Rolling Stone‘s interview series Last Man Standing features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and musicians who are the last remaining members of iconic bands. In some cases, they are the only classic-era member in the current touring lineup. In others, they are the only ones still alive. In either case, the task of keeping the torch lit has fallen onto their shoulders, whether they wanted that responsibility or not.
Noel Stookey agreed to take Paul as his middle name in 1961 because “Peter, Noel and Mary” just didn’t have much of a ring to it. There was also the biblical overtone to Peter, Paul and Mary. But at the time, the folk trio was little more than a fun side project to Stookey, something to do when he wasn’t playing solo shows or serving as the emcee at the Gaslight. He had no idea that Peter, Paul and Mary would become one of the most successful acts of the folk era or that people would still be calling him “Paul” 65 years later.
“The name is kind of a radar for me,” Stookey tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from his home in Maine. “I know if people know me personally or know a friend of mine personally, if they say, ‘Hey, Noel.’ But if they say, ‘Hey, Paul,’ I know where they’re coming from.”
The “Hey, Paul” people are likely thinking of Peter, Paul and Mary hits like “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” their performance in front of 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington, the pivotal role they played in popularizing Bob Dylan’s songs, and the countless concerts they played until Mary Travers died in 2009.
Their success gave Stookey a literal front row seat to history. He was right behind Martin Luther King Jr. during the “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and he sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Dylan at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, with one arm around Joan Baez and the other around Travers. A couple years earlier, Stookey allowed a completely unknown Dylan to take the Gaslight stage, night after night, providing him with the platform that slowly launched his career.
All of this took place well over 60 years ago. And even though Stookey is just two years shy of his 90th birthday, he remains remarkably sharp, able to recall names, places, and events in vivid detail without even a second’s hesitation. This recall became even more valuable to history after Peter Yarrow died, leaving Stookey as the last living member of Peter, Paul and Mary. (Yarrow, who was convicted of molesting a 14-year-old girl and later received a presidential pardon, died at 86 in 2025 from cancer.)
We spoke to Stookey about his history in the Village, the rise of Peter, Paul and Mary, the pain of losing Travers and Yarrow, his upcoming memoir, his recent solo work, and what he wants to still accomplish.
What’s your first memory of being a kid and hearing music that you really connected to?
My dad was very relaxed around music. And he was also a traveling salesman, so the whole family would go on these trips to visit places where the Gates Rubber Company was involved. In the car, we’d sing songs like “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.”
Then one day, while we were group singing, he went to harmony, and the buzz in my head went off. I said, “Wow, what is that?” That started my fascination with music. In fact, my dad had a four-string guitar, a tenor guitar that he tuned like a ukulele, and he made that available. And then when I got my own guitar in high school, I started a rhythm and blues band.
What drew you to New York City?
Oh, romance and mystique. I mean, I’m living in Pennsylvania, 90 miles northeast of the city, and I’m thinking, “What would it be like to be in the city?” At first, I started visiting, went down to get a job, lucked out, got a great job with a great company on 14th Street, Cormac Chemical.
I played chess in the office, and one day, one of the guys took me down to Greenwich Village. We went in and our table was abandoned. They had put up a stage, and remembering my rock & roll roots, I just kind of cheekily turned to the owner of the club and said, “Well, what do you have to do to be a performer here?” And he said, “Come in and audition.”
So in my three-piece Brooks Brothers suit, not of the times at all, I came in and I did a couple of original tunes. I don’t know why, it is a mystery to me as an only child, but I felt so comfortable being a master of ceremonies because that’s what I ended up doing. That was my calling card in Greenwich Village.
Performers, as a rule, safeguard their repertoire, and therefore the moment that they have onstage to share their material with an audience is just for them, just for this material, and just for this audience. I didn’t have any such restrictions. I could tell jokes. I’d be in the moment. I guess that’s where I learned transparency.
Tell me about the moment you first walked into the Gaslight.
Actually, it was kind of a comedown because the first coffee house I was in was the Commons, which coincidentally was owned by [Gaslight owner] John Mitchell’s brother. And then from the Commons, I went across the alleyway to the Cafe Wha. So I was very comfortable in coffee houses. To go down into the basement of the Gaslight, if it weren’t arguably the most renowned coffee house, I don’t think I would’ve felt anything. But as it was, it turned out to be a great home for me, and I met a lot of folks, a lot of musical folks
How did you wind up the emcee?
I think it was the reluctance of other artists to introduce other artists. They were like, “Hey, man. I’m a singer.” “Hey, man. I’m a juggler.” “Hey, man. I’m a pantomimist,” and I had no such restrictions. It was cool. It was fun. I never introduced myself, I guess, but I would do a shtick. It might be musical, it might be comedy, it might be sound effects. My big sound effects, as Dylan pointed out in an album release that he wrote for the trio later, was doing a standup imitation of a toilet.
Which comedians got the biggest laughs at the Gaslight? Who would crush it?
Adam Keefe, Murray Roman came by, but I wouldn’t say that they crushed it. I don’t think comedy was… I mean, it was okay for me to do comedy because it was kind of in passing to get to some other aspect of the evening’s entertainment, but I don’t ever recall a comedian coming in and crushing it. But at the Cafe Wha, Murray Roman was very big.
How about Bill Cosby, Joan Rivers, and Woody Allen?
That would’ve been later at the Bitter End. Although Cosby, I think, did the Cafe Wha once.
When they recreate the Gaslight in various movies and TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or Inside Llewyn Davis, it’s always really large. But in reality it was a tiny room, right?
Yeah. It was a tiny room, and you walked past the checkout counter to get to the main room, and tables were discreetly placed. It was tiny and long.
Was Dave Van Ronk a regular?
Yeah, and Hal Waters. That’s a name I would love to look up. He had a beautiful voice, a silken voice… played beautiful nylon guitar, and just kind of disappeared after the Gaslight.
In a video of you hosting there on YouTube, you tell the crowd to snap their fingers instead of clap so the police don’t close the place down.
The upstairs neighbors would like to go to sleep somewhere between 9 at night and midnight, and so applause was frowned upon at the Gaslight.
What’s your first memory of seeing Dylan in there?
Actually, it’s very clear. It’s curious to me that it should be so clear. The first time he came in, he had that nasal set to his vocal cords, and he did basically Woody Guthrie tunes. It was nothing really great, and he asked if he could do a guest set, and I said, “Sure,” because part of being an emcee was also kind of arranging the talent so that two singers didn’t go in a row.
So I worked Bob in. And then he was gone for two weeks, maybe three weeks. He was moderately well received, but not — certainly — how shall I say, no more excitedly received than Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who basically was doing the same kind of material, or Van Ronk, who touched on the blues, or Len Chandler. These were all names of pretty regular guys that worked at the Gaslight.
But Dylan came back in three weeks and asked if he could do a guest set again. I said, “Sure, I’ll work you in.” This was the change in Bob Dylan that I saw. He got up on stage and he started to play a song that anybody who had been in the Gaslight or was aware of folk music would know was a kind of version of [Woody Guthrie’s] “The Buffalo Skinners.”
It’s a song about a guy that goes out west, gets a job as a buffalo skinner, and at the end of his stay, the owner pays him in buffalo skins instead of money, and the guy says, “What am I supposed to do with this?” The owner says, “Oh, you just go to the general store, treat it like money.”
So Dylan’s doing this song about a folk singer who goes to a folk club in New Jersey, gets a job, and it’s a chess club in New Jersey that he’s singing at. And at the end of his gig, the owner gives him chess pieces, and in my mind I go, “Wait a minute, I’ve heard this concept before,” and he says to the owner of the chess club, “What am I supposed to do with these?” The owner says, “Just take it to the bar. You treat it like money.” He said, “I ordered a beer. I gave the bartender a king, and got two rooks and a knight as change.”
That was to me the beginning of the appreciation of how rich Dylan’s writing was, is, and could be. Because of that, I was already starting to work with Peter and Mary, and I knew Albert Grossman because he had put the trio together, and I said to Albert, “You’ve got to come down and hear this guy. He’s pretty remarkable,” and that was the beginning of Dylan’s relationship with Grossman.
How did you meet Grossman?
Albert frequented the coffee houses. The first meeting with Albert Grossman was when he asked me what did I think about being in a group, to which I responded cavalierly, “Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve got some stuff I want to do by myself.” I was doing solo gigs. I went up to Club 47 [in Boston] where Joan Baez was working and became kind of a weekly singer up there. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I had a girlfriend that I later married. I still am married, actually.
But Grossman came to the Gaslight to check me out, obviously, because I think he had in mind, according to the story that I’ve heard, a suggestion from Peter Yarrow, who he managed at the time, that there was this comic at the Gaslight that he thought would make a good partner to have in a trio. So I think it was essentially Peter’s idea, but Albert did the asking, and I said, “Nah, I’ve got too much going on in my solo plate.”
What changed your mind?
A confrontation with a beautiful blonde that lived across the street from the Gaslight for whom I had worked out a solo arrangement of [the Carter Family’s] “Single Girl.” I was in my apartment on the Lower East Side, and she called me and said, “There’s this guy here with a guitar. Is it okay if we come over and sing?” “Well, duh. Okay.”
So Mary Travers comes over with Peter. We could not agree on the chords or the words to any of the songs that were common in the folk repertoire, because folk music allows you to have your own version and our own versions were so discreetly different that the only song we could agree on singing was “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” but we did that in three-part harmony, and it was something special.
So then, Peter rolled out the idea and, hey, everybody’s got a project in Greenwich Village in the Sixties. I went to some rehearsals and it sounded pretty good. So we did a show and tell with Albert about three or four months later, and his associate, John Court, said, “Hey, if nothing happens, you’re going to happen.” And, boy, was he right.
What was the first concert like? Did it work from the very beginning?
I think we maybe were a little too nervous to actually do any honest assessment. Our first reveal was at the Gaslight. I think we did two or three tunes there. The bigger reveal was at the Cafe Wha because we were hired, and we had about seven songs maybe in our repertoire. But we were hired to do the whole night. Peter would open with folk songs. Then he’d introduce me. I would come up and do a solo with maybe a song or two, but mostly comedy and sound effects. And then I would introduce Peter, Paul and Mary. So that way, we were able to do a 60 to 90-minute presentation twice, or sometimes three times a night, at the Cafe Wha.
Tell me about making the first record.
It was the beginning of our repertoire. I think the identifiable thing about that recording was who put up the money for it. This was a Warner Bros. record. Warner Bros. was not into recording. Warner Bros. Records was operating out of a Quonset hut on the movie lot run by Mike Maitland. And Albert Grossman was such a persuasive kind of guy. If he really believed in something, he got us full control and no contractual limit. He told Warners, “You’re going to pay for the album. We’re going to deliver it. And if you like it and the world likes it, we’ll go on from there, but that’s it. You’ve got one record.”
You must have been stunned when “If I Had a Hammer” became this enormous hit right out of the gate.
Well, I mean, we were delighted, but again we didn’t have the perspective to assess our career that way. But in 1963, we had three albums in the top 10.
Many people don’t realize Mary was a single mother during this whole time period.
Yes. Matter of fact, I’ve reevaluated the comment that Albert made to Peter when Peter saw her picture at Izzy Young’s guitar store up on the wall and said, “What about her to sing with?” And Albert said, “Oh, she’d be good if you could get her to work.” We thought maybe that was because she didn’t have a mind that would focus. But “if you could get her to work,” I think, in retrospect, probably meant if she has time away from her child.
How did she balance all that once the group took off?
We chipped in and we paid for a governess to travel with us, for a nanny.
Do you recall first hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind?”
Yeah. They came together, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice.” They were on an acetate that Albert brought. By that time, Albert was handling Bobby. We finished an evening at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, and Albert had the acetate, played it. We fell in love with the tunes and learned them both.
Tell me about Albert. He’s often portrayed as somewhat of a villain in the Dylan story since they eventually had a bad falling-out. I feel like most people don’t have a full idea of what he was like.
There was an aura of mystery to Albert. He was a production partner and I think he owned a piece of the Gate of Horn, actually. He had a production office that he shared with maybe Harold Leventhal of the Weavers. He was quietly spoken, had some very endearing habits. He was like a great uncle to me, incredibly well connected. Manny Greenhill perhaps was the only other manager — as well as Harold Leventhal, of course, with the Weavers — that could generate the kind of deals or have the kind of contacts that Albert had.
I never saw a bad side of Albert at all. I mean, I’m sure he was firm in terms of negotiating, and I don’t know about the falling out with Bobby. That happened probably late Sixties.
What was it like to walk out onstage at the March on Washington and see 250,000 people?
We’d had a preview because the march to Lincoln Memorial took place from the lawn in front of the Washington Monument where we had a rehearsal. There were maybe 200,000 people at the rehearsal and everybody did their thing. Everybody sang. Even Dr. King spoke there.
So we had a sense of what the purpose was so that when we marched from there to the Lincoln Memorial, we knew why we were there. We were dedicated. We hoped it would make a difference. The fact that “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “If I Had a Hammer” had already been taught, if you will, to an audience made it that much more of a family event. Because 250,000 people singing the same song — it’s quite an event.
How close were you to Dr. King when he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech?
We were standing behind him, beside him.
What was it like to be that close to history?
Involving. I mean, our music, some of which we had inherited, some of which we were creating, was part of the movement. So whether it was in Selma, whether it was Southern states, which began to ignore our records because to sell them at a store meant that they were in a sense in accord with the civil rights movement, which they didn’t want to be perceived — it’s funny how that’s repeating itself again, isn’t it?
We were part of the movement. We sang one night in the middle of a field for marchers standing on coffins because that was the only physical structure that could be erected quickly to raise as a stage. It was solidarity. It was a sense that we were participating in something that was righteous.
How did you feel about the Beatles and the other British Invasion bands once that started in 1964?
I was hoping you would ask me that question because I have a regret.
Please. Go ahead.
When you write songs, you sometimes get overwhelmed by the desire to rhyme something rather than to say what it is you mean. I was young and impatient when I wrote “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” and the verse that says, “And when the Beatles tell you they got a word ‘love’ to sell you, they mean exactly what they say” — I never meant to demean their motives.
I loved the Beatles. As you could probably tell if you’ve played Peter, Paul and Mary music at all, I’m the wild one in terms of the trio and in terms of relating musically to the folk idiom in a jazzy or unpredictable kind of way. I’ve always felt that there should be a certain freedom. It does remind me of a time, though, when Peter and I were standing backstage and I played a major seventh in “This Land Is Your Land,” and Peter said, “You don’t play jazz chords in a Woody Guthrie tune.”
Many artists from the folk era were threatened by the Beatles.
Not as long as it stayed true to the subject and material. I thought McCartney and Lennon, Harrison, Starr — they were digging deep into personal relationships, and there was a truth there. There still is. I mean, in pop music today, it’s very hard to summon — how shall I say — the substantiation of wanting to do the twist to “This Land Is Your Land” or to boogie or to dance to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
There are songs that have a lot of informational import, but there are songs that are happy stuff. I thought the Beatles did an amazing job of bringing first-person angst into the public arena — “She Loves You” — I mean, even their early tunes. As they got later and later in their careers, I don’t think they lost a thing, and their musicality was off the charts. It was just some brilliant writing.
I think that when there’s someone like you and a folk singer talking 50 years from now, they’re going to be talking about the immense library of work that still is performed that was created by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
Their harmonies were pretty killer too.
Well, hey now, I’ll take a little offense at being ignored. Our harmonies were pretty out there as well!
I’m not putting down your harmonies. They were all great.
Much of the credit needs to be given to the chord changes that the Beatles invoked in their songs. But at our arrangement sessions that we would have either with Milt Okun or Robert De Cormier towards the end of our career, we took some real chances in terms of singing against the chords, passing tones, and that was unusual for the time. Three-part harmony was like country and western.
Everybody moved together in the same way and it was very pretty. But often, in order to underline what the lyric was talking about, particularly if the lyric was indicating some kind of tension, we would insert notes. We would just intuitively feel notes that underlined that tension. I don’t know if the Beatles ever sat down and talked about it like that.
In 1965, when folk rock is taking off with songs like the Byrds’ arrangement of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” did you feel any pressure to add drums to your records and make them more folk rock-sounding?
Pressure would be the wrong word. Curiosity. Certainly, from the third or fourth album out, we were playing with Skip Prokop from a Canadian group [the Paupers]. I think our attitude was pretty much one of conviviality. I mean, if you look at the lyric of “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” with the one exception of Noel making that — not meaning the inference that the Beatles were doing it just for the money — most of the other lyrics were pretty cute.
In terms of our relationships, Mama Cass and Mary were really good friends. Donovan, I kept running into on Seventh Avenue and he became a reasonably good friend. But no, I don’t think there was a lot of pressure. I just think we kind of gravitated that way. Certainly, Album 1700 was a stretched-out album for us. That had “The House Song.”
Late Again is often the album where people talk about a Beatles influence.
Did that have “Apologize” on it?
Yeah. It’s the first song.
I was probably the one that was the most attracted to what the Beatles did. It has a very Lennon attitude.
Tell me about recording “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
Well, Milt Okun was also John Denver’s musical director, so the access to the material, once again, came almost as easily as our access to Dylan’s material, and Mary just knocked it out of the park. Matter of fact, when Mary passed, prior to Peter’s passing, when Peter and I would do concerts, the audience would sing Mary’s part, and then we’d do harmonies.
That song shot to Number One. It was your biggest hit ever, but you broke up a year later. What happened?
Fame had gotten ahold of me and I was uncontrolled, really making stupid decisions, almost lost my marriage, and fortunately had a salvation moment asking Jesus to come into my heart, and it just turned my life around. I recognized what I had been missing, kind of clarity of purpose, a desire to reestablish my relationship with my family, caused me to move to the country. It clarified a lot of things, but I couldn’t get clear and still stay out on the road and still be in Peter, Paul and Mary.
So I began to make more use of my first name. I happened to put out an album that sort of, shall I say, gave me more of a platform than I had thought. The song that I had prayed for for Peter’s wedding became really popular. It still is quite popular. It’s interesting — when you were asking about what the feeling was like being part of the civil rights movement — because movements or benefits that the trio did and that Peter and Mary and I did separately tend to pull us back together again. So the first show that we did was to try to get the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant offline.
To rewind a little bit, it was your idea to break up the trio? How did they feel about it? Did they push back?
No, I think they could see from the last six months, maybe the last nine months of 1969, that I was a wildcard really yearning to be free. We were on our way to Tokyo. It’s funny you should ask me this because I’m in the process of writing an autobiography. There’s this scene that I just recalled where I’m on an airplane with Peter and I tell him that this is going to be the last concert — we’re flying to Tokyo — and he said, “Well, don’t tell Mary that on the plane. Wait till the last concert,” and so I did, and that’s when I made the announcement. When we came back from the Japan trip, there were no concerts set up.
I think we had tried to do fewer and fewer as the years went by. We were doing easily 200 concerts a year in the early Sixties, and they were not easy concerts to get to. They were in small towns, small colleges. You would fly to an airport, get a car, drive to the small town, do the concert, come back to the airport, stay overnight, get on a plane, fly to another big town, rent a car. I mean, it was tough. I’m amazed that my marriage sustained. I got married in ’63 just a few days after the March on Washington. That’s 63 years ago.
Most groups, no matter how close they are at first, grow to really resent each other. Did that happen to the three of you?
I don’t think so, and maybe part of it was because we were so different. Certainly, we did not live in each other’s back pockets either, and we had, I think, a respect and a sense of what we each were bringing to the group. It was so totally different in every respect that it was valuable to recognize and respect that.
It’s somewhat absurd to compare Peter, Paul and Mary to a group like No Doubt or Blondie. But there have been many groups in music history where the woman becomes the face of the group and the guys get resentful. It’s happened over and over. It didn’t happen here, though.
I think Mary was more modest, perhaps, and distrustful of quick acclaim. She was a very unusual and politically savvy young woman. Her parents were both newspaper folks, and she had marched with them against the Rosenberg executions. I mean, that’s how far back she went.
You put out “Wedding Song” in 1971 and it becomes this big hit. Why didn’t you do more solo work after that?
Because I had just left the stage, as it were, to save my family. I got asked to come on The Tonight Show and sing the song. I remember saying, “If I do that, it’s just going to open up a door and I’m going to be out the door again. I’m going to be on the road again. This is not why I’ve come back to my family,” and it’s been great. I am probably the quietest member of any successful group.
You made a rare choice. Most people in your position would have gone on Johnny Carson, pushed it as far as possible, and put their families a distant second. There are so many famous musicians who gained the world but lost their families.
Yeah, I consider myself really blessed. I look at the material that I’ve done. I think people will discover it eventually because it has a kind of personal value. I wrote a song called “Virtual Party” that’s probably as timely today as it was 10 years ago when I wrote it, but very few people know about it.
How often did you see Peter and Mary in the Seventies?
Less often than in the Sixties. Obviously, in 200 shows a year, we were really in each other’s hair a lot. In the Seventies, we sort of established boundaries right away when we discovered that, “Hey, we really could be back together again if we modified the amount of time we were away from our respective families.” By that time, Peter had a family. We were family-centric. We did maybe 40 shows a year. That was very doable.
In the Eighties and Nineties, you guys toured a lot, and so many musical trends came and went — new wave and hair metal and grunge — but you were always there.
People, I think, came because they kind of knew what they could expect. I was writing songs about El Salvador, Peter was still writing music about contemporary concerns, so they knew that they would get something new, challenging. They knew they’d get something funny. They knew they’d get something glamorous. They knew that they’d get something familiar like “Puff” or “Blowin’ in the Wind.” So what’s not to like about that two-hour experience?
It must have been really tough when Mary got sick. Just watching as a fan from a distance, I was impressed by her bravery. She’d use oxygen tubes onstage.
There’s a strength that comes from being honest, and Mary was honest, plus she had fun with it too. I mean, she would hold her nose tubes and call them her modern jewelry. And she had her haircut — that was her hallmark with the bangs and flowing blonde hair. She got a short haircut. That’s how we did our Christmas shows. Also, that’s another thing that factored into it: in the absence of radio, the emergence of PBS as a means of reaching an audience with, granted, less presence than an actual concert would be, but with that same breadth of presentation.
It must have been emotionally taxing to see Mary struggle with her health in those years.
There was that ever-present sense of hope combined with her dedication to being there, to being in the moment, that obviated an overabundance of sympathy. It just wasn’t called for. She didn’t want it. Betty and I were headed for Europe when we got the call that Mary had gone into the hospital and this was going to be it.
What were the shows like that you did with Peter as a duo?
I’ve always been kind of curious whether the name Peter, Paul and Mary didn’t in fact allow us to remain ourselves in much the same way that the Kingston Trio or the Brothers Four or the Mamas & the Papas did not. So because we had that solo aspect, we just took it to the stage. During the Sixties, the trio would come out, do a piece, we’d take an intermission, then Peter would come out, do a solo, introduce me, I would do a solo, I’d introduce Mary, and then the trio would get back together again at the end.
That kind of spilled over when Mary left us. Peter and I would come out, do a show, and at the beginning of the second half, Peter would come out and do a solo, I would come out, do a solo, and then I’d call Peter back out, and we would finish out. That routine felt the most comfortable, and I think to our audience as well.
I’m sure losing Peter was just as hard as losing Mary.
It’s still in the present tense, honestly. I’ve never sat shiva before, and I’m such a goy, which is the Yiddish expression for somebody out of the faith. I think anybody who’s ever had a spiritual moment recognizes that it’s not wasted no matter where it’s spent, and so just to sit quietly on the first floor with Peter’s body on the second floor and reflect on all of the gifts that I inherited and was given by him.
I am delighted by coincidences of life. Earlier today, somebody sent the opening of the Peter Yarrow memorial service that was held at the Ethical Culture school. It was good to, in a sense, relive that moment as well.
How are you processing being the last one left?
Well, no small part of it, I think, is because of the peace that I’m offered by my spiritual center, by my family. I do not disavow my Christian heritage. But for many people that are hard-right Christians, I don’t use the buzzwords as much as they probably think I should. And yet, quite honestly, my whole growth as a spiritual creature has been recognizing that metaphor — the capacity to place thoughts into a room that can be more easily understood, because there are not so many definitions connected with the terms, and yet you get the essence of what it is.
I just find that that’s such an important part of my peace of mind, my peace of heart, my demeanor. So I’m most thankful for this wonderful thing that happened to me in the late Sixties, early Seventies, that yielded “The Wedding Song” and that yielded a family life that I’ve sustained for 63 years. I’m just so thankful for that. And maybe the secret to a long and happy life is to be thankful.
What’s the secret to a long marriage?
I think we have to have a sense of humor with each other. You also need to surprise each other. That’s bringing home the flowers not on a birthday, just because you saw them and thought of the person. That’s making rhubarb crumble because you know your husband likes it, not because you like it. That’s the kiss before going to sleep at night. That’s the hug in the middle of the day. It’s embracing the unexpected.
How long ago did you meet her?
We went to high school together. She was a junior in 1955 and I was a senior when I graduated. But coincidentally, on the streets of New York in 1959, I’m coming back from doing a carpenter’s job for some friends that I knew in Pennsylvania, and up out of the subway comes this woman that I remembered because I always thought she was attractive. I said, “Betty Bannard,” she said, “Noel Stookey,” and that was the beginning of it again.
I feel like the legend of Bob Dylan has become so massive that even historical giants like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez often get reduced to the roles they played in Dylan’s life. And the entire Greenwich Village music scene is always just discussed in terms of Dylan’s connection to it. Does that ever frustrate you?
No, and I don’t think Bob ever intended it to be that way, either. We can fault the media, and actually this whole social media capacity to tear things apart, to fragment things. Probably, it’s the manner in which Dylan’s overview will be removed because there’s just too much out there to lay the credit at the feet of one person.
Did you see the Dylan biopic?
I did. And I did not think it was all that accurate. I didn’t think Yarrow was treated rightly, and also there’s still that whole mystery about Newport. I was at Newport in the afternoon when Dylan went on with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They loved it in the afternoon. He did “Maggie’s Farm” and they thought it was a knockout, got big applause. But he left the stage after three songs. So what are you going to do if you came in the afternoon to see Bob Dylan and he does three tunes and leaves? But it was nothing like what was going to happen in the evening, which I guess people just — they couldn’t make the connection between the blues done electrically and the blues done acoustically.
When is the last time you spoke to Dylan?
It was backstage at some television event [in 1986]. This was after Sara, his first marriage. He was either courting or going to marry one of the women in his backup group. We did “Blowin’ in the Wind” together with Stevie Wonder. That’s part of what I meant about Dylan not doing this overview on purpose. I mean, of all the people who could demonstrate a discomfort while he’s performing, it would be Bob Dylan.
He’s 85 and does nearly 100 shows a year. Are you stunned by that?
I’m saddened by it.
Why is that?
Because that’s all he’s got. I mean, that’s all he’s got. He hides behind a piano when he plays. I saw him recently in Boston. It must be really, really difficult for him to have a real relationship with somebody. I mean, unless he’s got a separate little place that he runs to, in which case, God bless you, Bob Dylan.
Did you enjoy the show in Boston?
No.
Why?
No, because he wasn’t there. I mean, his body was there, but he didn’t reach out to me. I didn’t feel — he was just doing — it’s like he was doing a show in spite of the fact that we were there rather than because we were there.
He makes very little effort to connect with the audience or please them.
Yeah, and there’s a difference between connecting and pleasing. I think an audience would be pleased if he tried to connect, and perhaps that’s because he’s a genius. And we have to admit that his choice of words, his choice of subject material, and his capacity to put them together in a poetic form that defies prediction, but in essence always hits us in the heart — his capacity to do that does remove him in a sense from a normal relationship with people. Maybe that’s the price of his own genius.
Is it strange to think that this little 20-year-old nobody you put onstage at the Gaslight has become one of the most important artists of the century?
No, not anymore than any artist who surfaces. There’s a reason for Bob’s success. Not a lot of people could duplicate that success, and it must be very lonely for him to walk that road.
How is your memoir going?
I’ve got about three chapters to go. It’s an odd book insofar as I’ve tried to keep it real. First of all, the book is called There Is Love, which is maybe a little overreach, but I wanted to remind people that it’s pretty much at the center of my life now, and I want to give it full credit. But the last three or four chapters are really tough because they only happened five years ago, 10 years ago. Really, how contemporary do you really want to make it? I will take it up through Peter’s passing.
The beginning of each chapter is like this little first-person “Hey, I…” — it’d be me telling you this story, “I was standing there and the guy walks up to me.” In other words, it has that first-person feel to it. Then it goes into the body of the text. And then each of the chapters is aligned with one of the songs. And then the last part of the book is an actual printout of the lyric of the song.
Last question: What do you hope to still accomplish?
Aren’t you nice to ask that. Well, I’d like to finish the book, number one. I think I still have an album left in me. I’d like to live through this atrocious period of time called the Trump presidency and see an improvement in everyone’s spirits, including mine. Life has its ups and downs, and somehow, in that fabric, in that weave of enjoyment and despair, we somehow have always had the capacity to turn to outside sources for a glimmer of hope.
Honestly, the outside sources seem to dwell so much — and perhaps because they must — on the atrocities that are being perpetuated by this administration, that I go from despair to total defeat, and then when I wake up in the morning… But I still feel like I’ve got to read the news. I’m just trying to find a way to stay hopeful and positive.
I wrote a song called “Revolution.” It says, “I’m going to start a revolution. I’m going to take it to the street. I’m going to smile at every solitary person that I meet. I’m going to wave at total strangers no matter where they’re from. I’m going to start a revolution. I’m going to win it one by one.” And I think that’s it. We’re left to our own recognizance. You’ve got to win the revolution on your own.
