Bob Dylan slept on her couch. Now this New City legend has written a memoir

She was Bob Dylan's first manager. She married the folk singer who was in the inspiration for "Inside Llewyn Davis." And she was witness to and participated in shakeups that rattled society’s foundations.

In the late 1950s and early 60s, Greenwich Village was the epicenter of a folk music revival amid a surge in political activism.

And Terri Thal was in the middle of all of it.

An ardent socialist and later wife and manager of folk singer Dave Van Ronk — dubbed “The Mayor of MacDougal Street” — Thal didn’t tolerate being treated as “an appendage of ‘the famous man,'" she writes. In the male-dominated music world of the time, she proved herself equal in the bar, in business and in bed.

“I cursed like a man; I drank like a man,” she writes. “I had sex with men I barely knew, and sometimes with men I didn’t know — just the way I thought men did with women.”

Thal, a longtime New City resident, tells her story in a new memoir titled “My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me” (McNidder & Grace, 2023) coming out Oct. 5, name-checking scores of performers from that era whom she befriended, managed or both.

On Sept. 12, she will be speaking at the Bitter End in Manhattan for “Terri Thal and Friends: Greenwich Village and Me,” with musical accompaniment by Tom Paxton and Happy Traum.

Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary and Tom Paxton were among the musicians who wandered in and out of their lives — and a young Bob Dylan crashed on their couch during his early days in New York City.

Back in the day, Thal and Van Ronk were a striking pair in the cafes of the Village — she at 5’ 11’’and he at 6’ 3’’— and wherever they were, a crowd seemed to gather.

Born Terri Lichtenthal to Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, Thal was introduced to folk music by her older sister, Joyce, who brought home records by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

While a student at Brooklyn College, she started attending socialist meetings, where she got connected with the burgeoning music scene.

“I backed into folk music from that,” Thal said in a recent interview. “My introduction was much more a political one than a Washington Square one.”

Her involvement in social justice causes would become an avocation that led her to the March on Washington in 1963 where she heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Thal’s left-leaning associations landed her under surveillance in 1981 when she allowed lawyers for Kathy Boudin, who was later convicted of murder in the infamous Brink’s robbery, to make phone calls from her New City home.

Tangled up with Bob

One night in 1960, Van Ronk came home and told Thal, “I just heard this kid who’s a (expletive) genius. You’ve got to hear him.”

So she went to hear Dylan —  then barely out of his teens — at a Village “basket house,” and glimpsed a raw performer who hadn’t yet gained a foothold in the music scene.

“Bob was neither a great guitarist nor a great singer,” Thal writes. “His voice was rough and he had a distinctive, disconcerting way of emphasizing odd syllables. He stumbled about on stage and one leg twitched. Dave and I thought he had brilliantly absorbed the way Charlie Chaplin had moved, and that his music was effective.”

Dylan began staying with the couple periodically in their fifth-floor walkup on West 15th Street, soaking up their politics and immersing himself in their records and books.

Thal became Dylan’s first manager in the spring of 1961, before he had developed an audience. Getting gigs wasn’t easy. “He’s too freaky for a folk music audience,” one club owner told her.

A reel-to-reel tape she made of Dylan performing original songs at the Gaslight Cafe is said to be his first known live recording. Thal took the tape around to club owners to introduce them to the young troubadour. She still has the tape, with Dylan’s dedication scribbled on its back cover.

Thal had a hand in getting Dylan booked at Gerde’s Folk City, where a New York Times’ review by Robert Shelton in September 1961 brought publicity that culminated in a contract with Columbia Records.

Dylan eventually left her to sign with the influential manager Albert Grossman, although they remained friends for some time afterward.

Thal and Van Ronk were at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan “went electric,” performing a rock’n’roll set backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and shaking up the folk music orthodoxy.

“We didn’t freak out about it,” she recalled. “Bob had a rock background before he came to New York. … I thought the Butterfield Band was great, and to have them back him did not throw us at all.”

Bringing it all back home

Thal later divorced Van Ronk and stopped managing folk artists as the music scene changed. In 1972 she became public relations director of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

She moved to her family’s former summer cottage in the Lake Lucille community off South Mountain Road in New City in the early 1980s. Until retiring about 10 years ago, she worked for local nonprofits.

Thal has stayed active in political, social and environmental causes, including the successful fight against a desalination plant in Rockland. She lived for years with Martus Granirer, a noted Rockland conservationist,  until his death in 2017.

“I’ve been lucky,” writes Thal, now 84. “I was born in a time and place where I’ve been able to fight for justice, and when my mother’s protests about the plight of being a woman are being addressed. My family didn’t encourage me to live my life in the worlds of folk music and social justice, but no one tried to hamper me, and everyone accepted me and my activities.

She adds: “I continue to foster social change, which I think is needed in this time of division and dissention, and to be immersed in the world of music, both of which support my being.”

The Times They Were A-Changing

• “My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me” by Terri Thal will be published by McNidder & Grace on Oct. 5.

• The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org

• On Sept. 12, the author will be speaking at “Terri Thal and Friends: Greenwich Village and Me,” with musical accompaniment by Tom Paxton and Happy Traum. The event, sponsored by The Village Trip, is at the Bitter End, 147 Bleecker St. in Manhattan. Visit thevillagetrip.com/event/terri-thal for tickets and information.

Robert Brum is a freelance journalist who writes about the Hudson Valley. Contact him and read his work at robertbrum.com.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Terri Thal of New City memoir: 'My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me"