Creativity Quote by Dave Van Ronk

There is a whole career’s worth of disillusionment tucked into the casual shrug of “I was tired anyway.” Dave Van Ronk isn’t performing tragic martyrdom here; he’s undercutting it. The phrasing is almost aggressively unromantic, the way a working musician talks when the mythology of the scene has long since stopped paying the rent.

Context matters: by the mid-70s the folk boom that helped make Van Ronk a downtown fixture had cooled, splintered, and been repackaged. The industry’s center of gravity moved toward arena rock, singer-songwriter polish, and a more corporate touring economy. For someone like Van Ronk - a craftsman with a gruff voice, encyclopedic taste, and zero interest in being an easily branded product - “the business” wasn’t just record labels. It was the constant bargaining with trend cycles, gatekeepers, and the expectation that authenticity should also be marketable.

The intent is blunt self-reporting, but the subtext is a critique of how cultural movements chew up their originators. “Wanted to get out” implies agency; “tired anyway” admits wear and tear, as if the decision is both choice and inevitability. It’s also a stealth protest against the romantic story we tell about artists: that the real ones can’t help but keep going. Van Ronk suggests the opposite - that staying in can be an act of compliance, and leaving can be the most honest response to a machine that mistakes endurance for devotion.