Folk Music and Me -a High School Romance

Folk Music

Everybody in my high school crowd was into folk music. We played guitars, and sang Bob Dylan tunes and Peter Paul and Mary tunes and Joan Baez tunes and my boyfriend Billy was obsessed with Tom Rush, who lived in Cambridge, so was close enough to go see a lot. We both liked Tom Rush, but he was in love with him, like a total crush. I was more in love with Cambridge itself and the Club 47 where we went to see Tom Rush, and later, Joni Mitchell, who was from Canada and a compete unknown, until Tom Rush brought her to the US, after introducing her songs to the Club 47 crowd over the past year. The Club 47 was dimly lit, with a tiny stage and really teeny tiny little tables with candles in old Chianti bottles, so the place always smelled of wax. We drank grenadine, a red drink made of pomegranates, which was the thing to drink while listening to folk music. They didn’t serve alcohol in the Club 47; at least not that I can remember, but then I was a Christian teenager from a dying mill town and what did I know?

My Birthday Surprise

On my birthday one year, Billy said he had a surprise for me; we were going somewhere for a great surprise. So excited, we headed off to the east and I tried to imagine what my surprise would be; this was great. Billy even brought clean clothes home from the shoe factory where he was working for the summer; all the kids worked in the factory during the summer between high school and college, so they’d have some money to start off with; and he changed in my kitchen.

We finally reached the destination, a cool looking club in the home of the Ipswich clam, Ipswich. I was sure we were seeing some famous act, Bob Dylan, or Pete Seeger, or maybe Peter Paul and Mary. One summer night we had gone to Canobie Lake Park, a really seedy amusement park in New Hampshire, and were thrilled to be entertained by Sonny and Cher singing I Got You Babe. My expectations were high.

So when we stood outside the ticket window of the small, out of the way club, and I saw that the headliner for the night was Tom Rush, I completely lost it. And not in a good way.

“Tom Rush is my birthday surprise!?” I hissed not under my breath at all, as we moved up the line toward the ticket window. “This isn’t any kind of surprise; we see Tom Rush all the time.” I whined. I stomped my feet. I was disappointed. Billy was embarrassed that his girlfriend was pitching a fit in front of the fans. I had never heard of “groupies" in those days, but that’s what Billy was, and he thought I was too, but I wasn’t. Tom Rush was all right and Joni Mitchell was even better, but not a birthday surprise. 

I can’t remember if we stayed for the show or not, but we didn’t stay together as a couple past the first trimester of college.

Hosting the Folkies

 

However this story is about something else, another time Billy and I went to a concert, a show, at the Club 47, where we usually saw Tom Rush or Joni Mitchell, or both together, the first time we saw Joni Mitchell, it was both together. This time we knew that Sandy and Jeanie Darlington were coming and we for some reason - what reason? who knows? That’s just something you say when you can’t remember what could have possessed you to do such a reckless thing - for some reason, we wrote to them and said we’d like to take them to dinner before the show. And they replied. They accepted the dinner invitation, so we had to do it; two high school students, going to dinner with big time folk musicians! We took them to some kind of hofbrau type place in Harvard Square, where the food was hearty and cheap, and Germanic if I recall. 

We tried to act cool and look older. And they were totally gracious, pretending they went to dinner with high school age fans all the time, acting like we knew what and who they were talking about, as they discussed their act and the other musicians who'd influenced them, asking us who we liked. They even let us pay for dinner without making the usual adult fuss or giving each other knowing looks over the bill.

Other than those details, which are seared on my brain, I don't remember a thing about the meal; or the concert afterward. This was my first encounter with famous people.

Except of course for Brian Jones. But that must wait for the next chapter.