Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry (17 page)

In the late fifties, the historical links between the jazz and folk scenes were still strong. Five years after George Wein and Elaine Lorillard began the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, folk figures including Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel joined with Wein to create the Newport Folk Festival. Both festivals attracted the same kinds of academics. Jac Holzman explained, “People who were intellectually alert loved the idea of reconnecting to roots. Then there was the political aspect … The Almanac Singers, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were generally liberal, or left-leaning. People who bought folk music were middle-class—school teachers, bohemians, professionals—who, in what were still quite austere times, could afford to have interests outside of themselves.”

When Hammond returned to Columbia in 1959, he was coming in from this academic corner of the music world—effectively an old man who’d stayed close to where he planted seeds in the late thirties. Except for “the superlative Miles Davis,” Hammond didn’t like the druggy introversion of bebop. On the other hand, the innocence of folk embodied many of the ideals he’d written about for years, including civil rights, social justice, multiculturalism, and the transmission of old repertoire.

At Lieberson’s behest, Hammond’s principal task at Columbia was to supervise the reissue of old Columbia and Okeh repertoire in album format. He was also given tacit permission to prospect for young talent. “Goddard knew me well, my weaknesses as well as my strengths. He did not think me much of a business man. He knew that my standards for judging talent were, and are, based primarily on on artistic rather than commercial potential, although in many cases the two go together.”

He made his first big find for Columbia one day when a black composer, Curtis Lewis, presented a demo of his latest compositions. Although Hammond was supposed to listen to the songs themselves, he was distracted by one of the voices singing “Today I Sing the Blues.” Struck by something eerily familiar, he asked, “Who is she?” Lewis gave the details: Aretha Franklin, eighteen years old, from Detroit, daughter of a famous Baptist minister. “An unknown?” Hammond thought. Shortly after the meeting, he got a phone call from the owner of a small recording studio on Broadway. “I know you’re interested in Aretha Franklin,” said the voice. “If you want to meet her she’ll be in my studio today.” Hammond picked up his coat and headed over.

Watching her sing, Hammond heard the makings of a star potentially as important as Billie Holiday. Because RCA Victor was also interested, Hammond arranged a contract with a favorable royalty rate and an advance. In January 1961, while producing Aretha’s debut album as gospel-jazz crossover, Hammond wrote her manager a diplomatically worded message. “There hasn’t been a singer and performer like this in 20 years,” he said. “The talent is all there, but of course it still needs very close supervision.”

Despite encouraging sales and reviews, Hammond was frustrated by what he viewed as Aretha’s immaturity. Distracted by her personal struggles as a single mother, she was proving unreliable, claiming throat problems and even failing to turn up for shows at the Apollo and Village Gate. By early 1962, Hammond was openly fed up. “Here is your royalty statement…,” he wrote her. “If you don’t straighten up soon you will be a legend in the business and not one of the nice ones.”

While on vacation in Europe, Hammond was replaced as Aretha’s producer. Not only was the artist sick of
him,
Columbia’s younger producers felt she wasn’t being produced right. It was argued, in Hammond’s absence, that the old man could find talent but didn’t know how to cook up hits. As one colleague, Robert Altshuler, explained the consensus inside Columbia, “Although he had these incredible ears and the ability to recognize talent at its earliest stage, at its embryonic stage, he was not very good at producing.” Columbia’s young guns, however, made the fatal mistake of adding new orchestrations to old recordings without the artist’s permission, thus giving Aretha’s manager grounds to sue and obtain a costly out-of-court settlement. By then, Hammond was happy to see her jump ship to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler guided her to superstardom. Although Wexler was an “agnostic Jew” himself, his winning formula couldn’t have been simpler—“I put her in a church!”

Hammond’s second key signing in 1961 was Pete Seeger, by no means a discovery, but a signal of Columbia’s commitment to become the leader in folk music. In September, Hammond tried to sign a beautiful young folk diva called Joan Baez whom he noticed at the Newport Folk Festival. She came to Hammond’s office accompanied by her tough-talking manager, Albert Grossman. The meeting fizzled out uncomfortably, and Baez signed with Vanguard. Feeling sore, Hammond instead signed up Carolyn Hester, another folk princess but perhaps lacking Baez’s presence.

Coincidence or design? It was at this crossroads that a twenty-year-old by the name of Bob Dylan wangled his way into opening for Carolyn Hester at a Club 47 gig. The next day, Dylan met with Hester and explained his difficult financial situation, practically begging to get more gigs as her warm-up. Unfortunately, she wasn’t planning on performing while preparing for her record, but because Dylan looked so dejected, she asked him to tag along in her studio troupe as harmonica player. Dylan pounced on the opportunity. “I’ll be there, and here’s my number,” he said.

To get a taste of the songs she intended to record, Hammond and Hester arranged a preproduction session at her apartment. Hester had rounded up a small band with stand-up bass, guitar, and the baby-faced Bob Dylan on harmonica. They all sat around a table picnic-style, and the musicians went through several swinging numbers for Hammond’s perusal. Dylan, seated next to Hammond, played his guitar on a few numbers and even sang some harmonies. Even though Hammond saw that Dylan wasn’t much of a musician, he nonetheless sat there thinking, “What a wonderful character, playing guitar and blowing mouth harp, he’s gotta be an original.” As Hammond was leaving, he asked Dylan, “Have you recorded for anybody?” Dylan simply shook his head.

When the studio date rolled around, Hammond was lost in his daily ritual of trawling through the newspapers when, lo and behold, he stumbled on a concert preview in
The New York Times.
Profiling Dylan for a show at Gerde’s Folk City, the piece concluded, “Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would appear straight up.”

Looking up, Hammond thought, “I gotta talk contracts right away!” As soon as Hester arrived with Dylan in tow, Hammond whisked the young man up to his office, where Dylan played “Talking New York Blues.” When Hammond produced a contract, Dylan read its first two words, “Columbia Records,” and asked, “Where do I sign?” Although inexperienced, Dylan knew who Hammond was. “There were a thousand kings in the world, and he was one of them.”

In a moment of hesitation, Hammond asked Dylan his age.

“Twenty.”

“That means you have to have your mother and father sign the contract, too. The New York state laws don’t allow a minor to sign a legal agreement without his parents’ approval.”

“I don’t have a mother or father.”

Well, then, did he have any relative who could sign for him Hammond wondered.

“I’ve got an uncle who’s a dealer in Las Vegas.”

“You’re trying to tell me that you don’t want anyone to sign for you, do you?”

“John, you can trust me.”

The deal was duly sealed in ink despite the lingering question marks. The
New York Times
journalist had observantly noted Dylan’s reticence to reveal his background. Little did Hammond know that the young man was concealing his middle-class background and his real name, Robert Zimmerman, from his girlfriend. It was Hammond’s turn to get a taste of this “most complex human being.” Over the next fifteen years, Hammond would come to believe that Dylan lived “in a fantasy world which he is powerful enough to impose on the real one the rest of us inhabit. He has created his own persona and put it to the service of his art. The combination is irresistible.”

As Dylan was leaving Columbia’s offices, Hammond gave him a present of a blues reissue he was about to release. The young man walked home through the streets of New York with a contract in one hand and a Robert Johnson record in the other. When he got back to his third-floor walk-up, Dylan examined the record. Called
King of the Delta Blues Singers,
it was a remastered compilation of recordings from 1936. He put the needle on the record and out poured “Cross Road Blues.” “From the first note, the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up,” Dylan remembered of that fateful day.

In a few hours in late November 1961, Dylan banged out his debut album—mainly traditional songs, only two original compositions. The
Village Voice
journalist Nat Hentoff remembered how Hammond “really wanted me to listen to [it]. He wanted me to listen to the lyrics. I saw something there, but it was only after John made me listen to the album that I started paying attention. The characteristics that John Hammond looked for in an artist were feeling and passion. He heard these things in Dylan. He heard something distinctive in Dylan—the message that came through the sound.”

Hammond’s younger superior, Dave Kapralik, would have happily shelved the album had anyone but Hammond been behind it. Even Dylan himself wasn’t so sure. By the time the finished product was pressed, he wished he could rip it up and start over.

Only thirteen hundred copies were sold, earning Dylan the title of “Hammond’s folly” inside Columbia. The unpleasant experience, however, seems to have intensified Dylan’s creative ambitions. His love life was also in a precarious state. When his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, found out he hadn’t told her his real name, her mother packed her off to Italy to study art. Dylan suddenly found himself isolated in a crummy apartment, disliked by many other folk singers, and socializing only through his concert appearances and love letters to Italy. From this lonely place, songs began pouring out in abundance.

Apart from Hammond, Dylan had two other key allies on his side. Pete Seeger saluted him on radio that summer as “the most prolific songwriter on the scene.” The other sympathetic helper inside Columbia was a young staffer in the publicity department, Billy James, who managed to get Dylan reviewed in a number of youth magazines. It was just enough support to get Dylan a second chance. When Hammond called his folly back to the studio, Dylan was eager to silence his many critics. Crucially, this time around, he would be given considerable time and space to put together a much stronger record.

Hearing Dylan’s new compositions, Hammond was confident that his next release would make an impact—it
had
to. Dylan understood the challenge and was arriving at every session with giant-sized songs, most of them written through Woody Guthrie’s “
talkin’ blues
” technique—a trancelike process of strumming a guitar all day, looking inside and out, letting words fly out arbitrarily. In total, Dylan recorded over thirty songs in eight sessions spaced out over a year. Treated as a sort of research and development process, Dylan was growing into the artist he later became, as Hammond sat in the control room reading his newspapers. Even by Columbia’s artist-driven standards, this was a generous second shot.

Then Albert Grossman entered the building as Dylan’s manager. The bug-eyed folk impresario was the archetypal show biz crook and everything Hammond hated. For his part, Grossman saw in Hammond a potential obstacle to controlling Dylan. Predictably, Columbia received a formal letter, supposedly written by Dylan, asserting that the artist’s contract was null and void because he was a minor upon its signature. It demanded that all masters be returned to Dylan. In the middle of an arduous second album, it landed like a bombshell on Hammond’s desk.

The original contract gave a royalty of 4 percent to Bob Dylan, and Hammond, of course, knew Grossman was after better terms, either with Columbia or at another label. When Columbia’s in-house lawyer, Clive Davis, advised Hammond to settle the matter amicably without Grossman present, Dylan was called in. Hammond said straight out what he thought of Grossman’s tactics.

Dylan was caught between two titans. Although he wanted to make records on Columbia for John Hammond, he needed Grossman to get regular gigs. In a second meeting with Hammond, Grossman, Dylan, and Davis present, the manager made a conciliatory yet solid legal case pointing out that in New York state law, there is a statutory limitation of three years’ duration on contracts signed by minors. Grossman was reminding Hammond and Davis that Columbia could lose Dylan in 1964.

A new five-year contract was duly written up with a higher royalty rate. Dylan signed it with relief as Grossman stood up having won something for his shenanigans. The problem, however, was that Hammond had to get the new deal countersigned by Columbia’s senior management. “I have enormous faith in Bob Dylan and think he will be the most important young folk artist in the business,” he wrote to his skeptical superiors. Fortunately, Hammond had Lieberson’s support.

Grossman had succeeded in manipulating the situation to embarrass and alienate John Hammond, who was replaced by a young black producer, Tom Wilson. By the end of 1962, Dylan was churning out so much interesting material, all Wilson had to do was stand over the engineers and stay out of Grossman’s way.

In May 1963, the yearlong experiment titled
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
was released to critical acclaim. Featuring eleven original compositions, it was an unusually autobiographical album for the period. At the civil rights event on Capitol Hill on August 28, 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I have a dream” speech, the twenty-two-year-old Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the racially motivated shooting of Medgar Evers. If there was a crowning moment in Bob Dylan’s early years, this was probably it.

Once again, the Vanderbilt rebel had pointed Columbia to a gold mine. A 1963 Pete Seeger live album containing the hymn “
We Shall Overcome
” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the song became the anthem of the civil rights movement. Goddard Lieberson, eager to ensure Columbia had a future with younger audiences, could learn about this vast generation courtesy of the students and brooding teenagers who appreciated folk music’s engaging lyrics.