Bob Dylan (2 page)

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.

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.

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.