Goodwin Bob Dylan: 1962 - 1970

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-460-4
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Bob Dylan is the magician who sprinkled poetic fairy dust onto the popular music of the early sixties. His songwriting sparked a revolution and changed rock music forever.
The diminutive poet/singer claimed he was merely a 'song and dance man', but Dylan altered popular music from intellectually bereft teenage rebellion into a serious adult art form worthy of academic study.
Dylan headed for the sixties as a Little Richard rock 'n' roller but soon turned acoustic folkie. After absorbing the music and words of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Brecht, he became a vagabond social troubadour. Basking in Rimbaud, he transformed into a poetic symbolist before later immersing himself in lysergic beat surrealism. The chameleon of Dylan in the sixties was bewildering to his followers. His first album was a raw debut folk/blues. He followed this with three acoustic poetic gems, three ground-breaking surreal, electric wonders and four that were more mundane and country tinged.
But by the mid-sixties, he was a strung-out polka-dotted rock star. He crashed (physically and mentally) before leaving the sixties as a clean-cut country crooner. Dylan had mutated more times than a trilobite. Dylan's ground-breaking music changed the world and his amazing story is revealed by exploring the eleven albums that he released between 1962 and 1970.

Opher Goodwin is the author of many books on rock music and science fiction and taught the first 'History of Rock Music' classes in the UK. He was fortunate to spend the sixties in London, the epicentre for the underground explosion of rock music and culture, where he was able to see everyone from Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Cream to The Doors, Captain Beefheart and Roy Harper. He now lives happily in East Yorkshire, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Goodwin, Opher

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Bob Dylan (1962)

Personnel:

Bob Dylan: acoustic guitar, vocals and harmonica

John Hammond: producer

Label: Colombia

Recorded at Colombia Studio A

Release date: March 1962

Highest chart position: UK: 13, USA: -

From the moment he arrived in Greenwich Village, Bob was a human dynamo, into everything, bursting with energy and manically throwing himself into the scene. He’d play anywhere, passing the basket round for small change, living hand to mouth, partying and jamming to all hours, crashing on couches and floors, talking incessantly, copying, pinching and exchanging chords, tales and songs. Greenwich Village was a melting pot. He was soaking it all up.

Bob was carefully cultivating his image as a rough-living, experienced roustabout in the Guthrie mould. He copied Guthrie’s style, played a lot of his songs and even based his image on Woody’s casual working clothes – an image that looked thrown together but was, in fact, agonised over. Part of the mystique he was studiously creating was the mythology of his earlier life, all carefully designed to put distance between his present incarnation and the ordinary middle-class upbringing he had experienced. Small-town middle class was not cool, not the image he wished to project. Bob Dylan was a construct, complete with an exciting, mythologised past.

There is some doubt as to when he completely left his former life behind. I had a friend (also called Bob) who was hitch-hiking around the States at the time and scrounging jobs wherever he could. In 1960, he ended up in Greenwich Village and managed to get a gig, because of his English accent, introducing acts in Gerdes Folk City. There was no pay, but Mike Porco supplied him with beer and food. That suited him fine. He remembered introducing Dylan onto the stage as Robert Zimmerman. Bob gave him a very dark look for his troubles. His recollection of Bob was of a very self-assured young man, with a brash, arrogant manner. He wasn’t impressed with him or his music, finding the music too raw and abrasive and Bob’s attitude rather aloof – my friend Bob was more a lover of traditional folk music – but he was taken with Bob’s girlfriend (who would have been Suze Rotolo) and attempted to chat her up while Bob was playing (to no avail). Maybe the construction of his image was still a work in progress? Suze Rotolo claimed in her memoir not to have known him as Zimmerman, that only slipping out by accident when she stumbled across his draft card. Maybe my friend Bob’s memory was playing tricks with him?

One of the consequences of Bob’s lifestyle was that he soon began to play with a number of other people and was often found on stage supporting other acts, mainly playing harmonica, on which he was very proficient, or as a second guitar and supporting vocal. He was rapidly making a name for himself. These interactions led to other work and recording sessions. The first of these recording sessions was to play harmonica on Harry Belafonte’s recording of ‘Midnight Special’. Following that, he was used for a Caroline Hester recording session. This was incredibly fortuitous. Caroline recorded for Colombia Records and her producer was John Hammond. John was intrigued by this young man who was making such an impact in Greenwich Village and had fortuitously just received a favourable review in the New York Times that very week. Prior to the sessions, he visited Caroline’s apartment to organise the arrangements, enticed Bob to sing a few songs for him and obviously recognised the talent. This led to Dylan signing for Columbia Records. For Bob, this was a major coup. Not only had Bob rapidly risen to prominence in such a cut-throat environment where most performers simply fell by the wayside, but he had secured a contract with a major label – not some small specialist label such as Vanguard, which many of the others had to be content with. Bob was as near as an overnight success. What was even stranger was that Bob’s raw style was far from the flavour of the month. Folk music was a backwater. The most successful exponents were the more sophisticated folk groups such as the Greenbriar Boys or New City Ramblers or debonair folk singers like Joan Baez, queen of the folk movement. It was extremely hard to imagine Bob’s unsophisticated style ever being commercial. John Hammond must have seen something and been incredibly persuasive with the board. Not only that but as a producer, he did not attempt to smooth Dylan out, polish up his performance or make it more commercial; he gave him his head, recorded what Dylan did without frills or a great deal of production and left it at that.

Incidentally, the third of Dylan’s ventures into recording as a backing harmonica player was for a 1962 recording of the blues musicians Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey. These came out as the 1962 album Three Kings and a Queen (later outtakes came out as Three Kings and a Queen Vol. 2).

Bob also appeared under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt to avoid contractual obligations on a large number of Broadside recordings (three songs were officially released on the compilation album Broadside Ballads Vol. 1: ‘John Brown’, ‘Only a Hobo’, and ‘Talking Devil’). He also later backed Happy Traum on a version of his own song ‘Let Me Die in My Footsteps’. Using the same pseudonym, he also backed both Richard Farina and Eric Von Schmidt on their album projects.

When this 20-year-old Dylan had been asked in to sign the contract for Colombia, he was in a euphoric haze. He would have signed anything. He just looked at the writing at the top that said Columbia Records and signed, trusting John Hammond not to screw him over. At that signing, John gave Dylan a couple of unreleased acetates to listen to, recordings of artists that he thought Bob might relate to – The Dellmore Brothers, country singers, and an album by the blues singer Robert Johnson. John informed Dylan that Robert Johnson could ‘whip anybody’. When Bob put it on his record player, he was instantly blown away. He couldn’t believe the level of musicianship, the structure of the songs and poetic imagery. In a euphoric state, he rushed around to Dave Van Ronk’s to play him this astounding masterpiece. Dave was less enthusiastic, calling it derivative, but that did not deter Bob. He spent ages playing and playing the album, picking the songs and lyrics to pieces to see how Johnson had put them together. It was an epiphany.

At around the same time, Suze had taken him to a Berthold Brecht play where he had been completely bowled over by the song ‘Pirate Jenny’. Another song that Bob would dissect and marvel at. The building blocks of songwriting were being assembled.

That first album was not greatly carved out of Bob’s stage act. Indeed, it left out most of the regular songs Dylan was performing at the time. He seemed reticent to reveal too much. Instead, in preparation for the recording sessions, he set about feverishly scanning friend’s record collections for tracks to perform – many of which seemed to have a big Jesus theme. Nonetheless, the album reflected the wide range of material that he had been exposed to and subsequently adopted. He was adept at learning songs. While crashing at peoples’ apartments, he would avidly devour their record collections. Bob claimed to be able to learn a song after only hearing it once. Quite a feat. The result was an album of earthy folk-blues and folk with only a couple of Bob’s originals.

The sessions were spartan, recorded quickly in three afternoons, with just Bob on his guitar and harmonica, nothing added. They came across with a lot of force. The only sign of Bob’s inexperience in the studio (John Hammond said that he spat his P’s and hissed his S’s and often turned away from the mic but refused to play songs twice), and the nerves he must have been feeling, was the speed of delivery. A number of the songs could have benefitted from a slower pace.

Ironically, the two Dylan tracks ‘Song to Woody’, in which he paid homage to his hero, and ‘Talkin’ New York’, based on a Guthrie number, were dominant, but none of the Woody Guthrie songs that had been so prevalent in his sets were recorded. Even at this early-stage Bob had already moved on. Though he was still visiting Woody in the sanitorium, still singing his songs on stage, still mimicking his image, it was as if his debut album was a farewell to Woody.

I was only thirteen at the time of the album’s release, but I was already a music nut. At that age, I was besotted with Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard and The Shadows as well as avidly listening to all the current pop that was being played on Radio Luxemburg. I was still a year or two away from being introduced to the blues and Woody Guthrie. The Beatles hadn’t yet happened, but I had been introduced to Joan Baez by an older girl with beatnik pretensions, and I liked Joan. I was young and open to new music.

My friend Charlie Mutton first played me the album. I remember being sat down as he reverently placed the album on his Dansette and I was handed the cover to read. I studied the cover, depicting a cherubic Dylan looking so fresh-faced that he didn’t look as if he’d started to shave. He certainly was different to anybody I knew, in his corduroy black cap and fur-lined brown jacket. We both had basic...