“IT AIN’T ME, BABE” was directed as much at the many fans who’d deified Dylan as a prophet with a “message” as it was at Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo, or any of the other women in his life. So empty did he find the adulation on his seven-date English tour that when he and Sara returned to Woodstock in early June 1965, he thought seriously about quitting music altogether.
Instead he sat in the Yarrows’ cabin on Broadview Road and, in his own words, “vomited out” the six pages of rage and revenge that became “Like a Rolling Stone.”** “We had come up from New York,” he said, “and I had about three days off up there to get some stuff together.” Boosting his confidence was the number 1 hit that the Byrds had just had with their chiming electric version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”—a defining moment in the new folk-rock and a welcome source of royalties for the Dylan/Grossman coffers.
Assisting with the arrangement of the ascending chord sequence in “Like a Rolling Stone” was a nice Jewish boy who showed up in Woodstock on June 12, carrying a white Fender Stratocaster without a case. Dylan had met and jammed with Mike Bloomfield in Chicago in 1963, but the trust-funded guitar whiz was now a member of the powerful, multiracial Paul Butterfield Blues Band. As Sara prepared a curious salad of tuna fish and toasted peanuts in the Yarrows’ cabin, Dylan played the song’s chords on an upright piano and Bloomfield filled in the available spaces with vicious blues licks. Three days later, the two of them reconvened at the Columbia studios in New York with Tom Wilson and some of the crew who’d played on Bringing It All Back Home. And by the end of Wednesday, “Like a Rolling Stone” had been recorded, with a crucial organ part added by another nice Jewish boy.
“There was a little magic thing going on,” says Al Kooper, the boy in question. “Dylan, Bloomfield, and I were Jewish and approximately the same age—which was unusual for the New York session scene. Most of the other session guys were older and Italian.” The date marked the end of Tom Wilson’s relationship with Dylan. “Tom and Albert didn’t get along at all,” says Kooper. “That was why he got the boot as Dylan’s producer. When I was invited back for the next session, Tom was gone, and there was Bob Johnston.”
When Dylan received an acetate of “Like a Rolling Stone,” he was ecstatic. “He was so excited he wanted everyone to hear it,” remembered John Herald. “Anybody he knew who passed by the Café Espresso, Dylan would run out and say, ‘I’ve got this great new song, it’s going to be really big, you’ve got to hear it.’ Then he would take them inside and play it for them.” By August the single—all six uncompromising minutes of it—was at number 2.
Dylan spent the rest of June and most of July in Woodstock, writing and recording material for his next album and house hunting around town. Having visited John Lennon’s impressive new home in the Surrey “green belt” southwest of London, he wondered how it would feel to possess so many material things. Just as she had alerted Grossman to the Striebel house, Shirley Glaser learned through the grapevine that Ralph Whitehead’s son was selling a property in Byrdcliffe’s East Riding, previously inhabited by the German artist Lotte Stoehr. “Shirley heard about the house on Camelot Road,” says her husband, Milton, “so you might say she’s responsible for everything that happened to Woodstock.” The rambling eleven-bedroom property, known as Hi Lo Ha, was acquired for $12,000 through Davasee Enterprises, a business set up by Grossman. Surrounded by rhododendrons and boasting its own swimming hole, it was the first home that Dylan had owned.
As Sara—pregnant by now with Jesse Dylan—busied herself with furniture and decorations, Dylan knuckled down and wrote half a dozen more of his greatest songs, proving just how much of a breakthrough “Like a Rolling Stone” had been. If that song was unprecedentedly confrontational, “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Positively Fourth Street” were more savage still: “truth attacks” set to rolling, roiling electric music and sung in what the poet Philip Larkin described as a “cawing, derisive voice.”
It was the same voice people heard when Dylan took the stage at that summer’s Newport Folk Festival with a hastily flung-together band that included both Kooper and Bloomfield. On a whim of sorts—and resplendent in Ray-Bans and one of his new polka-dot shirts—he commandeered three-fifths of the Butterfield Blues Band, added Kooper and Barry Goldberg to the mix, and strode defiantly onto a stage that for six years had been a hallowed platform for folk elders and Delta bluesmen. Even Albert Grossman couldn’t have prepared himself for the furor that Sunday evening.
In truth it sounded horrible. By Newport standards the amplification was deafening and distorted. Dylan had barely ever played electric guitar before. Worse, the Chicago rhythm section couldn’t acclimate to the songs Dylan had taught them, since the music had nothing to do with the twelve-bar grooves they’d played with Butterfield or Howlin’ Wolf. Yet Al Kooper disputes the claim that the audience booed because the music was amplified; he says they were upset because Dylan only played three songs. Barry Goldberg agrees: “There were more people there that really dug it and reacted favorably than hardcore folkies that felt betrayed. We thought we did a good job, and we thought we were part of something important. It signaled the end of that folk era.”
Peter Yarrow, who was on the Newport board, begged Dylan to go back on and throw the faithful a bone. Johnny Cash, who had met folk’s rising star at the previous year’s festival, made similarly encouraging noises. Shocked by the booing—an onstage photograph shows a tear running down Dylan’s left cheek—he borrowed Yarrow’s guitar and went back onstage to sing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” “He went out,” Kooper says, “and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life when he played that song—the irony of it, and the fact that he was using a borrowed guitar.”
It was all over now, and the old folk guard knew it. “They had gotten to the point of having all their dreams come true two years before,” reflected Joe Boyd, a stalwart of the Cambridge scene who was present that night. “And suddenly they could see it all slipping away in a haze of marijuana smoke and self-indulgence. As far as they were concerned, Grossman was the money-changer at the gates of the temple.” As Pete Seeger marched indignantly back to the festival’s car park, his wife burst into tears. “This was the Birth of Rock,” Boyd wrote in his memoir, White Bicycles, adding that “anyone wishing to portray the history of the Sixties as a journey from idealism to hedonism could place the hinge at around 9.30 pm on the night of 25 July, 1965.”
FOUR DAYS AFTER his folk apostasy at Newport, Dylan returned to the studio in New York to record more songs. Among them was “Positively Fourth Street,” possibly addressed to one of his many envious Village judges but more likely laying waste to the whole lot of them. This time there was another young gun on the session, a bass-playing pal of Al Kooper’s who was as struck by the glowering presence of Albert Grossman as he was by Dylan. “I’d been playing small dates in the city, so I didn’t know who Bob was,” says Harvey Brooks. “Then when I saw this old guy with long gray hair sitting there, I thought ‘Who is this man?’ Albert had a style unto himself that emerged even in that moment.”
On the weekend of July 31–August 1, Dylan invited Kooper up to Bearsville to write chord charts for the remaining songs on Highway 61 Revisited. Dancing attendance was the inevitable Neuwirth. “Dylan had ways of imposing distance when he wanted to, but mostly he was very loose with us,” Kooper says. “When I first started spending time with him, I didn’t say anything. I was learning—or, as Neuwirth said, ‘getting my hip card punched.’ It took me a while to assimilate.” On one of the evenings, stoned out of their minds, they ran a reel of Rebel Without a Cause on Grossman’s projector, thereby revisiting Dylan’s teenage infatuation with James Dean. “We watched it in slow motion, and then we watched it backwards,” says Kooper. “There was very little of Albert involved when I was there. Neuwirth was the ersatz Albert: he was doing Albert’s job so that Albert could get some time off.”
The following week, Dylan’s sixth Columbia album was completed. Released in late August with a Daniel Kramer cover shot of Dylan in a Triumph T-shirt on the steps of Grossman’s Gramercy Park building—and Neuwirth standing behind him—Highway 61 was unapologetically electric, with only the apocalyptic “Desolation Row” offering any sort of sop to Dylan’s older fans.** The gloves were off, and he was determined to push things to the limit with a full electric tour. Disappointed when Mike Bloomfield left—saying he was committed to the Butterfield band—Dylan put out word that he wanted a new guitarist and drummer to augment Kooper and Brooks for shows at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl.
Dylan had already met red-hot R&B band Levon and the Hawks when Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson backed John Hammond Jr. on his 1964 album So Many Roads, but he was unaware they were holding down a summer residency at Tony Mart’s on the Jersey shore that very month. Mary Martin, a Canadian working for Grossman and later described by Dylan as “a rather persevering soul,” made the reintroductions. The Hawks were from a very different music world, honing their chops in rough nightclubs and oblivious to the new pop order of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Though Arkansas-born Levon Helm was skeptical of the benefits of playing behind this tousled poet, Toronto native Jaime “Robbie” Robertson was more forward-thinking. The two men bade a temporary farewell to their bandmates and drove up to New York to rehearse with Dylan, Kooper, and Brooks.
Somehow it all gelled in time for the August 28 show at Forest Hills, where the anti-electric protestors were out en masse. “They came like lemmings,” says Kooper. “They sang along to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and then booed. It was farcical. Bob had taken ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’ from Ray Charles’s ‘I Believe To My Soul,’ so we played the intro to that. And then he sang the line ‘Something is happening and you don’t know what it is.’ It was like ‘Baby Blue’ at Newport—fabulous theatre.” At an after-show party at Grossman’s apartment, Dylan was all but levitating, delighted to have stoked the controversy still further. At the Hollywood Bowl, six days later, the reaction was significantly hipper: the city of the Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas was altogether more embracing of Electric Bob. Rock was completing its violent birth as a fusion of poetry and amplification.
The shows set the tone for the next nine months. When Kooper and Brooks bowed out, Helm told Dylan he had to take all of the Hawks or none. In mid-September, Dylan flew up to Toronto to rehearse with the group. Suddenly the small-town boys from Arkansas and Ontario found themselves on the world stage with the most charismatic song-poet of the time—a mod band in dark suits desecrating his revolutionary folk anthems.
Starting in Austin, the tour was booed from the get-go. It was as if Jesus had gone over to the dark side and hired Lucifer to play lead guitar. The sound was intense, irreverent, and often deafening. Dylan was sticking it to the people and upping his speed intake in the process. Watching in the wings was Grossman, whose willingness to empower Dylan was being tested to the limit. “Albert was back in the blues and folk mentality for his whole career,” says Michael Friedman. “He was trying to get Bob to get rid of the Band. He told me, ‘Every time I went to him to tell him to get rid of them, Bob would tell me to give them an extra hundred dollars a week.’ So he stopped asking.”
Dylan’s seismic changes may have made him uneasy, but Grossman knew better than to second-guess him. Instead he attempted to keep pace, altering his appearance to match Dylan’s and switching his image from tweedy left-wing professor to shaggy-haired nonconformist. “I used to remember Albert as a nice-looking businessman, the kind of middle-aged man you would meet in a decent restaurant in the Garment District,” said Gloria Stavers, editor of 16 magazine. “Then, a while after he signed Dylan, I met him again. I just couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘Albert!’ I screamed when I finally recognized him. ‘What has Bobby done to you?’”
The basic script for Dylan’s 1965–1966 shows was invariably the same: a solo acoustic set, performed fairly indifferently but greeted ecstatically, followed by an electric set played with gusto and greeted with outraged howls. As Robertson spat out angry Telecaster riffs at Dylan’s side, Garth Hudson filled every available space with inspired noodling. Dylan’s jaded, sneering voice was proto-punk, a decade ahead of its time. The fuss about guitars and amplifiers obscured the real point, which was that he’d sabotaged his own boy-heroin-overalls image and become a narcissistic icon. When Phil Ochs said that there was “something very dangerous, something very frightening” about him, it made clear what a threat Dylan posed to the bastions of Broadside and Sing Out!**
Dylan had invented Attitude, the mode of cooler-than-thou remoteness that’s driven pop ever since. It was undiluted ego on skinny legs, James Dean via Elvis and Rimbaud—in the words of Don DeLillo from his Dylan-inspired novel Great Jones Street, “the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.”††
ON NOVEMBER 22, at the end of an East Coast tour, Dylan married Sara Lownds in a ceremony in Mineola, Long Island, so low-key that almost nobody—Grossman aside—knew about it. The knot was tied so hurriedly because an old-fashioned part of Dylan wanted the heavily pregnant Sara to be married before having their baby. As much as he’d earlier tried to pretend they didn’t exist, he had his parents’ feelings to consider (though they weren’t invited). He also knew that being married didn’t quite sync with the image he was projecting into the world.
The old-fashioned Dylan also materialized in a New Year encounter with the decadent entourage surrounding Andy Warhol. Though he was intrigued by the silver-haired Pop artist, Dylan was repelled by what he saw at Warhol’s Factory studio. “Dylan represented a certain milieu that was almost the antithesis of Andy’s milieu,” said Factory artist and dancer Gerard Malanga. “. . . You had the heterosexual grouping and you had the so-called homosexual grouping.” Attempting to break the ice was the boyishly beautiful Edie Sedgwick, then sleeping with Bobby Neuwirth and being courted as a possible client by Albert Grossman (until he realized she couldn’t sing). It didn’t work: Dylan sat sullenly in a corner and only agreed to sit for one of Warhol’s “screen tests” on condition that he help himself to a diptych of the gun-toting Elvis Presley in Don Siegel’s 1960 western Flaming Star. When Warhol obliged, Dylan and Neuwirth strapped the painting to the top of Dylan’s station wagon like a dead deer and drove it up to Woodstock. “Bob wanted not to care about the painting,” says Bruce Dorfman, Dylan’s new Byrdcliffe neighbor. “I think he did care, because it fascinated him, but he wanted not to. Because there was a very strong middle-class or lower-middle-class ethic lurking with him all the time. You could really see it when he was around his mother or when he talked about his brother.”
Compounding the contemptuous transportation of Warhol’s Double Elvis were the stories its creator later heard about its mistreatment. “I got paranoid when I heard rumors that [Dylan] had used [it] as a dartboard up in the country,” Warhol reminisced in 1980. “When I’d ask, ‘Why would he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like, ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie’ or ‘Listen to “Like a Rolling Stone.”’” Over a decade passed before Warhol found out what had really happened to his Double Elvis: Dylan had traded it for a leather couch imported from Scandinavia by his manager. “The story I heard was that Bob had spent a year living on this funky old couch,” says Michael Friedman. “Albert had got it in a tag sale for, like, ten bucks. So he said he’d trade it for the Warhol. Bob said, ‘Seems like a fair trade.’”**
The sybaritic demimonde of Andy Warhol and his Factory workers permeated Blonde on Blonde, a double album recorded in Nashville with Bob Johnston in February and March 1966. Some even thought the withering ballad “Just Like a Woman”—like the unreleased “She’s Your Lover Now”—was at least partly about the doomed Sedgwick, while “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” was a song about fashion victimhood that would have been inconceivable in Dylan’s repertoire two years earlier. Blonde on Blonde was rock’s first double album, with a blurred Dylan running horizontally across the sleeve and Nashville session men riffing behind the bird’s-nest-headed speed freak. It was Highway 61 times two, with raw blues routines giving way to flowing ruminations such as “Visions of Johanna,” “One of Us Must Know,” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” an epic song inspired by Sara.
“Albert didn’t know if it was a good idea or not to record in Nashville,” says Al Kooper, who flew there with Grossman and Robbie Robertson. “He was watching this thing that he didn’t condone. Some press guy got into the studio one day and said, ‘My God, what is that guy on?’ Albert said, ‘Columbia Records and Tapes.’ Then he threw him out.”
The electric tour continued, but without the Hawks’ drummer. Levon Helm had jumped ship in late November, weary of being jeered for music he didn’t even like. “That was a dose of medicine,” he told me. “I took about one tour of it, and when they got ready to go to Europe and Australia, that’s when I passed. They were on us hot and heavy, boy. Them beatniks was tough!” Heading south from Washington, DC, Helm got himself a job with the Aquatic Engineering and Construction Company in Louisiana. “He ended up on some kind of oil rig,” remembered Rick Danko. “He said, ‘You’d go out for four or five days, and they’d pay you a lot of money.’ He had his mandolin and his harmonica with him, and they’d play music more than they’d scrape paint off rusty boats or whatever it was.” Robbie Robertson was hit hard by the loss of his musical brother. “It broke my heart when Levon left,” he said. “I remember, I walked him down to the corner and said goodbye as he got a taxi.”
What Robertson didn’t twig was how turned off Helm was by the guitarist’s obsequiousness toward Dylan: it just didn’t sit right with the dirt farmer’s son who’d been raised to be true to his authentic musical self. And yet Robertson was correct in his belief that the hookup with Dylan—even a reviled Dylan—would take the Hawks to a level of fame they would never otherwise have known. Thus the band continued with session man Bobby Gregg on drums, playing for almost three weeks in California. Another drummer, Sandy Konikoff, took over when the tour resumed in February. But it was the pounding Mickey Jones who played on the most infamous leg of the grueling tour, beginning in Stockholm on April 29. Along for the ride on this stretch were Donn Pennebaker and his assistants, Howard and Jones Alk.
“I may have made a movie about drugs without realizing it,” Pennebaker says of the footage shot during the European tour. He remembers Dylan “scratching himself a lot” and being told this was a sign of amphetamine abuse. It may also have been a symptom of opiate use, since Dylan confessed to Robert Shelton that he’d taken heroin.** For the most part, Grossman looked the other way—and perhaps even encouraged the drug use. “It was a source of his power,” an anonymous client of Grossman’s told David Hajdu. “He was bacterious [sic]. He made sure his clients had anything and everything they wanted, which made them all the more dependent on him.” Ed Sanders, then of the Fugs, agrees: “Our managers worked out of the Grossman office, so I had a lot of inside information. I’m not that much of a fan of Albert, because too many of his artists were junkies, and I think it’s possible he used their addiction as a way of controlling them.”
Though the Hawks were used to amphetamine—they’d popped what Helm called “fat girls’ pills” throughout their years on the road—being part of the retinue of a sadistic rooster on dope was uncharted territory for them. Rick Danko and piano player Richard Manuel stuck to their roles as bemused country boys; organist Garth Hudson was in another world anyway. Only Robertson seemed at ease with Dylan’s behavior: so tightly did he stick to his new boss that Mickey Jones referred to him behind his back as “Barnacle Man.” The humiliation of journalists and hangers-on had continued on the Australian leg of the world tour. Now even old friends of the Hawks felt excommunicated. “Albert didn’t like me at all,” John Hammond Jr. told me. “As soon as Robbie and the others got with Dylan, I fell out of touch with them. They had been the coolest guys—wide-open, full-throttle—but all of a sudden I was just a complete idiot to them.”
Once Dylan was being filmed, the tour became a twenty-four-hour-a-day performance. “Filming on the 1966 tour turned out to be hard,” says Donn Pennebaker. “Dylan was supposed to be in charge, but he was as wild as I’d ever seen him: all-night sagas of traipsing around shooting this and that, and none of it made sense. He was in over his head, and he was vamping, and I didn’t know what to tell him.” But Pennebaker did capture the legendary moment at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall when young John Cordwell shouted, “Judas!” as a protest against Dylan’s apparent disdain for songs that had meant so much to people. “That onstage posturing and rock-star arrogance was new in Manchester in 1966,” Cordwell said thirty-three years later. “Even super-egos like Jagger, Lennon et al. had yet to treat live audiences with the sort of contempt that Dylan seemed to show that night.”
Dylan was about to crash into the wall of his own drug-crazed megalomania. Footage that Pennebaker shot of him being chauffeured around London with John Lennon showed just how far he had gone. “I wanna go home to baseball and TV,” Dylan whines pathetically as the limo glides through Hyde Park at dawn. He was ready to be an ordinary American again.
* Ian Bell has rather dispelled the notion of “Rolling Stone” being “vomited out,” pointing out that the lyric drew on passages from his novel-in-progress Tarantula.
* Highway 61 Revisited was the last album cover that Daniel Kramer shot for Dylan. In December 1966 Albert Grossman placed an injunction on Citadel Press in an attempt to prevent the publication of Kramer’s book of Dylan photographs. The injunction was rejected, and the book appeared in March 1967.
* Ochs was himself briefly managed by Albert Grossman until he grew weary of being overlooked in favor of GrossCourt’s bigger acts and fobbed off with Grossman’s loftiest copout—“It’s not your time yet, Phil.” Richie Havens regularly heard the same words from Grossman before John Court took over and produced his 1967 debut, Mixed Bag.
† The story of reclusive and enigmatic star Bucky Wunderlick, Great Jones Street (1973) involves the theft of his unreleased Mountain Tapes and features a guitarist (Azarian) said to be modeled on Robbie Robertson and a manager (Globke) partially based on Grossman.
* According to Ronnie Lyons, Dylan admitted later that it was “the dumbest thing he ever did in his whole life.” Sally Grossman later sold the Warhol for $750,000; today its value would be closer to $40 million.
* The confession only became public knowledge when Shelton’s Dylan biography No Direction Home was revised and updated in 2011, sixteen years after the author’s death. However, like so many of Dylan’s boasts, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. “When I first met Bob, he claimed that he had been a junkie,” Al Aronowitz told me. “I believed him then, but in retrospect I didn’t.” To Bob Spitz, Dave Van Ronk said he “knew [Dylan] was playing with heroin,” though he added that he was “flirting with it and wanted us to know—as if it would shock us.”