17
Lookin’ back, it really was a stupid thing to do. But there was a house available on MacDougal Street, and I always remembered that as a nice place. So I just bought this house, sight unseen. But it wasn’t the same when we got back. The Woodstock Nation had overtaken MacDougal Street also. There’d be crowds outside my house.
—Bob Dylan, 1984
The worst times of my life were when I tried to find something in the past. Like when I went back to New York for the second time. I didn’t know what to do. Everything had changed.
—Bob Dylan, 1989
By January 1970, Dylan had just about renounced his previous view that ‘you have to be let alone to really accomplish anything.’ Perhaps, he reasoned, he needed ‘the New York atmosphere’ to write songs—even if there was little prospect of him anonymously enjoying ‘performers in New York cafés and the talk in all the dingy parlors.’ As the new decade kicked in, he had decided to purchase a town house on MacDougal. Its communal square at the back of the house could only be accessed by fellow residents, allowing the children a large playing area to cavort in without the usual urban dangers. The local schooling also garnered its share of plaudits. However, if Dylan held a notion that he might be able to blend into the hubbub of the Village, it was rapidly dispelled.
Inevitably, his return to New York became common knowledge. Even those who did not know Dylan’s exact address would wander the Village in the hope of a sighting. The most famous of these devotees was A. J. Weberman, who had also devoted a series of articles in underground magazines like East Village Other to interpreting Dylan’s work, in particular his ‘Currant Bag,’ i.e., his current state of mind. Except that Weberman was not really a fan of the current Dylan. A.J. had convinced himself that Dylan had consciously abandoned the counterculture in order to produce capitalist shucks like Nashville Skyline.
As in 1965, Dylan felt the need for some artistic elbow room, so that he could continue his career free of preconceptions. Should later pronouncements be believed, he now hit upon a plan to drive his fan base away—not that Nashville Skyline hadn’t already got some reaching for the door. According to this Dylan, the sense of a man parodying himself on his first album of 1970, Self Portrait, was a deliberate, concerted attempt to dispel much of the iconography surrounding him, once and for all.
Bob Dylan: That album was put out … [because] at that time … I didn’t like the attention I was getting. I [had] never been a person that wanted attention. And at that time I was getting the wrong kind of attention, for doing things I’d never done. So we released that album to get people off my back. They would not like me anymore. That’s … the reason that album was put out, so people would just at that time stop buying my records, and they did. [1981]
Bob Dylan: I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to’ … And then I did this portrait for the cover. I mean, there was no title for that album … And I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna call this album Self Portrait’ … And to me it was a joke. [1984]
The album as released certainly seems to provide substantial aural evidence that ‘it was [all] a joke.’ However, the decision to integrate the results from three days in the studio in March 1970 into an extended parody of fans’ expectations was surely made after the sessions themselves, at which Dylan recorded a couple of dozen folk songs—mostly traditional, some contemporary fare—in what might be termed his classic nasal style, in tandem with two of his favorite musicians, Al Kooper and Dave Bromberg. At the same time he laid down rough-hewn renditions of a couple of new songs, ‘If Not for You’ and ‘Went to See the Gypsy.’
Many of the covers recorded were not the kind that Dylan would have been inclined to parody. Songs like ‘Pretty Saro,’ ‘Belle Isle,’ ‘Copper Kettle,’ ‘Railroad Bill,’ ‘The House Carpenter,’ ‘Little Moses,’ and ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’ directly reflected Dylan’s roots. They were truly his ‘lexicon and … prayer-book.’ If it is possible to glean intent from a set of tape logs, then Dylan’s ‘original’ intent was the same as the one that inspired his attempt at a joint Dylan–Cash project, and the album of country covers he recorded in Nashville in the spring of 1969—to put together a set of covers that reflected something of who he was, and how he came to be.
Any suggestion that a fine album could be constructed from the March 1970 sessions has to remain a matter of speculation, given that fourteen of the covers remain in the vaults, though he has performed ‘House Carpenter,’ ‘Railroad Bill,’ and ‘Little Moses’ magnificently on other occasions. The released versions of ‘Copper Kettle,’ and ‘Belle Isle’ also strike all the right chords—‘Copper Kettle,’ in particular, being one of the most affecting performances in Dylan’s entire official canon. The other 18-carat nugget from the March sessions, buried amid the mountain of fool’s gold that is Self Portrait, is a suitably croaky version of ‘It Hurts Me Too.’ The two ‘Albertas’ and the version of Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Early Mornin’ Rain,’ clearly a personal favorite, also have something to commend them. Such performances were bound to confuse listeners when sandwiched between country tearjerkers.
There were clearly problems, though, with the tapes from the sessions, which ran March 3–5. The rhythm section—Alvin Rogers and Stu Woods—would eventually be mixed out, though they would still receive a name check on Self Portrait, and almost all of the songs were cut in single takes, as if Dylan was suggesting to the musicians, we either get this in one or we forget it. There were five exceptions to this approach: the three originals—‘Come a Little Bit Closer’ which remains unidentified, ‘If Not for You’ and ‘Went to See the Gypsy’—already earmarked for some entirely separate project; and two covers omitted from Self Portrait—Eric Andersen’s ‘Thirsty Boots’ and the traditional ‘Pretty Saro.’
‘Thirsty Boots’ was mixed down (which many of the outtakes were not), and would crop up as a ‘possible’ for Dylan’s next album, New Morning, perhaps suggesting it was too good for the project Dylan now had in mind. If the March sessions had started out as a serious attempt to produce an album of folk covers, then he evidently abandoned the idea upon hearing the tapes, deciding on an entirely different concept. As Greil Marcus recognized, in his famous review of the album in Rolling Stone:
Self Portrait most closely resembles the Dylan album that preceded it: Great White Wonder … [and] though it’s a good imitation bootleg, [it] isn’t nearly the music that Great White Wonder is.
Dylan admitted as much to Shelton the following year, calling Self Portrait ‘my own bootleg record.’ Just as Great White Wonder comprised a seemingly random selection of cuts from a 1961 hotel tape, a 1962 radio show, ‘a bunch of basement noise,’ and ‘Living the Blues’ from The Johnny Cash Show, so Self Portrait attempted to blend half a dozen cuts from the country covers sessions in April/May 1969 with a dozen of the March 1970 tracks, throwing in a couple of alternative takes for good measure and even a couple of instrumental jams, topping the whole she-bang off with four tracks from the Isle of White farrago. The result: an album of outtakes and live oddities from one of the least interesting periods of Dylan’s career.
It was as much the way Self Portrait was constructed as the songs themselves—seguing from Dylanesque folk covers into syrupy Nashville croon-tunes via almost insulting Isle of Wight renditions of Dylan favorites—that left the bitter aftertaste of pastiche. Thus the opening song, a Dylan original, features no Dylan vocal. Instead a chorus of girl singers repeatedly sings, ‘How’m I s’ppose to get any ridin’ [shouldn’t that be “writing”?] done.’ Dylan’s version of Paul Simon’s ‘The Boxer’ features two versions of himself—one is the ‘old’ Dylan, considered by some to be the subject of the song; the other, the ‘new,’ smoother, richer Nashville Skyline Dylan, singing a painfully out-of-sync harmony vocal. The album also features two versions of ‘Alberta’ and ‘Little Sadie,’ the latter performed in a ludicrously fast rag version, and then as a more sympathetic, not to say sedate, folk ballad. Even the one original Dylan lyric, ‘Living the Blues,’ is a pastiche of Guy Mitchell’s ‘Singing the Blues.’
The choice of songs from the Isle of Wight concert also smacked of the deliberately perverse. Of the four songs selected, only ‘Minstrel Boy’ sounds remotely palatable, and perhaps that is only because we have no other version with which to compare it (according to the usually reliable Writings & Drawings, the first edition of Dylan’s published lyrics, it dates from the Big Pink era). The Isle of Wight version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ his most famous song, is definitely a joke, and in very bad taste at that. He not only forgets the words, but strips the song of any feeling. Even the Band fails to inject any enthusiasm into the proceedings. ‘Quinn the Eskimo’ is equally disappointing, despite being the first official Dylan version of the most successful of all basement tape spin-off singles, while ‘She Belongs to Me’ sounds like a very nervous Hasidic scholar playing in front of two hundred thousand people.
Certainly, if Dylan’s ambition with the material recorded at the March sessions ever extended beyond simply parodying himself and insulting his audience, such thoughts soon evaporated. Within six days of the sessions, the tapes had been sent down to Nashville to be overdubbed with new rhythm tracks, backing vocals, strings, dobro, trombone, kitchen sink. That he left the final act in this passionless play to his producer, Bob Johnston, suggests an extraordinary level of detachment from the exercise. To then enlist the musical chops of McCoy and Buttrey, who had given such focus to Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding, for the overdubs was perhaps the final in-joke on a project where artifice seems to have replaced an honest recognition of the need for product during an unprecedented creative drought.
Charlie McCoy: Dylan sent the tape down with instructions that we were to just play over what he’d already recorded on it … The tape was mostly other people’s songs and it sounded like he was experimenting with them. The tempos didn’t really hold together real well and he wasn’t real steady with his guitar, either … I assumed … it was just stuff he’d thrown together for the heck of it.
Ken Buttrey: Charlie McCoy did his overdubs and I came in the studio as he was leaving … and he said, ‘You’re not gonna believe this.’
Having effectively disowned the idea of a simple album of covers for ‘a concept record,’ Dylan reserved his last creative input for the album cover, which was to be graced with one of his paintings, of a man’s face. With no title emblazoned across the front, just this curiously expressionless visage, it was inevitable that people would assume it was a portrait of himself, even if that was not his intent.
Bob Dylan: The way it turned out, the album became a concept record with a title that could be taken a ton of ways. Staring at the blank canvas for a while encouraged me to blindfoldedly make a picture that would paste all the songs together. [1991]
Not surprisingly, Self Portrait was panned on its release. The reviews were almost universally scathing. A lengthy review in Rolling Stone by Greil Marcus began with the question on most people’s minds when first hearing the album: ‘What is this shit?’ In his deliberately sprawling review, Marcus recognized the conceptual nature of the finished artifact but called it ‘a concept album from the cutting room floor. It has been constructed artfully, but as a cover-up, not a revelation.’ Perhaps the most incisive remark of the whole review, and the one that probably prompted Dylan to label the article ‘a piece of shit,’ came halfway through the four-page spread, when he warned Dylan that ‘unless he returns to the market-place, with a sense of vocation and the ambition to keep up with his own gifts, the music of [the mid-sixties] will continue to dominate his records, whether he releases them or not.’ The irony is that Dylan did eventually return ‘with a sense of vocation and the ambition,’ and still his audience would continue to ‘take over his past.’
Marcus’s review generated its own debate within fan circles, and the rock culture in general. Once again, though, Dylan’s cultural import was such that Rolling Stone felt the need to print its own version of a retraction—another review, this one by Bill Damon, that gave Dylan the benefit of the doubt:
Though he has taken plenty of chances in the past, never before has he left himself so vulnerable. For one thing, Self Portrait is the most daring title Dylan has ever chosen, and he has used it for an album with little of his own writing … What counts, though, is that Self Portrait is alive musically. It is beautiful to listen to, an evolution in attitude and sound that works as well as anything Dylan has ever done … He has brought to Self Portrait his myth, his images and his past. These add force and interest to his work, we can’t deny it.
Dylan’s own apparent response was to issue another album, this one composed entirely of new originals, within four months of Self Portrait’s release. It was a brilliant coup on Dylan’s part, and would have completely cut the ground away from the critics snapping at his heels—if only New Morning had been more substantial than a halfway decent collection from the man responsible for Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Fans and critics alike inevitably concluded that the vituperative response to the double album had prompted him to scurry into the studio, recording a ‘proper’ album to appease them, and to convince the world that he still had ‘a sense of vocation.’ As so often with Dylan, this was one more conjurer’s trick.
Bob Dylan: I didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, they don’t like this, let me do another one.’ It wasn’t like that. It just happened coincidentally that one came out and then the other one did as soon as it did. The Self Portrait LP laid around for I think a year. We were working on New Morning when the Self Portrait album got put together. [1975]
In fact, Dylan had all but completed New Morning at a series of sessions in New York the week prior to the release of Self Portrait. Only ‘Day of the Locusts’—and rerecordings of ‘If Not for You’ and ‘Time Passes Slowly’—postdate Self Portrait’s rocky reception. That said, the hostile response to the ‘concept album’ clearly had a bearing on the type of album he eventually elected to release. Only at the last minute, and after at least two alternate, sequenced versions had been provisionally approved, did Dylan decide to release an album entirely composed of originals—good, bad and indifferent—rather than his original concept, another album that contained both covers and originals, even if the balance, this time around, favored Dylan originals.
Though New Morning would, in its released form, contain no covers, the 1973 release of Dylan, an album of covers from the New Morning sessions (save for two stray Self Portrait outtakes), confirmed a continuing penchant and prompted Dylan to insist that ‘they were just not to be used—I thought it was well understood—they were just to warm up for a tune.’ In fact, the track sheets for the June sessions belie his version of events, as do the recollections of the musicians. Russ Kunkel, the drummer at the sessions, recalls it being the original songs that were the afterthought, and that the bulk of the sessions were occupied with recording traditional songs like ‘Rock a Bye My Saro Jane,’ ‘Lily of the West,’ and ‘Mary Ann,’ as if, having failed to realize an album of folk covers in March, he wanted to try again with a finer pedigree of accompanists.
The first of the five June sessions was devoted exclusively to covers, of which Peter La Farge’s ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ was the only one earmarked as a ‘possible’ for the final album (though one of the seven takes of ‘Saro Jane’ later appeared on Dylan). The second session began with a magnificent solo piano take of ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue.’ It would eventually see light of day on the ‘Watching the River Flow’ 45. Jerry Jeff Walker’s ‘Mr. Bojangles’ and the traditional ‘Mary Ann’ occupied most of the session. The only originals recorded that day—‘If Not for You’ and ‘Time Passes Slowly’—had already been laid down twice in the studio, at the March Self Portrait sessions and at a May Day session with George Harrison.
Indeed, three of the songs on New Morning had been attempted at the March sessions, but none of these versions would make the album, even though ‘If Not for You’ and the electric-piano version of ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ were both sent down to Nashville in July for some overdubs, favored by co-producer Al Kooper, over their official brethren. It was the session with Harrison that represented the true starting point for Dylan’s second album of 1970, and his fourth post-accident artifact, the same three originals being rerecorded at this May Day session, along with ‘Sign on the Window’ and the cryptic ‘Working on the Guru.’ The ‘If Not For You’ from the Harrison session was also at one point under consideration for the finished album. Evidently Dylan was determined to keep reworking these originals until he had either more originals or some usable covers with which to construct an album. Also recorded with Harrison were twenty covers, though only his own ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ was pulled from the reels. Of the others, Dylan’s particularly brutal deconstruction of ‘Yesterday’ is probably the best reason for wishing the song had never been written.
That the two months since the final Self Portrait sessions had produced only the admittedly sublime ‘Sign on the Window’ and the eminently disposable ‘Working on the Guru,’ and that the previous nine months had only generated a sincere love song, an insincere memorial to country life, and an account of his long awaited meeting with Elvis in ‘a big hotel’ in Las Vegas, suggested that the amnesia had hardly abated. Dylan was simply not coming up with new songs, good or otherwise.
In the summer of 1969, he had become involved with the production of a new play by poet Archibald MacLeish. The play, which was intended to be a musical version of The Devil and Daniel Webster, was called Scratch. According to Dylan, in the Biograph notes, he eventually wrote three songs for the play—‘New Morning,’ ‘Time Passes Slowly,’ and ‘Father of Night’—but he ‘didn’t see eye to eye’ with the producer on ‘Father of Night,’ ‘so I backed out of the production.’ In fact, MacLeish wrote a letter to his publisher in October 1970 stating that Dylan ‘proved simply incapable of producing new songs, and things looked desperate until [we] decided … to use old songs of Dylan’s.’ Al Kooper calls the songs he wrote for MacLeish’s play ‘pretty much the fulcrum for that album. [It was like,] “Well, I have these songs. Let’s go in and cut these.” That got him writing a little more.’
As it is, the early June sessions seem to have prompted Dylan to get down to some serious songwriting. At the last two June sessions, as Self Portrait began to be shipped, Dylan pulled from his pockets the likes of ‘Three Angels,’ ‘If Dogs Run Free,’ ‘Winterlude,’ and ‘The Man in Me,’ along with the MacLeish-inspired ‘Father of Night’ and ‘New Morning.’ The impulse to bookend his new songs with a couple of covers abided, though, and at those final sessions, Dylan continued to expend his energies on songs like Lead Belly’s ‘Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie,’ Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ and the traditional ‘Lily of the West’ and ‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget.’
Though Bob Johnston continued to be credited with production duties, he was apparently absent from the last couple of sessions and it was Dylan and his old stalwart, Al Kooper, who began at the end of the week to put an album together. The sessions may have had their low spots—few comparable to the one instance of Dylan Does Joni—but they were offset by his decision to remind fans he was no slouch at the piano. Though he remained self-conscious about his self-taught style, he had recently received reassurance from the classically trained Amram.
David Amram: He said [one time], ‘Y’know, I wanna work on my piano playing.’ I said, ‘Frankly, for your songs, I don’t think anyone could do any better. It would be like telling Picasso not to use so much yellow. If you’re trying to play a Beethoven sonata then you’d be in trouble, but for what you do, it’s perfect.’
Dylan also decided to revive the voice that hit notes as well as Caruso, and could hold its breath three times as long, notably on ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue’ and ‘Sign on the Window.’ The Nashville twang was permanently pensioned off, though the New Morning version of Dylan was a particularly nasal one, thanks to a mild attack of influenza.
Ron Cornelius: Dylan had a pretty bad cold that week. You can hear it on one song, y’know, that bit about ‘Brighton girls are like the moon,’ where his voice really cracks up. But it sure suits the song. His piano playing’s really weird; you fall over laughing the first time you see it, because his hands start at opposite ends of the keyboard and then sorta collide in the middle—he does that all the time—but the way he plays just knocks me out.
Dylan remained genuinely unsure of the worth of much that he had recorded. Nor was he sure how best to present the songs. With the reviewers not sharing the Self Portrait joke, song selection and mixing became a tortuous affair. Al Kooper, co-producer in all but name, was driven to distraction by his constant vacillating. The first sequenced version of New Morning incorporated elements of both New Morning and Dylan, as well as a lovely reworking of his unreleased 1962 song ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time.’ Kooper also pushed Dylan into sending ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue’ and the March versions of ‘If Not for You’ and ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ down to Nashville for some smoothing out of the edges. He also convinced him to add strings to ‘Sign on the Window,’ evidently having a far lusher album in mind. And initially, it seemed as if Dylan was in full accord. However, the man’s previous sureness in the studio had seemingly eloped with his muse.
Al Kooper: When I finished that album I never wanted to speak to him again … I was cheesed off at how difficult [the whole thing was] … He just changed his mind every three seconds so I just ended up doing the work of three albums … We’d get a side order and we’d go in and master it and he’d say, ‘No, no, no. I want to do this.’ And then, ‘No, let’s go in and cut this.’ … There was another version of ‘Went to See the Gypsy’ that was really good … It was the first time I went in and had an arrangement idea for it and I said, ‘Let me go in and cut this track and then you can sing over it.’ So I cut this track and it was really good … and he came in and pretended like he didn’t understand where to sing on it.
Unable to choose between versions of ‘If Not for You’ and ‘Time Passes Slowly,’ Dylan finally just recut them, along with a song he had written in the ensuing weeks, after he had accepted an honorary doctorate in music from Princeton University, the week after the June sessions. Dr. Dylan had not enjoyed the experience, from which he culled the unconvincing, semi-surreal ‘Day of the Locusts.’
David Crosby: I think we were staying at John Hammond’s house. Sara was trying to get Bob to go to Princeton University, where he was being presented with an honorary doctorate. Bob didn’t want to go. I said, ‘C’mon, Bob it’s an honor!’ Sara and I both worked on him for a long time. Finally, he agreed. I had a car outside—a big limousine. That was the first thing he didn’t like. We smoked another joint on the way and I noticed Dylan getting really quite paranoid behind it. When we arrived at Princeton, they took us to a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, ‘We won’t give you the degree if you don’t wear this.’ Dylan said, ‘Fine. I didn’t ask for it in the first place.’ … Finally we convinced him to wear the cap and gown.
‘Day of the Locusts,’ along with the two rerecordings from an August 12 session, was tagged to the front of the album, at the expense of ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ and ‘Mr. Bojangles.’ Dylan had completed his first collection of original songs since his return to New York, and when New Morning was released in October, it was met with a certain euphoria. In Rolling Stone, Ralph Gleason even proclaimed the album’s release with a rave review headlined ‘WE’VE GOT DYLAN BACK AGAIN’:
It came on the radio in the late afternoon and from the first note it was right. Bob Dylan bringing it all back home again … This is a message from home to all of us … There will be more. He will be back. He will sing for us again … Come back, Bob, we need you. And thank you for that letter from home.
Although the all-original New Morning was probably forced on Dylan by both critical and commercial considerations—from which no artist in the public arena, even one as contrary as Dylan, can entirely immunize himself—it provided only a fleeting form of solace for his fans. Though I’d trade ‘Sign on the Window’ for all thirty-five cuts on the two previous albums, nothing else on New Morning approaches such heights, and ‘Three Angels,’ ‘Father of Night,’ and ‘If Dogs Run Free’ inhabit depths even ‘Peggy Day’ feared to tread.
One key problem, as articulated by Richard Williams in his London Times review of the album, was that, although Dylan continued to hold the attention of those who remembered the impact of his earlier work, ‘a newer generation finds it hard to understand what [all] the fuss is about.’ This newer generation had found a new set of heroes, and those heroes were to be found on increasingly spacious stages in customized arenas, regularly peddling their wares. The Who, Cream, the Grateful Dead, the Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin all proved that they could simply bypass a certain critical distaste for their extended workouts, tapping into a new youth culture that favored the direct connection of live performance. Even the previously high and mighty Rolling Stones had responded to the dislocation by reinventing themselves as ‘the greatest live rock & roll band in the world,’ touring America in the fall of 1969.
In the fall of 1970, Dylan actually considered consolidating the commercial success of New Morning by going back out on the road himself. The notion even got as far as the rehearsal stage, with a simple four-piece setup, featuring Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks, à la Forest Hills.
Harvey Brooks: [After New Morning] we talked a little bit about playing shows, but it didn’t get very far down the line. We did have a few rehearsals at a place, a studio on Houston Street where he did a lot of painting … and we tried out a few different combinations of musicians, but it just didn’t click.
In the end, Dylan decided he was not yet ready to embrace another disruptive period out on the road, especially as Sara was expecting another child (to be a son, Jakob), in the spring. Though New York had not turned the key or provided the requisite impetus, his family remained central to all his considerations. Nor could he any longer rely on the management skills of Albert Grossman to arrange and coordinate a tour on a grand scale. They had arrived at the formal dissolution of their business relationship on July 17, 1970.
Early in 1969 Dylan had sought to change the publishing arrangement he had previously agreed with Grossman through the jointly controlled Dwarf Music. Grossman consented to Dylan forming another publishing company, under his direct control, into which he would place future compositions. Grossman retained his right to half the net proceeds from the exploitation of such compositions and Big Sky Music was duly formed. Shortly afterward, Dylan retained Grossman’s former secretary, Naomi Saltzman, on a full-time basis. Saltzman was to be a powerful weapon in the subsequent settlement. Dylan also took lawyer David Braun with him, leaving Grossman to find new counsel. He was prepared to argue the toss over how their agreement should be construed, if necessary in court. But what he most wanted was control of his work.
Grossman, through his lawyers, sought to clarify the terms of their previous agreement, from March 1969; and on July 17, 1970 Dylan and Grossman agreed to:
(A) terminate the Management Agreement, reserving to Grossman his right to royalties on works created during the management period;
(B) confirm Grossman’s rights under the Witmark, Partnership (i.e., Dwarf Music), and Joint Venture (i.e., Big Sky) Agreements;
(C) shift the control and administration of the Partnership and Joint Venture catalogues from Grossman to Dylan, who became obligated to account to Grossman for his share of profits owed under the Partnership and Joint Venture Agreements.
Big Sky Music would be replaced by Ram’s Horn Music before the close of 1971, effectively ending any joint ownership of publishing. As Dylan told Shelton in May 1971, Grossman ‘had me signed up for ten years, for part of my records, for part of my everything. But I’ll be out of that next month.’ The impetus for a settlement in 1970 may have been forced on Grossman by financial irregularities. Though Grossman’s cut, to which he would always be entitled on the work to date, continued to rankle with Dylan, he did gain complete control of all his music publishing, and personal management, as a result of the July settlement. The five-year CBS contract was also up for grabs in 1972 and—unbeknownst to Davis—Dylan had no plans to deliver any further albums under the conditions Grossman had secured for him back in July 1967. It was going to be a quiet couple of years.