In the Village Theater with Bob Dylan

Bob's in the process of writing “The Freewheeling Bob Dylan” and looking for ideas. He was still an outsider bugging the older generation for information. It was Ed who was the true ringleader of the movement. It was Ed who had organized the first folk musicians union, where meetings were held down the street on Bleeker, in the basement of the Red Lion Folk Club.

Dylan would go on to write “Hard Rain’s Gonna fall” in the basement of that building a few years later but tonight with to the muffled tone of Fast Bubba Phelp’s “jumping jitter in the hot pants red suit” Marzine and Ed are dancing and making out on the couch. People move in and out of the apartment, a bellicose little place on McDougal street, gaudy in its decorations and spirit, a few blocks from the Village Theater. They had just returned from visiting Woody Guthrie in New Jersey. Ed was to be the torchbearer of the folkie political movement.

It was 1958 and the world looked bright, Kennedy was on the horizon, a mere two years away. There was a strong folkie movement, who tapped into the anti- Eisenhower/Nixon feelings that were rampant all over the liberal boroughs of the United States. There remained, the distant leftovers of the beats, a hangover that kept the beats, with Ginsburg , Burroughs and Kerouac a big deal in the village. But a new horizon was brewing, a new generation who took the apathy of the previous generation and turned it on its ear.

It wasn’t just the start of the American counterculture, with the eventual explosion of LSD and Cocaine, these were more innocent times, the Kingston trio was a big act, and it would take years for the entire youth counter cultural movement to take root in their generation. By that time, Marzine would find herself without a career. But that night, with Ed at her side and a grand sense of future endeavors, the two set to write the new American songbook, filled with protests that would pave the way for the hippies to come.

None of them realized this of course; this was just before Ed proposed to Marizine. An event that took place outside one of the many coffee shops by Washington Square, the whole folk scene was there. Even Woody Guthrie found his way out of the hospital for one day to hang an ear and have a beer with everyone else.

A few months later, the Red Scare movement would assassinate Ed. But for now, they were young, Dylan hadn’t yet blown folk out of the water, not without Marzine & Ed’s help he wouldn’t, there wasn’t any way he could have written a single note of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” without them.