Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography - Part I

"There was this thing about his imagination; sometimes he didn't know what was truth any more. I knew about Zimmerman within a few weeks of the time I met him. He said that Dylan was his mother's name. There were a hundred stories about his background. Then it dawned on us that they were all so interesting, so much fun that I came to the conclusion after a while I didn't care about the quote unquote truth about what he was."

A Minneapolis girl, her mother a professional photographer, Gretel had been to Bennington for a while, was a dancer, played the guitar, and was part of the scene. She met Dylan in a folk club called The Scholar around February 1960, about the time he was giving up on college. He was living above a drugstore by then, a short walk from The Scholar. She would get together with him and play the guitar, and she remembers introducing him to the old New Orleans whorehouse song, "House of the Rising Sun."

Dylan, tracing some of his roots in a conversation a couple of years later: "And then you arrive at Woody Guthrie, who sounds pretty weird and obviously looks like you..."

He became Woody Guthrie. Paul Nelson, writer and editor, who knew Dylan at the university, would later write: "He was moving so rapidly that one could say his only style was that of transition, both in his artistic and personal life. It took him about a week to become the finest interpreter I have yet heard of the songs of Woody Guthrie."

Dylan's stories began to change to fit his changing identity. "I met Woody once in California," he told friends. Some of Bob's friends knew he would have had to be very young to have seen Woody in California because of Woody's illness, but they never let on that they suspected him of lying. As blues singer John Koerner put it: "I never bothered thinking about any of that."

Ellen Baker was exactly Dylan's age (one day younger) and a student at the university. Her mother was a Minneapolis grade school teacher, her father an industrial chemist who has been a folk music collector for years, with a house full of all the old People's Songs, Sing Outs, folklore material up to the rock era, and hundreds of recordings. The Baker house, on Gerard Street, not far from the university, was a second meeting room for the kids in the Folk Song Club at the school, and for other folkies. Once a week or so, for years, the place was filled with kids playing, informal, with coffee and cake and a lot of music.

"Some of the people around used to call him 'That itinerant Jewish folk singer.'" Ellen recalls. "He wanted so much to he part of what he was singing about. I used to ask him, 'How's the man of the soil today?' And that's what he was.

"He so absolutely became Woody Guthrie in the months I knew him well, from September to about December. 'We're going to go see Woody in New York,' he used to tell me all the time. He was painfully sincere in his feelings. He had an obsession about Woody Guthrie, and going to see him. And people used to put him on about it, especially when he was drunk. We'd be at a party and a couple of them would say, 'Woody's outside, Bob, Woody's here. Woody wants to see you.' And Bob would go dashing down into the snow in his shirtsleeves, crying, 'Hey, Woody, where are you? Wait, Woody, wait!' It got a big laugh. Very disgusting people."

Ellen's mother sensed some of the conflicts in Dylan. Mrs. Baker recalls: "I had the feeling he was a little lost boy. I felt he was rejecting a lot of things, sort of traveling in disguise. He built a character for himself and it's hard living up to that. I felt it was just a posture, at first. I took it as a kind of chutzpah thing, this little kid making a model on a Woody Guthrie. I didn't think of it as genius. I thought it was imitative.

"At the same time, there was this intensity, this singleness of purpose, within the boy. Whatever it was, he got a lot of support from inside himself. He was not compromising. He was going to entertain, that was what he was going to do. He was withdrawn, but I think inside he was on all the time. Once he lighted on Guthrie it all began to come together for him."

Dylan had been in Minneapolis a year by the time Ellen got to know him well, and in that year he had grown a great deal. And Dylan felt the growth, and was very much aware that he had something. There was also a toughening of spirit and a deepening cynicism — even about Woody. A few who were very close to Bob at this stage felt that in adopting the Guthrie identity Bob was coldly calculating: he knew Guthrie was dying, was no longer able to write or perform, and that a vacuum existed in the folk world. A vacuum that could be filled by a young man named Dylan.

Most of his Minneapolis friends however, don't believe it was as conscious as all that. More likely, he intuitively seized on Guthrie as the final piece that would fully complete his identity.

John Koerner: "I don't know about conscious designs. What it was, mostly, is that he was going to New York to see Guthrie and to get into a situation where some of the stuff he was doing could develop."