A Freewheelin' Time (13 page)

Particular

One of my favorite
Bob Dylan songs is one I first heard Willie Nelson sing on his CD
Across the Borderline:
“What Was It You Wanted?” I had a sense right away that only he could have written it.

To me, this song is the essence of Bob Dylan. It showcases his acerbic wit and his ability to twist multiple meanings around his finger. The old songs, from the early time of his life in which I participated, are so recognizable, so naked, that I cannot listen to them easily. They bring back everything. There is nothing mysterious or shrouded with hidden meaning for me. They are raw, intense, and clear.

When he started out, Bob was playful, a mix of Harpo Marx and Woody Guthrie, with a big dose of himself as a binding ingredient. Onstage he moved around a lot, removing the harmonicas from his pockets and placing them on a nearby stool, fiddling with the capo on his guitar and the corduroy cap on his head. Then he would adjust or change the harmonica in the holder around his neck, retune his guitar, and go back to organizing the harmonicas on the stool.

He rarely said anything. He might give a quick grin or grimace and make the little noises of someone who was working hard. When he finally began to play, he had the audience’s attention and he knew it. All that fumbling around was the warm-up for a set that was either very down home or hypnotic and distant. From the very beginning he was a charismatic performer.

Though he was developing a persona and absorbing many influences, he was always his own self. There were people who saw him as needing guidance and tried to mold and teach him. He went along, glad to get the input, the information, and the help; but he knew his own way to be. He sorted and sifted and took only what he needed. Ultimately much of the rancor many felt as he moved on and up and away, taking everything within him and leaving them behind, was due to the fact that these people wanted acknowledgment for what they had given him. He would not be who he is if it weren’t for me, they’d said.

He was not the person they thought he was. He kept going; he moved on. Look what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back.

What was it you wanted?

Tell me again I forgot.

Whatever you wanted

What could it be

Did somebody tell you

That you could get it from me,

Is it something that comes natural

Is it easy to say,

Why do you want it,

Who are you anyway?

Self-
Titled

Bob’s reaction
to being signed by Columbia Records in the fall of 1961—handpicked by the legendary producer John Hammond, no less—was exuberant. The
New York Times
review was having an immediate and positive effect. Bobby had performed some songs for Hammond during a rehearsal for the recording session when he played backup harmonica for the singer Carolyn Hester, and Hammond recognized something special in the raw, unblemished sound. It was John Hammond who got recording contracts for the young Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie, among others. Hammond had a reputation for finding gold. He’d signed Aretha Franklin. There was money to be made in folk music and a growing flock of very good musicians were available for the record companies to pick from. Most companies were hunting for the next Kingston Trio or another Joan Baez. Instead Hammond was struck by something he saw in Bob while he was producing Carolyn Hester’s album. Hammond was intrigued by the unpolished yet confident style that this unique young performer managed to exude.

After he secured Bob Dylan for Columbia Records, John Hammond went on to sign Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Tricky to predict the future, but John Hammond obviously had an ear for it.

T
hat a big, prestigious company like Columbia rather than Folkways or Vanguard wanted to sign Bob was true recognition of his talent. The road to where he knew he was headed was being paved. Each newly paved part brought his destiny closer to the present. There were no back roads to retrace, no side roads to follow—only forward, only ahead.

Quietly Bob said: This is the beginning of what I have always known. I am going to be big.

He said it calmly and knowingly, and it was true. No bragging, no Look at me, no Ain’t I grand. That was not his way. He spoke only what he knew to be true. He would not have said so otherwise.

Out on the street and in the clubs he celebrated with excitement and maybe even displayed a “drinks on me” joviality, though he was not known for his generosity. The inevitable envy and resentment of other folksingers were to be deflected if at all possible. Many who knew Bobby felt he would be successful, although no one knew how huge he would become. Certainly Dave Van Ronk and Izzy Young knew Bob would be culled from the crop of performers on the street. Early on they and others saw, as Hammond did, that Bob possessed something more, that he stood out in some rough-edged way.

Performers who had been on the scene longer and had their niche carved out on the folk circuit were aghast at the audacity of this young upstart punk. The malicious under-belly of the folk music beast was revealed, and it was positively an unpleasant sight.

Bob was serious about the work he intended to do and paid ill-wishers no mind. He was ready to set down on record the music that he had accumulated within himself up to that point.

I had never been in a recording studio before and it was exhilarating. The speakers were huge and the playback sound enveloped the studio, giving me the sensation that I was inside the music—listening to sound from the inside out. When the album came out and I read the liner notes by “Stacey Williams,” an alternate moniker for Bob Shelton, I laughed at his description of me as sitting “devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session” and Bob as fretting his guitar on “In My Time of Dyin’” with my lipstick holder. I didn’t wear lipstick and how typical of a guy to translate my reaction to being in a recording studio for the first time as devotion. At least he got “wide-eyed” right.

During the sessions, John Hammond did not interfere with Bob’s process but watched and listened, letting Bob do as he wished. Columbia planned to rush his album into stores within two months, believing Dylan to be the next big thing. I watched Bob as he sang and saw his focus, his loyalty to the work at hand, the art he was making. Bob was intense, both sure and not sure of what he was doing. Afterward he’d ask: What do you think, what do you think?

B
ob wanted a shearling jacket to wear for his picture on the cover of the album, but there was no way he could afford a real one. We had a hard time finding a jacket that looked right. We finally found a synthetic shearling in a shop on Sixth Avenue in the Village that looked pretty good—almost like the real thing—and had a price to match.

Bob carefully adjusted the collar, just so. He was ready for his self-titled close-up.

I
zzy Young produced a concert by Bob Dylan at Carnegie Chapter Hall, one of the smaller stages within Carnegie Hall, on November 4, 1961. Izzy said that Albert Grossman put him up to it but that he didn’t mind, because he thought Bob Dylan was great. It was a mystery why only fifty-three people showed up. Bob was better known downtown, yet between the
New York Times
review and a contract with Columbia Records (the album wasn’t released until March 1962), his reputation was rapidly growing all over town. Maybe the paltry turnout had to do with the venue on Fifty-seventh Street, so far above Fourteenth Street, the northernmost border of Greenwich Village.

Bob sang traditional folk songs and blues and casually wandered around the big stage in the nearly empty hall as if he were in a downtown coffeehouse. He was not discouraged by the low turnout; he liked to perform, and every performance helped him develop his chops and work his repertoire. Though Izzy lost money, he paid Bobby ten or twenty dollars, because as he said, you always pay the workingman for his efforts.

Southern Journey

Van Ronk called
Paul Clayton “Pablo” for reasons I no longer remember—or maybe there was no reason other than the translation of his name to Spanish and Dave’s penchant for nicknames. Back in those days, the study of the origins of traditional music was a passion among musicians. Some folksingers believed they had to perform a song authentically in the traditional style with no deviation from the way the original singer sang it on the scratchy old LPs they listened to, taken primarily from Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music;
those recordings were the Holy Grail. A folksinger who dared reinterpret a traditional song by adding a personal inflection of some sort was scorned as inauthentic. Yet most of these performers were about as authentic as Las Vegas. They were middle-class city or suburban kids who had never been near a backwoods except at summer camp. This same purist attitude was at the root of the problem when Dylan went electric.

Paul Clayton was one of the people around the Village with a vast knowledge of American folk music. He had studied at the University of Virginia with a well-known folklorist, Arthur Kyle Davis, and had done a lot of traveling to collect songs. Paul was also a folksinger with a smooth voice and clean guitar style, and he performed far and wide, starting in the 1950s. He and Bob hit it off and spent a lot of time together. Paul really cared for Bob, and when Bob planned a cross-country trip in February 1964 he asked Paul to come with him along with his buddy and bodyguard, Victor Maimudes, and Pete Karman.

In May 1962, two months after Bob’s first album was released, Bob, Paul, and I went on a trip south. The final destination was Paul’s log cabin in Brown’s Cove, Virginia, not far from Charlottesville. We drove into Virginia through the beautiful landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Paul was the driver and I sat with him in the front seat while Bob sprawled in the back playing his guitar, working on songs. It was the first road trip for me since the car accident I’d been in, and I was overcome by fear, sitting upright with my foot on an imaginary brake.

When Paul asked me why I was so tense, I mumbled something about the accident. He looked straight at me with his liquid blue eyes and said: That is a terrible trauma. Tell me what happened.

Revealing personal information wasn’t something that came easily to me and I was getting good at deflecting questions that came too close, but his approach was so direct and sincere that I began to talk. He listened and asked questions until the whole tale was told. He said he had wondered about my scar.

Talking about a traumatic car accident while driving in a car had an odd relaxing effect and I was fine for the rest of the trip, relieved that Paul had pulled the story out of me.

I think we ended up telling horrible accident stories for a time, and maybe even singing a few, as Paul drove the mountain roads with nary a screeching tire on any of the curves.

When we got to Charlottesville we stayed with friends of Paul’s before taking off to meet some old-time blues musicians he knew from his travels. We hoped to visit Etta Baker, the great blues guitar player famous for her song “Rail-road Bill,” but it never happened. To impress the folkies back in New York, Bob joked, we should say we met her, anyway, but we never did. You could blow your cool by not being cool about things like that.

S
ince I had never been south of Washington, D.C., the trip was a revelation. Though I’d seen photographs and films of dirt-poor and segregated America, actually being in it was something else. Clean, tree-lined streets with painted white houses gave way to dusty roads with few trees and rundown shacks made of wood boards or tin. At the first house where we stopped, Paul and Bob didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to go in, the living conditions were grim, so I waited in the car.

I went in with him and Bob at the next house, though, and it made me wonder what the first one must have been like inside. This shack was windowless and smaller than a New York City studio apartment. It was wide enough for a twin bed against one wall and a chair or two tight against the opposite wall with hardly any walking space in between. Coming in from the bright sunshine, I couldn’t see a thing at first.

After a minute I made out a figure sitting on the bed. He seemed very old and thin and when he smiled he had no teeth. I don’t remember if he played something first or if Bob did. I don’t even remember what Bob played.

But the reaction of the man on the bed was indelible. When Bob finished playing, the old blues man leaned forward and he said: You got it, boy. You got it.

After we’d gone outside, more people came by to listen and the old guy said again, stomping his feet in time to Bob’s playing: That boy’s got it. The boy’s got his music in him.

B
ack in Charlottesville Paul Clayton threw a party for Bob’s twenty-first birthday. We had a real good time listening to music and making music at Steve Wilson’s house. Steve was an old buddy of Paul’s and the friendship opened to include us. When Steve moved up to New York City at some point we saw a lot of each other and he became a close friend of Van Ronk’s. I think Steve played a Dobro, although I’m not sure how because he only had one arm.

After the birthday we all got into the car to go to Paul’s cabin. We bought food to make a big stew to cook outside on the fire. There was a brook running on his property that was clean, cold, and clear as glass—delicious water for drinking. When I went to the brook to wash and peel the carrots, I reveled in the sound of the water rushing over the stones as it chugged down from the far-off mountains. It reminded me of the brook near my grandparents’ farm.

As I scraped away at the carrots and popped a few pieces in my mouth, I felt my eyes starting to itch. So I rubbed them. When I wet them with water from the brook, they only itched more. By the time I got back to the cabin my eyes were nearly swollen shut and itched like mad. The back of my throat began to feel scratchy and I was in a bit of a stupor. When I could no longer see and was having trouble breathing, it got a little scary. A decision was made to take me to the nearest hospital, which meant driving back to Charlottesville—and that made me feel even worse because I was ruining the weekend.

At the hospital I was given a shot of cortisone and told I probably had an allergic reaction to the carrots. Out of nowhere I had developed a serious raw carrot allergy. I had a feeling it had something to do with what’s in the ground they grow in and the pesticides used, but what do I know?

I waited a year and then tasted a tiny drop of organic carrot juice. Immediately my throat began to itch, and that was it for raw carrots and me forever.

Back in New York City by the end of May it was time for me to get ready to leave for Europe on June 9. I had to pick up my passport in Midtown, at Rockefeller Center. Sylvia Tyson came with me and, as we walked up Fifth Avenue, at some point my pocket got picked. The running joke among Villagers is that it is never safe to travel above Fourteenth Street. I came back downtown swearing that this was true and wondering if crossing the Atlantic fell into the same category.