs from the ‘20s, before he became a fixture on the Johnny Carson show.

“The key thing back then was word of mouth. People would be talking at a club, ‘You’ve got to see Eric Andersen, I saw him here last night, he was really great.’”

We walk back up MacDougal toward West 4th Street and stand in front of the former location of the Five Spot, next to the Provincetown Playhouse…

“This was a club that had a lot of jazz and comedians. Lenny Tristano, the great blind pianist, played here, and I think I saw a young Dick Cavett do a comedy set. I also showed some of my paintings here — me and a friend had a double show. You went in [downstairs], the paintings were up [on street level], and the woman who ran it lived upstairs. She had told us, ‘You have to get your paintings out by so-and-so time.’ I remember telling Bob, who I didn’t know yet, ‘Hey man, I did a painting [based on] “Hard Rain,” I’d love for you to see it.’ He was with a group of people, they were all walking from Gerdes to the Kettle of Fish. So we went inside — and the painting was gone! The woman had taken it upstairs. I eventually got it back.”

… Up another half block to Washington Square Park…

He gestures toward the chess tables on the west side of the park. “I would show my paintings along those railings, and Edward Hopper, the painter, and his wife — who is the woman in his paintings — would always walk by and give a look. I’d say ‘Oh, Mr. Hopper,’ very respectfully. He was a kind of forgotten artist at that time because abstract expressionists were all the rage, and Warhol and the whole pop scene was coming. He was not revered the way he is now.”

We walk toward the famous fountain near the arch, the eternal symbol of Greenwich Village folk.

“And then of course the folksingers would all gather around the fountain, bring acoustic guitars, banjos, harmonicas, kazoos, they’d swap guitars — because they were all really cheap back then, and all you needed was three chords. And at the other end were people who’d play congas and timbales and Latin stuff. It was a wild mix.

“Every major city had a folk area — here, and Bob came up in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, in Boston there was Cambridge, in Chicago there was Old Town, there were all these different pockets. But folk music actually became a big genre, and Bob had a lot to do with that.

“Bob’s rise was like Elvis, it was so fast,” Wolf continues. “He came here in [January] 1961 and within a year he was signed to Columbia Records, which was like the Empire State Building. He’d started out busking, then playing at Café Wha?, then playing for the inner circle in the Village; I remember he did a concert by Riverside Church that had about 20 people, and one for very few people at the recital room in Carnegie Hall.

“But then [in September 1961], Robert Shelton wrote an article in the New York Times that turned people onto Bob, and boom. It was that review that got Bob on his way, and got John Hammond [who signed Dylan to Columbia] interested in him. Albert Grossman was managing Peter, Paul and Mary, started managing Bob, brought them ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August of 1963. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

Finally, we conclude on Sixth Avenue and West 4th, in front of a storefront that was the site of O. Henry’s Steak House.

“They used to have tables out on the sidewalk, and one night I was walking by, and Bob’s sitting there, wearing this kind of Zorro hat, reading the New York Times. His leg was pumping at, like, a hundred miles an hour. He sees that I notice him and he goes [he mimes pulling newspaper in front of his face] — too late! I was flying high after two Barcardi-151 rums on an empty stomach, and walked up and said, ‘Excuse me, Bob,’ and I asked him what is truth, and …

“The rest is all in the book!”

“Waiting on the Moon” is out now on Little, Brown and company.