Talkin' Greenwich Village The heady rise and slow fall of America's bohemian music capital

The New York City neighborhood that nourished the 1960s folk explosion is celebrated--and its lapse into upscale sterility mourned--in this colorful account. Rolling Stone journalist Browne (So Many Roads) traces four decades of music-making in Greenwich Village, starting in the 1950s, when a modern folk style--pioneered by the likes of Dave Van Ronk--took shape in coffeehouses, nightclubs, and Washington Square Park's informal concerts. From there, Browne explores the 1960s scene that incubated such superstars as Bob Dylan and Judy Collins and transformed the Village from a working-class enclave into a hippie tourist destination, and chronicles the scene's decline in the 1980s as soaring rents displaced artists and musicians. The author paints a vivid portrait of infectious creativity and socioeconomic volatility, highlighting the neighborhood's fashions ("Milling about outside of clubs like the Night Owl, the young men, with their long hair, flowered shirts, pinstriped bell bottoms, and chinos, wanted desperately to resemble a Beatle or a Rolling Stone") and turf battles between white residents and the racially integrated crowds the folkies brought in. Evocative prose enlivens this captivating ode to a storied chapter of pop culture history. (Sept.)

Almost three-quarters of a century has passed since Greenwich Village's rise to prominence as a cultural juggernaut. Yet, its longevity, capacity for reinvention, and musical fertility have never really been rivaled anywhere else in the United States. Browne (Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup) seeds his narrative with significant anecdotes, serendipitous meetings, and local politics, against the backdrop of four decades of American history. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, the Village turned out a veritable who's-who of jazz and folk musicians. Reputations were made or enhanced on the venues' stages, many of which became legendary, from the Village Vanguard to CBGB. Browne's emphasis on the sense of community, that community's persistence through decades of transformation and hardship--up to and including September 11--and its lightning-in-a-bottle nature brings home what made the Village so special. Much of the material is based on over 150 new interviews Brown conducted (with Judy Collins, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Suzanne Vega, Arlo Guthrie, Shawn Colvin, and others). VERDICT A thorough and thoroughly human history of a unique locale and era. For fans of American folk, jazz, and New York City.--Genevieve Williams

Reviving New York's spirited music scene. Browne, a senior writer atRolling Stone and biographer of many music notables, including Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, draws on a wealth of interviews and archival sources to create a teeming history of Greenwich Village from 1957 to the 1980s. By the late 1950s, venues like the Village Vanguard, Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, and the Half Note already were famous for jazz, while folk singers drew crowds in Washington Square Park. Soon, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, and Judy Collins, among many others, took the stage in coffeehouses and clubs, drawing throngs of fans. On a snowy night in 1961, a "funny, fumbling, somewhat chubby kid" who called himself Bob Dylan appeared at Cafe Wha?, one of many young upstarts hoping to make a name for himself in New York. "As disparate as the talent in the Village was--oceans of difference between Van Ronk's gruffness, Dylan's bristling wheeze, Collins's purity, and Paxton's smoothness, to cite a few--one thing bound them together," Browne writes. "Theirs was music neither as stuffy nor as straitlaced as that of the balladeers who'd preceded them" on those same stages. Dylan was especially influential, with original compositions that inspired others to write their own pieces rather than rework traditional songs. Browne recounts the genesis of groups (Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Roche sisters); the agents who managed them; and the rivalries, love affairs, and musical hits that transformed their careers--in turn, transforming the Village. He recounts, as well, the "wall of segregation" that kept folk music largely white and the government surveillance that threatened the community. Steeped in music culture and lore, Browne offers a detailed, abundantly populated chronicle of a storied place and its creative, outspoken, driven inhabitants. Animated social history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.