Café Wha?

Long before Dylan electrified Newport and folk-rock became a mainstream cultural movement, Greenwich Village was already humming with voices, stories, and songs that rarely made the headlines—but shaped a generation. Cafés and clubs echoed with the music of Fred Neil, Karen Dalton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pat Sky, Tim Hardin, Bonnie Dobson, Richie Havens, Dave Van Ronk, and many others who helped define the soul of a movement.

A celebration of the 1970s Greenwich Village folk scene and the fiftieth anniversary of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Curated by Rolling Stone senior journalist David Browne, author of Talkin' Greenwich Village, and Fabio Fantuzzi, co-editor of Bob Dylan and the Arts, the evening will feature musicians and special guests directly involved in the genesis of that visionary, freewheeling tour—shaped in Village venues as a liberating artistic circus that defied the constraints of the commercial music industry.

“Those early days in the Village were great,” Bob Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton around 1970, shortly after he had moved into his townhouse on MacDougal Street, trying to recreate the magic of the early 1960s, when there was “music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.”