Bob Dylan
Authors: Andy Gill
Text and design copyright © Carlton Books Limited 1998, 2011
This edition published by Carlton Books Limited in 2011
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eISBN 978-1-78011-209-1
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The material in this book was originally published as
My Back Pages
CONTENTS
Of all the stars thrown up by the pop explosion of the Sixties, none has exerted as deep or lasting an influence on our culture as Bob Dylan. Others may have been prettier, or sold more records, or made a smoother transition into today's gossip-column celebrocracy, but none has so irreversibly altered our conception of what is possible within a popular song, and particularly within its lyrics. He was pop's great emancipator: from Hendrix to the Beatles, Clapton to Cohen, Beach Boys to Beck, virtually all of rock music has been inspired or influenced in some way by Dylan's creative ambition. It's testament to that ambition that, almost four decades on from his recording debut, Bob Dylan remains a restless, quixotic figure, heedless of musical trends, exasperatingly uneven, but still capable of stunning work like 1997's
Time Out Of Mind.
But whatever the merits (or otherwise) of his subsequent work, and notwithstanding in particular the greatness of
Blood On The Tracks
, it's upon his sixties songs that Bob Dylan's reputation ultimately rests: that extraordinary sequence of records which unerringly tracked the tenor of the times as he moved through his various incarnations as raw young folkie, prince of protest, folk-rock innovator, symbolist rocker and country-rock pioneer.
Dylan's progress through that decade is a trail which constituted the primary motor for my own development, as it did for so many others; yet to a younger generation his position grows progressively less clear, more vague and blurredâpossibly because of his constant creative flux, but also, I think, simply as a result of the accelerating erosion of knowledge which seems to accompany our supposed âinformation society.' A case in point: in a weekly British music paper recently, the guitarist with a highly successful American post-grunge rock bandâwe'll call him Jamesâcited Dylan's âThe Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll' as one of his favorite songs. Fine, except that he erroneously claimed it was a fictional storyâand one which, furthermore, was apparently issued on an album called
Don't Look Back
. Which doesn't exist.
This book is basically to help people like James. In it, I've tried to give some idea of the forcesâmusical, political, historical, literary, philosophical
and personalâat play in each of Dylan's songs through this period of his greatest achievement, along with brief accounts of their recording, where appropriate. For research material, I consulted much of the available trove of Dylan literature, of which the most useful were the three classic biographiesâAnthony Scaduto's no-nonsense
Bob Dylan
, Bob Spitz's iconoclastic
Dylan: A Biography
, and Robert Shelton's exhaustively detailed
No Direction Home
âall of which proved fascinating funds of information.
Dylan's own
Lyrics
1962â1985 sparked as many questions as it provided answers, and Craig McGregor's excellent compilation
Bob Dylan: A Retrospective
contained a wealth of contemporary essays and interviews. Two other compilations,
All Across The Telegraph
(ed. Michael Gray and John Bauldie) and
The Dylan Companion
(ed. Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman), offered stimulating blends of opinion and explication. Other books consulted include Levon Helm's autobiography
This Wheel's On Fire;
Greil Marcus's examination of
The Basement Tapes, Invisible Republic;
Clinton Heylin's account of Dylan's recording sessions,
Dylan Behind Closed Doors;
and Tim Riley's
Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary
. On more general social and political matters, the following were helpful: Hugh Brogan's
Kennedy;
Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg's
The Growth Of The American Republic
, and David Steigerwald's
The Sixties And The End Of Modern America.
I've also drawn on interviews I conducted at various times with Joan Baez, Don Pennebaker, Sam Lay, Robbie Robertson and Al Kooper; I am particularly indebted to Robbie and Al for their time and generosity. I'd also like to thank my editors at
The Independent, Q, Mojo
and the
NME
âin whose pages various of the opinions contained herein were originally ventilated in one form or anotherâparticularly Neil Spencer, Mark Ellen, Giles Smith, Nick Coleman and Mat Snow.
Other friends, colleagues and musicians who have directly contributed to my greater understanding of Dylan throughout the years, or who have helped this project in some other way, includeâfirst and foremostâthe late John Bauldie, who helped re-ignite my dormant interest; and also Phil Barnes, Pete Bennion, Jackson Browne, Paul Du Noyer, Barry Everard, Patrick Humphries, Daniel Lanois, Jared Levine, Roger Longmore, Phil Manzanera, Gavin Martin, Rainer Ptacek, Leon Russell, Patrick Smith, Paul Trynka, Don & David Was, Lucian Randall at Carlton Books, and most of all, the lovely Linda, who kept me sane enough to finish it. My love goes out to all of them, and to each and every underdog in the whole wide Universe.
ANDY GILL
BOB DYLAN
When Bob Dylan recorded his first album in late November of 1961, he had been in New York less than a year, most of it spent scuffling for low-paying gigs on the coffeehouse folk music circuit based in Greenwich Village. Folk music had joined jazz as the hip musical choice of bohemian beatniks and students through the late Fifties, as a more “authentic” response to what was increasingly perceived as the gaudy insincerity of rock 'n' roll: the raw power of originators like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard was being supplanted by tame corporate copyists like Pat Boone and Fabian, and the music industry was riven by payola scandals which left a strong stench of materialist corruption around rock 'n' roll.
For the more serious-minded young adult, American folk music offered a comparatively clean breath of righteous fresh air, having served as the rallying cry of liberals, lefties and outsiders through the conservative Eisenhower era. Just as importantly, the older, pre-war songs which were the bread and butter of any folk performer's act came from a time before America had assumed imperial dominance over the world, and were considered unsullied by the plastic desires of the Fifties. Their themes and mythographies bore the authenticating stamp of a timeless oral tradition, and though collectors like Alan Lomax, Paul Oliver and Harry Smith may have recorded or compiled the classic folk and blues performances in the early decades of the century, there was no telling how old the songs themselves actually were, or how many generations further back they stretched. For a country which had effectively wiped out its native Indian culture during its brutal colonizing years, these songs provided a badly-needed sense of cultural heritage.
The folk movement received its biggest boost in 1958, when The Kingston Trio, a San Francisco-based folk group, had a huge, chart-topping hit with âTom Dooley', a song traceable back at least as far as 1866. Suddenly saleable, folk music started to be regarded
with something approaching mild interest by the big record companies, who joined specialist labels like Folkways, Elektra and Vanguard in signing up the genre's leading lights. Columbia had Pete Seeger and The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem, and Vanguard itself scored a coup when the young Joan Baez became the toast of the scene after her appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival.
By 1961, folk music was still largely the preserve of the die-hard traditionalists, who considered these old songs to be texts just as sacred as any fundamentalist's Bible; their performance should be as close to the original version as possible, any deviation being deemed a bowdlerization or corruption of the song's integrity. But there were signs of a split in the folkie ranks, between these older, “High Folk” types and a new breed of “Low Folk” performers like Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk, who sought pleasure in the music, rather than being concerned to be intellectually truthful in their interpretations. The young Dylan was very much in the latter camp, drawn by Elliott's and Van Ronk's unashamedly “black” inflections applied to “white” material, and he quickly developed a distinctive singing style of his own, part-Woody Guthrie, part-blues moanâwhich some found quite comical. Nevertheless, it was unmistakably his own. Along with the piercing blasts of harmonica (which he played in a wire brace similar to the one he had seen bluesman Jesse Fuller using during a three-week stay in Denver) and a stage style that incorporated little Chaplinesque moments of physical comedy with an engaging line of patter, Bob Dylan became an accomplished performer with an easily discernible, inimitable character.
The campus town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had evolved a folk scene of its own. Its leading lights were Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Jim Kweskin and Eric Von Schmidtâthe latter became Dylan's host on his visits there. On one such trip, he introduced Bob to Texan folk singer Carolyn Hester and her husband Richard Fariña, who instantly took a shine to him. Hester was about to record her third albumâher first on a major labelâwith the legendary John Hammond Sr. Always a man with an eye for the main chance, Dylan played her a couple of his own tunes, and Hester decided to use one, a blues called âCome Back Baby', on her new album. Doubly fortunate, from Bob's point of view, was the fact that the song featured an extended harmonica break, which Bob himself would play. He was, after all, a professional blues-harpist, his only recording session to date having been as a sideman, playing harmonica on an album by Harry Belafonte. (He would also play harmonica at sessions for Victoria Spivey and Big Joe Williams before Hester's album was recorded.) Hester and Dylan agreed to
meet for rehearsals at the apartment of poet Ned O'Gorman in New York, which is where John Hammond first encountered the young man who would become the crowning glory of his career in A&R.
It was already an illustrious career, to say the least. Hammond had discovered and launched the career of Billie Holiday, and had been instrumental in the successes of Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter and the celebrated boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson and Meade “Lux” Lewis. A devoted fan of jazz and blues, his ground-breaking promotion of the
Spirituals To Swing
concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938/39 was the single greatest factor in the dissemination of the various forms of black music to a widerâand whiterâaudience. He was, in short, a giant of 20th century music, with a proven ear for original talent.