"Just got here from the West," the gangly 19-year-old told Manny Roth, owner of the New York nightclub "Cafe Wha?" "Name's Bob Dylan. I'd like to do a few songs? Can I?"
Sure, Roth said; on "hootenanny" nights, as he called them, anybody could sing a song or two, and this was a hootenanny night, a bitterly cold one, Jan. 24, 1961. And so Dylan took out his guitar and sang a handful of Woody Guthrie songs.
The crowd "flipped" in excitement, Dylan later said.
The crowd "flipped" in excitement, Dylan later said.
He had hitchhiked to New York from Minnesota, and after showing up at the cafe, he mentioned to Roth that he had no place to sleep. So Roth later asked the audience "if anybody has a couch he can crash on" -- and somebody did.
It was all standard fare, recounted again and again in many places, for Cafe Wha?, a large, plain basement room presided over by Roth during a lively and fertile period in Greenwich Village's history. He died July 25 at his home in Ojai, Calif., his daughter, Jodi Roth, said. He was 94. She said he loved being called the "Duke of Macdougal Street."
It was at the Cafe Wha? that young performers like Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor got early chances to hone their talents. Folk singers, artists, poets, beatniks and anarchists came to the club, and so did far greater numbers of tourists, eager to observe those exotic breeds. (The club's odd name was a shortening of the word "what," intended to convey incredulity.)
An advertisement for Cafe Wha? featured a picture of a beatnik in beret and sunglasses and the slogan, "Greenwich Village's Swingingest Coffee House." Mary Travers, before she was the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, was a waitress there.
Roth abandoned the club in the late 1960s, but it was started up again, after a stint as a Middle Eastern restaurant in the 1970s and 1980s, under the same name by a new owner, and it continues to operate.
Manuel Lee Roth was born Nov. 25, 1919, in New Castle, Ind., where his family owned a mom-and-pop grocery. He grew up loving sports and acting. At the University of Miami, he majored in theater and business before dropping out to enlist in the Army in World War II. He became a navigator on bombing missions over Germany and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other medals.
After the war, he helped run a United Service Organization theater in Germany, finished his studies in Miami and studied acting in New York.
In 1959, someone told Roth about a garage that used to be an old horse stable. You had to go down steep stairs to reach the dark, dank basement, which was bisected by a trough once used as a gutter for horse dung. Roth immediately recognized it as an excellent site for a coffee house.
He spent his last $100 on a truckload of broken marble to make the floor, which he personally laid.
Roth kept a famously tight lid on expenses.
"By the time he got finished with a penny, you could no longer see the Lincoln on it," folk singer Dave Van Ronk once said.
Roth was quoted as saying, on the website of the rock band Van Halen, of which his nephew David Lee Roth, the superstar rocker, is a member: "Every day was an adventure."
There were, to be sure, small problems, like the time in 1961 when the police filed charges against Roth for allowing an unleashed French poodle to roam the club. It turned out to belong to a waitress, and the charges were dropped.
Ultimately, revenues from coffee, light food and a cover charge that climbed to $5 -- high for those days -- could not cover expenses. In 1968, Roth walked away, essentially penniless, according to his daughter. With his marriage breaking up, he eventually moved to Woodstock, N.Y.
