Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 20 - 02:40 PM

I understood from his parents, Mairi and Clark, that it was a burst appendix. I saw where his ashes were buried on their wonderful finca in Puerto Rico. We purchased land next to theirs so we could be close to them.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Nov 20 - 02:36 PM

We were good friends of Mairi and Clark Foreman in Puerto Rico. We loved them so much. What we always heard of Gino is that he died of a ruptured appendix. I think it was in England - not sure. He went to the hospital, was turned away, and then died of the appendix. We would love to be in touch with Joan Baez to talk about our wonderful memories of Mairi and Clark and their family - especially Shelaigh and her children who stayed with us for a while. The son became an audiologist which I am.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Mike
Date: 25 Jul 20 - 11:20 AM

I didnt know him - but a friend of mine did. Davy (Graham) used to mention him as a visitor in 1962/3 to the flat he was sharing. You probably know he called a blues instrumental from his 1963 LP Guitar Man "Blues for Geno"
Incidentally, the song you were referring to earlier is the Champion Jack Dupree number "Junckers Blues" from 1940.
Incidentally, this blog is a great read - a lasting tribute to someone who was truly living in interesting times !

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: cnd
Date: 03 May 20 - 04:32 PM

Wow, is this "the" Peter Rowan? That would be incredible!

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Peter Rowan
Date: 03 May 20 - 02:19 PM

Gino kidnapped me on his motorcycle Drove all over Boston. Ended up in a loft past Huntington Ave. Played guitar. I learned Keep on Truckin Mama.   He blew my mind. He was the “ Ur” sensibility of those days. Mt Auburn St Club 47. Magic!

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,1959-1967
Date: 07 Jan 19 - 02:09 PM

Met Geno midway thru freshman year at Harvard 1959. An irresistibly exciting guy. I was a dedicated blues picker at the time and it was a thrill to watch Geno pick and sing. As preppie from an Ivy League family, my folk blues performing was short on authenticity. Geno looked and sounded as if he had broken rocks on the chain gang with Ledbellie,

Besides blues guitar, I was passionate about riding motorcycles. So was Geno. A flamboyant, daring guy on a bike, Geno was a challenge ride with because you didn’t know what me might do. People were drawn to Geno and he was almost always fun to be around. He loved to make a party out of almost anything, and did.

It’s truly sad that Geno’s inner demons kept him out of a recording studio and denied the world a record of what she sounded like. My best memories might be of him playing and singing in Albert and Kelsey’s room in Matthews, upstairs at The Golden Vanity. I never heard anyone sound like Geno before or since. Tapes I’ve heard only play back a fraction of his rich sound. Many, many great times with Geno!

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 27 Feb 17 - 07:43 PM

I knew Geno twice. Once at St John's College in Annapolis, circa 1958-59, and again in Munich in 1960. I don't mean I met him casually; we were buddies. I want to tell an account of these times, but I can't do it now. I'll be back ASAP.
Tony Miller
San Pedro, CA

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Mar 15 - 10:55 PM

Yes... I knew Gino from the Albert & Gino days. I probably still have tape he made at my house Charlottesville, va in early 60's... Visiting Paul Clayton Steve [e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Bob Freedman
Date: 28 Nov 14 - 10:59 PM

Marcia,
I apologize for being late but want to remember Gino with love and respect

Bob Freedman

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 15 Nov 14 - 08:11 AM

Remembering Geno Foreman May 29, 1941- Nov 15, 1966 with love always from Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 28 Oct 14 - 12:42 PM

Geno Foreman... how he died by Marcia Stehr
October 28, 2014 at 11:28am
Geno's death Nov 15, 1966
November 15, 2012 at 6:58am

Nov 15th is the anniversary of Geno's death in 1966. He died around midnight in the tiny windowless furnished room (bed-sitter) we had rented near the old West London Hospital in Hammersmith, London. Four days earlier, on Nov. 11th, I had taken him to the Hospital because he was experiencing serious abdominal pains. He was examined and sent home. During the next four days I saw five different doctors, trying to get some help for him as it was clear his health was declining. We did not have a telephone or car and of course I had our 16 month old baby girl to take care of as well. I even went back to the emergency room at the hospital to ask for help and was given a bottle of Peppermint Liquid for him. One doctor I saw told me that "big hospitals don't make mistakes". One hour before he died a doctor did come to see him and said that he needed to get to the hospital quickly. He said he was going to go outside to his car and radio for an ambulance. I asked him to wait with us until it came. He refused. The ambulance never came. His last words to me were,"Don't worry, it's nothing". It turned out he had ulcerative colitis which had perforated, causing peritonitis. He had been hospitalized twice before, in Rome in Dec 1965 and in Paris Aug 1966. He was never diagnosed correctly. He was 25 1/2 years old. At the Inquest the Intern who misdiagnosed him cried when he realized that his mistake had resulted in Geno's widow and baby girl would have to live the rest of their lives without him. Of course the story is much more complicated than I have related here. I have been working on a book about Geno's life. Peace, Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 12 Nov 13 - 09:49 AM

Nov 15th is the anniversary of Geno's death in 1966. He died around midnight in the tiny windowless furnished room (bed-sitter) we had rented near the old West London Hospital in Hammersmith, London. Four days earlier, on Nov. 11th, I had taken him to the Hospital because he was experiencing serious abdominal pains. He was examined and sent home. During the next four days I saw five different doctors, trying to get some help for him as it was clear his health was declining. We did not have a telephone or car and of course I had our 16 month old baby girl to take care of as well. I even went back to the emergency room at the hospital to ask for help and was given a bottle of Peppermint Liquid for him. One doctor I saw told me that "big hospitals don't make mistakes". One hour before he died a doctor did come to see him and said that he needed to get to the hospital quickly. He said he was going to go outside to his car and radio for an ambulance. I asked him to wait with us until it came. He refused. The ambulance never came. His last words to me were,"Don't worry, it's nothing". It turned out he had ulcerative colitis which had perforated, causing peritonitis. He had been hospitalized twice before, in Rome in Dec 1965 and in Paris Aug 1966. He was never diagnosed correctly. He was 25 1/2 years old. At the Inquest the Intern who misdiagnosed him cried when he realized that his mistake had resulted in Geno's widow and baby girl would have to live the rest of their lives without him. Of course the story is much more complicated than I have related here. I have been working on a book about Geno's life. Peace, Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 31 Jul 13 - 09:48 PM

I have received many new photos taken by the great Joe Alper at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in 1960.... some are with Eric von Schmidt and others with Rev. Gary Davis. Also 12 photos again by Joe Alper taken at the Caffe Lena in the fall of 1963 after Geno returned from Europe. Some of them can be seen at the following link:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman-Hugh-Quin-Foreman/42626487985

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 18 Mar 13 - 10:39 AM

Geno and Hamza el Din singing in Nubian and playing Ouds together. Hamza taught Geno to play the Oud and sing in Nubian. They speak in Italian and English on this tape. Recorded in Sandy Bull's mother's home on 61st St in New York City in 1963. Geno and Hamza met in Rome in 1962. Geno had a tape made of Hamza and took it back to NYC and Maynard Soloman at Vanguard Recordings resulting in a contract for Hamza.

https://soundcloud.com/hamza-el-din-1/hamza-geno-did-noura-remember

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 29 Jan 13 - 09:47 AM

Check out Geno's page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman-Hugh-Quin-Foreman/42626487985

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 14 Nov 12 - 08:07 AM

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman-Hugh-Quin-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts&fref=ts
Tomorrow, Nov 15th is the anniversary of Geno's death in 1966. He died around midnight in the tiny windowless furnished room (bed-sitter) we had rented near the old West London Hospital in Hammersmith. Four days earlier I had taken him to the Hospital when he experienced a serious abdominal pain. He was examined and sent home. During the next four days I saw five different doctors, trying to get s
ome help for him as it was clear his health was declining. We did not have a telephone or car. One hour before he died a doctor did come to see him and said that he needed to get to the hospital quickly. Ha said he was going to go outside to his car and radio for an ambulance. I asked him to wait with us until it came. He refused. The ambulance never came. His last words to me were,"Don't worry, it's nothing". It turned out he had ulcerative colitis which had perforated, causing peritonitis. He had be hospitalized twice before, in Rome in Dec., 1965 and in Paris Aug 1966. He was never diagnosed correctly. He was 25 1/2 years old.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 27 Aug 12 - 07:54 AM

My BOB DYLAN collection is for sale!

Bob Dylan Collection

Photos of Bob Dylan:
Café Wha? playing harmonica 1961 - my photo
Gerde's playing harmonica 1961 - my photo
My wedding to Mark Spoelstra 1962 with Suze Rotolo
My wedding to Spoelstra 1962 alone

Signatures:
Guest list from wedding to Spoelstra 1962
- " Me Bob Dylan"
- "me too, Suze Rotolo"
- "Jack Elliott"
- "Patty Keith"
- "Eve McKenzie"
- "Warren McKenzie"
- "Howard Schoenfeld"
- "Ann Lye"
- "Len Lye" and more..
Copy of Check to Geno Foreman from Ashes and Sand
   for $1,000. Dated 2/21/66 "Original retainer fee for research of POP material in Europe".

"Bob Dylan 1966 Tour Itinerary" 3 pages- Hotel Accommodations- List of personnel

Three 12" Vinyl "Audiodiscs" from "Another Side of Bob Dylan"
about 10 tracks.

Vinyl Albums:
"The Times They Are A-Changn'" "For Demonstration Use Only Not For Sale"
"The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"
"Another Side of Bob Dylan"
"John Wesley Harding"
"Infidels" 2 copies one in sealed plastic
"Street Legal"
"Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits"
"Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. 2"

If you are interested or know someone who might be email me:
[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 25 May 12 - 07:43 PM

"ODE TO ERIC" for Eric Dolphy   a poem by Geno Foreman


ODE TO ERIC


The innocent abroad, the unattached wanderer, lost in finding himself alone in his musing and skyrocket sonic creations of love.

How Everest-like the humblest of his conceptions would seem if comprehended searchingly by the lost and lonely homeland student of art and the lives of greats.

How timely the meditative and analytical care
that was taken in the dialectical fantasies and far-reaching intellectual ponderings of his beloved scales.

Where/when ever his pathfinding panegyrics oded
overwhelmingly brave in their fathomable fearlessness in the face of barely tolerable gumchewing drunks.

For the listeners who could hear him, he told of the trials of yesteryear in the total-tomorrow language
of a lonely bird bound outward in the still night.

The solemn sorrowful sufferingly sound belief
of those hearers whence came his sane strong sound
of great and powerful love for them and their sleeping song.

Hugh Quin Foreman, 1965
For Eric Dolphy

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 12 May 12 - 09:37 AM

Get ready to celebrate Geno's birthday May 29!

See new photos on his page!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman-Hugh-Quin-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 20 Apr 12 - 05:28 PM

More on the film:

http://www.wbur.org/2012/04/17/club-47-film


http://www.loveofthemusic.com/

Wish I could see it!!

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 20 Apr 12 - 05:21 PM

See Geno's Page for information about the movie "For The Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Revival"


https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

...................................................................

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts#!/Club47Film

Just released in Cambridge, MA.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 15 Apr 12 - 10:55 AM

Hi Stephen,
Thanks for the wonderful memories! I will email you.
Peace and love, Marcia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epoMnWLeE68

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Stephen Wilson
Date: 15 Apr 12 - 10:45 AM

Apologize for unintentional, incoherent voice/iphone message preceeding:   Met Geno a variety of times in New York and elsewhere. In those days he was most often found with Albert Mayher (sic) and it was under the attractive influence of Paul Clayton that they came to Charlottesville Va, probably in 1962-63, staying at my house for about a week. Somewhere I do believe I still have a reel-to-reel of Geno playing accoustic guitar, possibly "Twelve Gates to the City" and bongo-ing on the guitar. (Not sure cuz I no longer have r-t-r to investigate.) He was much under the stylistic influence of Gary Davis at that instant. More records, smoke, comedy at 190? Waverly Place, Van Ronk and Barry Kornfeld's address. I expect BK has recollections and possibly tape. My last sighting of GF was as I sailed off to Europe in the middle of winter with no money, warm clothes, or friends, but a bountiful amount of weed which G had acquired for me. Went months around Spain, to Granada & Ibiza and the gypsy caves, but trip almost finished me off. Scurvy. A year or two later, heard GF had expired in London. Very sad. Charming and I believe Che Guevara channeled Geno stylistically.   [e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Steve wilson
Date: 15 Apr 12 - 12:42 AM

I was a friend.of Dylan and Paul Clayton and geno a d (Albert) came to visit my place in Charlottesville, va. I may have a old reel tape of him playing and drumming on guitar. We did a lot of dope and listened to the the bahama singers at van ronk and cornfields place on wavily. [e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 12 Apr 12 - 01:40 PM

New photos on Geno Foreman's page!!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 25 Feb 12 - 10:21 AM

Suze Rotolo wrote about Geno Foreman in her book "A Freewheelin' Time"·

Suze Rotolo died on Feb. 24, 2011. She wrote beautifully about Geno in her book.

... 1. A Freewheelin' Time: a Memoir of Greenwich Village in the sixties - Page 270

Suze Rotolo - 2008 - 371 pages - Preview

Geno Foreman came from a distinguished family. Though he was the son of Clark Foreman, the director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the group that had given Bob the Tom Paine Award, Geno didn't seem to be from any family. It was as if he just flowed loose in the world with an extraterrestrial energy. He was about six feet tall, with very dark, thick hair and a full beard, and he was missing some front teeth. His dark fiery eyes darted about as fast as his words when he spoke.

........

I don't remember when I saw Geno again-later that day or weeks afterward- but he had no sense of gaffe or an offense because Geno wouldn't intentionally hurt a fly. Geno. Man. Geno was beautiful, brilliant and irrepressible. He was the mad prince in the kingdom of the mad ones. He married and fathered a child and died in a freak accident in England a few years later.

"Codicil"

..."Sadness so overwhelming it takes the breath away. Numbness affects the ability to move the body, and brain fog hampers vision. The slightest thing can bring on a bout of crying. Constricted throat, burning insides, dull aches. Nothing matters but what went wrong or what can go wrong now that something is beginning to feel wrong. There is a wicked, hideous, backbiting enemy in cahoots with instinct to beat the daylights out of white-hot sentiment. No contest. Everything is obliterated."

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 21 Feb 12 - 08:15 AM

In 1961 Geno bought his 1951 Citroen 15-six and drove all over Europe.
He loved that car; it gave him a new freedom and he lived in it for many months. When he returned to NYC in the fall of 1963 he reluctantly left the car on the street in Rome. In July 1965 (almost two years later) we pulled up to that same car still parked on the street and just then some boys had opened the door and were beginning to go through Geno's possessions inside. I jumped out of our home, the 1951 Citroen Type H step van (eight months pregnant) and chased them away. Everything was still there. Geno was delighted.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 19 Feb 12 - 09:05 AM

I am uploading new photos of Geno on his page:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Peace and love,

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 01 Feb 12 - 05:25 PM

See this page for Geno Foreman:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 30 Aug 11 - 06:21 PM

Hi Richard, I have emailed you about your questions, Peace, Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,R. Ryan
Date: 29 Aug 11 - 01:15 PM

I was wanting to get access to any records on Geno Foreman, but they require some proof of death (either an obituary or death certificate). Does anyone know where I might find such records? I haven't been able to find anything online.

[e-mail]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 08 Jul 11 - 04:32 PM

AND A VOICE TO SING WITH -- A MEMOIR


PART TWO: "RIDER, PLEASE PASS BY"

1. "FILL THEE UP MY LOVING CUP"

After high school we moved to Boston. My father had a new job at M.I.T. and I had been rejected at every school except Boston University's School of Drama.

Traveling across country with my mother and sisters, we heard the commercial songs of the budding folk music boom for the first time, the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley" and "Scotch and Soda." Before I turned into a snob and learned to look down upon all commercial folk music as bastardized and unholy, I loved the Kingston Trio. When I became one of the leading practitioners of "pure folk," I still loved them, but kept their albums stuffed at the back of the rack.

Shortly after we'd arrived at our new house in Belmont, Massachusetts, not far from Boston and Harvard Square, my father took us to see a new phenomenon, the "coffee houses," where you could order a cup of coffee or tea, no alcohol, and sit around in a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. The Harvard students brought in their books to study, and people played guitars and banjos and sang.

We went into a tiny, smoky, jam-packed coffee house called Tulla's Coffee Grinder. My father saw young minds interlocked in Socratic dialogues, expanding their horizons of knowledge and understanding, or simply reading books and playing chess. I saw the guy under the tiny orange lamp, leaning over his classical guitar, his hair a soft yellow in the diffused light, playing "Plaisir d'Amour." I was entranced. I wanted a classical guitar, I wanted to learn that beautiful, sweet, haunting melody, and I wanted to move into Harvard Square and fall in love with every guitar player and singer I met, and never think about going to college or studying or taking exams or being normal.

My first day at Boston University I made friends with Debbie and Margie, who looked like the only other nonconformists in the freshman class. They, along with myself, refused to wear beanies to the freshman class picnic, a horrible affair held in a smelly old lodge in the country in a rainstorm. The three of us fell in love that very day with a sort of psychotic, James Dean- -looking youth (also beanieless), who fell in love with all of us, one at a time, starting with me because I was the most aggressive and had cornered him under a tree in the rain and hurled a series of homemade Zen puzzles at him. We three maidens all loved folk music, and as he switched from flower to flower, we became closer, and when he finally quit school and went home to his wife, we soothed and mended our broken hearts with song.

Although I officially lived at home, I would drive my ninety-nine dollar blue-green Studebaker to school, stay for a class or two, and then go to Margie's. The three of us spent hours in her tiny apartment on Plympton Street in Harvard Square. Margie baked bread (after letting the dough rise twice on the radiator); Debbie taught me new songs and how to really play the guitar. And we practiced duets, "Fair and Tender Maidens" appropriately being our finest offering. She also taught me "All My Trials," a song which would be one of my "most requested" over the years to come. Debbie and Margie, to my constant envy and frustration, had waist-length hair. I had cut mine short just before leaving California, and now waited impatiently for it to grow out into tresses so that I could be like them, and like all the fair and tender maidens in all of the long and tragic ballads. The. melodic, repetitive songs of love forsaken spoke to my young and fragile heart, and I would sometimes get so carried away with a song that I wept while trying to learn it.

Cold blows the wind o'er my true love
And gently drops the rain
I've never had but one true love
And in Greenwood he lies slain.

And poor young Geordie ...

Geordie will be hanged in a golden chain
Tis not the chain of many
He stole sixteen of the king's wild deer
And sold them in Boheny.

And Geordie's lover . . .

Two pretty babies have I born
A third lies in my body
I'd gladly give you them, every one
If you'll spare the life of Geordie.

And our theme song, "Fair and Tender Maidens" ...

Come all ye fair and tender maidens
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a star of a summer's morning
First they appear, and then they're gone.

I met blues singers, the most famous in the area being Eric Von Schmidt. He looked like a grizzly bear with granny glasses, and his best-known song was about a grizzly bear. At Margie's, I listened to all of her Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) records. I loved Eric's white blues and Ledbetter's black, but I could not sing the blues. A blues song had to be belted low, mean, chesty and soulful. I sang high and pure (and very white), and it was for what Bob Shelton later referred to as an "achingly pure soprano" that I was becoming known. Debbie and I began going out to coffee houses and singing our duets. We scanned the smoky room for our respective princes, inevitably discovered the same adorable boy at the same time, sang our hearts out, or got the giggles. Or both. Jesus, I was only seventeen! I bought a Goya classical guitar with gut strings. I learned "Plaisir d'Amour." And I wanted to fall in love.

I did not understand then that in my tender narcissism I was reaching out for what someone recently described to me as a "tattered remnant of my Own self." An outlaw, a savage, someone who understood what it was to be "different" and could enter my secret garden and leave the blemished and terrifying world of adults and reality outside.

Many years later I wrote a song made up of titles and characters from the folk songs I had learned in Harvard Square.

Ah, the time spent in the foggy dew
With the raven and the dove
Barefoot she walked the winter streets
In search of her own true love.

For she was Mary Hamilton
Lover of John Riley
And a maid of constant sorrow
And the mother of the doomed Geordie.

One day by the banks of the river
Midst tears and gossamer
Sweet Michael rowed his boat ashore
And came to rescue her.

Sweet Michael was perfection. Aside from the compulsory mop of tousled hair, he was handsome, bright, intense, sexy, and talented, but also troubled and preoccupied, with a hint of a wounded look in his lovely blue eyes. It seems to me that I knew all that in the first glance when he rowed over to where I was sitting wistfully plunking my new Goya and singing on the banks of the Charles. We exchanged looks and shy hellos, and then the song was over and he was gone. I heard later that he was expelled from the Harvard rowing team for loafing.

I was smitten. I began haunting the streets late at night, peering into the busy hangouts and bookstores, and, of course, my already familiar coffee houses. In a matter of days I spotted him in Hayes Bickford's cafe, a fluorescent-lit cafeteria which sold awful food and attracted droves of students because it was cheap and open twenty-four hours a day. I stood barefoot on the pavement and stared at him through the big dirty windowpane. He stared back and neither of us made a move. I walked around the block with heart and mind in a dither, and when I came back his chair was empty, but his friend was still there. I charged into the busy room which smelled of cigarette butts and Franco-American spaghetti, sat myself down in the empty chair and pumped his friend for information.

Michael studied Greek. Perfect. He was from the West Indies. Dazzling. He spoke French, did not have a girlfriend, and, yes, had noticed me, in my bohemian knitted and tasseled garb and bare feet, gaping at him from the sidewalk. What a fortuitous beginning. Our meeting was arranged. We fell in love and became inseparable.

I told my mother I needed some birth control. "Do you love him?" she asked, and then sent me off to a doctor, who reluctantly fit me for a diaphragm. Birth control was illegal in Massachusetts in 1958.

Margie loaned us her apartment and at long last, after years of telling myself I would go to hell if I did "it" (and Michael agonizing because he was sure I had already done "it" plenty of times and was lying to him), I finally knew that my body was making more sense than my Spanish demons. "it" was marvelous, and for quite some time after, Michael and I spent most of our energy figuring out' where we could go to do "it" next.

And so, in the winter of 1958 my eighteenth birthday found me deeply in love, as in love as I would ever be in my life. I had found my fellow savage, rebel, soul mate, a nineteen-year-old West Indian would-be poet, actor, writer, sailor, philosopher, wonderboy. Michael went to classes occasionally, and I dropped out of school completely. We were together every possible moment. When I first saw snowflakes on Michael's hair, they looked so beautiful that I wanted to be one of them and melt down through to the roots and then under his skin and just live there, because that was where I belonged.

In the middle of all of this, I was offered a job singing at Club Mt. Auburn 47, a jazz club in the middle of the square whose owner wanted to convert it, on Tuesdays and Fridays, into a folk club to accommodate the changing times. I was to be paid ten dollars.

For my first performance I was accompanied by my mother and father, Mimi, and two friends. Another friend of the family showed up, and there were the proprietress and her partner. That made eight. Aside from that, there was no one. I was clammy and nauseated and my mouth was dry as dust. With my heart lodged down in my winter boots, I began the first set. !t was a ridiculous situation, friends and family all trying to look like an audience, trying not to peer hopefully over at the door every time they heard footsteps. In the middle of "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," Michael breezed in, his tan duffel coat flapping open and snow in his hair, and my throat swallowed all by itself right in the middle of a note, and I began to blush, a long and merciless blush from my toes to my scalp, and didn't look up from the floor until both the blush and the song were finished. A few stragglers wandered in for the second set. When I returned the following Tuesday, word had gotten around and we had a half-filled house. I took a job at another coffee shop, the Ballad Room, one night a week. A schoolmate from B.O. passed me on the street one day, and asked if I had picked up my report card. B.O. seemed a thousand years in the past but I drove across the river out of curiosity and asked for my grades. I didn't know there were so many ways to flunk: X's, F's, zeros and incompletes. That was the official end of my college career. I never gave a second thought to what I would "do with my life."

I would finish at Club 47 around midnight and run, sometimes barefoot in the snow, over to Adams House, where Michael officially lived with three other freshmen. Carrying a cup of coffee (through .the gates forbidden to "girls" in the daytime, not to mention the middle of the night), I'd burst into his apartment, past his flustered roommates, and find him slouched languorously on a floor cushion in his tiny room, reading Greek history, or Blake, or Camus in French. He'd accept the coffee, and we would nestle down together and talk about his dream of building a boat and sailing "away" to an island. It didn't matter which island, as long as the climate was warm.

We understood each other. What I did not understand was what I would do with myself on an island, and if I could be happy singing to parrots and monkeys, and perhaps an occasional non-English-speaking islander, and eating coconuts and bananas and lighting fires without matches. I was also terrified of boats, because sailing naturally meant you threw up in bad weather, so I was secretly hoping that Michael would find a way to remain true to himself and never have to leave the United States (which he said he hated). But I thought it was a noble idea that if you truly loved someone, you didn't need anything else in the world except that person. We would crawl into his tiny bed and have our dreams, both private and shared, and have each other, like two small woodland animals hidden in a dry stump, safe in the night from dangers both real and imagined.

Sometimes when he slept I'd sneak over to the window and watch the snowflakes go past in a ghostly cavalcade to cover the streets in silent blankets of white for the morning. I'd listen for the chiming of the Harvard bells in their tower and sit with a blanket wrapped around me, smiling like a bohemian Mona Lisa, at one with the snowflakes, with the tiny room, with Michael and myself.

And then, of course, there was morning, and stark realities edged in, jagged and imperfect against the new-fallen snow. My car wouldn't start. My parents thought I was at Margie's, and I worried they might have called. Adams House security had seen me racing up the stairs in the middle of the night, and Michael would no doubt have to see some awful disciplinary committee about rule-breaking, and if he was kicked out of school, we might be in serious jeopardy of having to realize his dream of sailing away, when in my heart all I wanted to do was stay in my beloved Harvard Square with him as a rebel student and me as a troubadour.

While I was generally subservient to Michael, I was a tyrant on stage. If some innocent student wandered into the coffee house thinking it was like all the others, namely a place to relax and read, he was mistaken. I'd stop in the middle of a song and tell him that if he wanted to study he could use the library. My growing collection of utterly pure, nearly sacrosanct folk songs was not something to be paid only partial attention to, and neither, apparently, was I.

As my repertoire expanded, my rigidity stayed the same. Each new song was as desperately serious as the last. One evening two young men got the giggles while I was singing, and I realized, to my embarrassment, that it was because the songs had been unrelenting in their plots of death, misery, and heartbreak: "Don't sing love songs/You'll wake my mother/She's sleeping here right by my side/ And in her right hand a silver dagger/She says that I can't be your bride." "Ail of my days I have seen trouble/And now I know it's common run/I'll hang my head and weep in sorrow/Just to think on what you done." "I leaned my back against all oak/Thinking it was a mighty tree/But first it bent and then it broke/So did my love prove false to me." "Oh mother, oh mother, go dig my grave/Make it both long and narrow/Sweet William died of love for me/And I will die of sorrow." I groped around in my mind for one single cheery song with a happy ending, and finished the set with "John Riley," because John Riley lives through a war to come back and claim his own true love after seven years, and she is actually alive to be claimed. But it sounded exactly like all the rest, and the giggling persisted. After that night, I made it a point to add some "humorous" numbers to the repertoire, my first concession to commerciality.

I began to frequent another club called The Golden Vanity. One night we had a double-bill show featuring Joan Baez in concert and a screening of Marlon Brando's The Wild One. My Harvard motorcycle friends had dreamed up the idea. Just as I was getting up to sing, there was a great roar out on the street, and the Hell's Angels pulled up. They were loud, tough, hairy, and obviously not coming to hear me. I was scared as hell, because I wanted to be a big hit and was sure the Angels would think me ridiculous in my madras curtain dress and bare feet, singing quaint unrequited love songs. But they decided I was okay, and even listened and clapped, and then I let them know, modestly, that I rode bikes, too, small ones, of course, but that I had learned on the largest Harley, which was true, and all in all the evening was a grand success.

Trouble nudged its way into Michael's and my dream existence by way of his jealousy of my popularity, his general incapacity to face the "real world," and soon after that, the awakening of new and more fierce demons in me, making my behavior more neurotic than it had been since my early teens. I was tom between my total infatuation with Michael and the fun of being a "well-known person." Michael halfway convinced me that if I pursued a career in music, I would inevitably become lost in the filthy world of show business, and so lost to him. I had a support system of boys who were going about their business and waiting for Michael to drop dead, and when he and I fought I would flirt wildly with all of them and sleep with none of them. And Margie would look wistfully at us as she gave me the key to her apartment and left for the evening to waitress. Her hair was sweet and fell like cornsilk to her waist, and she was crazy and tilted her head and smiled like a hexed cat. Margie was waiting for me to drop dead.

Michael and I shared one friend whom we both loved equally. He was one of those uncategorizable souls, rare and therefore treasured, a celestial junkie madman named Geno Foreman. He was eighteen, like us, but seemed to have lived several lifetimes. He was a hustler and a schemer and a dreamer, the original fuck-up, but such a stylish one that he was impossible not to admire. No school had been able to contain him. He had no normal sense of fear, and would drive a motorcycle the wrong direction down a one-way street in the snow. He was six feet tall and beautiful, with pale white skin; fierce, mad black eyes under an artistic sweep of eyebrows; and a mane of black hair. He played the guitar and piano, both with natural brilliance. Geno ate yogurt, wheat germ and vitamin C and was hooked on heroin. None of us ever understood why Geno was the way he was. His parents, Clark and Mairi, were the first couple I'd ever met who appeared to love one another deeply, run their lives in an intelligent way, and relate totally to the younger generation. They had two normal daughters and Geno. The first time Michael and I went to New York we stayed at the Foreman apartment on Ninety-seventh Street and Riverside Drive. We slept together in Geno's tiny cavern of a room, and when I emerged, guilt-stricken in the morning, Mairi put her arm around me and said, "Oh, darling, we don't consider you and Michael sharing Geno's room wrong! As long as you love each other, and Clark and I feel that you do!" And in the evenings when Clark came home from work, the two of them would lie side by side on the thin divan talking to us and watching the sun set over the Hudson River.

Geno died in England at age twenty-six. He was standing up waiting for the ambulance when his appendix burst. His last words were "Don't worry ..."

Peter, a friend of my family, offered to manage me and set up a recording date in the cellar of another friend's house. I went there with Bill Wood and Ted Alevizos to make an album. Bill was an engineering major at Harvard who hosted a folk show On the campus radio station. I harbored a wild crush on him, first because he was cute, second because the family thought he'd be a good date for my sister Pauline, and third because of how he played the guitar between the verses on "John Henry." Ted Alevizos sang Greek songs and had a gorgeous timbre to his voice, had had vocal training and was a conservative. Gossip had it that Ted had tried this new drug called LSD and gone completely out of his mind and had taken weeks to realize that he was back on planet earth. We sang some solos, some duets, and, for the finale, our own unique and special version of "When I'm Dead and Buried, Don't You Weep After Me." Peter designed the record cover in red and black with a big circle and a big square, and a shot of the three of us superimposed over them both. It was called Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square. I had bare feet, bangs, and at long last, tresses. Many years later a producer took it upon himself to repackage it with a new cover and call it The Best of Joan Baez. He also magically turned monaural into stereo, advertised it as by "America's Most Exciting Folk Singer," and released it just when my yearly-record was due. We had to go to court to stop its continuing production and distribution.

Under Peter's guidance and inspiration I decided, in spite of Michael, to give my first concert. It would be with Bill and Ted, and it would be held at Club 47. I don't remember what we charged; I do remember the crisis over the poster design when I 'couldn't make up my mind whether to change my name. The choices were Rachel Sandperl-Rachel sounded biblical and mysterious, and Sandperl was the last name of my political and spiritual mentor, Ira. Or it could be Mariah-after the song that the Kingston Trio had made popular, "They Call the Wind Mariah." At the last minute, I opted to keep my real name, as people might think I had changed it because it was Mexican.

It was a funny sensation seeing our poster around the Square. I liked it; Michael hated it. Somehow I was managing to hold on to both Michael and my mini-career, though not without the help of a psychiatrist because the contradictions were literally driving me crazy. Michael was my God, and I didn't question him because I didn't want to lose him. But when I was showered with compliments and praise, he became wretched, blaming me for the disintegration of our relationship. In between fights, we made love at Margie's, and I forgot all about singing until we went back out on the street and heard someone say, "Look, it's her!" and the cycle would repeat itself. I drank in compliments like a thirsty sapling after a drought to brace myself for the next siege of self-hatred brought on by the doubts of my own true love.

Spring came, and feeling guilty for having flunked out of school, I found a "real" job at the Boston Vespa Company, teaching people how to drive the scooter and then taking them to get their license. Summer came, and Michael went home to Trinidad to see his parents. I was still living at home and earned enough money to buy my father a brand-new four-speed Vespa and then quit. I went on singing, learning songs, riding motorcycles with the elite Harvard bikers, seeing Debbie and Margie and my psychiatrist, and pining over Michael and flirting with all the lovely boys who were still waiting for Michael to drop dead.

Big management approached me in the form of Albert Grossman, a sly, furtive, nervous, soft-spoken, funny, generous, and bizarre man with a round form, round face, round eyes, and round glasses. Above his round eyes arched black eyebrows, like smudges of charcoal, rose in an expression of surprise. He terrified me by saying things like, "You can have anything you want. You can have anybody you want. Who do you want? I'll get him for you." I wanted Marlon Brando, but wanted more for Albert to quit talking that way.

My father was impressed by the kind of money Albert was talking, but I didn't trust him. Neither did my mother. He wanted me to sing in his nightclub in Chicago, and offered me two hundred dollars a week, a lot of money. I said no. He told my mother I was very young and naturally frightened of leaving home for the first time. I said yes. He was right, of course: I was frightened of flying alone, of staying alone, of a club where people drank and might not listen, of everything, and that's why I went. The money sounded terrific, but I couldn't have cared less.

Albert's club was one of the finest in the country, The Gate of Hom, and featured Bob Gibson, at that time a very popular singer who played twelve-string guitar and banjo. I got a crush on Bob, of course, and was terrified of him because he was at home in a den of sin called a nightclub, was marvelously sarcastic and funny, drank too much, sang both serious and silly songs, and cracked jokes in between them: he actually "entertained" people. I lived in the Y.W.C.A.; it was July and I spent my days on the beach playing with black slum kids, my evenings at the club, and my nights writing frantic letters to Michael about how nothing could ever come between us, and reading letters from him about how he doubted me every minute of the day. I began to wonder why I was spending so much energy staying out of bed with attractive musicians. The time left over was spent sitting in the metal stairwell of the Y where the acoustics were positively liquid, practicing the songs I'd learned from Bob.

One night the Queen of Folk, Odetta, came to the club. I was a nervous wreck waiting to see her and was at the bar when I realized that she had arrived. I watched her for a minute from across the room. She was big as a mountain and black as night. Her skin looked like velvet. She wore massive earrings that dangled and swung and flashed, and her dress looked like a flowing embroidered tent. She had a split between her front teeth which showed all the time because her face, between expressions of worry, surprise, concern, and mock anger, would shift back into a smile big enough to match the rest of her. Her chin jutted out round and full of dimples when she laughed, and I thought she was the most dignified person I'd ever seen. To overcome the panic welling up in my chest, I went up to her and flat out did an imitation of her singing, "Another Man Done Gone." She looked surprised and then pleased, and then she enveloped me in her great velvet arms. I felt about six years old, and my heart didn't get back to normal for a week.

I spent two weeks at The Gate of Horn baffled, flattered and terrified by what appeared to be dazzling success just within reach. Within me the demons engaged in a riotous dance, coaxing me with the soft light, the maleness around me, the overt sexuality that erupted as inhibitions were anesthetized by alcohol. I knew only that at age eighteen, I was not cut out for the cocktail crowd. I needed my academic, rebellious coffee-drinking admirers who listened single-mindedly to their madonna, and dared not touch her.

Bob Gibson invited me to appear as his guest at the first Newport Folk Festival. I have only patches of memories of that historic occasion. It was August. I went to Newport with Odetta and her bass player. It rained every day. Bob Gibson had a very rich girlfriend named Penny, who was nice to me. I looked like the Original Bohe mian, wearing knit tops from Latin America or India, nondescript skirts or blue jeans, dangling earrings like my heroine, Odella, and sandals with thongs that laced up to just below the knee. There were tents full of folksingers, banjo pickers, fiddle players, and gospel groups, and streets full of hitchhikers. The kids who flocked to the festival were trim and had short hair: the sixties had not begun yet. Pete Seeger was there, my second living idol. (Martin Luther King, Jr., was the first.) There were black blues singers with broken-down guitars, and white kids trying to sound like them. There were big dinners where fiddle bands played long into the night. People put dishes of food into my lap and then asked me to sing. I was like a tiny star in the middle of an as yet unnamed firmament.

On the second night there were thirteen thousand people sitting out in the Rhode Island mist. After other performers (I don't remember who), Bob went on to delight the audience with his ballads and jokes while I stood in gladiator sandals down in the mud, stage left, gripping the handrail that led upstairs to the stage. I was wearing a bright orange knit and crocheted rebozo made in Mexico. It was lined in silk and was the fanciest bit of clothing I'd ever worn onstage. My other sweaty hand was clutching a guitar.

Finally, I heard Bob Gibson announce a guest and say a few words about me. I have no idea what they were, but I knew that in a minute I would be singing before what seemed to me to be the biggest crowd ever assembled in the history of the world. In that moment there was only the speeding of my heart; all movement was a silent film, and all sound was surface noise. There were nods of encouragement and thumbs up all around. It is my style when I am let out of the chute to walk swiftly and steadily, and I did so up the soggy stairs to my doom or glory. Bob was giving me a bright and cheery smile, and his cocky look which meant that life was only one big joke anyway, so not to worry. We sang, "Virgin Mary Had One Son." He played the twelve-string, and with eighteen strings and two voices we sounded pretty impressive. I had a solo part next, and my voice came out just fine. We made it to the end and there was tumultuous applause. So we sang our "other" song, an upbeat number (thanks to Bob) called "Jordan River." The two songs were religious, and I looked and sounded like purity itself in long tresses, no makeup, and Bible sandals. No wonder the press labeled me "the Madonna" and "the Virgin Mary" the next day.

An exorbitant amount of fuss was made over me when we descended from the stage. Into one tent and out of another. Newspapers, student press, foreign correspondents, and, of course, Time magazine. I gave Time a long-winded explanation of the pronunciation of my name which came out wrong, was printed wrong in Time magazine, and has been pronounced wrong ever since. It's not "Buy-ezz"; it's more like "Bize," but never mind. The French pronounce it "Bayz," which (phonetically speaking) is the present tense of the verb baiser, which in slang means "to fornicate."

Bob asked me if I'd like to make an easy hundred dollars the next day singing at a party for wealthy Newport types. He was to be paid five hundred, and if I helped him out, he'd give me one fifth. Making a hundred dollars in twenty minutes impressed me more than. anything else that year at Newport, aside from realizing in the back of my mind and the center of my heart that in the book of my destiny the first page had been turned, and that this book could no longer be exchanged for any other.

Back home in Harvard Square, I went to sing my usual Tuesday night stint at Club 47, and there was a line of people going right down the block and around two corners. Albert Grossman was back and wanted to talk about making records.

I had already been in touch with one half of Vanguard Records, twenty-nine-year-old Maynard Solomon, a music scholar who, with his brother Seymour, operated a first-rate classical music recording company. They were low-key and interested in making a quality recording of me.

Al Grossman wanted me to go to New York with him and meet John Hammond, president of Columbia Records. John was a well-known and gifted talent scout who had the power to push what he liked and push it well. In my mind, the difference between the two companies was that one was commercial and had mostly to do with money, and the other was not so commercial and had mostly to do with music. But I went to New York, convinced that I should do so in order to be "fair to myself."

I will never forget my first impression of Columbia. All I could see was gold. The walls were decorated with gold records and everything seemed to shine and glitter. And the air-conditioning was icy. I was led directly into John Hammond's office, no waiting. He was very nice, but the first thing he said was, "D'you want to meet Mitch?" I didn't know who Mitch was, but I said "Sure!," and he poked some buttons on a box on his desk and talked to his secretary, who quickly ushered in a man whose face was only vaguely familiar. He had a coiffured mustache and a goatee and I thought maybe he was Colonel Sanders. But I shook his hand and looked duly impressed. He was, of course, Mitch Miller, known in all the millions of living rooms in the country which had a television set. We still didn't have one, so all I knew about "Mitch" were some unkind jokes made by my music purist friends to whom his name was anathema, as he epitomized the kind of music and presentation against which we were, knowingly or otherwise, in rebellion. That episode over, a discussion commenced about recording contracts. At one point, a contract was slipped across John Hammond's big desk. They would have had me sign right then and there what I believe was an eight-year contract. I was developing a head cold, partly from the air-conditioning and partly from stress. I told Al that I wanted to go across town and talk to Maynard at Vanguard. Albert hated Maynard, and vice versa. My nose was stuffing up and I had chills. Grudgingly, he packed us into a cab to "go see Maynard, because I told him I would."

When we walked into Vanguard, the first thing I noticed was that there were no gold records on the wall. Maynard came out from behind his desk briskly and shook hands with us. Then he went back around and sat down again. He had pale blue intellectual eyes, one of which drifted off toward the periphery every so often and seemed to snap back on command. He wore tennis shoes and a brown sweater his wife had knit him, and he was going not grey, but white, and was so intense that he seemed a little goofy. I liked him. Perhaps it was my being a primitive classicist-I couldn't tell a sonata from a concerto from a suite, but I could hum ninety percent of the music played twenty-four hours a day on the classical music station. I knew that Maynard had made a career of recording the classics, and I was fascinated and felt at home. We talked.

After we left I told Albert, who wanted me to tie the knot with Columbia that afternoon, that I needed two days before making this very big decision. If I had not been tempted by the gloss and flattery and shining gold of the "major company," I would not have been so afraid. And as for Albert, he was right in his own way. Before the end of the sixties he would be managing Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, to name just a few. If I wanted to go "big-time," Albert was the best and so was Columbia. Over the next forty-eight hours I had to figure out if the big time was something I could stomach.

The next night was a Friday, and I went to sing in Greenwich Village. Both Maynard and John Hammond came to see me. I talked with my parents on the phone and with my friends in New York. In the end, of course, I discussed it with myself and resolved to go with Vanguard. Albert faded out of my life for the time being except as a show business shadow who persisted, whenever he saw me, in reminding me that no matter how well I was doing, I could do a lot better if I teamed up with him.

The leaves turned, Michael came back from Trinidad, and I went to work as a housemother at Perkins Institute for the Blind, and continued at Club 47 Tuesdays and Fridays. My pay had been upped to twenty-five dollars a night. I met Manny Greenhill, a local Boston impresario who presented performers when they came to the area and also was personal manager to some famous blues acts. Manny worked out of a dingy old office overlooking Boston's South Station. He prided himself in his egalitarian behavior, and like a certain brand of good old Marxists who consider themselves working-class no matter how much money they make, always looked as if he had just stepped off a bread line, in his golf cap of nondescript color and wrinkled ancient raincoat. He was proud of his boxer's nose which had no septum and made him look like George C. Scott. He loved to tell stories about his old blues singers and the difficulties that arose because they couldn't read or write. Half of Manny's time was spent banging on doors of orphanages in the deep South hunting down birth certificates for blind guitar players so they could meet the rising demand for performances in Europe, for which they needed something called a passport.

Manny, too, wanted me to be heard by the largest number of people, but he also understood that I was a political being, and though I did not share his leftist ideology (which was the cause of many minor battles between us), he accepted my nonviolence and shared with me the understanding that speaking up for peace and justice involved risks which would inevitably interfere with commercial success.

We decided not to sign a formal written contract, but for a certain percentage Manny would work with me for a year. If at the end of the year the arrangement was mutually satisfactory, we would shake hands and continue it for another year. This agreement continued for eight years before we ever had a written contract.

To start, Manny got me jobs opening the second half of concerts with established artists. The first was in the Summer Series of 1959 at the University of Massachusetts, with John Jacob Niles, the well-known traditionalist and old crank, a singer- songwriter who sang in a high falsetto and played the dulcimer. As we had gone with my family in Manny's old rattletrap and as it had run out of gas, we were late to the performance and sat down in the back of the brightly lit auditorium. Someone else came in late and chose to sit up front. Mr. Niles stopped in the middle of a note, waited in deathly silence until they were seated, and then announced that "Attention follows motion, not sound." I was mortified and intimidated, but after intermission, when I sang my two songs, I was given an enthusiastic encore, which didn't do much to improve Mr. Niles's mood.

Manny also arranged for my first concert with Pete Seeger. I was late as always, and Pete was already finishing his first set when I got there. It was a tiny hall; too tiny, I thought, but Pete was wailing away on the banjo and everything looked to be in order. He came off the stage and greeted me. I went onstage and was utterly baffled: there were only a couple hundred students sitting around on the floor. I bowed and turned around to see if anyone was seated in the rear of the stage and discovered that I had been facing the wrong direction. Apparently Pete had sung his last song of the set to the overflow crowd seated up on the stage. I was thrown off balance, and as my heart began to slam in my poncho-covered chest, I launched into my first song. In the middle of the first sustained note I swallowed a large gulp of air and went on strumming while trying to gather a little spit with which to swallow and coat my bone-dry throat. As the note had been cut off, most ingloriously, I decided to say something-an event rare enough in my performances, but I had to see if I had a voice at all, or if it had vanished with the gulp of air. I said something like, "Oh! What a lot of people!" and then managed to collect myself and continue the song.

The first snows came. I was fired from Perkins Institute for going barefoot and looking like a bohemian. Soon after, I sang a concert with my Harvard Square blues buddy, Eric Von Schmidt, and went to a hootenanny in New York City.

By winter of 1959, neither Michael nor I could imagine our lives separate from each other. But I was sick with demons. Sometimes I needed to be held like a lost and trembling waif, and other times to flirt and conquer. I was the perfect example of the common high school expression "P.T." (prick teaser), and in refusing to consummate my seductions could tell myself that I had been and was still "good." The Madonna was in the Village; she didn't drink, take drugs, or make love, and yet somehow she was like a whore, and her demons were running wild. Many years later, Michael told me that that was why he fell in love with me. The "virgin" he worshiped and the "whore" he wanted to save.

Back in Boston, one day I sat in the psychiatrist's office, exhausted and crazy after a fight with Michael. The doctor asked what I thought would happen if I left Michael. I shut my eyes and saw the earth explode and a tiny figure tumble into blackness.

One night I found myself on a street comer in Greenwich Village, alone, with a suitcase and a guitar. Someone took me in; I have never remembered who. I walked down MacDougal Street and hung out in cafes. I didn't eat or sleep. I met people who smoked marijuana and talked about drugs.

For a few nights I followed my giddy beckoning demons, staying up until dawn, feeling sick, taking Miltown (which preceded Librium, which preceded Valium). I was sickest at the first morning light, tasting the metallic tang of guilt sliding to the back of my throat, running down my spine and emptying into my stomach.

It was safer back in Harvard Square. I had grown close to Mimi, who played duets with me, and I had "all my lovely Harvard boys." They were in love with Mimi and me, and we were in love with them collectively. We were both like Guy de Maupassant's whimsical character Mouche, only Mouche slept with all her lovely boys, and they loved her none the less for the sharing. Our boys seemed satisfied to love us as they would two Mexican virgins who would eventually be given in marriage to the boy proven to be the truest and purest. Dear Goodie, Stein, Todd. Dear Piper, Cooke, Billy B. Dear Geno.

Once I was driving through the Square to Adams House and I saw Michael out in front of a bookstore, leaning forward to kiss a beautiful woman on the lips. Her hair was pulled back into a sophisticated bun, and she looked like a grown-up. I parked down the street in a nauseated daze and waited long enough to see Michael flash into the dorm late for our meeting. He yawned and put his book down when I walked in, and I watched him lie for the first time.

School let out and the summer of 1960 arrived. Michael went home again to Trinidad, and I went to New York to make my first Vanguard album.

We worked in the Manhattan Towers Hotel on a dingy block of Broadway. The ballroom was available every day of the week except Wednesday, when it was transformed into a bingo parlor for the local residents and their guests. I stood on the dirtiest rug in New York City in my bare feet, dwarfed by the huge, musty room, and sang into three microphones, two on the outside for stereo, and one in the center for monaural. Freddy Hellerman of the Weavers used a fourth microphone for six songs after I had decided, under great pressure, that a second instrument, tastefully played, was not "commercial," but rather enhanced the music. The beautiful ballad "Mary Hamilton" was secured in one take, without a run-through. I would work for a few hours, and then Maynard and the engineer and I would go down the street for roast beef sandwiches. In three days we recorded nineteen songs, thirteen of which made up my first legitimate solo album.

My parents were moving back out west; I was staying east. We had a mother-father-Joanie-and-Manny meeting at the house. I was tight-lipped and distracted as Manny asked questions which I let my parents answer. The only thing I kept bringing up was that I didn't want to sing in nightclubs, but wanted to give regular concerts. Manny said he was willing to work on it, provided there was a big enough audience for me. The meeting was terribly tense. I was paralyzed by the fact that my parents were leaving, and I would actually be on my own. I suddenly felt so tiny, not at all like a star of any size or import. For the first time in my life my mother would not be waiting by the fire with a cup of tea for me and some violin or cello or piano on the phonograph. But I couldn't think about it. I just clammed up and stared out the window and let everybody else discuss my future. I thawed a little when Tia arrived with a glass of wine in her hand and cheer in her heart and a wonderful understanding of the child she had always referred to as her "little songbird." Somehow she made me feel that I could take the next step in my life and not die from it. It was decided that Manny would try to set up concerts for me, I would continue my two nights at Club 47 and weekends at the Ballad Room, and I would not do nightclubs.

My parents left. Margie disappeared. Debbie was in love. McDoo, a good high school friend, moved east to live with me. We found a fourth-floor apartment, no elevator, with one bedroom, a living room, kitchen, and bath, a few blocks from Harvard Square. What we had in common was that we were both professor's daughters. What we didn't was that she was blond, very pretty, exactly as I had known her when we had graduated together and had made a vow, along with Muff Calloway, that we would all remain virgins until we were married.

I was fascinated by McDoo's magnificent breasts. Even when she lay on her back daydreaming, they pointed skyward, with or without a bra. She curled her hair at night in huge plastic rollers, was hygienically squeaky-clean, pink-and-white complected, sweet-tempered, and wanted to be a beatnik. So she bought black panty hose and stopped wearing lipstick. For a while, we had a wonderful time, fixing up the apartment, making a lot of salads, and feeling independent.

Michael and I hung out in the living room, drawing, talking, making love, and fighting. McDoo would poke her head out of the bedroom door, curlers abounding and towel wrapped around her gorgeous body, say" 'Scuse me" in a high-pitched voice, and fly across the hall to the bathroom with a little wave.

One night Michael and I had been to the movies. The last scene had left Joanne Woodward standing on a street corner yelling at her husband, who was driving away with his lovely young mistress. On the way home I had a nausea attack, and by the time we reached the fourth floor, I collapsed on my bed. Michael was telling me that I was like Joanne Woodward, and I had thought I was like the lovely young mistress. I asked Michael to change the subject or, better yet, just tell me I wouldn't throw up. Michael went into the kitchen and made an avocado and banana sandwich and sauntered back into the bedroom chewing noisily.

Suddenly, very suddenly, the nausea vanished and I found myself flexing my toes around the upright lamp we'd bought at the flea market, and in dreamlike slow motion, lifting it with my leg and hurling it across the room. It landed directly on Michael's head. His mouth froze open over the avocado and banana sandwich and the whole scene vanished into darkness.

I got up feeling like Godzilla and headed toward the living room. The first thing to catch my eye was the wine bottle with a candle in it and a year's supply of wax dripping down in multicolored lumps. I grabbed it by the neck and threw it against the wall with all my might and was rewarded by the sound and sight of shattering glass and wax chips in flight. But I was already on my way to the kitchen. First the coffee pot went, but it was metal and suffered only a small dent while spewing the cup or two of stale coffee and grounds into splotches against the wall. I headed for the plates in the cupboard. Michael stepped up behind me, saying, "You stupid ... Are you crazy, or what?" and grabbed my arms at the elbows. Empowered with the strength of rage, I turned myself around, and in a quiet and determined frenzy, grabbed his hair and pulled, kicking furiously at his ankles. He hopped up and down to get out of the way of my feet, squeezing my wrists to unlock the grip I had on his curly locks, and cursing and hissing in shock and anger. I finally gave up and collapsed in tears.

Michael left, smoothing back his hair but clearly shaken. I sat on the floor in pools of damp coffee grounds and sobbed my heart out. McDoo came home and helped me up and listened to the whole story. By the time the story was over, I was resolved never to see Michael again. McDoo helped me pack all his things into boxes, put them out in the hall and double-bolt the door. I pinned a note to one box saying something original like "I never want to see you again." Drained and exhausted, I went to bed. Awakened by the first morning rustlings, I heard McDoo tiptoe past me into the bathroom. There was a brick lodged between my eyes in back of my nose. Then I heard a scream and by the time I could prop myself up, she was in the doorway next to my bed with her beautiful blue eyes wide above the night's mascara blotches.

"Michael's trying to climb in the bathroom window!" He had picked the screen off, opened the window, and hoisted himself over the tub with the still-steaming one inch of water and three inches of bubbles that was supposed to have been McDoo's bath.

Wherever you are, McDoo, I apologize. And you needn't have cried when you told me that you just weren't cut out to be a beatnik and were going home. I hope your wild ride in Harvard Square afforded you some laughter in memories.

Michael and I groped for a way to make a fresh start. He was stifling in New England. Even I felt it might be time to move on. We began talking about moving to California.

Go to Next Page....

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 22 Jun 11 - 11:35 AM

Hi Aggie,

Sorry to take so long to respond. I've been really busy here!

I will write about Joan Baez and Geno in the book about his life.

Meantime, you can read much more in "Baby Let Me Follow You Down".

Peace, Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Aggie
Date: 07 Jun 11 - 02:37 PM

Hey Marcia...
Hope you are well!
Could you tell me a little bit about Geno's relationship with Joan Baez?
I never did get the chance to meet Geno but I've seen Joanie around a few times.
I was always under the impression that Geno was close to Bob Dylan but the other day when I was glancing through Joan's autobiography, I found a very touching paragraph that she wrote about Geno... How exactly did they know one another?
Aggie

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,GUEST
Date: 07 Jun 11 - 02:35 PM

Hey Marcia...
Hope you are well!
Could you tell me a little bit about Geno's relationship with Joan Baez?
I never did get the chance to meet Geno but I've seen Joanie around a few times.
I was always under the impression that Geno was close to Bob Dylan but the other day when I was glancing through Joan's autobiography, I found a very touching paragraph that she wrote about Geno... How exactly did they know one another?

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 29 May 11 - 08:55 AM

Today is Geno's birthday. May 29, 1941
He would have been 70 years old!

Listen to him play with Joan Baez on her album 5, Vanguard, 1964.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epoMnWLeE68

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 21 May 11 - 10:37 AM

May 29th is Geno's birthday. He would have been 70 years old.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 01 Mar 11 - 02:06 PM

Suze Rotolo died on Feb. 24, 2011. She wrote beautifully about Geno in her book.

"A Freewheelin' Time: a Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" - Page 270

"Geno Foreman came from a distinguished family. Though he was the son of Clark Foreman, the director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the group that had given Bob the Tom Paine Award, Geno didn't seem to be from any family. It was as if he just flowed loose in the world with an extraterrestrial energy. He was about six feet tall, with very dark, thick hair and a full beard, and he was missing some front teeth. His dark fiery eyes darted about as fast as his words when he spoke.
..............
I don't remember when I saw Geno again-later that day or weeks afterward- but he had no sense of gaffe or an offense because Geno wouldn't intentionally hurt a fly. Geno. Man. Geno was beautiful, brilliant and irrepressible. He was the mad prince in the kingdom of the mad ones. He married and fathered a child and died in a freak accident in England a few years later."

CODICIL
"Sadness so overwhelming it takes the breath away. Numbness affects the ability to move the body, and brain fog hampers vision. The slightest thing can bring on a bout of crying. Constricted throat, burning insides, dull aches. Nothing matters but what went wrong or what can go wrong now that something is beginning to feel wrong. There is a wicked, hideous, backbiting enemy in cahoots with instinct to beat the daylights out of white-hot sentiment. No contest. Everything is obliterated."

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Bill the Collie
Date: 01 Mar 11 - 10:25 AM

Another sad loss

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 01 Mar 11 - 09:58 AM

SUZE ROTOLO was a good friend of Geno Foreman's. How sad she died so young!
I will always remember her warm friendship (Marcia)
Rest in Peace dear Suze.

Suze Rotolo, a Face, With Bob Dylan, of '60s Music, Is Dead at 67
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: March 1, 2011   
       Suze Rotolo, who became widely known for her romance with Bob Dylan in the early 1960s, strongly influenced his early songwriting and, in one of the decade's signature images, walked with him arm-in-arm for the cover photo of his breakthrough album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.
The cause was lung cancer, her husband, Enzo Bartoccioli, said.

Ms. Rotolo (she pronounced her name SU-zee ROTE-olo) met Mr. Dylan in Manhattan in July 1961 at a Riverside Church folk concert, where he was a performer. She was 17; he was 20.

"Right from the start I couldn't take my eyes off her," Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir, "Chronicles: Volume 1," published in 2004. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid's arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard."

In "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" (2008), Ms. Rotolo described Mr. Dylan as "oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way."

They began seeing each other almost immediately and soon moved in together in a walk-up apartment on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village.

The relationship was intense but beset with difficulties. He was a self-invented troubadour from Minnesota on the brink of stardom. She was the Queens-bred daughter of Italian Communists with her own ideas about life, art and politics that made it increasingly difficult for her to fulfill the role of helpmate, or, as she put it in her memoir, a "boyfriend's 'chick,' a string on his guitar."

Her social views, especially her commitment to the civil rights movement and her work for the Congress for Racial Equality, were an important influence on Mr. Dylan's writing, evident in songs like "The Death of Emmett Till," "Masters of War" and "Blowin' in the Wind." Her interest in theater and art exposed him to ideas and artists beyond the world of music.

"She'll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: 'Is this right'?" Mr. Dylan told the music critic and Dylan biographer Robert Shelton. "Because her father and her mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was."

When, to his distress, she went to Italy for several months in 1962, her absence inspired the plaintive love songs "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Boots of Spanish Leather," "One Too Many Mornings" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."

Mr. Dylan later alluded to their breakup and criticized her mother and sister, who disapproved of him, in the bitter "Ballad in Plain D."

Ms. Rotolo spent most of her adult life pursuing a career as an artist and avoiding questions about her three-year affair with Mr. Dylan. (He was, she wrote, "an elephant in the room of my life.") She relented after Mr. Dylan published his autobiography. She appeared as an interview subject in "No Direction Home," the 2005 Martin Scorsese documentary about Mr. Dylan, before writing "A Freewheelin' Time."

Susan Elizabeth Rotolo was born on Nov. 20, 1943, in Brooklyn and grew up in Sunnyside and Jackson Heights, Queens. Her mother, from Piacenza, Italy, was an editor and columnist for the American version of L'Unità, published by the Italian Communist Party. Her father, from Sicily, was an artist and union organizer who died when she was 14.

Artistically inclined, she began haunting Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village as the folk revival gathered steam, while taking part in demonstrations against American nuclear policy and racial injustice. She adopted the unusual spelling of her nickname, Susie, after seeing the Picasso collage "Glass and Bottle of Suze."

The famous photograph of her and Mr. Dylan, taken by Don Hunstein on a slushy Jones Street in February 1963, seemed less than momentous to her at the time, and she later played down her instant elevation to a strange kind of celebrity status as the girl in the picture.

"It was freezing out," she told The New York Times in 2008. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put on a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage. Every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat."

The album, Mr. Dylan's second, included anthems like "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right."

After Ms. Rotolo returned from Italy — a trip engineered by her mother in a move to separate her from Mr. Dylan — the relationship became more difficult. Mr. Dylan was becoming increasingly famous and spending more time performing on the road, and he entered into a very public affair with Joan Baez, with whom he had begun performing.

Ms. Rotolo moved out of their West Fourth Street apartment in August 1963 and, after discovering she was pregnant, had an illegal abortion.

By mid-1964 she and Mr. Dylan had drifted apart. "I knew I was an artist, but I loved poetry, I loved theater, I loved too many things," Ms. Rotolo told The Times. "Whereas he knew what he wanted and he went for it."

In "Chronicles," Mr. Dylan wrote: "The alliance between Suze and me didn't turn out exactly to be a holiday in the woods. Eventually fate flagged it down and it came to a full stop. It had to end. She took one turn in the road and I took another."

In 1967 she married Mr. Bartoccioli, a film editor she had met while studying in Perugia. The couple lived in Italy before moving to the United States in the 1970s. In addition to her husband, she is survived by their son, Luca, of Brooklyn, and her sister, Carla, of Sardinia.

Ms. Rotolo worked as a jewelry maker, illustrator and painter before turning to book art, fabricating booklike objects that incorporate found objects.

She remained politically active. In 2004, using the pseudonym Alla DaPie, she joined the street-theater group Billionaires for Bush and protested at the Republican convention in Manhattan.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 1, 2011, on page B15 of the New York edition.

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 08:45 AM

Hi Bob,

You do not have to be a member of Face Book to see Geno's page.

Geno wrote a beautiful poem for Dan Chval which I will send to you by email. Dan's death affected Geno very deeply. They were like brothers and had known each other since they were very young.

Peace and love to you,

Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST,Bob Freedman
Date: 10 Feb 11 - 02:31 AM

Hi, Narcia

Do I have to be a Facebook subscriber to visit Geno's page?

Also, am wondering, did Geno ever talk about Danny Chval?

With love and peace and blessings

Bob

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 20 Dec 10 - 09:54 AM

Hi Bob,
And thank you for message!
Best wishes to you for a wonderful and happy Christmas and New Year.
Take a look at Geno's page I have for him. It has a lot of new info about old friends of his I have met recently.
Also many photos.
Peace and love,
Marcia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Dec 10 - 06:33 PM

Hi, Marcia
Thanks for your welcome which is really nice to read :)
And my further apologies for the drug
reference.
All good wishes for the New Year.
Be well.
Blessings
Bob

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 29 Nov 10 - 12:33 PM

Hi Bob,
I'm so happy you came back to Mudcat to read about Geno!
I remember seeing you here in Santa Fe and telling you the story of Geno's death. I know his family knew the story as well since I showed them his Death Certificate. But rumors of the cause of death about musicians are many and often untrue.
Peace and love,
Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Nov 10 - 12:17 PM

ps after re-reading my post, i realized that what I wrote - meaning Gino
right after I mentioned when Clark died, is mis-leading. I hope this clarification will eliminate the unintended ambiguity.
Bob

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Nov 10 - 12:23 AM

Marcia
Thank you for what you said about Gino's and my friendship!
I hadn't visited the site in 5 years so just read your '05 post a few
days after Thanksgiving 2010. About my reference to Gino's death,
If i recall, the drug OD was something I got from Clark % Mairi, or maybe Shelagh.
I apologize for any mis-information I perpetuated.

I have always been blown away by the memory of Gino's coming up to me, after I read some poetry, at the Gate. One of the very first things he
said to me was that he wanted me to neet his parents! I stayed in touch,
with Clark and Mairi and eventually visited them, in Adjuntas, in 1976.
Clark dies the next year. His death was a great loss for the world of music and for his friends and family.
Bob [[e-mail]]

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 26 Nov 10 - 08:55 AM

You can now listen to Geno Foreman playing guitar with Joan Baez singing on You Tube. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epoMnWLeE68

I hope you enjoy it!

Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 22 Nov 10 - 09:08 AM

I have a message from Yaak Karsunke in Berlin today... he is sending me a poem he wrote for Geno and some letters and other papers about Geno!

It is so wonderful to be meeting these old friends of Geno's who loved him, and remember him so well.

Here is a link to an interview with Yaak... I posted a photo of him on Geno's Face Book page.

http://deptorg.knox.edu/catch/2006fall/non/divers.html

Peace and love,
Marcia

Subject: RE: Did you know Gino (Geno) Foreman
From: Marcia Stehr
Date: 15 Nov 10 - 09:49 AM

Today, Nov. 15th, is the anniversary of Geno's death in London at the age of 25. It turns out he had Ulcerative Colitis which perforated and was missed by the doctor in the hospital. He was sent home instead of being admitted to the hospital and he died four days later from blood poisoning.
I've been reading old letters from his friends and found several of them on line.
Rainer Hachfeld, a fabulous political cartoonist has sent me three new photos of Geno from 1963 in Berlin.
Here is the link to Rainer's page of cartoons:

http://www.rainerhachfeld.de/main/index.php?view=cartoons&kat=1ℑ=1625&submit=Ok

Here is the link to Geno's Face Book page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Geno-Foreman/42626487985?ref=ts

Peace and love, Marcia