V. “ALL WE CAN DO IS GO AROUND” (GUTHRIE)
ND: Jack Kerouac rejected your suggestion that Woody Guthrie’s prose writing was like Jack’s famous spontaneous writing, in effect. What didn’t he like about that comparison?
JC: He said, “Woody Guthrie’s just a folksinger. I’m a poet, like Rimbaud and Verlaine!”
ND: You photographed Kerouac listening to himself on the radio — possibly a revealing character study — and Woody in what must have really been his last months being upright and strong.
JC: In other pictures on that same roll, he was shaking and not in good shape. But I will only use the pictures of him that, to me, show his real inner strength and his dignity.
ND: You brought up Jeff Tweedy. The Billy Bragg and Wilco take on later Woody Guthrie songs show a New York hipster side to him, a controversial counter image. Who was this guy you knew for ten years?
JC: The first time I laid eyes on Woody was at the Lead Belly memorial concert, where Tom Paley, my future partner, was trying to get all of these instruments in tune with each other. Some big jazz band was playing, and there’s Woody wandering around playing bones, and wandering in and joining the jazz band!
ND: He was not making distinctions!
JC: Woody gets up there and says, “Einstein says we can’t go up, we can’t go down, we can’t go in, we can’t go out; all we can do is go around and arrouuuuund and around!” This is just what came out of his mouth to that audience. I thought, “This is wonderful!”
ND: Did it feel incongruous that there were these fraternal jazz-loving Beats, and also a Roscoe Holcomb, a traditional singer brought up from the South, right next door in that day’s Greenwich Village? How did that all connect?
JC: We’ve got the Stoney Mountain Boys that we’ve brought to New York. And they’re going to audition at the Village Gate, unannounced. And no one’s going to show up. So I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to get some people to come over. So I go over to the Cedar Bar, in the late afternoon, and they all — the painters and whatnot — are there. I say, “Come hear this incredible music!” And everybody dies laughing. But then Allen Ginsberg, at a table full of his friends, says “Okay! Let’s go!” And a whole bunch of them came over to the Gate. That was amazing! I was so delighted about Allen gathering up his pals to hear something they just hadn’t heard before.
VI. “YOUR ROOFTOP HAS BEEN DEMOLISHED” (DYLAN)
ND: I never knew that when Bob Dylan says in the Highway 61 Revisited liner notes, “John Cohen…your rooftop…has been demolished,” he referred partly to a real roof, where you photographed him, as your book shows. There’s a process of image-making beginning there. We see a 19-year-old kid hitching up his pants, playing with a cigarette. He seems very interested in what he’s going to look like to people, and you’re taking part.
JC: I don’t think we had ever done a photo session; I had never taken somebody out to photograph them. As to what I brought in my mind, and he brought as his agenda, we never discussed it. I took pictures. And we sat down, and I’m seeing some wonderful Sid Grossman pictures of Woody Guthrie — and I’m seeing that in him. Then I’m suddenly seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, something in the way he walked…and then James Dean struck me.
ND: And you took these unseen pictures. Dylan told someone soon after, “You should see some pictures they took of me; I look like James Dean!” He was surely aware of how he came off once he saw them.
JC: But I don’t think he’d been trying to shape me.
ND: “Your rooftop has been demolished” could be seen as a sort of announcement that from now on Mr. Dylan was doing image-shaping for himself, album by album, as David Bowie would. A song would soon say “It’s beginning to work for you like your Nine Pound Hammer did.”
JC: He had a new thing. And I’ve continued to appreciate about Bob through the years that he takes these phrases from the old songs and keeps reusing them again in new ways.
VII. WHAT WILL I DO NEXT?
ND: Your book shows Eck Robertson, the great early fiddler who you also played with, not as simple “folk,” but as a man who’d fought like hell to get to New York City in the 1920s, to record at Victor Records in Gramercy Park. That’s remarkable drive and ambition.
JC: I knew his old records, then I make this trip to Texas to go find him, and find out that he had come to New York to make them! It’s wonderful symmetry.
ND: The old-time music you helped bring back then was only 25 to 35 years old. It’s now 40 years later. To a young generation who are fans of, say, the Freighthoppers, or other young old-timey bands, you’re a bit of an institution yourself. Do you have anybody showing up to “rediscover” you?
JC: I’ve even been asked to do a “master class,” although I’m not sure what that means, in banjo. But the things you’re bringing up now, they’re fascinating to me, and fun and rewarding. But my real effort is, “What will I do next?”
ND: But if younger bands come to you with questions, what do you advise them, if they want to “get it right”?
JC: All you can do is point people toward the aesthetic of what they’re listening to, and see how they can deal with that. If they can love it. If they can make their hands work. You could learn from the inside out, or learn a piece of music and train your fingers, and the fingers train your brain. And that may even give you access to your spirit — outside in. You don’t have to start with the Bible to get there!
