THE MUSIC WORLD remained in the dark about Bob Dylan’s accident. Rumors continued to circulate that his long silence was the result of serious injury or even disfigurement. Never had such a prominent musician simply disappeared in such a Garbo-esque manner. He wanted to be alone, or at least out of sight. When the New York Post’s Barry Cunningham came to Hi Lo Ha in January 1967, Sara Dylan threatened to call the police.
The first journalist to “penetrate the veil”—in Jonathan Taplin’s phrase—was New York Daily News reporter Michael Iachetta, whose persistent calls to the East Fifty-Fifth Street office were eventually met by Albert Grossman’s terse statement that Dylan was recovering from a broken neck and “is not seeing anybody” . . . followed by the sound of the dial tone. Iachetta, who’d interviewed Dylan in October 1963, drove up to Woodstock in early May 1967 and—after forty-eight hours of “vague answers” from protective locals—found his way to the “mahogany-stained estate” that was Hi Lo Ha. Fortunately for him, Dylan was in a good mood and remembered their earlier encounter. He invited Iachetta in and talked openly. He spoke of the accident and of money. He spoke of “mystery, magic, truth and the Bible in great folk music.” He was, wrote Iachetta, “a gypsy-like figure in faded dungarees, lavender shirt with collar turned up to cover his neck and a purple-and-blue striped blazer.”
One remark stuck out among the otherwise affable statements that appeared in Iachetta’s story. Dylan said that songs were “in my head like they always are” but were “not goin’ to get written down until some things are evened up. Not until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened.” What was he talking about? Who were these people? Iachetta chose not to probe, and the comment was left to the conjecture of those insiders who could read between the cryptic lines. One of them was Victor Maymudes, who a year earlier had tipped Dylan off to the fact that Albert Grossman was making a lot more money out of his biggest star than anyone (including Dylan) realized. “Bob did not know that he was giving away the rights to his songs when he handed them over to Albert to publish,” Maymudes said later. “Bob was receiving all of the money from writing the songs but was splitting fifty-fifty the proceeds from the publishing of the songs, which is where the real money was.”**
For informing on Grossman, Maymudes was rewarded with excommunication, Dylan apparently refusing to believe Grossman could do him any wrong. On checking his contracts, however, the truth was revealed. Naomi Saltzman, one of Grossman’s bookkeepers, confirmed that her boss owned half of the Dwarf Music company set up to administer Dylan’s publishing royalties—which meant that he was making the same amount from Dylan’s songs as their author was. Dylan was shocked, as much by his own naïveté as by Grossman’s greed. Like many entertainers he had simply trusted in his protector and skipped the small print. His sense of betrayal was bitter. It was as if his own father had been stealing from him. Behind Grossman’s back he called a meeting with Saltzman, inviting Grossman’s lawyer, David Braun, and his accountant, Marshall Gelfand, to join them. “The tension, I believe, came from Naomi,” says Jonathan Taplin. “And then unfortunately Braun made it worse. They essentially got Bob to feel that Albert was taking way too much of the music-publishing revenue. Once Bob began to believe that Albert was screwing him, it was all downhill from there.”
“The only thing remiss in Naomi’s mind,” suggests Ian Kimmet, who worked for Dylan’s subpublishers B. Feldman in London, “was that it was a ten-year contract, which was not appropriate for a management contract. It was in the small print, and she told Bob not to sign. So that’s where it all started breaking down.” It wasn’t long before Saltzman left Grossman’s office and began working exclusively for Dylan out of her high-rise apartment on Bleecker Street at LaGuardia Place. Simultaneously, Braun ceased working for Grossman and then, in the fall of 1968, helped Saltzman set up Dylan’s new publishing arm, Big Sky Music. Grossman continued to share in Dylan’s royalties but agreed to a lower percentage rate. He was keen to keep things out of the press. “I finally had to sue him,” Dylan later said. “Because Albert wanted it quiet, he settled out of court. . . . He had me signed up for ten years . . . for part of my records, for part of my everything.”
Not everyone saw the situation in black and white. “There are two sides to the coin,” says Linda Wortman, a copyright administrator who worked for Grossman. “Most musicians of that period didn’t read anything, and Dylan wasn’t any different. All managers take percentages. Albert was no different; he was just smarter.” Others agree. “There are those who say Albert took advantage of people,” says Peter Yarrow, who saw Dylan’s breakaway as little more than adolescent rebellion. “I see that as absolutely unfair and inappropriate. I never felt that Albert’s contracts with Peter, Paul & Mary were in any way excessive or unfair. I also have very serious questions as to whether Bobby would have emerged as an artist without Albert.”**
Dylan’s fury at Grossman’s perceived malfeasance came out obliquely in songs he was writing—possibly without the Hawks even being aware of them—as the Big Pink sessions wound down. “There is the music from Bob’s house, and there is the music from our house,” Robbie Robertson told Al Aronowitz. “John Wesley Harding comes from Bob’s house. The two houses sure are different.”
John Wesley Harding certainly was different—in mood, texture, arrangement—from the rollicking songs on the Big Pink tapes. Despite being recorded once again in Nashville with two of the key players on his previous album, Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey, it was also radically different from Blonde on Blonde: austere and haunting, with harmonica once again in the foreground and Dylan sounding like a traveling soothsayer. In a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, Dylan mentioned “the sound that Gordon Lightfoot was getting” with McCoy and Buttrey on the stripped-down, John Court–produced The Way I Feel (1966), claiming that John Wesley Harding was an (unsuccessful) attempt to “get it.” Strewn with biblical references—the result of his daily poring over a large Bible set up on a shtender at Hi Lo Ha—the Harding songs were parables, allegories shot through with portent and foreboding. “The biblical resource is not an unusual one, but it certainly was special to him,” says Bruce Dorfman. “My assumption always was that he was treating it as literature, in much the same way as he might have treated Melville as something he could draw on.”
John Wesley Harding also hinted at Dylan’s grief over the recent death of Woody Guthrie, whose spirit could be felt on songs such as “Drifter’s Escape” and “I Am a Lonesome Hobo.” Written for the most part as poems before music was added to them, they were, Dylan later said, “dealing with the devil in a fearful way, almost.” Given the recent merriment at Big Pink, which devil was he talking about? Was it Grossman? At least three of the songs on John Wesley Harding appeared to express feelings toward his manager. Most transparent was the slow, loping “Dear Landlord,” with its imprecation not to “put a price on my soul” and its sneering observation that “anyone can fill his life up with things / he can see but he just cannot touch.”**
Equally loaded with possible allusions were the song of pity for “the poor immigrant” who “falls in love with wealth itself / and turns his back on me” and the implacable “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” with its description of the almost Faustian pact Dylan had signed with Grossman in 1962 and reference to a “big house as bright as any sun / with four and twenty windows / and a woman’s face in every one.”†† Even “All Along the Watchtower,” the most famous song on John Wesley Harding, appeared to speak of Dylan’s breakdown at the time of his accident, with businessmen drinking his wine but not knowing “what any of it is worth.” Was the joker in that song Dylan and the thief Grossman? And was there indeed any “way out of here”? Nowhere on the album did Dylan sound more devil-haunted than in that song’s final image of the two riders approaching as “the wind began to howl.”**
If these extraordinary songs were at least partly about Grossman, they may have been the only way Dylan could express his anger toward him. “Albert was having a terrible battle with Bob, but I stayed close to him,” says Donn Pennebaker. “And that was a problem for me, because I was kind of in the middle of it.” For the moment, manager and artist were still yoked together by the contracts Dylan had signed in 1962. Indeed, after months of trying to prize Dylan free of Columbia and score a huge advance out of MGM Records’ Mort Nasatir—who came to Woodstock to make sure the singer hadn’t been too damaged by the motorcycle accident (and to hear tracks from the basement sessions)—Grossman had finally agreed to an improved offer from Columbia’s Clive Davis, who was desperate not to lose one of the label’s marquee names. But when John Wesley Harding was delivered as the first Dylan album under the new terms of a 10 percent royalty rate, Davis was understandably baffled by it.
MANY IN WOODSTOCK were unaware of the new froideur in Dylan’s relations with Grossman. “My first hint of bad blood boiling between Albert and Bob came when Bob started sneering at the very mention of [his] name, muttering angry words about a mysterious incident concerning somebody’s wife,” Al Aronowitz wrote. “Whose wife? Albert’s wife? Bob’s wife? My wife? If the truth be known, all three wives were in love with Bob. Each loved Bob a little too much.” Years later, Sally Grossman denied that either she or Albert thought “Dear Landlord” was about him. The general impression Dylan gave to those who socialized with him was of an almost blissfully happy family man. “He calmed down,” said Eric Andersen, who’d known Dylan at his most merciless in the Village. “[He] got into his family, got into something more real and more tangible, and he was really grooving on it for a while.” When Macmillan’s Bob Markel visited in February 1968 to discuss Tarantula, he found Dylan “far more friendly, far less distracted . . . more grown-up and professional, easy to be with.” Aronowitz described Dylan and his wife as “the ideal loving couple [who] flirted with each other constantly” and “put on an impressive show for me, a drama full of romance and wisecracks and everyday common sense.”
“That was the time we knew Bob best,” says Happy Traum. “It was very family-oriented—dinners together, hanging out and playing a lot of music. He would come down to our house and say, ‘Hey, you wanna hear this new song I wrote?’ What were we gonna say, ‘No’? I remember some of the songs from John Wesley Harding. Very few people were let into that world—a couple of artists and a couple of stonemasons—so we were very careful not to abuse the privilege.” Indeed, when he agreed in the summer of 1968 to do three interviews with Traum and John Cohen for Sing Out!—which Traum was then editing—Dylan preferred to talk about stonemasons than about Vietnam. To Bruce Dorfman he even expressed support for George Wallace, the pro-segregation governor of Alabama who ran for president that year. “He was a small-town kid, and a lot of his thinking politically was quite conservative,” says Dorfman. “What I was getting from him was, ‘At least you know what you’re getting with Wallace, so you can deal with it.’”**
Affectation or not, Dylan took his country-boy act to such an extreme that when he needed a new suit, he asked Dorfman to accompany him to Sears, Roebuck in Kingston. “He had this big truck, and he put Buster in the back,” Dorfman recalls. “At Sears he found a horrendous green suit with saddle-stitched collars and pockets. He thought it was terrific, and I don’t think he was making it up. Innocence gets shattered at some point, but then it comes right back again.” When Dylan showed the suit to Sara—who in her hippie-maternal way was quite chic—she smiled. “She said, ‘That’s a lovely suit, Bob,’” says Dorfman. “She just tolerated this stuff in a bemused way.”
Dorfman saw something troubled in Dylan’s “sad-eyed lady.” She had problems squaring her Playboy bunny past with her new role as muse and mother. (The couple’s next child, who was given the very Hebraic names Samuel Abraham, was born in July 1968, a little over a year after the birth of his sister Anna.) “There were times in her life when she was very unkind to herself and became very involved with the possibility of doing herself in,” Dorfman says. “There was a self-destructive dimension to her, emotionally and psychologically, that she was very actively trying to somehow hold off to the side.”
It was Sara who made Dorfman and his wife aware of the war that had broken out between her husband and Grossman. “Over the course of maybe a year,” Dorfman recalls, “what I got from her was that Bob was going through a very bad thing with Grossman and was thinking of changing managers. The idea was that he shouldn’t have had to read the contract, which I think a lot of artists would say. They should be able to trust people.”
By early 1968 the falling-out between the two men had become obvious to those around them. When Dylan appeared onstage with the Hawks during two Carnegie Hall memorial concerts for Woody Guthrie—“so changed, serene, smiling, oddly respectable in his grey suit and open-checked blue shirt,” Lillian Roxon wrote—Levon Helm noticed that he did not speak a single word to his manager the entire evening.
* In point of fact, Dylan was receiving “all of the money” from recording the songs, not from writing them—as the second half of Maymudes’s sentence makes clear.
* “Did Grossman rip off Dylan?” industry commentator Bob Lefsetz wrote in 2014. “I’ll let you decide. But without him there’d be little to steal.”
* In a 1971 phone conversation with self-appointed “Dylanologist” A. J. Weberman, Dylan claimed that “Dear Landlord” “wasn’t all the way for Al Grossman,” adding that “only later, when people pointed it out to me that the song might have been written for Al Grossman, I thought, well, maybe it could’ve been.” He specifically asked Weberman not to report that the song was about Grossman.
† At Big Pink, Dylan had cut a version of a big Porter Wagoner country hit that warned “it’s so hard to find / one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.” One could also suggest that basement originals such as “Too Much of Nothing” (“can turn a man into a liar”) and “Nothing Was Delivered” (“some answers for what you sell that has not been received”) were veiled comments on Grossman.
* The Village Voice’s Richard Goldstein heard the line as “two writers were approaching.” He was informed that Dylan “got a good laugh out of that.”
*Dylan said the same thing when Elliott Landy photographed him at Hi Lo Ha. After leaving the house, Landy ran into Richard Manuel and told him what Dylan had said. “I don’t know,” Richard said with a chuckle. “You can never tell with Bob if he is serious or not.” In Chronicles Dylan admitted that he had “a primitive way of looking at things and I liked Country Fair politics.”