The Hungry 2



the hungry 2 at The Pilgrim's Cave

    I met Bob Clayton in mid-June 1963, when I was crossing Dupont Circle, and I saw a large group of people around a big tree (no longer there) on the western edge of the Circle. They were clustered around a blocky guy with his back to the tree, playing guitar while everyone sang. Sue Buchanan, Bill Locke's girlfriend, was sitting next to him and motioned me into the middle of the group. He liked my voice and asked me to join him as a singing group. We called ourselves the hungry 2 and performed the following weekend at The Needle's Eye on Connecticut Avenue and, when it closed a couple of weeks later, at The Pilgrim's Cave in the basement of a church on Florida Avenue near Rock Creek Park. We broke up about 6 months later but remained friends.

    June 13: Has it happened? I met a guy at the Circle tonight (whom I had seen there before) named Bob Clayton, and we are going to try to get an act together for the Needle's Eye.
    Oddities of oddities: Hank Davis called and wanted to make the Circle scene. But since I'm going over to Bob's in a few minutes, that's the way the eggshell cracks.
    What happened--I was walking across Dupont Circle in the late afternoon when I saw a crowd under the large old tree at the western edge of the Circle. (The tree is no longer there.) I stood on the outside. In the middle of the crowd, Bob was playing guitar and Sue Buchanan was next to him. I always said that Bob reminded me of the Dutch Boy Paint boy with a mustache but he also resembled Cisco Houston a bit. Bob had a weak voice but was a good musician. Anyway Sue saw me and motioned me in. I sang along and Bob liked my voice. He was playing with two other guys at the Needle's Eye but they were having some kind of troubles.
    The Needle's Eye was a coffee house on the second floor of an old house on Connecticut Avenue a couple of blocks south of Dupont Circle. The coffee house was always packed but the church with which it was associated closed up two weeks after I started performing there.
    Bob and I rehearsed all week. June 20: Regarding my "moment of truth": our first set almost bombed. "The Lone Wolf" was a bad start, but they were snapping their fingers as we sang "Separation Blues." Between sets, Pat, the redhaired dispatcher at GSFC, came by and a friend Andy (for Andrea). Our second set was Indian protest songs and was well-received. As Andy said, by the time it was over, she "felt like crawling under the table." Saturday, we had only one set and it was received without a great deal of enthusiasm or lack of it. ("The Lone Wolf" was Woody Guthrie's theme song for the show he did out of Los Angeles in the late Thirties; "Separation Blues" was a Patrick Sky song.) The "practice room" was next to the stage and I hung out the window calling to passersby on the street and inviting them up. That's where Pat and Andy Proudfoot saw me. Afterwards we went to a party with them. I don't think it was being given by anyone that Bob knew but somehow he got us invited.
    I saw Andy Proudfoot again when Bob and I were playing at the Circle. She walked up with a colored jazzman, Hank Mobley. A crowd gathered and soon was taken over by another guitar player. I left, depressed because Andy was with Mobley. Bob told me later that when he was preparing to leave, she asked him if he was leaving. He said yes and she said goodbye to Mobley. But by the time he had gotten his guitar packed, she had left and Mobley followed her. Bob made a circuit of the Circle but couldn't find her. I never saw her again.
    We called ourselves the hungry 2, which was a reference to The Holy Modal Rounders and also came from a piece Woody Guthrie did about the blues. (Bob: "A man can get hungry for a lot of things." Me: "He can get hungry for food." Bob: "He can get hungry for a woman." Me: "He can get hungry for a good job." Bob: "He can get hungry for a woman." Me: "He can get hungry for applause." Bob: "He can get hungry for a woman." The patter was a combined effort, but for some reason it seemed that Bob was always the one who said the woman line.)
    The following weekend, Bob and I went down to the Needle's Eye and I was in a very high manic mood but, due to our fooling around shouting down to the people passing by, we never got around to doing a set. A couple of hours later, at 2:15, I walked over to the allnight drug store on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown and passed a mockingbird, standing entranced as I listened to him run through his repertoire. I came home and wrote a song about it. The next day we played our last sets before the Needle's Eye closed. They were nothing to write home about.

    With the Needle's Eye closed, Bob and I went to another open mike, this one in the basement of a church near the O Street bridge to Georgetown. Although it was much larger, it didn't have the atmosphere of the old house that the Needle's Eye was in, and it didn't draw a very large audience.

    Another night spent with Sue and Bob. I may get to meet another of Bob's women friends, Eileen, tonight at the Pilgrim's Cave. I'm going to try to do a solo set.
    Last night I did one set by myself: "Dead Girl of Hiroshima," "Codeine," "False Friend," and "A Gentle Thing," which was received with a frightening silence of attention and about as much applause as a crowd of about 20 can generate. The same was true of a second set done with Bob Clayton, which also got a number of laughs, especially in "Bad Girl," when I said, "They tell me you're a lost girl, well, baby, I'm the lost-and-found."

hungry 2 photos


the hungry 2 on the road
"Where are we, Bob?" "Damned if I know, Grant."
(Photos by Sue Buchanan)



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