Coens to do Van Ronk

Dave Van Ronk

I first met Dave Van Ronk sometime in late 1961, perhaps early in 1962 when I saw him perform at a Greenwich Village club called Gerdie’s. He was the titular head of the Village folk music scene at the time and any struggling entertainer who need a place to stay at the time could crash at his Village apartment. Bob Dylan, who was then performing under the name Blind Roy Gunt, was a frequent guest at Van Ronk’s.

Van Ronk was no great shakes as a writer, but he could play the acoustic blues guitar with the best of them and his gravely voice made him sound like he was living the songs he sang, not just playing them. If you can find it, listen to his version of Cocaine. Listen to how much more desperate he sounds as the song progresses. That’s how a person who needs another line but can’t find one feels. He nailed it.

I spent a lot of time at Van Ronk’s apartment, although I never crashed there. I pretty much stayed on the periphery, mostly listening to his great record collection. Perhaps a grand total of 50 words passed between the two of us during all that time. We did correspond extremely sporadically after that.

During the late 1970s, Van Ronk was invited perform at the Kerrville Folk Festival. He knew through our correspondence that I was involved with the Festival, so he called me and asked if there was any way I could pick him up at the San Antonio airport and drive him to Kerrville and then back to the airport after his festival gig. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with greatness.

My favorite moment of that Kerrville experience came when we prepared to drive back to the San Antonio Airport. He had a couple of hours to kill before his flight so he asked me if there was anything to do around Kerrville that was “distinctly Texan.” I drove him to nearby Ingram where there’s a joint that makes the world’s greatest beef jerky. It’s not put in plastic bags like those you see on the Interstate wanna-be beef jerky joints, but it hangs by string from racks in the store. Van Ronk and I each bought a string of jerky and a beer and sat outside like two old fogeys around the cracker barrel in a cheap western. He took one bite of the jerky and was hooked, He walked back inside the store, bought out the store’s entire supply to take back for the folks in New York City so they could discover what real beef jerky tastes like. (I was at the Ingram store on a different occasion when a producer from NBC News in Los Angeles ordered 10 pounds of the jerky. His colleages at KNBC learned he was going to be vacationing in the Texas Hill Country and asked him to go this store and bring back its beef jerky.)

All these thoughts about the late great Dave Van Ronk (he died in 2002) came back to me when I read that the Coen Brothers are planning on making Van Ronk the center of a film they are contemplating making on the Village folk music scene of the early 1960s. The question becomes who could play Van Ronk and, unless he’s really “retired,” especially from playing iconic singers, I think Joaquin Phoenix would be a good choice.

And I too would like to know about whatever happened to the Coens’ treatment of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I was really looking forward to that one.