In the ’60s and ’70s, Greenwich Village was the musical heart of New York

In a tiny pock­et in down­town Man­hat­tan, peo­ple crowd the his­toric Green­wich Vil­lage each day, strolling past charm­ing brown­stones and bou­tiques dressed in styl­ish garb, hop­ping between high-end restau­rants and bars. In 2025, The Vil­lage is known for being afflu­ent and res­i­den­tial. But for most of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, it was known for Ker­ouac and Dylan. Mail­er and Hen­drix. It was a hotspot for bohemi­an cul­ture, with youth at the cen­tre of it. With weary beat poets in smoky base­ment bars and nomad singers with har­mon­i­cas, the Vil­lage was a home for any­one and everyone. 

In his lat­est book Talkin’ Green­wich Vil­lage: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemi­an Music Cap­i­tal, David Browne traces the rise and fall of the neighbourhood’s music scene. Pub­lished in Decem­ber, the book came out only a month before A Com­plete Unknown hit the­atres in the UK on 17 Jan­u­ary. The film fol­lows Bob Dylan’s (played by Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met) arrival in the Green­wich Vil­lage folk scene from 1961 to his con­tro­ver­sial 1965 per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Festival.

While the biopic only dives into four years of The Village’s cul­tur­al rel­e­vance, Browne tack­les the ​’50s through the ​’80s, detail­ing the ori­gins of the scene when a young gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians and poets moved to the neigh­bor­hood at a height­ened time of polit­i­cal tur­bu­lence in New York City, before chron­i­cling its decline in the mid ​’80s as famed venues closed. Browne inter­viewed over 150 peo­ple for the book, includ­ing musi­cal lumi­nar­ies like Son­ny Rollins, Ram­blin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, John Sebas­t­ian, and mem­bers of The Blues Project.

We spoke to Browne from his home in New York City, where he dis­cussed the recent online fas­ci­na­tion with The Vil­lage, the remark­able cul­tur­al pow­er of the neigh­bour­hood, and if there could ever be a revival.

You’ve writ­ten books about The Bea­t­les, Jeff Buck­ley, and Son­ic Youth. What made you decide to tack­le the artists that rev­o­lu­tionised the vil­lage for this book?

David Browne: The idea had been in the back of my mind for a long time. The seeds for it were prob­a­bly plant­ed decades back when I moved into the Vil­lage to be a col­lege stu­dent at NYU — I was­n’t there in the ​’60s, I was there much lat­er in the ​’80s. But even then, I saw there was still a music scene. It was start­ing to revive in the late ​’70s and ear­ly ​’80s. But when I start­ed work­ing for The New York Dai­ly News in the late ​’80s, I start­ed see­ing it crum­ble. One club after anoth­er would close, and often they wouldn’t be replaced by anoth­er club. The idea was def­i­nite­ly fes­ter­ing there and then I also wrote some sim­i­lar arti­cles for Rolling Stone. One was about Ram­blin’ Jack Elliott, who was part of that scene for a bit and anoth­er was about David Blue, who was also part of the Dylan crowd. So all that research plus I was look­ing for a new book to do – it just seemed like a nat­ur­al time. Also, no one had real­ly done a nar­ra­tive his­to­ry of this scene, so I felt like it was a good time for me to look back on that period.

Why do you think there is such a fas­ci­na­tion with the Vil­lage and its music scene?

It’s been so inter­est­ing to see The Vil­lage come back into pop cul­ture in the last decade. First, there was Inside Llewyn Davis, then The Mar­velous Mrs. Maisel, which was part­ly set there, and now we’re see­ing The Com­plete Unknown. Espe­cial­ly in the last few years, there has been a new­found fas­ci­na­tion and allure to the idea of this small, tight­ly knit com­mu­ni­ty where you can club hop prac­ti­cal­ly from one door to the oth­er while hear­ing ground­break­ing folk, jazz or rock. You would hear poets in these small, cozy spaces where you could smoke or drink and there were no cell phones. There were no dis­trac­tions and I think it speaks to a long­ing for a com­mu­ni­ty and for hear­ing music that you had­n’t heard before. I think one of the allures of The Vil­lage back then is that peo­ple went there to hear music that was real­ly fresh and not every city had a Bob Dylan. If you went to The Vil­lage Van­guard or the Five Spot Café, you could see Ornette Cole­man or John Coltrane and hear some­thing you’d nev­er heard before. 

The Vil­lage had a very spe­cif­ic ener­gy in the lat­ter half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. How would you describe its ener­gy and do you think it still has that today?

It has­n’t changed that much phys­i­cal­ly. For the most part, you can walk those same streets and many of the same build­ings are still there. The streets are still nar­row and tiny, and they zigzag and inter­sect. While there are more NYU build­ings than there were in the ​’60s — a clas­sic club called The Bot­tom Line became an NYU build­ing – you can still walk those streets and feel the ghosts of the past. You can walk the steps lead­ing down to The Gaslight Café, even if that’s now a restau­rant. When most peo­ple go out today in the neigh­bour­hood, they are main­ly going to the bars and restau­rants because only a hand­ful of music clubs are left. But it’s still a mag­net for young peo­ple because there’s still noth­ing quite like it in New York City. The Vil­lage was always a vil­lage with­in the city. I think what it needs is some more music venues but we’ll see if that happens.

A Com­plete Unknown fol­lows a few of the same years and events that you cov­er in the book. What were your thoughts on the film?

Much like Inside Llewyn Davis, it cap­tures what it was like to live there in these tiny apart­ments and con­gre­gate in these base­ment clubs with not a whole lot of peo­ple. A lot of the spaces like Gerde’s Folk City and Gaslight Café bare­ly held 100 peo­ple. And I think both of those movies, espe­cial­ly A Com­plete Unknown, put you right there and depict it pret­ty accu­rate­ly. Of course, cer­tain things were a bit head-scratch­ing. For exam­ple, Mac­Dou­gal Street is not a two-way street and Joan Baez did­n’t stum­ble into Gaslight and see Dylan singing ​‘Mas­ters of War’ the night of the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis. It’s the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion where they con­dense every­thing. But putting that aside, I think the movie does a ter­rif­ic job of cap­tur­ing his tran­si­tion from Min­neso­ta kid to rock star. In a way, it cap­tures the tran­si­tion of The Vil­lage, show­ing how that neigh­bour­hood became pret­ty com­mer­cialised and touristy with­in that time frame. It’s not a doc­u­men­tary, but cer­tain­ly gives a sense of what those venues and places looked like and felt like.

When peo­ple think of the Vil­lage music scene, they often think of Bob Dylan. But in your book, Dave Van Ronk is the main focus.

I knew right from the begin­ning the arc of the sto­ry had to go from when things real­ly start­ed to kick off as a scene in the late ​’50s to when it peaked in the ​’80s, as I sort of wit­nessed myself. There were lots of hills and val­leys in between there, but I felt like the ​’50s to the ​’80s was the time frame because the Vil­lage exist­ed before Dylan and it exist­ed after him. I think the big­ger arc of the sto­ry is the Vil­lage as a metaphor for bohemi­an cul­ture in Amer­i­ca itself ris­ing and slow­ly crum­bling and being replaced with drug stores and high-end restau­rants. But I did­n’t want it to just be a list of which clubs opened and which clubs closed and it be like a Wikipedia page. I knew Dave Van Ronk was going to have to be a major char­ac­ter in the book because he’s one of the first peo­ple in the scene and he was in the Vil­lage through­out it all until he died in 2002. Oth­er peo­ple came and went, but Van Ronk stayed the whole time. He was this sort of griz­zled elder states­man of the scene but also as I talked to peo­ple, it became appar­ent just how many peo­ple inter­sect­ed with him, took gui­tar lessons with him, picked his brain, or crashed on his couch. Even­tu­al­ly, it became appar­ent that I could have Van Ronk be a recur­ring char­ac­ter and a foun­da­tion of the book and then do off­shoots of peo­ple who were his pro­teges in one way or another.

Do you think a neigh­bour­hood hav­ing that sort of cul­tur­al pow­er was only pos­si­ble dur­ing that era?

The time when the Vil­lage music scene was coa­lesc­ing, espe­cial­ly at the very end of the ​’50s and through­out the ​’60s coin­cid­ed with such a tumul­tuous time in Amer­i­ca. Not every­one in the Vil­lage was singing protest songs and there were a lot of bal­lads and love songs com­ing out of there too. But with the con­ver­gence of the civ­il rights move­ment in the coun­try and the Viet­nam War com­ing into focus, there was a younger gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians who were ques­tion­ing all of it and start­ing to write songs reflect­ing it. They were writ­ing about their own feel­ings, about what was going on around them, and how it was affect­ing them. That was very new at the time and it real­ly all start­ed in the Vil­lage. When you fac­tor all of those cir­cum­stances togeth­er, it’s unclear if it could hap­pen in the Vil­lage again. Just because it’s so expen­sive to live and pay rent there. Cer­tain­ly, the real estate mar­ket is one of the major vil­lains in the book, with one club after anoth­er clos­ing, not just because peo­ple weren’t going there, but because the rents would be jacked up, or they would have to be sound­proofed — that had a major impact on that world. So it’s unclear if that will hap­pen in the Vil­lage again, but it could hap­pen some­where. That’s the mag­ic and mys­tery of music scenes.

Talkin’ Green­wich Vil­lage: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemi­an Music Cap­i­tal is pub­lished by Hachette.

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