Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in Hibbing, a small mining town near the Canadian border. At 10, he learned to play the family piano, and a couple of years later he had taught himself guitar and harmonica. He also spent a lot of time listening to the radio or hanging out in a record store on Howard Street. He absorbed everything he heard. “I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life.”1 Hank Williams, one of the founding fathers of country music, was one among Dylan’s favorite songwriters early on. There were also all those Southern bluesmen he heard on the radio—Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King—as well as the pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. All influenced him greatly.
In late 1955, along with two classmates, LeRoy Hoikkala on drums and Monte Edwardson on guitar, Bob formed his first band, the Golden Chords. The band took its name from Bob’s ability to find chords that “sounded good” on the piano. The trio performed covers of songs by Little Richard and various blues musicians. The Golden Chords rehearsed in Dylan’s parents’ garage and sometimes in the living room, where the piano was located, before performing at various high school events and participating in amateur competitions.
After months together, the band split up over musical differences. Bob wanted to engage fully in blues and rock ’n’ roll and immediately joined another band with Chuck Nara on drums and Bill Marinac and Larry Fabbro, respectively, on bass and electric guitar. Rehearsals resumed at the Zimmermans’. Bob played the family piano and gave a surprising impression of Little Richard, perfectly imitating his showmanship, although with less pizzazz. Other groups followed, including the Shadow Blasters, Elston Gunn and the Rock Boppers, and the Satin Tones.
By this time, the young Bob, who took the stage name of Zimbo, sang and played guitar and piano pretty well. In addition, he had a motorcycle like two of his idols—James Dean and Marlon Brando. At this point, he could envision himself as a rock star. To realize this ambition, and to get away from his parents’ hostility regarding his music, he had to leave Hibbing for the big city—namely Minneapolis. Anthony Scaduto quotes Echo Helstrom, Dylan’s first girlfriend: “When I was about thirteen, I started listening to the rock stuff, and rhythm-and-blues. Nobody else I knew had ever heard it. You couldn’t hear it in Hibbing, you had to tune in black stations from Little Rock or Chicago, late at night… And when Bob started talking to me about Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed and B. B. King and all the great blues guys, I just couldn’t believe what he was saying. It couldn’t be true.” She added, “By the time I met him it was just understood that music was his future.”2
In September 1959, Dylan moved from Hibbing to Minneapolis and enrolled in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota. He spent most of his time in Dinkytown, the bohemian district of the city. His encounters there led him to Beat literature and opened him up to the culture of the folk music revival. “All the music I heard up until I left Minnesota was… I didn’t hear any folk music… I just heard country and western, rock and roll, and polka music.”3 During an interview with Playboy magazine in March 1978, Dylan says, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in ’58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson… [Her record was] just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record.”4
After Odetta, other influences followed, such as Josh White, Jesse Fuller, the Carter Family… but mostly Woody Guthrie. At the end of 1959, a young actress named Flo Caster played several old 78 rpm albums by Woody Guthrie for him. Bob Dylan: “I put one on the turntable and when the needle dropped, I was stunned—didn’t know if I was stoned or straight… All these songs together, one after another made my head spin. It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted.”5 That was a true aesthetic shock. “I was listening to his diction, too. He had a perfected style of singing that it seemed like no one else had ever thought about… The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them.”6 In September 1960, through Dave Whittaker, one of the Svengali-type Beats on the scene, Dylan acquired Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory. The young Dylan went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane. He had found his hero and model and dove passionately into his life and work.
In January 1960, the young Robert Zimmerman decided to travel to New York City to, among other things, visit his musical idol, Woody Guthrie, then hospitalized in New Jersey. He arrived in New York with his guitar and harmonica on a freezing morning in January 1961 and went straight to Greenwich Village. There, he discovered the vibrant artistic life of the neighborhood, where he became a familiar figure performing in various folk clubs such as Cafe Wha?, the Gaslight Cafe, and Gerde’s Folk City on MacDougal and Bleecker Streets. He found good souls, enjoyed the hospitality of Bob and Sid Gleason—Guthrie’s close friends—and befriended singers active on the New York folk scene, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, and Dave Van Ronk.
The young singer, who took the name Bob Dylan, attracted a growing number of fans and folkies at every concert. The Rotolo sisters, Carla and Suze, fell in love with him. At the time Carla was an assistant to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Suze later became Dylan’s girlfriend after a folk demonstration at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on July 29, 1961. Dylan gained some public recognition when music critic Robert Shelton wrote a laudatory review in the New York Times, and when Dylan played harmonica on folksinger Carolyn Hester’s third album; she was married at the time to the folk songwriter Richard Fariña. As early as summer 1961, future manager Albert Grossman saw Dylan’s enormous potential.
John Hammond discovered Dylan in September 1961, during a rehearsal session of the folksinger Carolyn Hester, whose next album he was producing. A friend of Dylan, she asked him to play backup harmonica on her album, and Hammond wanted to hear what she planned to include. This was the first contact between the two men. “John Hammond wanted to meet us and get everything in running order, to hear the songs I was thinking of recording,” said Carolyn Hester. “Dylan was there and Richard [Fariña, folksinger and Carolyn’s husband]. Just the four of us… Dylan was sitting next to Hammond on a bench, I was just in front of them and singing while Dylan was accompanying me on harmonica. They talked about ‘Come Back,’ the song that Dylan had given me. Hammond loved it.”2 Hammond later said he was immediately impressed by the young man, despite his clumsy playing and hoarse voice. However, nothing else happened that day.
On September 29, 1961, before the Carolyn Hester’s first recording session, an article by Robert Shelton appeared in the “Folk and Jazz” column of the New York Times under the headline: Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist. As Dylan said, “… a tidal wave occurred—in my world at least.” The next day Hammond came across it. At the studio, Dylan played harmonica and guitar and even sang a song or two with Carolyn. Hammond found this “young man with a cap” fascinating, even if he was not particularly good either on the guitar or on the harmonica. Hammond invited him to go to the studio at Columbia Records to discover what he could sing. Dylan sang (among other songs) “Talkin’ New York,” “a social chronicle of life in Manhattan, which has literally taped me,” Hammond wrote in his memoir. “Bobby, I do not know what Columbia is going to think of everything, but I think you are absolutely stupendous, and I’ll take you under contract.” Dylan agreed. “It was the right place for me,” he later wrote. Columbia also produced Pete Seeger, one of his heroes. Still a minor, he told Hammond that he had neither parents nor a manager. “John Hammond put a contract down in front of me—the standard one they gave to any new artist. He said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I looked at the top page which said, Columbia Records, and I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ Hammond showed me where, and I wrote my name down with a steady hand. I trusted him. Who wouldn’t? There were maybe a thousand kings in the world, and he was one of them.”3 In 2005, Dylan confessed to the filmmaker Martin Scorsese: “I wondered if I was dreaming. Nobody thought that such folk could appeal to Columbia…”4
Outside of John Hammond and Billy James, who worked in the advertising department, no one at Columbia Records believed in Bob Dylan. Even after the release of his first album, the songwriter remained “Hammond’s folly.” The producer’s stalwart support of Dylan, against everyone in the Columbia Records management offices, is evidence of his ability to discover new talent, as well as of his own rebellious character. In the late 1960s, the visionary producer was known as “the oracle.” Hammond died in 1987. At his memorial, Springsteen and Dylan sang “Forever Young.”