How Greenwich Village (and Bob Dylan) Invented the Sixties

How did one neighborhood become the locus for generations of musical invention, from Dylan to Nina Simone? A new book has some answers

Decades never start quite on time, pop-culturally speaking, and it’s tempting to say that the Sixties didn’t really kick off until the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, just as “Smells Like Teen Spirt” started the Nineties in 1991. But as David Browne’s new book, Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capitalsuggests, the Sixties’ spirit really began in Greenwich Village, not Liverpool — and the music that really got it going was written by Bob Dylan. In June of 1963, Peter, Paul, and Mary, a group of Village folkies assembled by manager Albert Grossman, released their prettified version of Dylan’s protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It rocketed to Number Two on the pop charts, a harbinger of the protests and generational uprising that would mark the later years of the decade.

In the new episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast — with the Greenwich Village-heavy Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown on the way — we look at the rich, complex musical history of that New York neighborhood, from Pete Seeger to Dylan to John Coltrane, with Browne joining host Brian Hiatt for the discussion. To hear the whole conversation, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotifyor just press play above.

Greenwich Village’s boundary-pushing musical history goes back much earlier than the Sixties. As early as 1940, you could pay $1.50  and see a bill of Billie Holiday (who debuted “Strange Fruit” in the neighborhood), Art Tatum, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The folk scene that Dylan would come to dominate was already taking shape in the Fifties, but by the time Dylan hit town in 1961, the Village was also home to a much wider array of artists, from Ornette Coleman to Nina Simone. Simone and Dylan would become friendly, after he taught her his songs in Village dressing rooms, she became one of his greatest interpreters, laying down stunning reinventions of songs like “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

Among many other topics, the episode also touches on the story of Dave Van Ronk, the longtime Village resident and singer who inspired the main character of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. “If you talk to people who knew him  back then, they’re not big fans of that movie,” Browne says. “The big objection they have is they feel like it’s so dour and depressing. And that the scene was actually much livelier, much more supportive… It was a lot of drinking and sleeping together.”

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