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 20th 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 20th 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 Cafe, 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 Cafe 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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