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Following is the first of two lengthy excerpts from Anthony Scaduto's authoritative biography of Bob Dylan, to he published by Grosset & Dunlap on February 29th. Together, the two Rolling Stone segments add up to a total of approximately 35,000 words, which is substantially less than a third of the book's length. Thus, the book in its entirety is recommended to serious followers of the Dylan legend — and who among us these days isn't that?
Anthony Scaduto is a former police and court reporter accustomed to ferreting out hard facts and making them stick. This he has done in tracing Dylan's development as both man and artist. The end product is a richly-detailed and penetrating portrait of Dylan — and what Dylan mirrors of our times. — Grover Lewis
"Dylan used to tell us that he came out doing it — out of the womb, singing and playing and writing," folk-singer S. David Cohen, formerly known as Dave Blue, likes to recall. That's an exaggeration, certainly, but possibly not by that much; at least, Bob Dylan said it so often, with so many variations, that he must have come half way to believing it. A man who is cloaking himself in myth must believe in his own magic to make it all work. "After a while," a close friend from the early days recalls, "he didn't seem to know any more what was truth and what was his own creation."
During one of our talks, Dylan conceded that I was "right on target" in discussing the inner Self that he could not repress, that brought him so much pain he had to make himself invisible, and provided him with the strength to reach for higher levels of consciousness.
Eric von Schmidt, folksinger, songwriter, illustrator, writer of children's books, was close to Dylan in his early professional years. He recalls: "Dylan's mind seemed to make strange jumps, like electricity. His mind was the most exciting... like a calypso mind, making instantaneous sorts of connections, relating seemingly unrelated things and putting them together into something marvelous. He doesn't go from A to B to C and so on — he can jump from A to G while other people are plodding on. He doesn't need to plod. He is able to make connections, not out of something he studies, but viscerally."
Von Schmidt recalls: "Dylan was continually inventing himself," as a circus hand, carnival boy, road bum, musician, and many other roles in what have come to be called the Dylan myths. One of those myths was that he had started running away when he was ten, got picked up by the police and sent home, and ran away again. But he never actually ran away as a child; he ran from, and within, himself, because of what his parents wanted him to be, what the educators wanted him to be, what Hibbing, Minnesota, wanted him to be.
He was going to be Bob Dylan (whoever Bob Dylan might be), not Robert Allen Zimmerman. As he matured, he built a new identity every step of the way in order to escape identity; he would pursue privacy as some pursue notoriety.
Echo Helstrom and Bob began going steady in Hibbing about a month after they met. He gave her his identification bracelet. "A symbol of our belonging to each other," Echo says. "We were really in love. Everybody laughs at kids when they fall in love, saying how they don't know what it all means or anything, but that's not true.
"By the time I met him it was just understood that music was his future. All along we knew there was no other way for him to get out of there, to leave Hibbing. I just knew he had to go on to his career, his singing. I accepted it on those terms, that when school was over, after graduation, he would be off and gone. Get out of Hibbing."
Echo's mother, Martha Helstrom, recalls: "Bob and John Buckland always talked big dreams together about how they were going to make it. They decided whichever got to be famous first would help the other one. They were always planning about being in the lime light, get all the world's attention, stuff like that. Elvis Presley — the idea was to be like him."
"When I first met Bobby he claimed he was an Okie, a real Okie," says Gretel Pelto, who was Gretel Hoffman back then while she and Bob were students at the University of Minnesota and residents of Minneapolis' student quarter, Dinkytown. "He never talked about Steinbeck because Bobby was, at least superficially, non-intellectual, a primitive. He sort of was one of Steinbeck's characters. He had a whole set of original stories that he was an Okie, that he was an orphan. And that he'd been on the road for years as a piano player.
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"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."
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But even his closest friends didn't believe he would make it. "We all laughed," Hugh Brown recalls. "It's so easy to say 'I'm going to make it big' and so hard to do it." And Gretel: "I don't think any of us believed he was going to make it. Because it was all so tough. Not that he wasn't good but there were a lot of good people. And, you see, at this time he was doing very little of his own composing. Mostly singing other people's songs."
Dylan stopped off at Lynn Kastner's house, carrying some clothing, records and books. "Hold onto this stuff for me," he said. "I'm going to New York to see Woody." He left, carrying his guitar and a knapsack.
One afternoon shortly before Christmas, Kevin Krown was sitting in a coffee house near the University of Chicago, when a chilled kid wearing a corduroy snap-brimmed cap wandered into the place.
"Kevin?" he asked.
"Yeah?" Krown asked in reply.
"They told me at your place you'd he hanging out here. I'm Bob Dylan."
"Great. Who's Bob Dylan?"
"Remember? Ya told me to look you up when I got to Chicago. I got here."
"Oh, yeah," Krown said. "Want to play piano somewhere?"
Krown introduced him to the folkie crowd. "He played guitar in the girls' dorm that night and I listened and it didn't ring. Whatever he was before, he wasn't that now." Krown asked: "What happened? Why you playing the guitar?"
"Well," Dylan said, "I met this guy Woody Guthrie in a hospital in New Jersey and I started playing guitar." He had not yet visited Guthrie, of course.
Dylan remained in Chicago for several weeks. He moved into Krown's place for a couple of days. Then he met a girl — "She grows pot in her place," he said — and moved in with her. He came and went, drifting in and out of Krown's circle, over the next few weeks, playing at parties, coffee houses, dorms.
He was writing a great deal by now, mostly rewording old folk standards into something that he considered his own kind of music, often Guthrie kind of things. The only song from this period that is remembered is his very significant "Song to Woody." Young Dylan's tribute to his idol who was slowly dying in a hospital almost a thousand miles away.
Dylan arrived in New York at the end of January, 1961. The city was shivering with temperatures down near zero, the coldest spell of weather to hit in at least 15 years. A week before he arrived a foot of snow had been dumped on New York, with drifts ten feet high, and the paralysis that usually grips the snow-bound city lingered for many days. Dylan went directly to Greenwich Village and wandered around, taking in the sights, checking the coffee houses and folk clubs and tourist bars along MacDougal and Bleecker Streets. That evening, lugging his guitar and knapsack, he wandered into the Cafe Wha?, a coffee house on MacDougal. Maddy Bloom, then a waitress there, remembers that Dylan found Manny Roth, who still operates the Wha? and said: "Just got here from the West. Name's Bob Dylan. I'd like to do a few songs. Can I
"Don't have a place yet. Know anybody's got a place I can crash for the night?"
"I'll see what I can do." Roth said.
Bob climbed up on the stage. Maddy recalls Dylan with his guitar and his harmonica on the wire holder around his neck. "I'd never seen that before. Thought it was unusual and kind of kooky." He sang a couple of Guthrie's songs and a few others, and between songs he told the audience a little about himself. "I been travelin' around the country," he said. Followin' in Woody Guthrie's footsteps. Goin' to the places he went to. All I got is my guitar and that little knapsack. That's all I need."
The Wha? was half empty but, Maddy recalls. A number of people in the audience seemed to share her feeling about Dylan: "I remember thinking he was very raw. That he had no professional polish, but that he had a quality of such great innocence, in a way. That you just had to notice him, you had to listen to him."
After a few songs Roth took the microphone and told the audience: "This kid has just come into town and he has no place to stay. Can anybody help him out?"
There were a half dozen offers, folk buffs from Queens and Brooklyn, straight people, not Village freaks. No one remembers now where Dylan spent that first night but those who were there remember very clearly that he seemed to drill right into the hearts of the audience.
Within a day or two he was hitchhiking out to Greystone Hospital, a mental institution near Morristown in central New Jersey, with facilities for some non-psychiatric patients like Woody. Dylan was alone, and exactly what took place is known only to him. But Kevin Krown recalls another visit to Greystone a short time later: "Guthrie was very shaky, he could barely talk, and he was very difficult to look at. But Dylan would sit beside him and play the guitar for him and somehow they communicated. Guthrie legitimately liked the guy, he even tried to play 'this land is your land' for Dylan." By this time Huntington's disease had practically crippled Guthrie. He couldn't do much more than strum the guitar with his full hand
Dylan sent a postcard hack to David Whittaker a couple of days after he arrived in the Village, a brief message scrawled on the back of one of those cards printed by the Guthrie Children's Fund. The organization set up to provide for Woody's children. The card carried the classic photo of Woody in a workshirt, holding his guitar in front of him. Dylan's enthusiasm leaps off the card: "I know Woody. I know Woody...I know him and met him and saw him and sang to him. I know Woody. Goddamn." He signed it, "Dylan."
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Bob Gleason and his wife Sid had been fans of Guthrie since the Thirties when they heard he was in Greystone they went to visit him. Guthrie complained about being confined to the hospital and the Gleasons persuaded hospital officials to let them take Guthrie around Morristown for the day. While wandering around the town, Gleason asked Guthrie if he'd like to spend weekends at their place if the doctors would agree, and Guthrie said he'd love it. The hospital director gave his permission, so long as Guthrie was back at night for special medication. The next Sunday, Mother's Day, 1959, the Gleasons picked up Guthrie at the hospital and drove him to their apartment in East Orange, New Jersey.
Over the next two years the Gleasons brought Woody to their apartment every weekend, missing only two weekends in all that time. The Gleason apartment in East Orange became a center of folk activity, filled every weekend and frequently during the week with "every stumblebum in creation," as one of them affectionately said of the loose crowd, all come to spend time with the greatest figure in modern folk music. Pete Seeger would come, with his wife, Toshi, and their children. Peter La Farge part-Indian, cowboy, folksinger, author of "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" weaver of tall tales. Cisco Houston, Jack Elliot and dozens more. They would eat and drink and swap tall tales, and play music. Much of the playing was laid down on Bob Gleason's tapes, some of the most marvelous and priceless tapes around.
When he visited Guthrie, Dylan was told that the Gleasons were bringing him to their home every weekend and the next day Dylan hitchhiked to the Gleasons' apartment. Mr Gleason remembers that first meeting:
"He came, and he said little except that he loved Woody and wanted to spend time with him. He looked like an archangel almost, like a choir boy, with that little round face and the beautiful eyes. His hair in those days was long and curly and he wore that dark Eton cap. He had a pair of boots that was two sizes too big, everything that child had was either too small or too big."
Mrs. Gleason apparently (she doesn't recall exactly) told Dylan that Woody would be at her apartment the following Sunday, which was January 29th from the available evidence, and that she expected a few of Woody's friends to show up. And, she added, Bob would be welcome if he cared to make the trip.
Bob began visiting Woody at the hospital several times a week, and he showed up at the Gleasons practically every weekend over the next few weeks. By the second weekend Woody was asking for Bobby, and he would ask for him all the time: "Is the boy coming today? When is the boy coming back?" Something grew between them, between the dying originator of modern folk and the boy who was imitating him, idolizing him, and who would soon surpass him. On one of those first Sundays Bob played "Song to Woody" for him, privately, in the corner, and everyone in the room stopped to listen. And, someone remembers, Woody's face broke into a broad smile of joy and he said: "That's good, Bob. That's damned good." After everyone left Woody told The Gleasons, "That boy's got a voice. Maybe he won't make it by his writing, but he can sing it. He can really sing it."
He also said, "Pete Seeger's a singer of folk songs, not a folksinger. Jack Elliott is a singer of folk songs, but Bobby Dylan is a folksinger. Oh Christ, he's a folksinger all right."
Ramblin' Jack Elliott as he's long been known, is able to see Dylan from some special vantage points. He had himself become so totally hooked on Guthrie ten years earlier that he imitated his music and his style. The Guthrie magnetism so completely attracted him that he eventually became known as "the son of Woody Guthrie." And in Dylan's first few months in New York, playing with Elliott at folk clubs and in private parties, Dylan began to absorb some of Elliot's tricks and mannerisms, and folkies would describe Dylan in those earliest months as "the son of Jack Elliot and the grandson of Woody Guthrie" with just a little bit of scorn, at first.
Jack Elliot on Bob Dylan and Jack Elliott: "Bob was kind of shy, that first day. He had a lot of strong feelings about things. I could tell he liked Woody a lot. In fact I told him so one time. 'You sound like Woody.' and he explained he picked it up from an old black street singer he met down in New Mexico, who speaks like that. I used to imitate Woody all the time and I saw Dylan imitate me direct, doing things that were pure Jack Elliott. He'd already been doing it quite a bit before he got to New York, from my records. A girlfriend of his from back in Minneapolis, Bonnie Beecher, the last time I saw her she said, 'Bob used to play all your records before he came to New York. He was fond of your voice and he listened to your records and picked up your style, and I was tickled about that. And then in Gerde's Folk City he used to get up on stage and sing things like me. I didn't know it was some of me, at first. I thought he was doing it Woody Guthrie style, in the Guthrie-Cisco Houston school. I was tickled to see somebody doing it well cause I was really bored with all the other folk singers. There was not another son of a bitch in the country who could sing until Bob Dylan came along. Everybody else was singing like a damned faggot.
"Some of the people around were turned off a little bit because Bob was playing the hobo role. I thought that he was maybe a little too young to pull it off in the style in which he was doing it. He was trying to sound like an old man who bummed around eighty-five years on a freight train, and you could see this kid didn't even have fuzz on his face yet. But I was charmed by it. He was a rough little pixie runt with a guitar. He was headed in the right direction and he had great taste the words he was singing, the gestures and the mannerisms. Like he was not quite bringing it off the way he was trying. He was very rough. I thought sometimes he had a lot of nerve trying to get away with that bullshit.
At the same time I felt unofficially like a coach teaching him a little bit, in a very loose way. So, secretly, I felt a lot of pride about every once in a while picking up on something I did.
"I saw him one time. I don't know what it was that I was doing some kind of gesture I didn't know about and must have just got started on. But he got up on stage right after I did and sang songs and did the same things I'd just done. He had a great ability to pick things up quickly but more from hanging out not a calculated thing.
"There was something else about Bob. He had the same kind of magnetism as James Dean. Dean was the first cat I ever met with that kind of thing, the magnetism and the feeling he was running too fast and was going to get himself killed because he was running too fast. And Bob was the second I ever met."
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Dylan was singing before Village audiences every chance he got, hitting the coffee houses primarily. No one would hire him at first and he was forced to sing for nothing more than the exposure, getting up on the stage of the coffee houses in the afternoons and evenings, before the paid professionals would come on singing for a sandwich and some coffee, mostly. He seldom shared in the donation baskets, even.
Dylan sang at the Commons, the Gaslight, and the Wha?, and occasionally when he backed someone who was getting paid he would share in the wages. But usually he got just a dollar or two. Freddy Neil was one of the first to recognize Dylan's talents and had Bob accompany as often as he could, but the pay wasn't much. Paul Clayton who came from the old whaling town, New Bedford. Massachusetts and who sung sea chanties, went around singing Dylan's praises to any who would listen. "Bobby worshipped Pablo Clayton artistically," one of the folk-singers from those days recalls. "And Pablo became absolutely fixated on Bobby. Bobby could talk about nothing else but Woody Guthrie and Pablo could talk about nothing else but Bobby Dylan."
There weren't too many paying jobs available, however. The coffee houses and clubs weren't run by people with especially well-tuned ears and Dylan was considered a little too off-beat even if the professionals were digging him. "Nobody would hire Dylan, he was a freak," blues singer Dave Van Ronk recalls. He was living a very marginal existence, not quite starving; but going hungry often enough. The Gleasons say Dylan look a job for a short time working as a laborer for the Department of Sanitation removing snow from the city's streets. The Mills Tavern, where Bob claimed he wrote the song to Guthrie was an early hangout for Dylan and Kevin Krown and their friends. It was a warm place and Rocco the bartender, was a friendly sort of guy who would give the boys free stew with their beer. Dylan ate a lot of stew. Rocco also permitted Dylan and Krown to sleep in the back when they had nowhere else to go.
All of the older women around suspected Dylan was smoking marijuana and part of the mothering included attempts to show him the folly of his ways. "He was hanging around with a pretty blatantly pot-smoking crowd," Camilla Horne recalls, "and we kept nagging him about it because if he got busted he wouldn't he able to work in a club in New York. I was concerned. I figured his crowd was due for a raid because it was too well known and I kept nagging at him, and he kept saying he'd given it up."
One of his closest friends at the time says: "There wasn't that much grass around. None of us were smoking heavy. And Bob wasn't buying back then, he was cheap. I remember once Bob was up at our apartment and we had been blowing grass a bit and I gave him a little grass for himself that be stuck in his pocket. After a while we left the apartment to go somewhere and I suddenly remembered Bob had his grass and I almost killed for it. It was never smart to walk around the Village with grass on you and this fool kid was holding. I made him take it hack to the apartment."
Sue Zuckerman, then a college girl had met Dylan as he sat in back of the Folklore Center, playing and singing, and she remembers thinking "he looked like he was 14 years old." She recalls: "A friend of mine belonged to the folk club and told me Dylan was singing at N.Y.U. So I went. There were only about six of us, sitting around this little room, listening to him. And I just immediately fell in love with him, with him and his voice." She and her friends began following him around the Village "totally entranced by him." Catching him in the afternoons at the Cafe Wha? One of her closest friends was a 17-year-old girl she had met at camp a few years earlier, Susan Rotolo, who called herself "Suze."
"I told her about this groovy guy I had a crush on, named Bob Dylan. So Suze and I started hanging around with Bob and Mark Spoelstra, hanging around, talking to them, and they hardly knew we were around." A couple of months later Suze would get to know Dylan and she would quickly become one of the most important women in his life.
Izzy Young recalls: "He came into the Folk Center a lot, to play. He was very powerful right away, took over the room right away. Very competitive. He really didn't listen to anybody else. He would sort of wail to sing and then go out. Looking back now, I realize he didn't come in casually like the other kids would come in. Van Ronk and them, just wander in the back of the store and hang around. Bob Dylan was performing all the time, like this was the right time to play his songs and he would play.
"What I'm saying is, he wasn't an innocent kid when he came to New York City. He knew exactly what he wanted, knew how to use people, and when the point came that he didn't have to use them any more he dropped them. In other words, he's sitting with Dave Van Ronk in his apartment for three days, drinking, sleeping and listening, and then he comes to my store and he doesn't say anything about Van Ronk. Or he'd spend a week with Jack Elliot and then go to Van Ronk and not talk about Jack Elliott. He never gave you a feeling he was into anybody else except you."
Dylan's first major engagement began on April 11, 1961. He was the second act behind John Lee Hooker. Hooker had a three-week engagement, starting the week before Dylan was to debut, and Dylan spent every night in Gerde's watching him, talking to him, sponging up his unique urban-country blues guitar.
Woody couldn't make it to Bob's opening, but everyone else was there. As his friends jammed into Gerde's that opening night, Dylan remained out of sight, down in his dressing room, wearing one of Woody's jackets given to him by Sid Gleason. When he came on stage, he seemed very uptight. Then he seemed to shake it off and he began to play "House of the Rising Sun" as an opener. Those standing at the bar stopped drinking and listened to the kid growling and gut-crying the whore's lament. He sang "A Song To Woody," "like he meant every word," one who was there remembers, and one or two Guthrie songs, and a black blues, and then he was off — five songs in the set, and it seemed to be over before it began.
The Dylan rooting section was cheering loudly from tables as he bounded off the stage. He ran, he hopped, over to Bob Gleason and shook his hand - the first time anyone remembers Bob Dylan shaking hands. "You know, Bob," he said to Gleason, "somebody does care. I guess somebody cares, really."
By the time his two-week stint was only half over. Dylan was climbing up walls. "I hate that kind of stuff," he was saying toward the end of it. Hate to play in one place more than a couple of nights. It's such a drag. One week is a drag and two weeks are ridiculous." His friends had to work on him as they had done when he was singing at the hoots, bolstering him, getting liquor into him to loosen him up and, at the same time, trying to keep him from getting drunk and ruining his set.
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He had been in New York less than three months and he had moved at a remarkable pace in that short time. He had been befriended, fussed over, mothered and smothered and fathered and bothered, was "getting a lot of chicks" (as he put it to a Dinkytown friend around this time), and he had been helped in his craft by some of the most talented folk and blues musicians around. And yet he went away somewhat bitter about his first winter in New York. "He was like paranoid about it," one very close folkie-friend says today. "He felt everyone was out to take him, like it was a plot. So many people went out of their way to make him feel part of the scene and to keep him from freezing and starving, but he sort of accepted that part of it and then got strung-out-paranoid about the few things that were going against him. Like he went up to the Sing Out! office and Irwin Silber [the editor] sort of threw him out. He was there to put out a magazine and he didn't have time to talk to every grubby kid who came in off the street asking questions like they were doing around the clock. Bobby was furious, upset, angry about that. And then there was the first gig, with Freddy Neil at the Wha?. where he got only a dollar or two which is all Freddy could afford to pay him. He became friendly with Silber and with Neil, but he was very offish, because he suspected everyone was out to take. After getting to know Woody, Dylan started to write seriously. "He was always working on some song in his mind when he was out in East Orange with us," Mrs. Gleason says. "I can remember him lying on his stomach almost across the dining room table, making notes on scraps of paper, even the edges of newspapers, because he never had anything to write on, and then sticking them in his pocket. Always working on scraps and snatches of songs."
Jack Elliot: "Dylan never talked much, but Dave Van Ronk could actually get him to start arguing. I'd sit in and listen to Bobby argue for many long hours, mostly with Dave, about politics and the world and everything. Him and Dave, both like bulls, locking horns for hours." And, while he had not appeared to be paying much attention to radical thought in Minneapolis, it touched him here in New York.
Van Ronk, by most accounts, also got Dylan into the French symbolist poets, particularly Rimbaud, and into Villiers and Bertolt Brecht. Dave talked about them, quoted them, during the long sessions of arguing, but Dylan continued to carry off the American primitive role, the Woody Guthrie kid who never read a book in his life. Van Ronk: "Being a hayseed, that was part of his image or what he considered his image at the time. Like, once I asked him, "Do you know the French symbolists?" And he said, "Huh?" — the stupidest 'Huh' you can imagine — and later, when he had a place of his own, I went up there and on the bookshelf was a volume of French poets from Nerval almost to the present. I think it ended at Apollinaire, and it included Rimbaud, and it was all well-thumbed with passages underlined and notes in the margins. The man wanted to be a primitive, a natural kind of genius. He never talked about somebody like Rimbaud. But he knew Rimbaud, all right. You see that in his later songs."
One man who helped fuel Dylan's imagination was Richard M. Buckley, known as Lord Buckley. "A most immaculately hip aristocrat," someone has called him. Lord Buckley was a monologist, but that's as same as calling Dylan a singer. Born in California in 1905, he began working nightclubs in Chicago during Prohibition when Al Capone ruled, and gangsters, hookers, pimps, chorus girls and sporting men were pop culture heroes. He swung into it all and he learned the language and mores of the streets, and of the black jazz musicians with whom he shared the stage and life, and he incorporated them in the visions and allegories he wove. A white man speaking the slang of black jazz musicians, he used the language of the hip to bring fresh insight into the meaning of, for example, the Nazz-namely, Jesus, or appraising good and evil in his monologue "The Bad-Rapping of the Marquis De Sade, the King of Bad Cats."
A number of people introduced Dylan to the Buckley magic, including Bill Cosby, who was doing some Buckley monologues at the Gaslight, and Hugh Romney. Dylan crashed at Romney's place occasionally during the summer, and Romney got him an album of Lord Buckley's material. Dylan studied it the way he had studied Guthrie.
Suddenly, their friends say, Dylan and Suze Rotolo began going together. It was summer and there was no school for Suze and no work for Dylan, and they were together a great deal. Suze was living with her sister Carla in the Village and their widowed mother, Mrs. Mary Rotolo was living with friends.
"They were two kids bouncing around together two innocent children falling in love," one girl in the crowd remembers. "It was very pretty, at the beginning. It was like the picture of them walking along West Fourth Street that's used as the cover for the second Dylan album."
Dylan stirred the maternal instinct in older women, and he stirred another basic impulse in younger women. Sue Zuckerman says: "He roused a sexual instinct. It's difficult to describe him. I always dug the way he moved. It was pleasing to watch him move, and he had that sort of rough kind of appeal, not all pretty and fancy, but definitely an individual who was very different from most people hanging around in those days. He just had a very special sort of identity."
Some time in early August, a couple of weeks after meeting Suze, Bob went to Cambridge with a couple of other folksingers. They dropped into the Club 47, which was the center of the young folk sound in New England, the place where Joan Baez had begun to sing. Dylan was called to the stage and he did a couple of songs, and then he was introduced to some of the folk crowd. Among them was Carolyn Hester, who was appearing regularly there through the summer, and her husband, Richard Farina.
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Carolyn was a warm, fresh-faced young folksinger from Texas who had been signed to Columbia by John Hammond, director of talent acquisition, a few months earlier, in 1961. Farina was a darkly impetuous and bubbling young man of prodigious talent as a folksinger, songwriter, novelist and short story writer. Dylan struck it off well with them and the next day, Carolyn, Dick, singer Eric von Schmidt and his wife and infant daughter all went off to Revere Beach.
Carolyn Hester: "This was the first time I ever got a good look at Dylan, got to talk to him. His hair was pretty long then, and I loved the way he looked. But he seemed to be in bad health, he seemed to be living out in the street. His hands were very rough, very tough, but almost feminine in a strange way. He was in a shirt and jeans, and when he took his shirt off his skin was transparent. He had his harmonica with him and played it, and had music very much on his mind.
"I don't remember exactly how Dylan came to work with me on my first Columbia album. It may have been Richard saying to Dylan, 'Gee, if we gel into some gigs or something we'll bring you in, too.' And the record was the first thing to come along.
"Bob was happy about it. I went to the apartment where he was staying with Suze and Carla, off Sheridan Square, to see him. Dylan impressed me as being, again, totally absorbed by the music. It seemed to me he didn't put his guitar down hardly ever, I think at that time, by September, I was beginning to get the idea he was writing, he may have sung me part of a song but he didn't emphasize what he was doing. He was very happy he was going to play the harmonica, going to get a record date.
"The next meeting was a week or so later. Richard and I were staying in the apartment of Ned O'Gorman, the poet, on West Tenth Street. John Hammond came by, to listen to what I had worked up, and Dylan was there, and Richard. Just the four of us. I remember one wall was all a window and there was a garden in the back and the sun was streaming in. Dylan was sitting next to Hammond on the couch and I was sitting in front of them singing and Dylan was playing his harmonica and they talked to me about "Come Back," a song Dylan gave me, and Hammond liked that song very much. He said, 'OK, our first session will be...' and he set a date for the end of September. And he liked Dylan."
John Hammond: "I saw this kid in the peaked hat playing not terribly good harmonica, but I was taken with him. I asked him, 'Can you sing? Do you write? Why don't you come up to the studio? I'd like to do a demo session with you just to see how it is.' 1 was sitting (here thinking. 'What a wonderful character, playing guitar and blowing mouth harp. he's gotta be an original.' It was just one of those flashes. I thought. 'I gotta talk contract right away.' So we made a date for him to come to the studio."
But Dylan would first go into the studio to record for someone else. Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson opened a two-week engagement at Gerde's on September 12th. Miss Spivey, born in Houston in 1910, began recording the blues when she was a teenager, and began writing the first of what is probably as many blues numbers as Guthrie had written white folk songs. Victoria Spivey: "The first night I was aware of him, really, he came up and put his arms around me and said. 'You're the most gorgeous creature,' and I asked. 'What can I do for you?' And he said, 'Nothing, I just like you.' And we just used to hang around and talk. And Big Joe Williams was there a lot. I know Bob Dylan loved Big Joe Williams, and Big Joe Williams loved Bob Dylan, and they used to get on the stage at Gerde's and play together. "I told Bobby that Big Joe was gonna record for me and he said. 'Moms, you want a little white boy on one of your records?' Bobby, you know, had no color denomination to him at all, everybody was people, not color. So I said, 'What do you mean? You're just one of my sons,' and he said, 'You should,' and I said, 'You got some around?' And he said. 'Yeah, me.' So I told him we'd yet together."
Dylan went into a West Forty-sixth Street recording studio with them on a warm afternoon in late fall and laid down at least four tracks with Big Joe, playing the harmonica behind and around Williams' strong guitar and sandpaper-rough Delta blues voice. Two of them have been issued on an album featuring tracks by Miss Spivey, Williams, Lonnie Johnson and Roosevelt Sykes called Three Kings and the Queen.
Mike Poren booked Dylan into Gerde's again for a two-week engagement beginning Sptember 26th, with the Greenbriar Boys on the same bill as the lead act. Dylan was ready for the New York Times now, and Bob Shelton was there for the opening night. A couple of days later Shelton's enthusiastic almost rhapsodic review ran under a four-column headline that said "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist."
The review simply amazed everyone, and it created some jealousy in folk circles. None of the singers who'd been knocking themselves out had ever been treated to such an effusive bit of puffery by Shelton. The critic was friendly with all of the folkies in the Village, yet had never given any of their careers the boost he gave to Dylan.
Jack Elliot, "I remember that review. I was really turned on by it because it was beautiful and true, but I was a little burned because Shelton gave me a review a little before that, but not like Bobby's. It was nice, no putdown, but he flipped out Bobby so heavily I remember feeling. 'Gee whiz, Shelton, you gave him a jet-propelled push there."
Carolyn Hester: "The day of my recording session was the day the review was printed, and Dylan brought it with him. He was absolutely delighted with it. He would laugh and sort of shyly say something like he didn't expect it and he was so new in town and wasn't that a bitch and wasn't he lucky. And Dick and I had the article and Bruce Langhorne who was playing guitar with me on that session, he had it, too. And Hammond saw it. We were in the studio working every day and I could see Hammond was getting more and more interested in him."
Hammond: "So he came in and made some demos, and when I heard him I flipped. I told him I wanted him to record for Columbia, and I had the contract in drawn up right away. We sat in my office and I said, 'How old are you?' and he said he was 20 and I said. 'I have to get your contract signed by your parents,' and he said, 'I don't have any parents.' I asked. Do you have any relatives?' And he said, 'Yes, I have an uncle who's a dealer in Las Vegas' and added, 'John, don't worry, you can trust me.' He said he had no manager and I told him 'I'll get you the best deal possible from the company. We usually start an artist at two percent of royalties but I'll start you at four.' It was unprecedented to start him at four. Seeger was getting five, and was established."
Bob ran down to Mikki Isaacson's place and burst into the apartment. "I've got it!" he cried. "I got the contract." He waved a couple of sheets of paper around, hopping all over the place. But wouldn't let anyone see it, and he wasn't believed, at first. When the folk crowd learned he had actually been signed by Columbia, the jubilation outweighed any jealousy anyone may have felt because it was a breakthrough: the first of the younger male folksingers to he signed by a major record label.
[Excerpt From Issue 103 — March 2, 1972]