Bob Dylan Read online

  One notable aspect of the material chosen for his debut is the pervasive presence of death in many of the songs, particularly for such a young man. Bob Dylan had been preoccupied by death—obsessed, some say—since his youth in Hibbing, Minnesota, where he was involved in several car and motorcycle accidents. In New York, several friends, including Suze Rotolo, perceived an undertow of pessimistic despair beneath Dylan’s comic exterior, and it is entirely possible that this dichotomy was what attracted people to him. Years later he admitted to Robert Shelton that, during this time, he was terrified of dying before he had said all that he had to say, but that, ironically, he was partly dependent on this fear for creative inspiration. “I don’t write when I’m feeling groovy,” he explained. “I play when I’m feeling groovy. I write when I’m sick.” Of death itself, he seemed remarkably cynical: “All this talk about equality—the only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.”

  There was a five-month wait between the recording of the album and its release, due to David Kapralik’s cold feet about his newest artist. There was no obvious single with which to promote the LP, and its cheapness meant that there was an obvious temptation to cut losses by not releasing it. Some company operatives had even tagged Dylan ‘Hammond’s Folly’, so low was their enthusiasm. Hammond, though, would have none of it. “It was the same way the first time I played Billie Holiday’s record,” he recalled, “so to me, this negative reaction was almost a recommendation, and I was more determined than ever to get Bobby’s album released.”

  Going over Kapralik’s head to his friend, CBS president Goddard Lieberson, Hammond secured a release date of March 19, 1962, when Bob Dylan duly appeared with a front cover photo of Bob wearing his trademark cap and a suede sheepskin-style jacket he had chosen after seeing how cool Ian Tyson, of folk duo Ian & Sylvia, looked wearing a similar jacket on their album cover. A glance at the stringing of Bob’s guitar, however, indicates that the photograph was actually printed the wrong way round. On the back cover, Robert Shelton contributed scholarly annotations of the songs under the pseudonym Stacey Williams. Minimal promotion ensured the LP sold less than 5,000 copies in its first year, but by the time it was released, Dylan had already far outgrown the record anyway.

  TALKIN’ NEW YORK

  A sly commentary on his early days in the New York folk scene done in the talking blues style popularized by his hero Woody Guthrie, ‘Talkin’ New York’ is the earliest of Bob Dylan’s own songs to be recorded. Previously he had written other comic monologues in the same style, including ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues’, which satirized the “ethnic” folksong fashion of performers such as Harry Belafonte and Theodor Bikel, and ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues’, a humorous riff about a disastrous boat trip which derived from a newspaper clipping shown to him by Noel Stookey (later Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary).

  The talking blues is an easy mode to write in, and a devastatingly effective one to perform, involving as it does a simple, steady guitar vamp around three or four chords underneath the spoken lyrics, each verse usually capped by a sardonic, throwaway punch-line followed, in Dylan’s case, by a brief, double-time rush of harmonica which stands in for the absent chorus. In many ways, the talking blues was a direct precursor of rap music, enabling the performer to serve as a kind of journalist, reporting on current events with an immediacy and vitality denied to the more portentous, long-winded ballad form. As such, it served Woody Guthrie well during his decades as a labor activist and troubadour, and Dylan was to make good use of it through most of the Sixties, with comic riffs like ‘I Shall Be Free’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’. Even flat-out rock tracks like ‘Tombstone Blues’ and ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, and surreal nightmares like ‘On The Road Again’ and ‘Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again’ are ultimately just customized versions of the talking blues.

  ‘Talkin’ New York’ wittily presents the young Bob Dylan as a country naïf cast adrift amid the chilly winds of the big city, eventually throwing up in “Green-witch Village,” where callous coffee-house proprietors initially turn him away for sounding too much like a hillbilly, before he gets a job playing harmonica for a dollar a day. The song oozes cynical disillusion, with Dylan even borrowing Woody Guthrie’s famous image from ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ about people who can “rob you with a fountain pen.” But despite the narrator’s clear dislike of the harsh realities of the New York folkie’s life, he’s ultimately unable to break away completely: though he heads off for “western skies” in the final verse, he gets only as far as neighboring East Orange, New Jersey—where Guthrie resided in Greystone Hospital. The suggestion is, perhaps, that Dylan’s many visits to his ailing hero served to strengthen his ambition, to turn his steps back towards New York whenever his resolve was weakening.

  Certainly, the song reflects Woody’s hold on Dylan’s imagination at the time, both in its style and in its borrowings from Guthrie songs like ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ and ‘Talkin’ Subway’, the latter of which likewise talks of the singer’s bemusement at the way people go “down into the ground” in subway and traffic tunnels. Dylan did, however, claim to have written ‘Talkin’ New York’ at a truck stop while hitch-hiking westwards in May 1961, a trip that took him only as far as his old stamping-ground of Minneapolis.

  The disenchantment which underscores ‘Talkin’ New York’ does, however, seem rather unfair. No other folk singer working in Greenwich Village at the time experienced as meteoric a rise as Dylan, who made his big-time debut at Gerde’s Folk City within months of his arrival, and recorded an album—for a major label—well before his first year in the city was up. Indeed, virtually from the moment of his arrival, he was the golden boy of the folk scene, loved and mothered by a succession of benevolent friends, such as Bob and Sid Gleason, Mikki Isaacson, Dave and Terri Van Ronk, Eve and Mac Mackenzie, and Mel and Lillian Bailey, on whose couches he appears to have crashed in rotation for several months, before acquiring his first apartment on 4th Street.

  “I bummed around,” Dylan later claimed of his early days in New York. “I dug it all—the streets and the snows and the starving and the five-flight walk-ups and sleeping in rooms with ten people. I dug the trains and the shadows, the way I dug ore mines and coal mines. I just jumped right to the bottom of New York.” But though Dylan showed little compunction in using others ruthlessly—as showed by his appropriation of Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, against his friend’s express wishes—he seems to have believed that there was some sort of conspiracy operating against him in the folk scene, that people were going out of their way to retard his progress.

  This perception probably originated in his frustration at trying to get coverage in folk magazines like Sing Out!, and attempting to score a record deal with the specialist folk-music labels like Elektra, Vanguard and Folkways mere months after his arrival in New York. “I went up to Folkways,” Dylan said bitterly. “I said, ‘Howdy. I’ve written some songs, will you publish them?’ They wouldn’t even look at them. I’d heard that Folkways was good. Irwin Silber didn’t even talk to me, and I never got to see Moe Asch. They just about said ‘Go!’ And I had heard that Sing Out! was supposed to be helpful and friendly, big-hearted, charitable. Must have been in the wrong place—but Sing Out! was written on the door. Whoever told me they had a big heart was wrong.”

  SONG TO WOODY

  Of all the influences which the young Bob Dylan soaked up in his late teens, the folk singer Woody Guthrie had by far the greatest impact. Indeed, so closely associated did Dylan become with the legendary troubadour that he was twice offered the lead role in a film of Guthrie’s life based on his autobiography Bound For Glory; he turned it down both times, and David Carradine eventually took the part.

  The composer of more than a thousand songs, including such standards as ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You’, ‘Pastures Of Plenty’ and ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Guthrie was the prototype hobo minstr
el, thumbing rides and jumping freight-trains to criss-cross the USA through the Thirties and Forties, supporting leftist causes and singing of the tribulations and essential dignity of the common working man. “I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose,” he said. “Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling… no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built. I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.” Throughout his life, he considered himself simply a mouthpiece for the people, a journalist noting down the way things really were.

  His empathy with the downtrodden was well-founded in his own experience, which was tough at the beginning, tough at its conclusion, and unremittingly hard in between. Born in Oklahoma in 1912, named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie after the American President who founded the League of Nations, his childhood was scarred by family tragedy, both his sister and father killed in fires and his mother dying from the degenerative nerve disease Huntington’s Chorea. This ailment would be passed on to her son, who would spend the last years of his life, from 1954 to his death in October 1967, in hospitals, slowly wasting away—a cruelly tragic conclusion to a life so full of movement.

  By the age of 17, the orphaned Guthrie had begun the rootless drifting which would characterize a good deal of his life, joining the disenfranchised migratory workers from the ruined Dust Bowl farmlands of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas on their journey to the fruit farms of California—the social disaster dramatized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes Of Wrath. Taking his cue from his cousin, country singer Jack Guthrie, Woody began writing songs, adapting traditional folk tunes with his own lyrics, and quickly became the folk-poet of the underdog. Working solo, with his traveling companion Cisco Houston, or as part of The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, Guthrie offered an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing mean-spiritedness of the times which would eventually result in the Communist witch-hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy’s notorious House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Seeger, who was condemned by that committee, persuaded Guthrie to write about his own extraordinary life, and the result, Bound For Glory, caused a sensation when it was published during the Second World War. It was this autobiography which captured the interest of the young Bob Dylan in Minneapolis, where he could be found avidly devouring the book in the coffeeshops of the ‘Dinkytown’ campus/ bohemian district, memorizing passages and drawing inspiration from Guthrie’s tales of hard traveling and social injustice. Though he was by that time familiar with some of Guthrie’s material, he subsequently spent more and more of his time unearthing and learning Guthrie’s songs—a close friend from Minneapolis, David Whittaker, recalls him listening over and over again to a record of Guthrie’s half-hour epic ballad ‘Tom Joad’, day after day. Another college acquaintance, Ellen Baker, gave Dylan access to her parents’ huge collection of folk magazines, such as Sing Out!, and records by Guthrie: her parents were impressed with his interest, though like many who encountered Dylan at this period, they felt he was drawing on Guthrie’s life in a more than merely musical sense, trying to build himself a more interesting identity to replace the relatively ordinary one he had grown up with. His slim repertoire of folk songs soon bulged with Guthrie material, and his vocal inflection changed from a rather sweet voice to an imitation of the Okie’s brusque nasal twang.

  Dylan’s obsession with Guthrie grew into a standing joke among Dinkytown friends, particularly his ambition to meet his hero; some would play jokes on him when he was drunk, telling him Guthrie was outside or on the phone. But he did try and contact the singer one snowy night in December 1960, Whittaker affirms, phoning Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where Guthrie was dying of Huntington’s Chorea. The ward doctor told Dylan that Woody was too sick to come to the phone. That seemed to settle matters once and for all. “I’m going to see him,” Dylan told Whittaker, “I’m going to New York right now.” And he was off, hitch-hiking East through a blizzard.

  Dylan got to meet his idol in late January or early February 1961, at the home of Bob and Sid (Sidsel) Gleason, a folk-enthusiast couple with whom Guthrie spent weekends at their place in East Orange, New Jersey, where Sundays were a kind of open-house hootenanny session for such noted luminaries of the folk scene as Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, along with lesser lights such as Peter LaFarge, Logan English, Lionel Kilburg and Guthrie disciple Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Dylan had apparently hitched out to Greystone Hospital a few days earlier, and had visited Guthrie’s family home in Howard Beach, Queens, where he gave Woody’s young son Arlo an impromptu harmonica lesson, but the Sunday session at the Gleasons’ was probably the first time Guthrie —or any of the folkie crowd, for that matter—was made aware of his existence. Having heard of the Gleasons in his first few weeks as a coffeehouse folkie in Greenwich Village, Dylan had called on them and secured an invite to the following Sunday’s session, where he sat quietly on the floor by the couch where Guthrie lay, frail and palsied, while Houston chatted to Guthrie about his own illness (which claimed his life later that year), and Elliott tried vainly to cheer proceedings up. It was, by all accounts, a somewhat dismal afternoon. When Dylan finally sang a few songs, the old master was impressed. “He’s a talented boy,” one of those present recalls Guthrie saying, “Gonna go far.”

  Shortly after this first meeting, Dylan wrote ‘Song To Woody’, basing the melody on Guthrie’s own ‘1913 Massacre’. A sincere, if sentimental, tribute from an acolyte to an icon written in a gentle waltz-time, the song acknowledges the pupil’s debt to the master, reflects with longing upon the master’s earlier, rambling days and concludes with an assurance that the pupil, too, will seek out experiences with the same diligence and integrity. Over the following weeks, Dylan visited Guthrie several times in hospital and frequently attended the Gleasons’ weekend soirees where, much to the envious chagrin of Kilburg and English, he became a firm favorite of Woody’s. The first question Guthrie would ask when the Gleasons arrived at the hospital to pick him up was “Is the boy gonna be there?”; and when, one Sunday, the boy played ‘Song To Woody’ for him, Guthrie beamed with pleasure and assured him, “That’s damned good, Bob!” After Dylan had left, Woody told the Gleasons, “That boy’s got a voice. Maybe he won’t make it by his writing, but he can really sing it.”

  The boy was growing up, however, and he grew to realize that Woody was far from the idealized hero of his imagination, that, though touched with genius, he was just as petty, irresponsible and egotistical as the next man. This undoubtedly had a significant effect on Dylan’s songwriting and performing styles and his attitude to life. A few years later, he told Nat Hentoff of The New Yorker magazine, “After I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him—as much as he could talk—and the talking helped. But, basically, he wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realized that. So Woody was my last idol.”

  The original song manuscript—a sheet of yellow legal paper—ended up with the Gleasons. On it is the song and Dylan’s note, “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.

  THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN

  After the poor sales of his debut album, there was talk at Columbia of Dylan’s contract being dropped before he could make a second record. John Hammond, however, would have none of it, and blocked David Kapralik’s move to offload ‘Hammond’s Folly’ by appealing over his head to Columbia president Goddard Lieberson, an old friend whom he had been responsible for bringing into the company years before. Helped by the support of Johnny Cash, one of the label’s leading country stars, who made no secret of his admiration for the youngster, Hammond was able to secure an extension of Dylan’s contract—for which Columbia was presumably eternally grateful. A giant leap beyond his raw debut, The Freewhee
lin’ Bob Dylan was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that changed the face of first folk, then rock music.

  There are two basic driving forces behind the Freewheelin’ album: Dylan’s involvement in the civil rights movement; and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s absence in Italy, which spurred him into a prolific fever of songwriting. Since Suze was the person who drew Dylan into the civil rights arena in the first place, her position alongside the singer on the album cover was more than justified. Bob and Suze had bumped into each other a few times before through her sister Carla—who worked for folk archivist Alan Lomax and was an early supporter of Dylan—but the two became a couple following a benefit concert he played on July 29, 1961, for the Riverside Church’s radio station WRVR-FM. The youngest daughter of politically active Italian immigrant parents, Suze was already involved in de-segregation and anti-nuclear campaigns, working as a secretary for the Congress On Racial Equality. She helped Bob bring his general concern for the underdog and dislike of injustice into sharper, more specific focus.

  The pair began an intense, if problematic, two-year affair. At first, Suze had the effect of smoothing out Bob’s spikier side, sweetening his demeanor and encouraging him to smarten up a little. But after the couple took a tiny apartment at 161 West 4th Street, the demands of his ego began to encroach upon her own ego-space, and she started to feel smothered by his attention. She was an intelligent young woman with interests of her own in the theater and visual arts—she introduced Bob to the work of Bertolt Brecht, who would be a big influence on his work—but Dylan seemed to require nothing more of her than that she be “Bob’s girl”. As early as November 1961, before Dylan had released any records, she confided in a letter to a friend, Sue Zuckerman, “I don’t want to get sucked under by Bob Dylan and his fame. I really don’t. It sort of scares me… It really changes a person when they become well known by all and sundry. They develop this uncontrollable egomania… Something snaps somewhere, and suddenly the person can’t see anything at all except himself… I can see it happening to Bobby…”