Bob Dylan Read online

  THIS IS A CARLTON BOOK

  Text and design copyright © Carlton Books Limited 1998, 2011

  This edition published by Carlton Books Limited in 2011

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of cover or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition, being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser. All rights reserved.

  eISBN 978-1-78011-209-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The material in this book was originally published as My Back Pages

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  BOB DYLAN

  THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN

  THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

  ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN

  BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

  HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

  BLONDE ON BLONDE

  THE BASEMENT TAPES

  JOHN WESLEY HARDING

  NASHVILLE SKYLINE

  BOB DYLAN 1960S DISCOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  Of all the stars thrown up by the pop explosion of the Sixties, none has exerted as deep or lasting an influence on our culture as Bob Dylan. Others may have been prettier, or sold more records, or made a smoother transition into today’s gossip-column celebrocracy, but none has so irreversibly altered our conception of what is possible within a popular song, and particularly within its lyrics. He was pop’s great emancipator: from Hendrix to the Beatles, Clapton to Cohen, Beach Boys to Beck, virtually all of rock music has been inspired or influenced in some way by Dylan’s creative ambition. It’s testament to that ambition that, almost four decades on from his recording debut, Bob Dylan remains a restless, quixotic figure, heedless of musical trends, exasperatingly uneven, but still capable of stunning work like 1997’s Time Out Of Mind.

  But whatever the merits (or otherwise) of his subsequent work, and notwithstanding in particular the greatness of Blood On The Tracks, it’s upon his sixties songs that Bob Dylan’s reputation ultimately rests: that extraordinary sequence of records which unerringly tracked the tenor of the times as he moved through his various incarnations as raw young folkie, prince of protest, folk-rock innovator, symbolist rocker and country-rock pioneer.

  Dylan’s progress through that decade is a trail which constituted the primary motor for my own development, as it did for so many others; yet to a younger generation his position grows progressively less clear, more vague and blurred—possibly because of his constant creative flux, but also, I think, simply as a result of the accelerating erosion of knowledge which seems to accompany our supposed ‘information society.’ A case in point: in a weekly British music paper recently, the guitarist with a highly successful American post-grunge rock band—we’ll call him James—cited Dylan’s ‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’ as one of his favorite songs. Fine, except that he erroneously claimed it was a fictional story—and one which, furthermore, was apparently issued on an album called Don’t Look Back. Which doesn’t exist.

  This book is basically to help people like James. In it, I’ve tried to give some idea of the forces—musical, political, historical, literary, philosophical and personal—at play in each of Dylan’s songs through this period of his greatest achievement, along with brief accounts of their recording, where appropriate. For research material, I consulted much of the available trove of Dylan literature, of which the most useful were the three classic biographies—Anthony Scaduto’s no-nonsense Bob Dylan, Bob Spitz’s iconoclastic Dylan: A Biography, and Robert Shelton’s exhaustively detailed No Direction Home—all of which proved fascinating funds of information.

  Dylan’s own Lyrics 1962–1985 sparked as many questions as it provided answers, and Craig McGregor’s excellent compilation Bob Dylan: A Retrospective contained a wealth of contemporary essays and interviews. Two other compilations, All Across The Telegraph (ed. Michael Gray and John Bauldie) and The Dylan Companion (ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman), offered stimulating blends of opinion and explication. Other books consulted include Levon Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire; Greil Marcus’s examination of The Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic; Clinton Heylin’s account of Dylan’s recording sessions, Dylan Behind Closed Doors; and Tim Riley’s Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. On more general social and political matters, the following were helpful: Hugh Brogan’s Kennedy; Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg’s The Growth Of The American Republic, and David Steigerwald’s The Sixties And The End Of Modern America.

  I’ve also drawn on interviews I conducted at various times with Joan Baez, Don Pennebaker, Sam Lay, Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper; I am particularly indebted to Robbie and Al for their time and generosity. I’d also like to thank my editors at The Independent, Q, Mojo and the NME—in whose pages various of the opinions contained herein were originally ventilated in one form or another—particularly Neil Spencer, Mark Ellen, Giles Smith, Nick Coleman and Mat Snow.

  Other friends, colleagues and musicians who have directly contributed to my greater understanding of Dylan throughout the years, or who have helped this project in some other way, include—first and foremost—the late John Bauldie, who helped re-ignite my dormant interest; and also Phil Barnes, Pete Bennion, Jackson Browne, Paul Du Noyer, Barry Everard, Patrick Humphries, Daniel Lanois, Jared Levine, Roger Longmore, Phil Manzanera, Gavin Martin, Rainer Ptacek, Leon Russell, Patrick Smith, Paul Trynka, Don & David Was, Lucian Randall at Carlton Books, and most of all, the lovely Linda, who kept me sane enough to finish it. My love goes out to all of them, and to each and every underdog in the whole wide Universe.

  ANDY GILL

  BOB DYLAN

  When Bob Dylan recorded his first album in late November of 1961, he had been in New York less than a year, most of it spent scuffling for low-paying gigs on the coffeehouse folk music circuit based in Greenwich Village. Folk music had joined jazz as the hip musical choice of bohemian beatniks and students through the late Fifties, as a more “authentic” response to what was increasingly perceived as the gaudy insincerity of rock ’n’ roll: the raw power of originators like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard was being supplanted by tame corporate copyists like Pat Boone and Fabian, and the music industry was riven by payola scandals which left a strong stench of materialist corruption around rock ’n’ roll.

  For the more serious-minded young adult, American folk music offered a comparatively clean breath of righteous fresh air, having served as the rallying cry of liberals, lefties and outsiders through the conservative Eisenhower era. Just as importantly, the older, pre-war songs which were the bread and butter of any folk performer’s act came from a time before America had assumed imperial dominance over the world, and were considered unsullied by the plastic desires of the Fifties. Their themes and mythographies bore the authenticating stamp of a timeless oral tradition, and though collectors like Alan Lomax, Paul Oliver and Harry Smith may have recorded or compiled the classic folk and blues performances in the early decades of the century, there was no telling how old the songs themselves actually were, or how many generations further back they stretched. For a country which had effectively wiped out its native Indian culture during its brutal colonizing years, these songs provided a badly-needed sense of cultural heritage.

  The folk movement received its biggest boost in 1958, when The Kingston Trio, a San Francisco-based folk group, had a huge, chart-topping hit with ‘Tom Dooley’, a song traceable back at least as far as 1866. Suddenly saleable, folk music started to be regarded with something approaching mild interest by the big record companies, who joined specialist labels like Folkways, Elektra and Vanguard in signing
up the genre’s leading lights. Columbia had Pete Seeger and The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, and Vanguard itself scored a coup when the young Joan Baez became the toast of the scene after her appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.

  By 1961, folk music was still largely the preserve of the die-hard traditionalists, who considered these old songs to be texts just as sacred as any fundamentalist’s Bible; their performance should be as close to the original version as possible, any deviation being deemed a bowdlerization or corruption of the song’s integrity. But there were signs of a split in the folkie ranks, between these older, “High Folk” types and a new breed of “Low Folk” performers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, who sought pleasure in the music, rather than being concerned to be intellectually truthful in their interpretations. The young Dylan was very much in the latter camp, drawn by Elliott’s and Van Ronk’s unashamedly “black” inflections applied to “white” material, and he quickly developed a distinctive singing style of his own, part-Woody Guthrie, part-blues moan—which some found quite comical. Nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own. Along with the piercing blasts of harmonica (which he played in a wire brace similar to the one he had seen bluesman Jesse Fuller using during a three-week stay in Denver) and a stage style that incorporated little Chaplinesque moments of physical comedy with an engaging line of patter, Bob Dylan became an accomplished performer with an easily discernible, inimitable character.

  The campus town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had evolved a folk scene of its own. Its leading lights were Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Jim Kweskin and Eric Von Schmidt—the latter became Dylan’s host on his visits there. On one such trip, he introduced Bob to Texan folk singer Carolyn Hester and her husband Richard Fariña, who instantly took a shine to him. Hester was about to record her third album—her first on a major label—with the legendary John Hammond Sr. Always a man with an eye for the main chance, Dylan played her a couple of his own tunes, and Hester decided to use one, a blues called ‘Come Back Baby’, on her new album. Doubly fortunate, from Bob’s point of view, was the fact that the song featured an extended harmonica break, which Bob himself would play. He was, after all, a professional blues-harpist, his only recording session to date having been as a sideman, playing harmonica on an album by Harry Belafonte. (He would also play harmonica at sessions for Victoria Spivey and Big Joe Williams before Hester’s album was recorded.) Hester and Dylan agreed to meet for rehearsals at the apartment of poet Ned O’Gorman in New York, which is where John Hammond first encountered the young man who would become the crowning glory of his career in A&R.

  It was already an illustrious career, to say the least. Hammond had discovered and launched the career of Billie Holiday, and had been instrumental in the successes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter and the celebrated boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade “Lux” Lewis. A devoted fan of jazz and blues, his ground-breaking promotion of the Spirituals To Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938/39 was the single greatest factor in the dissemination of the various forms of black music to a wider—and whiter—audience. He was, in short, a giant of 20th century music, with a proven ear for original talent.

  At the rehearsal, Hammond was immediately intrigued by the young Dylan. “I saw this kid in the peaked hat playing not terribly good harmonica, but I was taken with him,” Hammond later recalled. “I asked him, ‘Can you sing? Do you write? I’d like to do a demo session with you, just to see how it is.’ It was just one of those flashes. I thought, ‘I gotta talk contract right away.’” Checking that Dylan would be available for the session, he set a recording date for the afternoon of September 29, 1961. In the interim, fate would play an auspicious part in Dylan’s life.

  The New York Times chose that very day to run a glowing review, which their music critic Robert Shelton had written, of Bob’s performance at Gerdes Folk City on September 26, where he was supporting The Greenbriar Boys, a well-liked bluegrass group. Under a photo of Bob in his trademark cap, and the headline “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Stylist,” the perspicacious Shelton raved about the “bright new face” that was “bursting at the seams with talent,” offering a detailed account of Dylan’s performing style and material, and concluding, with remarkable foresight, that “…it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up.”

  All the Village folkies were knocked out by Shelton’s piece—except for The Greenbriar Boys, who were relegated to the final four paragraphs of the review, a virtual afterthought. Dylan, unsurprisingly, was elated. He arrived at the Hester recording session clutching the review, which he showed to Hammond. “I could tell Hammond was hooked from the very start,” Hester later recalled. “The longer we worked, the more I could see Hammond’s interest in Bob developing, until the two of them were thick as thieves.” He played harmonica on three tracks of her album, including his own ‘Come Back Baby’, and secured an invitation to come in later to cut some demos of his own with Hammond. Dylan’s studio technique, the producer discovered, was undisciplined—“he popped every P, hissed every S, and habitually wandered off mike”—but Hammond heard enough in his performance to convince him that here was a major talent in the raw, who should be snapped up quickly. Dylan, of course, was exhilarated when he left the studio. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said later. “I remember walking out of the studio. I was, like, on a cloud. It was up on 7th Avenue, and when I left I happened to walk by a record store. It was one of the most thrilling moments in my life. I couldn’t believe that I was staring at all the records in the window—Frankie Laine, Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, Mitch Miller, Tony Bennett and so on—and soon I myself would be among them in the window. I guess I was pretty naive, you know.”

  Hammond was fortunate in that the new Director of A&R at Columbia, David Kapralik, had been appointed a few weeks before with the brief to strengthen the company’s youth roster. “Dylan’s an extraordinary young man,” Hammond told his boss. “I don’t know if he’s going to sell, but he has something profound to say.” Such was Kapralik’s faith in Hammond’s ears that he allowed the young folkie to be signed without even hearing him. There were initial problems in signing the contract—which was for one year, with four subsequent yearly options—when Dylan, still a minor, claimed he had no parents who could sign for him; but Hammond decided to let him sign anyway, a judgment call that would cause a few problems a year or two later. At the age of 20, Bob Dylan became a Columbia recording artist.

  It wasn’t that great a gamble on Columbia’s part. The album was recorded in a couple of late November afternoons, with Dylan accompanied by just his own guitar and harmonicas (which he kept moist in a glass of water), and it cost a piffling $402 to make. Hammond, who believed in catching the spontaneous flow of inspiration, rarely pushed Bob beyond two or three takes of any song, and encouraged him to vent his hostility through his performances. “There was a violent, angry emotion running through me then,” Dylan explained in his first teen magazine interview, with Seventeen magazine. “I just played guitar and harmonica and sang those songs, and that was it. Mr Hammond asked me if I wanted to sing any of them over again but I said no. I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That’s terrible.” At one point, he borrowed his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s lipstick holder to use as a slide for his guitar on the bleak spiritual ‘In My Time Of Dyin’’ a song he never performed live. He was pleased when, during his recording of Bukka White’s ‘Fixin’ To Die’, an old black janitor stopped working and stepped into the studio to listen.

  The material on Dylan’s debut album—“some stuff I’ve written, some stuff I’ve discovered, some stuff I stole”—offers a rough cross-section of the kind of songs that could be heard any night at any coffeehouse folk club in Greenwich Village in 1961. Suze Rotolo’s sister Carla worked for the musicologist Alan Lomax, and through her and other notable collectors such as Bob and Sidsel Gleason, Dylan gained access to a treasure-trove of folk
classics, on albums such as Harry Smith’s celebrated six-LP Anthology Of American Folk Music and Lomax’s own noted Folk Songs Of North America compilation.

  The songs he chose were picked to provide as comprehensive a demonstration of his styles as possible, though he wisely chose to downplay his interest in Woody Guthrie, apart from his own ‘Song To Woody’. Besides this and his ‘Talkin’ New York’, there was the resigned ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, which he had heard Judy Collins singing (as ‘Maid Of Constant Sorrow’) on his brief sojourn in Denver; ‘You’re No Good’, a song by another Denver acquaintance, the one-man blues band Jesse Fuller; revved-up versions of the old spiritual ‘Gospel Plow’ and the traveling songs ‘Highway 51’ and ‘Freight Train Blues’; ‘Fixin’ To Die’, ‘In My Time Of Dyin’’ and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’; a satirical romp through the traditional ‘Pretty Peggy-O’, which poked fun at more precious interpretations; a beguiling arrangement of ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ which, as he explained in a spoken introduction, had been taught him by Ric Von Schmidt “in the green pastures of Harvard University,” and which would, with minor revisions, provide The Animals with their first hit as ‘Baby Let Me Walk You Home’; and another song which heavily influenced the British R&B band, the brothel lament ‘House Of The Rising Sun’.

  This last inclusion would cause a bitter split in Dylan’s friendship with Dave Van Ronk, who had originally developed the dark, haunting arrangement he used, and could thus be presumed to have first option on the song in that form. Shortly after the sessions, Dylan bumped into Van Ronk and asked him if he could record the song. “I’d rather you didn’t,” replied Van Ronk, “because I’m going into the studio soon and I’d like to record it for my album.” Embarrassed, Dylan had to admit that he’d already recorded it, and couldn’t pull it from the album because Columbia wanted it included. Furious, Van Ronk stormed off, and didn’t speak to Dylan for the next two months. Bob never really regained his former friend’s full trust.