You're standing on the most important block in American counterculture, and it looks like a pizza place next to a souvenir shop. That's MacDougal Street for you.
Look at the basement doors. One fifteen, one sixteen, one seventeen. Three addresses. Between them, these basements launched Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Pryor, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Chappelle, and — indirectly — the lead singer of Van Halen. I'll explain.
One fifteen MacDougal is Cafe Wha? Opened in nineteen fifty-nine by a man named Manny Roth in a converted horse stable. He laid the marble tile himself. The name came from his Russian Jewish mother, who used to growl "Wha?" in her broken English whenever she was at a loss for words. So he named his club after his mother's confusion, which is one of the better origin stories in nightlife.
On January twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-one, a nineteen-year-old kid from Minnesota walked off a Greyhound bus in the middle of a blizzard with about ten dollars in his pocket and
one mission — find Woody Guthrie. He walked roughly forty blocks south to Greenwich Village, stumbled into Cafe Wha? on open-mic night, got on stage, and told the audience he'd been traveling around the country following in Woody Guthrie's footsteps. He played a few Guthrie covers. Manny Roth hired him — not as a headliner, but as a backup act who only played solo during the afternoon shift. For f
