Over the years I’d read about Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street and how Patti Smith and other music luminaries played there. I didn’t realize, until recently, that I’d been there. I’d seen Big Joe Williams, the blues great, play there in 1982. This was when I was working as a building super at 258 Broadway. It was a live-in job, and also, I was told, a part-time job. So, I had lots of time to spend walking around the city, just checking things out. 

At the time, I’d been sending out poems. I also had a manuscript of a novel. But nothing was happening on that front. Poems sent out were like stones thrown into the ocean. I had some positive feedback from the author of The Correct Sadist, Terrence Sellers. A woman who worked cleaning apartments at 258 Broadway knew her and showed her my work. I forget what she said, exactly, but the idea was that Ms. Sellers was thinking of starting a press, and that maybe she’d publish my manuscript. As I recall, she said it was better than other things she’d been reading. For me, at that time, this was a resounding success. But the cleaning lady, who was a young hip woman, moved on to whatever, and I just didn’t see her around anymore. And that was that.

My friends and I were open to what was happening in the music world and the art world. We liked the Talking Heads, we saw Robert Gordon, and King Sunny Ade and the African Beats at the Ritz. We drank at the Pyramid Club and the Raccoon Lodge. We checked out storefront art in the East Village (cockroach playhouses!) and danced at the Lone Star Cafe and Heartbreak. One night Mick Jagger came strolling through Heartbreak, followed by a security guy. We liked the album Some Girls and the song Shattered. People actually were directing traffic dressed in plastic bags, no lie. It was happening. Homeless people sleeping against the walls, rolled up in dirty blankets. I called Mick’s name, and he looked back. A girl standing by me said she kissed him. 

We talked about Keith Haring’s work before we knew who he was. Haring’s subway drawings were spot on entertaining messages from where we were, outside of the financial world and outside of the art world, outside of the world of success. I once saw him putting black paper over a subway ad as my train pulled away. A contemporary composer lived at 258. He gave me signed copies of his albums, and I listened and liked the drive and the subtle changes.

Lots of people were talking about art. Some of the guys hired to renovate apartments at 258 Broadway were artists. A curator for the Whitney lived in the small, super cool, top floor apartment with her boyfriend, a commodities broker. The broker was an artist, too. He had a John Chamberlain piece, a twisted bumper of a car hanging on the wall. I’d hear about what was up at Boone and Castelli galleries. In fact, my neighbor across the hall, Tom Powers, was a painter. One night I ran into him at the Raccoon Lodge, and we had a beer sitting at the bar. He said he’d been in the elevator at Castelli’s gallery when Castelli and Julian Schnabel walked in and they rode up together. “Stick with me with me and we’ll both make a lot of money,” Castelli said to Schnabel.     

Schnabel and David Salle, New York art world superstars of the 1980s, weren’t appreciated by the people I knew. Susan Rothenberg was a favorite, and I could dig what she was doing. I’d read that Schnabel liked Albert Pinkham Ryder, someone I liked, too, so I went to the Boone Gallery to check out Schnabel’s plate paintings— shattered ceramic plates glued onto wooden panels, covered and layered with oil or acrylic paint. They were very large, they were very grand, and that’s all I got out of it. But I must have brought what I’d heard to the viewing.

About this time, the building management company that oversaw things at 258 Broadway had me visit another building they managed. This building had a boiler like the one at 258, so I was supposed to learn something. The super met us. He was a quiet, introverted guy. who lived with his mother in the little super hovel they provided. He led us down to the boiler room. There were paintings on the walls, leading down. Kind of strange Dubuffet figures in dull, thick Ryder colors. I kept stopping to look. Who is the artist, I asked. He looked away, saying he was the painter. Do you show anywhere, I asked him. He shook his head and turned away and continued leading us on down. I kept stopping, his paintings kept stopping me. They were unique and roughly beautiful.  

One day when I was walking along Bleeker Street, I saw a sign in the window of a bar. It was a handwritten sign that read “Blues Man Big Joe Williams tonight! Real Mississippi Delta blues!”

I called up my friend.

“Hey, man, want to check out this blues guy?

“Who is it?”

“Big Joe Williams. An old delta blues guy.”

“Sure.”

My partner was into it, and my friend brought this girl he’d been seeing. She was the cousin of some famous rock photographer. When we got there the place was empty. We had beers at the bar and sat waiting, not knowing what to expect. There were a few chairs set up, maybe ten, and one chair facing the audience.  Big Joe wasn’t packing them in, I’ll say that. But eventually he came walking in, carrying his guitar. He had a shot at the bar, carried a beer over and got his guitar out and started playing. We went and sat on the folding chairs. Some others  joined us. I mean on that night, Big Joe was really playing, leaning into it, growling out the lyrics and hitting the cool blues runs and turn arounds. He sang, Baby, Please Don’t Go, and Crawling King Snake (didn’t The Doors cover that?) and Sloppy Drunk Blues and more. He leaned over his strange 9-string guitar and brought the blues and the pain from old time Mississippi up to New York City. Believe me when I tell you, he blew that place away! He brought art, up from the deep south to Bleecker Street.

Even now, when I think of art in the 1980, it’s not the big names that the journalists wrote about at the time who come to my mind. Instead, I think of the super living with his mom working away, painting, and Big Joe Williams laying down the blues at Kenny’s Castaways in 1982.

***

Dan Hubbs  is a librarian and a banjo player. His book Downtown Super Tells All was published in 2021.  danhubbs.substack.com