unpopular, alienated interlopers with a penchant for cheap liquor

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The crowd at Big Joe’s confirmed that bit about madness: Clauberg had courted a perfect outcast harem. A Greek dishwasher and janitor named Popeye helped keep the place clean, rubbing oil into the floorboards as necessary. According to the former employee Henry Rinard, Popeye was a short, well-muscled man with no teeth, hair, or eyebrows, prone to mumbling to himself for hours “in gibberish not even another Greek could understand.” Clauberg let Popeye crash on the floor at night, and in exchange, Popeye performed additional odd jobs, like bringing Clauberg food from the joint where he washed dishes, cutting his hair, and helping him yank a rotten tooth from his gums using a pair of pliers. Another regular, Abbie the Agent, wore “thick-lensed eyeglasses, smoked continuously, and was seldom sober.” An outcast from a wealthy Connecticut family, Abbie fetched cigarettes and wine for Clauberg, and periodically became so inebriated himself that he passed out on the Popeye-oiled floor. (His other nickname was Horizontal Abe.) Rinard also wrote about a guy known mostly as the Sea Captain, who wore a wool hat, raincoat, and heavy, too-big, laceless boots, even in June. The Captain was something of an enigma, even to Rinard: “He was either Swedish or Norwegian; he understood English, but never spoke,” he wrote. The clientele was no less unique. “Saturday afternoons they met at Indian Joe’s, where they thumbed through the bins in between swigs from the bottles of muscatel that Pete Kaufman brought along from his store, suspending their searches briefly at three, when a man called Bob turned up with a suitcase of pornographic books.”

When Van Ronk takes a vocal, the hogs are restless for miles around

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The Café Bizarre, which was what Allmen called his room, was the first Village coffeehouse to feature folk music — or any formal entertainment at all for that matter — and it became a howling success that shortly begat clones all over the country. In concept and design, it was a tourist trap, selling the clydes (customers) a Greenwich Village that had never existed except in the film Bell, Book and Candle. The ambiance was cut-rate Charles Addams haunted house: dark and candlelit, with fake cobwebs hanging all over everything. The waitresses were got up to look like Morticia, with fishnet stockings, long straight hair, and so much mascara that they looked like raccoons. I swear I even saw some poor clown in a Frankenstein outfit wandering around the set.

"Your mother play dice with the midnight mice."

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I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit. The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the vocabulary we needed. They'd give us arithmetic to exercise our minds. Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.

I fucked your mama 

Till she went blind. 

Her breath smells bad, 

But she sure can grind.

I fucked your mama 

For a solid hour. 

Baby came out 

Screaming, Black Power ...

And the teacher expected me to sit up in class and study poetry after I could run down shit like that. If anybody needed to study poetry, she needed to study mine. We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.

Buddy Bolden, who is often credited with leading the first true jazz band, was apparently an aficionado of the form. A fan named Dude Bottley recalled that Bolden and his regular sidemen, trombonist Frankie Dusen and guitarist Lorenzo Staulz, "had the reputation of being the nastiest talking men in the history of New Orleans, and that also included the Red Light District."

When they arrived on the bandstand they greeted each other with such nasty talk as, "Is your mother still in the District catchin' tricks?" "They say your sister had a baby for a dog." "Don't worry about the rent, I saw your mother under the shack with the landlord." These three men could go on insulting you for hours if you played "the dozens."

a sexy growl that gradually rose to a series of wild honks and screams

 

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blues queens celebrated freedoms in no uncertain terms: “No time to marry, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith sang, “I’m a young woman, and ain’t done running ’round.” And if their current lives still involved trials and troubles, blues provided a way to speak out: Smith threatened that if her man interfered with her affairs, “I’m like the butcher right down the street, I can cut you all to pieces like I would a piece of meat.” Ma Rainey sang of the harsh realities of domestic violence, describing a man who would “take all my money, blacken both of my eyes, give it to another woman, come home and tell me lies.” But she also sang about finding happiness in lesbian culture, dressing up in “a collar and a tie” to go out with “a crowd of my friends / They must have been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”

the whole nasty image started with Brian, because Brian was a bitch

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“Our rhythm guitarist was Brian Pendleton. He wasn’t popular, poor guy. But anyway, Pendleton and me went shopping in Carnaby Street for a pile of new gear. Pendleton bought this black and white striped jersey. Next day Brian spotted it in the flat. ‘Oh, that’s real nice!’ says Brian. ‘We’re doin’ RSG! live tonight. Do you think anybody would mind if I borrowed it?’ I laughed and said, ‘Yeah, go on and take it.’ Poor Pendleton never saw it again. But you know the best bit? We were all sitting in the flat that night, before the telly, and on comes Brian, you know, like wearing this jersey. ‘Oh, look!’ cries Pendleton. ‘Brian’s got a jersey just like mine!’ Well! We all fell about laughing. He didn’t twig. He never twigged! He kept saying, ‘I wonder whatever happened to my jersey like Brian’s?’ And I wouldn’t mind, but every boy in the land the next day went out and copied Brian’s jersey. He was photographed in it too, so many times. “ About that jersey, Phil May says, ‘There’s no way Brian would like a jersey and go out and buy one like it. He’d just nick it. That was just Jones.’

couples rubbing against each other in drunken, snaky dances

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James Cotton would recall the Waters band being booed when they opened for Vaughan at Washington’s Howard Theater—but at the rowdier rock ’n’ roll shows, Waters did just fine. This was a time when Wolfman Jack was broadcasting from the Mexican border, and one of his typical segments would segue from Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans singing “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah” to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” then into a rap that would go something like: “Here’s Elmore James and his funky-funky slide guitar. Makes me want to get naked every time I hear it, baby…and I wantcha to reach over to that radio, darlin’, right now, and grab my knobs!”

associated with juvenile delinquency and condemned as “jungle music”

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Big Al Downing, a black pianist and singer from Oklahoma who, like Twitty, would later reemerge as a country artist, had some regional success with a rockabilly single, “Down on the Farm,” but recalled that when he got his first East Coast club booking, the owner was a Fats Domino fan and insisted that he play all of Domino’s hits: “He even put a big sign in front of the window, saying ‘Big Al Domino.’ I said, ‘My name is Downing.’ He says, ‘No, it’s Domino.’ ”