Last Call is a song by Dave Van Ronk

Dave Van Ronk

Dave Van Ronk was an American folk singer, born in Brooklyn, New York, who settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and was eventually nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street" ....

, originally released on his album Songs For Ageing Children

Songs for Ageing Children

Songs for Ageing Children is an album by American folk and blues performer Dave Van Ronk, released in 1973.-Side one:#"Duncan & Brady" – 3:48#"Green Rocky Road" – 4:08...

 in 1973, and released in a different version on Going Back To Brooklyn

Going Back to Brooklyn

Going Back to Brooklyn is an album by American folk and blues singer Dave Van Ronk, released in 1994.Although Van Ronk was primarily an interpretive singer of traditional folk and blues songs along with covers of the songs of others, he still wrote a number of songs over his long career...

 in 1994, and is one of the few songs he has written.

Van Ronk claims that he woke up one morning after a night of drinking with Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...

 and Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...

, and the lyrics to this song were written on a piece of paper. Neither of them admitted to writing it, so he had to assume that he had

Cultural references

Crime writer Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is an acclaimed contemporary American crime writer best known for two long-running New York–set series, about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, respectively...

 took the title of his Matthew Scudder

Matthew Scudder

Matthew Scudder is a fictional private investigator, the most famous and enduring creation of American crime writer Lawrence Block.Scudder debuted in 1976's The Sins of the Fathers as an alcoholic ex-cop who had recently quit the NYPD and left his family after accidentally causing the death of a...

 novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes is a Matthew Scudder novel, written by Lawrence Block. Based on the short story "By the Dawn's Early Light", and published four years after Eight Million Ways to Die, this novel resurrected Block's interest in the character and led to his writing 10 more titles in the...

(1986) from the lyrics to the song:

And so we’ve had another night

of poetry and poses,

and each man knows he’ll be alone

when the sacred ginmill closes.

A key scene in the novel has ex-cop Scudder listening to the song late one night in the studio apartment of a bartender as they drink their lives away, and the song serves as a structural and philosophical theme for the book.