The 2CD set released by the Smithsonian Folkways documenting the Fast Folk community only touches on the history on those involved. They relyed on only a few for liner notes while the knowledge and names involved in the Coop and the club that spawned much of the recording, the Speak Easy, are numerous. The magazine began six months after the opening of the Speak Easy. The MacDougal St. club supplied not only a pool for potential recordings of musicians, but a labor source for the magazines production. l kept the books there and lived its reality.   http://www.wjffradio.org/FolkPlus/SpeakEasy/dailynews.html .

In the summer of 1981 Vinny Vok and I had researched its location. By the fall I had negotiated a space and  created a framework for musician involvement in the form of a steering committee to run its operations. Bored with normal booking, nights took on themes:  "Tall night", "Italian night" etc. Annoyed that most of the hooters were trying to emulate Bob Dylan, I decided to book a Bob Dylan imitator's night. It was an unexpected, crowd-swelling success.

1. Bob Dylan #26 (Frank Christian) from August of 1982

What ended up on the record was a representation of a what was happening in the village at the time. Nightly, at the Speak Easy one could hear who was active in the folk world at the time. Hoots, popular around the corner at Folk City in the days Mike Porco ran it,  were re-labelled dollar nights. Having looked over the books I kept at the time, dollar nights would average bring in anywhere from no money, to 20 dollars, meaning that was the number in attendance. Some of the issues revolved around themes at times (Humor April 83, Women Oct 84) and then the issues began to expand from the Greenwich village crowd to include tributes to Cafe Lena,  the Toronto or the Boston scene.

2. Chuck Hall - Dollmaker's Secret

Many musician's wrote and played, but few regularly performed other performers tune's.  Lucy Kaplanski (spelling at the time) did. In an effort to get more material to the public's ear, the Song Project group was born. It gave voice to the tunes. Members over the years changed, but here is Tom Intondi, Frank Christian, Marth P. Hogan and Lucy singing a Jerry Devine song.

3. Song Project - (J.Devine) Monchanin

Lucy was one of the few who would sing other singer's works: Suzanne Vega, Jack Hardy or Brian Rose songs. Mark Dann was omnipresent on songs. He would show up with a tape recorder and memorize everything by the second time it was played anywhere.

4. Lucy Kaplanski (B.Rose) - Open All Night

The Coop was an ambitious project that relyed heavily on an ability to be on time monthly. Though the pool for music was abundant, business expertise was not. I remember being amazed that something so extensive would have begun without a filing cabinet and hauling one up many stairs in an effort to organize the information coming in from interested subscribers.

5. Bob Franke - The Great Storm is Over (July 82)

6.  Suzanne Vega - Gypsy

7.  Josie Kuhn - Cows Come Home

Josh Joffin and David Roth put out an LP together. Flipped over you would see each performer.

8.  Josh Joffin - Crazy Horse  Dec 82/Jan 83

After banquets and membership dues to the Cooperative, assembly lines would stamp, label and prepare issues for mailing. By December of the first year, they put out a joint monthly issue, and began to try to catch up.  My brother was one of the first subscribers, number 3 actually. His complaint was like many we heard, that the idea was good but the delivery was unreliable. The organizational aspects of the project were weak. Dates that began on the records February 1982 and so forth, faded into Vol 3 #2 after several years and then month identification succumbed to a mention only of a year. Then a questionnaire went out about changing to a CD format, it didn't go over really big at the time. Many clung to vynal and even stated that they refused to purchase cd players. The operation couldn't support both formats however and the cd version took over.

9.  Ilene Weis - Woman of a Calm Heart  (Sept 82)

10. Mary Catherine Reynolds -  Weller's Wiskey

11.  Jack Hardy (M. Roche) - Apostrophe to the Wind

12. Nancy Lee Baxter - Terrarium

13. Tom McGhee - Rock Breaks Scissors

A caller mentioned some URL's are dedicated to this game, it's rules, and the use of the game to solve conflict.
Official Rules are at:  www.rpsgame.com/rules.html
http://www.grudge-match.com/History/rock-paper-scissors.shtml

14. Michael Jerling - Long Black Wall

15. John Gorka - Downtown Tonight

16. Laura Burns / Roger Rosen  (Jones )  - Killkelly Ireland

17. Palmer and Bragg- Bayonne

18.  Julie Snow - Baptism of Fire

19.  Greg Brown - Speed Trap Boogie

20.  Colvin & Kaplanski (J.Zwaiman) - Heart on Ice

21.  Shawn Colvin - Knowing What I KNow Now

22.  Rachel Polisher - Rough Edges

In Feb 1982  Andy Breckman, Joey George  and Christine Lavin were playing Speak Easy  on the weekend the N.Y. Post's Ira Meyer wrote about the unique musician's cooperative. That month was the date of the first "Coop: Fast Folk Musical Magazine" The title was a combination of what we liked from the member's suggestions. Later, production and even the crowd involved would be reduced and referred to as Fast Folk.

23.  Christine Lavin - Regretting What I Said

24.  Dave Van Ronk - New Jersey Stomp

25. David Massengill - Great American Dream

Having typed hours and hours of the Coop Magazine, booked the Speak Easy nightly and listened to countless musician's from that time, I know that neither two discs, two liner note writers,  nor two hours can present the whole picture. This show presents only a slice of some realities of the Fast Folk operations in it's first few years. In the past I have focused other setlists of music of that time:

Folk Plus airs Saturdays from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm on WJFF following NPR's Car Talk.
90.5 Jeffersonville, NY. and 94.5 in Monticello. We Hydro-powered Public Radio serving the Mid-Hudson Region, North East Pennsylvania, and the Upper Delaware Valley.

Format:   Artist - Track Title
               Album - Label / Contacts
Theme:   Jay Ansill- The Two Horizons  -  Origami - Flying Fish