Bob Dylan (3 page)

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.”

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 minstrel, 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 Freewheelin' 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…”

Besides which, Dylan was, even then, not the most forthcoming of people. “It's so hard to talk to him,” Suze told another friend. “Sometimes he doesn't talk. He has to be drinking to open up.” She sensed a pervasive air of despair about Dylan, a pessimism about people which bordered on paranoia and made him reluctant to leave the flat. Suze's mother, Mary, disapproved of her relationship with this scruffy 19-year-old kid who had dubious personal hygiene and a cavalier way with the truth, particularly concerning his own past. She persuaded her daughter to travel with her in the summer of 1962 to Italy, where Suze took a course at the University of Perugia. The trip, which was meant to be for a few months, was ultimately extended to a total of six months, during which time Dylan pined terribly for her.

Like many an artist before him, however, Dylan learned successfully how to transmute his pain into creative energy: the period of Suze's absence marks the first full flowering of his poetic talent, with songs of high quality pouring out of him at a phenomenal rate. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalls going on a car trip with him at the time, and being amazed at his industry: “He had a small spiral notebook, and must have had four different songs going at once. He would write a line in one and flip a couple of pages back and write a line in another one. A word here and a line there, just writing away.” Another friend, the singer Tom Paxton, recalled strolling late at night through Greenwich Village with Dylan as he scribbled away on scraps
of paper. “His mind was on fire. Between the club and wherever he was heading, he'd start as many as five songs—and finish them!”