Art by Jack Kirby
In X-Men #7, Bobby Drake and Hank McCoy – aka Iceman and the Beast – decide to take a break from their studies at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and visit Coffee A Go-Go in New York City’s famed Greenwich Village. As they sit at a table sipping their java, they observe a jazz band performing on stage, a handful of women dancing along, a poet reciting his most recent composition, and various other patrons ranging from artists to full-fledged Beatniks.
“How about that jazz combo, Hank?” Drake asks. “It’s so far out that they’ll be fired if anyone can understand the melody.” McCoy, however, is more interested in the poetry reading. “I assumed he was checking a housewife’s shopping list aloud,” he puzzlingly remarks. “He is!” someone replies. “That’s what makes him such a genius.”
A much different type of poetry reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, when Beat poet Allen Ginsberg gave his first public recitation of what would become his most famous composition. “Howl” was more than a mere poem, more akin to an opening salvo that captured the ethos of the Beatnik movement through the use of raging emotion and questioning lyricism.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” the poem begins, condemning both the conservativism and conformity of the 1950s. Yes, the Beats were regularly on the hunt for “an angry fix” as a way to pass through “the Door in the Wall” of perception, but only because they were searching for some mystical alternative to the crass materialism and modern-day capitalism of America.
What Ginsberg achieved through poetry, Jack Kerouac succeeded with prose. Although written six years earlier, his novel On the Road wasn’t published until 1957. New York Times reviewer Gilbert Millstein called it an “historic occasion,” adding, “The ‘Beat Generation’ was born disillusioned; it takes for granted the imminence of war, the barrenness of politics and the hostility of the rest of society. It is not even impressed by (although it never pretends to scorn) material well-being (as distinguished from materialism). It does not know what refuge it is seeking, but it is seeking.”
Rolling Stone reporter Charles Perry, meanwhile, wrote that the Beats “saw themselves as a movement or a social group more than previous bohemians,” and all it took was a commitment to that movement to make one a member. “Anybody who reads a poem, no matter how terrible, at a Beat coffeehouse was accepted as long as he expressed the necessary bile against the squares, the cold war, racism and other evils of the day.”
While the more conservative and scientifically minded Hank McCoy may feel out of place in the Bohemian setting of a Greenwich Village coffee shop, he soon finds himself the center of attention nonetheless. Despite being a mutant, the Beast resembles any other person except for one significant difference – his large feet. Feeling constrained by the shoes he is wearing, McCoy removes them and the huge, barefooted visage that suddenly appears immediately attracts attention.
“Don’t move, stranger,” a nearby artists remarks. “I’ve got to make a sketch of those feet. They should be immortalized on canvas.” Another adds, “Wait till Bernard sees them. He’ll write a new poem immediately.”
It doesn’t take long before someone suggests forming a “new cult” around Hank McCoy and calling themselves the “Barefoot Beats.” The idea is quickly embraced by the rest of the crowd, who lift McCoy onto their shoulders and parade him around the coffee shop, referring to him as the “King of the Barefoot Beats.” The proceedings are cut short, however, when Warren Worthington III – aka Angel from the X-Men – arrives and announces that a pressing emergency has arisen.
“Warren, you’re like manna from heaven to me,” Hank McCoy exclaims as someone paints a face on the sole of his right foot. “I thought I was inexorably trapped here!”
During another visit to Coffee A Go-Go, Bobby Drake and Hank McCoy once again sip their java while listening to Beat poet Bernard’s latest masterpiece. “Like life is a yo-yo, and mankind keeps tying nots in the string,” he begins. “Go up, go down. Then call it progress.” McCoy’s date, Vera Cantor, is enraptured and exclaims, “Isn’t he marvy, Hank? He’s our answer to Bob Dylan.” The Beast, who is less enthralled, simply replies that he doesn’t understand the question.
Robert Zimmerman of Duluth, Minnesota, arrived in Greenwich Village on January 24, 1961. Only his name wasn’t Zimmerman, it was Bob Dylan. And he wasn’t from Duluth but Gallup, New Mexico, where he worked in a circus. He also raced motorcycles, worked on a farm, and traveled across the country in the box cars of freight trains. At one point, he even claimed to be Native American.
“Nobody held it against him,” Dave Van Ronk – the unofficial Mayor of MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village – explains in Howard Sounes’ 2001 biography, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. “Reinventing yourself has always been part of show business. But he sort of got backed into a corner with his own story. I remember he solemnly gave us a demonstration of Indian sign language, which he was obviously making up as he went along.”
On his first night in the big city, Dylan walked into Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street for open-mic night. “I’ve been travelin’ around the country,” he said when he took the stage. “Followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.” It took less than a week for Dylan to meet the iconic folksinger, who resided in a hospital due to Huntington’s disease. The nineteen-year-old former Robert Zimmerman was on a mission – numerous wannabe musicians traveled to Greenwich Village but few had the single drive and ambition as Bob Dylan, who was convinced he was destined for greater things.
It was legendary producer John Hammond who signed Dylan to Columbia Records and – believing that he could indeed be the “next big thing” – let the young folksinger record with little oversight. Only two of the thirteen songs on that first album were written by Dylan, and the album itself sold a paltry five thousand copies when released. Columbia executives began referring to him as “Hammond’s folly” as a result, but Hammond decided to give Dylan a second chance, this time with original songs as opposed to covers.
Bob Dylan composed the most famous song – of both the follow-up album and possibly his career – in a matter of minutes while sitting at a café in Greenwich Village. The melody was borrowed from an old African American spiritual called “No More Auction Block,” the lyrics simple and rhetoric, but “Blowin’ in the Wind” quickly became an anthem for the Sixties Generation nonetheless.
In X-Men #31, a waitress at Coffee A Go-Go named Zelda decides to throw a surprise birthday party for Bobby Drake, with not only Hank McCoy in attendance but fellow X-Men Scott Summers and Jean Grey as well. The party is interrupted by a biker gang, however, whose head honcho recently asked Zelda out on a date, a proposition that was politely rejected by the coffee shop waitress.
Realizing that they can’t openly use their powers, the X-Men decide to fight back subtly instead. As one motorcycle heads towards them, Warren Worthington and Scott Summer tilt their table downward, creating a ramp that sends the cycle flying through the air. As he crashes, Worthington tells the rider, “It’s all over now, baby blue.”
In addition to being a catchy phrase uttered by a superhero during the heat of battle, the words are also the title of a Bob Dylan song from the singer’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home. Greenwich Village’s most famous resident had apparently found a fan in a Marvel Comics’ superhero, intertwining two popular culture icons from the 1960s in the process.
In the words of Coffee A Go-Go’s resident poet Bernard, “Like it’s out to be in. And it’s square to be hip. I mean dig the scene, a nap is a nip.”
Anthony Letizia