Tag: Cafe Rienzi

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Hymns?

I received an early Father’s Day present yesterday. One of my sons surprised me with plans to visit a small town in New Hampshire for a concert. It was a great day for a drive through rural New England to the small Town Hall where the concert would be hosted. And it was a wonderful venue to be introduced to the Folksinger Lui Collins. ****

The concert swept me back to the sixties. If you haven’t heard Lui Collins, I can’t endorse her more than to say that she pulls the audience in with a joyful warmth that makes you smile and ache for more. She partnered with the very talented Anand Nayak. Anand’s incredible guitar work made an ideal pairing with Lui’s voice and repertoire.

BACK STORY

Lui’s last song before the set break was a tune someone else had written based on the melody from an old hymn. It was lovely. But by the end, the inkling of memory was pulling me back to a night at Cafe Rienzi in New York’s Greenwich Village.

I had been sitting around with a group of my usual friends, talking about music. There was my somewhat girlfriend Sue. The Harmonica sensation Louie Lefkowitz, and someone named Tom, whom we did not know well. The topic of conversation was tunes and where to find them. I said that I usually just noodled around on the axe ( meaning the guitar) until I found something to develop. The others chimed in with their methods. Tom scoffed at me. He then opened a leather valise at his feet. From it, he pulled a worn copy of an old hymnal.

“This is the mother lode,” he exclaimed. We were skeptical. ” Isn’t that, like, stealing from other artists?” Louie exclaimed. Opening the hymnal to a well-worn page, Tom smiled and pointed to the fine print, which read, “based on a traditional melody.” He proclaimed to us it was just the “Folk Process” in operation.

THE FOLK PROCESS

The Folk Process was a concept that I believe was first expounded by Pete Seeger. It’s the process of continual reinvention, reuse, and evolution of material in a community. Old songs never die; they are adapted, changed, and grow in tradition through the process. Tom certainly knew his Folkie’s chapter and verse, and while we remained skeptics, there was no doubt that Tom had a whole flock of interesting tunes.

Upon hearing the tune at the concert, this memory came flooding back. Additionally, there came a reminder of the Folk Process. And today, as I write this post, I am reminded that it’s a part of the Folk Process too – the recollection, the passing on of the story, and the recycling of ideas.

****I almost forgot, here is a link to Lui Collin’s website. An incredible artist worth getting to know more about: https://www.luicollins.net

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Surreal Dream

A Flashback Friday presentation from 2019

I’ve had some doozies of lucid dreams in my time. But, about six months ago, I had the most extreme case. ****Spoiler alert John Haley Bellamy is the Dean of 19th-century American Shipscarver ( IMHO). Dali was my favorite Surrealist and habitue of New York growing up. So I wondered what would happen if Dali and Bellamy ran into each other. So – A Surreal Dream.
I was sitting in my usual spot at the Rienzi coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, and joining me that night was John Halley Bellamy. John was down from Kittery for his first trip to the Big Apple. He wanted me to fill him in on who the local shipscarvers were, the best time to visit the Empire State Building, and the Guggenheim directions. We were pouring over one of those little accordion maps of the city that hotels give you when in walk Salvador Dali. Dali siddles up and starts praising Bellamy for being an early Surrealist. “My only dispute with you comes in the calculation of spirals and curves you use; I’ve always preferred logarithmic spirals; you, on the other hand, use something that looks like it’s part of an ellipse? Bellamy, admiring Sal’s logarithmically twined mustachios, takes time to twirl his mustache ends into a number seven Copenhagen curve and replies, ” I started in a boat shop, so I used ships curves.” They happily spent the next ten minutes discussing how to simplify for emphasis, stretch proportions, and play with conventions. For once, I was without words.
After an hour or so, Dali said he’d pick up the check. So he and Bellamy wandered out onto McDougal Street. Dali suggested they head to Paris and visit. Pablo – “Not really a Surrealist, but an interesting artist…”
Pondering my next move, I noticed the signed credit card receipt – I quickly pocketed it and walked out with a signed Dali.

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The Future

When they served you pastry at the Cafe Rienzi, you ate the crumbs. First of all, if you were a habitue of the said establishment, you appreciated the quality. But mostly, if you were like me, the calories were an essential part of your daily intake.
As an aspiring folk singer, your music was a central part of your existence, but you were one of the thousands, and a note of music did not equate to a dollar to spend on food.
Unlike some of my friends, I could not run home on weekends or odd evenings to tank up at the family table. That was closed to me thanks to the ferocious battle that raged between my parents and me. I was fortunate in not understanding how desperate my life was. Talk about starving for your art.
New York City was full of people busy remaking themselves into new images from the old components. Most of the time, this just resulted in a rehash of the old and just as tired.
Aliases and names were fragile things in those days, and they changed quickly over a week of self-reflection and drugs. We had no flashy laminated “Government Issued ID.” We did have those on pasteboard, and the local forger in the Jeweler’s District would whip you up a new one for ten bucks.
Real change? To create that, you either have to have little attachment to the past or little history. I was fortunate I had neither.

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Blather

Lefkowitz moved from something similar to a Bach fugue to an interlude that morphed into a 12 bar blues. Mitch provided some impromptu lyrics, and Sue did some neat things with her soprano voice. I had a bad cold and sore throat, so I just sipped my extra-large tea with honey. After Lefkowitz finished up, Mitch picked out one of his tunes for us. Sue followed up with one of her favorite Scottish ballads. 

It was a quiet Monday night in the Village. Monday and Tuesday tended to be slow, and on Wednesday, things picked up heading into the weekend. Monday was a good time to experiment with friends. Several other groups at the Rienzi were doing likewise. Over in a corner, a clutch of poets was critiquing a colleague’s latest work, and near the door a pair of sketch artists were drawing the scene in the Cafe Rienzi’s music room.

A clearing of the throat announced a stranger at our table. He snubbed the men at the table while shuffling in a chair between Lefkowitz and Sue. Portly, bearded, and looking like a down at the heels professor of lit, he began to take issue with Sue’s diction and accent on her version of “The Bonnie Earl of Moray.” He was in full blather about how the McEwan version was the one she should emulate. Sue sat there smiling slightly, apparently not knowing if this was the intro to a come-on or just another deranged Village tourist who couldn’t find his tour bus and was now stuck in the inmates’ asylum. On he went, and when we all assumed he must come to a pause, on he continued.

Mitch picked up a discarded New York Times and began finishing the prior reader’s crossword puzzle. Lefkowitz started to miming “yada, yada, yada, yada,” while pretending to be before a class delivering a lecture.

Mitch looked up at me and loudly asked, ” Wes, what’s a 12 letter word for an idiot who endlessly natters on about uninteresting topics?” This one I knew. When he isn’t playing coffeehouses, Mitch is a grad student in sociolinguistics. Mitch is my primary source for obscure words that might sound insulting, and this was his word of the day for me on Friday. I pretended to think deeply about this while everyone at the table watched. “Why, that would have to be Blatherskite!” I croaked.

Mitch looked pleased with me, but looked over to our unwanted companion and said, ” It is derived from the 17th century Scots Bleatherskate, but of course, sir being all-knowing on things Scots, you knew that.”

Sue began laughing, Lefkowitz picked up his harmonica and began playing the Bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Loman as a blues. I choked, and Mitch slapped me hard on the back. Our unwanted guest had the wits to take his chair to the corner and bother the poets.

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Bright, Hot Lights

The guitarist spent time warming up while I prepared my video and audio recording equipment. Finally, a chord rang out. ” Your high E is just a bit sharp,” I said, not thinking for a moment that I had not performed for about fifty years. She grinned and checked that string; ‘just a bit sharp,” she agreed.
We were recording in the old Meeting House. They designed the buildings as centers for religion and to be the center of Town government – in those days, in much of New England, religion and Town government were the same. Being that a significant part of the Town population might squeeze in, they designed for good acoustics: no microphones, no amplifiers, and no speakers in those days. These days it’s used mostly for weddings and performances.
Acoustics aside, air currents, hot lights, and temperature differences create problems. The lower end of your guitar lives in one temperature zone, and the tuning heads at the top of the neck live in another. The lower tension, more heavily wound bass E, A, and D strings seem less affected. The treble strings are under more strain and are thinner – they seem to be the source of most issues.
For a while, I am back in the music room of Rienzi’s Coffehouse in the Village. The wound G string rather than breaking on my classical guitar always let’s go gradually as its outer wrapping unwinds. I am hurriedly placing a new string and stretching it out as carefully as I can – new strings have lots of excess stretch, and will go out of tune at the worst possible moment; in the middle of a song. The B and high E both need replacement, but that will have to wait until I buy new strings. Being that I am pretty busy at the coffeehouses this spring, that means almost every week.
When I get to my gig at the Dragon’s Den, I can almost feel the treble strings go out of tune as I step into the hot lights that shine down on the performer’s little stage. Our “green room” for preparation is a barely heated cubby with a draft. You know that any tuning you do here is a waste of time in February.
I am back in 2020, the guitarist and I discuss how capo’s change tuning and how you have to retune after placing it and after taking it off. Capo’s are little adjustable bars that fit over your guitar’s neck. They help change the key while staying in a fingering style you prefer. but there is a cost to everything. Your tuning ican be affected. Even more so if the neck of the guitar is not absolutely straight.
It is pleasant to just for a moment, step back, and realize that some things have not yielded to either technology or years.

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Cafe Why Not, Greenwich Village, New York City; 1965

The Cafe Why Not didn’t stand; it lurked below ground level opposite the Cafe Wha in New York’s Greenwich Village. The Wha took in crowds and lit up that corner of Bleecker and McDougal, the Why Not was, just what it appeared to be, a dark hole in the ground. I checked only a few years ago, and the location remains much the same as it was the last time I performed there in April of 1965. The stairs down just as dingy and dark.
There were three rough tiers of Folk coffeehouses in the Village. At the upper range were places like Gerdes Folk City. The next level included the Wha. Near the bottom were places like the Why Not.
Performing at places like those was not a living, but it was a way of life. In my day gig, I tried to sell timeclocks and supplies in the Garment District. Among ourselves, we didn’t share the details of those other lives. They weren’t real. Only our seven PM to six AM reality mattered. Between gigs, we assembled at places like Cafe Rienzi, Figaro, Kettle of Fish, or the bar at the Minetta Tavern. Conversations never featured mundane life, only how the songs we were working on were going. Real-life crept in in the form of where we were going to squat for the night if we were currently homeless, money because, at our tier, we always needed it, and, for some drugs- gaining access.


The Folk scene in Greenwich Village was my life from the fall of 1963 to just after the Easter of 1965. One night at Rienzi, I fell a bit too much in love with songs about being on the road. And, I decided to slip into another life. Back in the music room, I sang my last song in Greenwich Village, Fred Neil’s Blues on the Ceiling. By three AM, I was on my way to Boston. I didn’t return.
One night about three years ago, I was noodling around with the guitar. My hands fell into a chord pattern and a pick that I once used frequently. What the hell was that song? The internet helped, and soon I was listening to Fred Neil’s album Bleecker and McDougall. Looking at the album cover, it seemed as though it was me walking with my guitar to the next gig in ’65.

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An Eagle Commission

by Lou Carreras

 

Jay Hanna style eagle

The eagle presented here was a commission. It’s an all-time favorite design that I first carved in the 1970’s when I saw Jay Hanna’s take on this classic 19th-century carving trope.
After carving four or five variations on Hanna’s redesign of the classic, I moved on to other designs. About twenty years ago a client saw a photo of my first effort at Hanna’s eagle in my scrapbook. He decided that it would be the perfect launching gift for a boat his friends were building. After settling on a price, deposit and timeline I went hunting for the wood. Although I love to carve in New England white pine, I opted to do this eagle in Western sugar pine. It is not too easy these days to get good quality sugar pine, but I was fortunate in finding a short piece locally that was just what I needed. Western sugar pine has an enticing odor when carved, but mostly I love it for its straight grain and ability to take and hold fine detail. The photos show the progression of the project from pattern through gilding. Although this is a small eagle, meant for a cabin interior, the underlying essentials are the same for most relief eagles in which the head and banner are not separately added pieces. And…yes it is true; on eagles like this, I do carve the head first so the eagle can watch what I do.  So far I haven’t been bitten.

Medora turned out to be a game changer for me. Okay, this is where it gets weird. One night after finishing the carving I dreamt that I was in my favorite coffee house in New York City ( Cafe Rienzi). Seated with me was the famous carver John Haley Bellamy and my favorite painter Salvador Dali. Dali and Bellamy were pointing out that many things took on compelling interest when pulled out of proportion. Bellamy looked at me and pointed out that the wings on his eagles were exaggerated for precisely this reason. Dali smiled and agreed.
After waking up, I thought lots about that dream. Since then I’ve always added a bit more length to my eagle wings.
I heartily recommend to you Jay Hanna’s book on marine woodcarving: The Ship Carver’s Handbook, as well as anything you can find on John Haley Bellamy and Salvador Dali! Carving the eagle head first, and ghostly conversations with dead artists remain strictly optional.