Take Off Your Thirsty Boots

If it had been included on Self Portrait, the reactions of some critics might not have been so harsh.

On November 1, 1964, the day after Bob Dylan’s famous Halloween concert at Philharmonic Hall, the first Broadside Hoot was held at the Village Gate in New York City.  Broadside was a mimeographed topical song magazine that published all the singer-songwriters who were working the clubs and coffee houses of Greenwich Village.  Just about every topical singer-songwriter was there including Phil Ochs, Eric Andersen, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Peter La Farge, Len Chandler, Julius Lester, and to link it to the original hootenannys from the ’50s, Pete Seeger.  Jack Elliott also stopped by to contribute Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” to the proceedings.   The hoots cost a dollar and were held in the afternoon.  At the very first hoot, near the end Phil Ochs got up and said, there’s a couple of songwriters we can’t forget, and called Eric Andersen to the stage for a duet of Lennon & McCartney’s “I Should Have Known Better.”