WHEN ALBERT GROSSMAN BECAME Bob’s manager he initiated a war of attrition against Columbia Records that lasted the full seven years he represented the singersongwriter. Grossman’s first complaint was that Columbia was not working hard enough to promote his artist. Partly because of this, he asked his lawyer David Braun to draft a ‘disaffirmment’ letter to Columbia, stating that their contract was invalid because Bob was under twenty-one when he signed. Grossman wanted to re-negotiate. John Hammond was furious his protégé had embarrassed him in this way and called Bob into the office where he prevailed upon him to sign a reaffirmment – now he was of age – meaning he agreed to abide by the original contract. This upset both Grossman and Braun. ‘I thought it was a violation of the canons of ethics since Mr. Dylan was represented by an attorney when the disaffirmments were sent in and when the reaffirmments were signed they didn’t contact us,’ said Braun, who was introduced to Bob at this time. (Before the introduction, Grossman said he was about to meet the ‘next Frank Sinatra,’ and Braun subsequently became one of Bob’s closest advisers.) There was some positive outcome from the skirmish with Columbia, however. ‘From that moment on their attitude changed toward Bob and they started promoting his records,’ says Braun.
Grossman then decided to get rid of John Hammond. The two men could not have been more different. Hammond was a WASP aesthete, so relaxed during recording sessions that he sat with feet up, reading The New Yorker. Grossman was a Jewish entrepreneur with a shady background, hustling to become a millionaire. But it would not be easy to remove Hammond. He was a legend at Columbia and he was married to the chairman’s sister. So Grossman decided to make the producer’s life so miserable that he would quit.
Session musicians had been hired by Bob and John Hammond to play on selected tracks on Bob’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, starting in April 1962 and continuing, in sporadic sessions, into the fall. A drummer, bass player, and guitarist added backup to a cover of the traditional ‘Corrina, Corrina.’ Grossman now suggested a band back Bob on one of his new songs, ‘Mixed Up Confusion.’ This was a reasonable suggestion in itself, but Grossman wanted the band to play Dixieland-style. Hammond was aghast at this deliberately provocative suggestion, but did make several attempts at the record. None worked and Hammond eventually lost his temper, ordering Grossman’s partner, John Court, from the studio. Bob became so frustrated he walked out. Shortly afterward Hammond resigned from the album. ‘Grossman hated my father,’ says John Hammond Jr. ‘Maybe because my father was not into big bucks. And Albert was definitely into big bucks.’
There was a hiatus while Columbia executives found a producer Grossman and Bob would work with. In the interim, on December 14, 1962, a lively take of ‘Mixed Up Confusion’ was released as Bob’s first single. It sounded like a track from Elvis Presley’s early Sun sessions, and it flopped.
With problems in the studio, his estranged girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, in Italy, and the Christmas holidays coming, Bob accepted an invitation to get away from it all and fly to England for an appearance in a play for British television. This unlikely idea came about after British director Philip Saville saw Bob performing in Greenwich Village and decided he could fill the role of the anarchist-student in Madhouse on Castle Street. As Saville recalls, Grossman agreed because he was eager for Bob to ‘enlarge his repertoire.’ Under the terms of their contract, Grossman would earn twenty-five percent of ‘any motion picture, or recording of any kind’ that Bob agreed to do. Thus it would be to Grossman’s benefit if his client forged a second career as an actor. Grossman also told Saville that Bob had an offer of a concert in Germany,* so if the BBC paid his air fare to Britain, plus a fee, Bob would do the play.
It was Bob’s first trip outside the United States and he found London – then enlivened by a youthful renaissance in fashion and music – a very exciting place. ‘He loved it. He was very fond of London,’ says Saville, who took Bob shopping in Carnaby Street and invited him home to stay with his family in the north London district of Hampstead. ‘He wanted to hit the road. If it meant [coming] to England, that was part of the road he was on. That was part of the adventure.’ Saville found Bob to be a curious but endearing guest. He lived a twenty-four-hour day, sometimes taking meals at three o’clock in the morning. ‘His bed times and night times and morning times were all [one] time,’ says Saville. At seven one morning, Saville stumbled blearily from his bedroom to find Bob sitting on the stairs singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for Saville’s two Spanish au pairs. Bob also smoked a lot of pot. Once, when he seemed to be missing, Saville found him two streets away from his Ferncroft Avenue house, passed out under a car. ‘I think it must have rained and he must have taken shelter under [the] car.’ When Bob moved briefly into the grand Mayfair Hotel in Berkeley Square, at the expense of the BBC, he astonished hotel management by playing guitar in the foyer as if he were on a street corner.
Bob spent a fair amount of time in London folk clubs such as the Troubadour, the King and Queen, and the Singers’ Club. (The latter was a traditionalist evening at the Pindar of Wakefield public house on Gray’s Inn Road.) Bob performed at the Singers’ Club on December 22. The senior figures there were Ewan MacColl (writer of ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’) and wife Peggy Seeger (half sister to Pete). Both were hidebound traditionalists and they did not give Bob a friendly reception. ‘He ummed and awed and looked at his feet and seemed apologetic about being there,’ says Peggy Seeger. ‘He seemed lost without a microphone, as plenty of U.S.A. performers did in our nonwired clubs. Ewan and I were rather standoffish at that time and perhaps we were not welcoming enough.’ Bob made a more friendly connection with folksinger Martin Carthy, from whom he learned the traditional English songs ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Lord Franklin.’
Once Saville got Bob to the television studio, he discovered that the eccentric young folksinger was not a natural actor. He was uncomfortable with learning lines, saying he would rather express himself through song; he was lax about time keeping, invariably arriving late at rehearsals; and he had a habit of wandering off to smoke pot. Eventually, Philip had to hire another actor to deliver Bob’s long, anarchic speeches, leaving Bob to play a part that was essentially himself, a character named Bobby who sang songs including ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ It is hard to say whether any of this made for good television because the BBC wiped the tapes after transmission of Madhouse on Castle Street. Saville, however, recalls the play was well received.
When filming was completed, Bob went to Rome to meet Grossman, who was on tour with Odetta. Mary Travers also joined them. They went to a nightclub where Bob attempted to dance, and took an excursion to look at Roman antiquities. As they were inspecting a relic of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, an Italian woman came up and announced she wanted Bob as her lover, which amused them all. ‘I’m sure they didn’t know us, [but she] just up and claimed that kid!’ says Odetta. ‘I’m sure he had, outside of his fan club, a ladies’ club that was huge.’ While Bob was always happy to meet new girlfriends, he seemed preoccupied with his rift with Suze, who had come to Italy the previous summer. While he was in the country, Bob completed an important love song for her, ‘Boots of Spanish Leather.’ Ironically, though, there was no chance of him meeting Suze because she had just recently returned to New York.
Bob flew back to London and, on January 14, 1963, he took part in a drunken recording session with friends Eric Von Schmidt and Richard Fariña. They were making an album in the basement of Dobell’s record shop on Charing Cross Road. Bob turned up with a bag of Guinness bottles. Later that night at the Troubadour club he was so drunk he almost fell off stage. When he met up with Martin Carthy again, Bob told him he had written a new song to the tune of ‘Scarborough Fair,’ which Martin had taught him before Christmas. It was ‘Girl from the North Country,‘* which would feature on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album and become one of the most celebrated songs he ever wrote.
The song ‘Girl from the North Country’ seems strongly auto biographical. The north country – where rivers froze – up near the border line – was presumably Minnesota, and one wondered which girlfriend Bob was singing about. Echo Helstrom was, of course, a north country girl, and Bob later gave Echo the impression ‘Girl from the North Country’ was her song. But, no doubt thinking that women were flattered by having songs written about them, Bob led another north country girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher, to think the same. Bonnie also recognized the line about a ‘coat so warm’ as a reference to a coat with a fur collar she’d worn when she was dating Bob. ‘It seems to be very important to some people who that song is about,’ says Bonnie. ‘I actually had a woman physically attack me one time about whether or not I was claiming to be the girl from the north country.’ Later in 1963, when he performed the song on a radio show hosted by Oscar Brand, Bob indicated that the song was about an idealized woman, saying, ‘This is dedicated to all the north country girls.’ It is also hard to imagine that, when he wrote the song, his thoughts were not at least partly on Suze, whom he had been pining for since the previous summer.
While Bob certainly missed Suze, he had not forsworn other dalliances. He was a romantic who loved women; for their part women found him very charming and as a result he became an inveterate womanizer in young adulthood and would remain so throughout most of his life. During Suze’s absence, for instance, he had developed a platonic crush on Mavis Staples, a member of the family gospel group The Staple Singers. They first met in 1962, introduced by Robert Shelton. Mavis was a beautiful young African American with one of the great contralto voices in popular music, sounding both spiritual and sexy at once. Bob became so besotted he went to the patriarch of the family, Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples, and asked: ‘Pops, can I marry Mavis?’
‘Don’t ask me. Ask Mavis,’ replied Pops, not very pleased by the idea. Nor was Mavis, evidently. She did not accept his proposal, although she and Bob remained friends.
Bob was reunited with Suze in New York in January 1963. She soon found herself dragged back into the oppressive relationship she had escaped for more than half a year. Now it was harder to retain her individuality because Bob was becoming famous. ‘When I came back from Italy, I was surrounded by these people I didn’t even know intruding into my personal life,’ she says. ‘There were people who were actually angry that I had abandoned him at the “most important time of his life.” I was “the woman who deserted him.”’ Suze was at a club one evening when a singer performed ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ with such vehemence Suze could only conclude it was directed at her.
Despite her fear about being consumed by Bob’s celebrity, when Columbia needed a cover photograph for Bob’s new album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Suze agreed to pose with him. The image of Suze snuggled into Bob’s shoulder as they trudged between snow-covered Greenwich Village brownstones in the fading light of a winter afternoon became one of the most memorable album covers of the 1960s. It also brought decades of unwanted attention. ‘Maybe no one would have known what the songs were about if it weren’t for the album cover,’ she says. ‘You see, the story is in the songs. Every song he has ever written about me. It’s all there.’
With his best girl posing on his arm for his new album, and brilliant song ideas flowing through him with apparent ease, Bob was now entering the golden part of his early career, and almost each month brought new triumphs. His first important solo concert was staged at the Town Hall in New York on April 12, 1963, promoted by Harold Leventhal. Although the show did not sell out the evening was a major success. Highlights included a rendition of the love song ’tomorrow Is a Long Time‘* and the acerbic antiwar song ‘With God on Our Side.’ The concert concluded with Bob reading a poem, ‘Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.’ This was a tribute to his hero, but also a symbolic ending to the chapter of his life when Guthrie dominated his thoughts. Bob had never read on stage before, and was noticeably uncomfortable without his guitar. He began diffidently, saying he had been asked to write twenty-five words about what Guthrie meant to him. He found it impossible. So he wrote five pages, which he proceeded to read. The epic ended with an evocation of Guthrie at the Grand Canyon at sunset, and the audience exploded with applause. ‘He was so charismatic,’ says Jane Traum, wife of Bob’s Greenwich Village friend Happy Traum. Like many in the audience, Jane felt the concert was a turning point, perhaps the moment when Bob became a star. His confidence, which had been apparent since he was in high school bands, combined now with a mature stage presence and good original songs. Everything came together at the right time and to watch him on stage was suddenly very exciting. As Jane says, still thrilled by the memory decades later, ‘Nothing was going to be the same again.’
Television executives became interested in Bob performing on their shows. Earlier in 1963, on a visit to Hibbing to see his family, Bob had gone into his old high school to tell his former teacher B. J. Rolfzen to watch The Ed Sullivan Show on May 12. Bob was going to be on the show. But when Rolfzen and most of the rest of Hibbing tuned into CBS-TV on the night, Bob was nowhere to be seen. During rehearsals he had been asked not to perform the satirical ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’ because the lyrics stated John Birch Society members sympathized with the politics of Adolf Hitler. CBS feared a lawsuit. Rather than change his set list, Bob withdrew from the show. The press coverage made him appear principled and made The Ed Sullivan Show seem foolish. Bob later alluded to the incident in concert. ’this is called “Talkin’ John Birch Blues,”’ he told his audience at Carnegie Hall on October 26, pausing for applause. ‘And there ain’t nothin’ wrong with this song.’
Three hundred copies of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan had already been shipped to stores when the Ed Sullivan Show controversy broke. Columbia recalled the records and resequenced the album, possibly deciding to take this action even before the program aired because they were already becoming concerned about potential slander. Four songs, including ‘Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,’ were replaced with recordings made under the direction of Bob’s new producer, Tom Wilson, a thirty-two-year-old jazz specialist. Although Bob seems to have been irritated initially by the need to change the album, and even complained to CBS Vice President Clive Davis, the changes had to be made and they were in fact to his ultimate benefit because he substituted better songs. These included two of his best new compositions: ‘Girl from the North Country’ and what is probably the best antiwar song he ever wrote, ‘Masters of War.’
The liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, written by J ournalist friend Nat Hentoff, indicated that ‘Masters of War’ -which was written over the winter of 1962-63 – was inspired by the Cold War arms buildup. Yet like many of Bob’s best songs, ‘Masters of War’ transcended the time in which it was written. It would have great meaning during the looming Vietnam War and it still rang true nearly three decades later during the Gulf War in 1991. Part of the appeal was the hardness and anger in the lyric. In the last verse, Bob wrote that he hoped the warmongers would die, and soon; he would stand over their grave until he was satisfied they were dead. This fierce language was one of the characteristics of Bob’s mature style, and a quality that set him apart from the idealists of the folk revival. When Judy Collins recorded a version of ‘Masters of War,’ dropping the aggressive last lines, Bob thought she missed the point. But no one song – even one as powerful as ‘Masters of War’ – could define Dylan’s songwriting. He was interested in writing songs that came out of social concerns, but he was also interested in love songs and comic songs. To categorize Bob as having become simply a ‘protest singer,’ as journalists increasingly did, was to sell him short.
As happened with so many of the major songs Bob wrote as a young man, he stood accused of using another musician’s melody for ‘Masters of War.’ Veteran folksinger Jean Ritchie recognized that Bob had appropriated the tune from her arrangement of ‘Fair Nottamun Town,’ a traditional song sung in her family for generations. ‘He might not have realized when he wrote the song. He might have just thought he made it up,’ says Ritchie. ‘A lot of times people do that … I don’t think he was out to try and rob anybody.’ Jean wanted an acknowledgment on the song credit that the arrangement was hers. Instead, Bob’s lawyers paid Jean $5,000 to settle and agree not to make any more claims. As far as the world was concerned the song was now wholly his.
Before the The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released Bob flew to California, in mid-May 1963, to appear at the Monterey Folk Festival, with Joan Baez joining him on stage for ‘With God on Our Side.’ Baez was at the pinnacle of her career, having appeared on the cover of Time the previous November. After the festival, she and Bob traveled down the coast to her house outside the picturesque town of Carmel. It was the start of one of the most celebrated love affairs of the decade. ‘Joan was wild about him,’ says her sister, Mimi. ‘And, in her usual fashion, [she] gave a hundred percent attention to the thing that charmed her the most.’ Bob was in Carmel when Freewheelin’ was released at the end of May. Then he flew home to Suze. It was not long before rumors of the affair with Baez reached her. In fact, Bob and Suze were together in New York when their friend Geno Foreman asked Bob with supreme tactlessness, ‘Are you still fucking Joan?’ Suze had also probably heard stories about Bob asking Mavis Staples to marry him. It all helped to destabilize their relationship and fray Suze’s nerves.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was Bob’s first great album, and it included five classic songs. The opening track, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ would have ensured the album’s place in music history on its own. Years later when he was in dispute with Albert Grossman, Bob gave this as the primary reason the album was a success: ‘Although I didn’t know it at the time, the second album was destined to become a great success because it was to include “Blowin’ in the Wind.”’ But there was much more to Freewheelin’ than one song. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ was followed by the lovely ‘Girl from the North Country’ and followed in turn by the ferocious ‘Masters of War.’ The first side ended with another masterpiece, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’ The first track of the second side was the great ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.’ All five songs became mainstays of Bob’s repertoire. The rest of the album was filler of a very high standard, including the blues ‘Down the Highway,’ which described Bob’s longing for Suze during their separation, and the delightful ‘I Shall Be Free.’ In the latter, President Kennedy called Bob on the telephone and asked what it would take to make the country grow. In reply, Bob suggested a list of fantasy women – Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, and Sophia Loren – groaning comically: ‘Country’ll grow!’ Lightweight material balanced the big songs and helped make The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan an album one could listen to time and again without becoming emotionally exhausted. Although it received mixed reviews upon release, it would stand the test of time as one of the masterworks of his career. Bob’s pride in the material is borne out by the fact that he has performed songs from the album throughout his career.
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and some of the other songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan would forever be associated with the struggle for reform in America, but Bob had no firsthand experience of segregation, the fundamental issue of the day, never having visited the South. This was not lost on friends in the folk community. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘Snick’) was organizing voter registration rallies in the South to enfranchise African Americans. There was to be a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in July. Theodore Bikel, The Freedom Singers, and Pete Seeger were scheduled to perform. Bikel suggested to Albert Grossman that Bob should join them. ‘It looks different and feels different when you’re in the midst of it,’ Bikel told Grossman. ‘I think Bob should go.’
‘He can’t afford to,’ replied Grossman. ‘The fare’s too high.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ suggested Bikel, writing a check. ‘Here, buy him the ticket. Don’t tell him where it came from. Tell him it’s time to go down and experience the South.’
Dylan and Bikel traveled together on an evening flight from New York, changing planes in Atlanta. As they flew on to Jackson, Mississippi, Bob scribbled lyrics on the backs of envelopes. They were met in Jackson by two civil rights workers and driven to Greenwood where they slept in the loft of a church. In the morning, they lay flat in the car as they were driven the last three miles to the rally. ‘If the cops saw a car with mixed blacks and whites, that telegraphed civil rights workers,’ says Bikel. ‘They‘d pull you over on any pretext, or none, and put you in jail.’
The rally was in a farmyard on the edge of a cotton patch. The hootenanny was due to start at 10 a.m., but it was so hot they postponed until dusk. Three hundred or so people assembled by sundown, mostly African-American farmworkers. They were watched by policemen in a patrol car and groups of white men on the other side of the highway. Dylan and Bikel met up with Pete Seeger and The Freedom Singers, who had traveled separately. ‘What I remember is the black man who gave a speech,’ says Seeger. ‘He had a fierce grin, as though he knew they were winning, and the Ku Klux Klan didn’t know what the heck to do with it. He knew some of us are gonna get killed, but they are not going to be able to kill all of us.’ Bob sang ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ his song about the killing of Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Evers had been shot dead in Jackson a month earlier. Byron De La Beckwith, a local member of the Klan, was indicted for the crime. Bob sang that the killer was a pawn in a game of ignorance, prejudice, and hatred. He leaned forward as he sang the words, never smiling for cameras that were on hand to record the event for television and newspapers. This was serious and it demanded a serious demeanor. As Seeger says, ‘One of Bob’s most important things is refusing to smile for cameramen.’ As darkness closed in Bikel, Dylan, and Seeger joined hands with The Freedom Singers and sang ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Bob rarely took a public stance on a political issue, and it was a powerful event; in private, Bob put his money where his mouth was by making a donation to SNCC.
PETER YARROW HAD NO DOUBT he was hearing poetry the first time Albert Grossman played him ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ He did not share others’ misgivings that the song was simply rhetorical. ‘It is precisely because Bobby was a poet that he invited people to participate in the definition of what his message truly was,’ he says. ‘And like a true poet, I think he stepped back from prescribing an interpretation.’ Peter, Paul and Mary recorded a sweetly melodic version of the song, sung in perfect three-part harmony. Unfortunately, they made a mistake with the lyric. ‘Mary to this day, even though I pointed it out to her, still sings “How many years must a mountain exist,”’ says Noel Paul Stookey. ‘[It is] “How many years can a mountain exist.”’ Despite this, the single sold a phenomenal three hundred thousand copies in its first week of release. On July 13, 1963, it reached number two in the Billboard chart, with sales exceeding one million. Peter Yarrow told Bob he might make $5,000 from the publishing rights. Bob was almost speechless; it seemed like a fortune.
Bob was to receive visceral evidence of the power of the song within days when he and Peter, Paul and Mary performed at the Newport Folk Festival, which was held each summer in Freebody Park outside the harbor town of Newport, Rhode Island. Surrounded by the palatial summer mansions of society families including the Vanderbilts and Astors – with millionaires’ yachts anchored offshore – Newport was an incongruous venue for folk music. Indeed, the setting underscored the gulf between the proletarian roots of this music and the privileged lives of most of the performers and the majority of the audience. Thirty-seven thousand people visited the Newport Folk Festival over the long weekend of July 26-28, and it seemed at times as if the crowd was focused only on Bob. Peter, Paul and Mary helped build him up for the crowd. ’this song was written by the most important folk artist in America today,’ Peter Yarrow announced, when the group took the stage to sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ Bob came on after them to a rapturous reception, and then the other stars of the festival joined him for an emotional rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome.’
Backstage, Bob wore movie-star sunglasses and cracked a bullwhip he had received as a gift from Joan Baez. The whip added to the frisson surrounding the couple, a semisecret affair made more exciting because Suze was also at the festival. Baez headlined the evening concert on Sunday. Before performing ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,’ she told the audience it was a song about a relationship that had lasted too long. Suze walked out of the arena, apparently close to tears. Dylan and Baez sang ‘With God on Our Side’ as a duet. The song, set to a folk tune also used by Dominic Behan, had become their song. ‘That was a big, big breakout festival for Bob,’ remembers Tom Paxton. ‘The buzz just kept growing exponentially and it was like a coronation of Bob and Joan. They were King and Queen of the festival.’
Baez was planning a summer tour and invited Bob along as her guest. This seems to have caused Suze enormous distress. The circumstances have never become entirely clear, but some time after the Newport festival, and possibly after she learned Bob was going to tour with Baez, Suze apparently tried to take her own life at Bob’s West 4th Street apartment by letting the gas run. ‘I got a call from Bobby telling me to come and help and she came [and] stayed with me,’ says her sister Carla Rotolo, who believes the incident may have been a bid for attention. Suze did not move back in with Bob afterward, but lived instead with Carla on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. ‘[Bob] left a lot of damage behind him,’ says Carla. ‘Bobby at that time was a very fucked-up person.’ By which she means that his drive for success had become all-important, and he did not seem to care what happened to those who fell by the wayside. It is impossible to know what he felt deep down about what happened with Suze, because he did not talk about it, but considering his sensitive nature he must have been very upset. The tour with Baez, however, would continue.
Beyond the distress it caused to Suze, many in the folk community thought that Dylan and Baez’s relationship had a cynical side. They seemed to be using each other to enhance their respective careers: it did Baez good to introduce a major new talent to audiences, and Bob profited by the exposure. ‘Everybody used everybody else,’ says Oscar Brand. ‘His drive to success [was] such that he [may] have done a lot of things that I would find appalling … I always thought he went out with Joan [because] she was doing his songs.’ This was the gossip going around the folk community when the tour began in New Jersey on August 3, 1963. By the time Dylan and Baez reached Lenox, Massachusetts, later in the month, a routine had been established. Baez sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ which got a big reception. Then she asked the audience casually: ‘Would you like to meet the author of that song?’ People yelled out that they certainly would and then Bob came out to huge applause. Albert Grossman had actually negotiated a larger fee per appearance for Dylan than Baez received, even though she was purportedly the star. Baez had always taken a relaxed attitude to money. ‘The minute anyone would discuss money with her she would just black out,’ says Nancy Carlen, Baez’s close friend and producer. ‘She was an entertainer who never went looking for [success]. It came looking for her, [and] the value she put on it is the value [of] somebody who has had things come easily.’ However contrived these shows were, and whatever the feeling in sections of the folk community that Bob was using Baez, and vice versa, the couple came across as natural and charming to concert-goers like Eve Baer. She saw the show in Lenox and found herself smitten with what appeared to be this ‘humble, shy guy.’
Some of the concerts were in huge venues, like the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens, New York. Here Baez introduced Bob to an audience of approximately fifteen thousand, nearly the population of Hibbing. ‘There’s a boy wandering around New York City and his name is Bob Dylan,’ she said. ‘It just so happens that Bob Dylan is here with me tonight.’ It was gratifying to Baez to introduce a genius to the world and Baez’s friends and family felt that she played a key role in boosting Bob’s career, the insinuation being that he never gave her sufficient credit (in fact, he gave her almost none). ‘Those shows are underestimated in historical accounts of his career,’ says Mimi. ‘[Joan] really went all-out to promote him.’ Perhaps Bob became irritated by the slightly patronizing nature of Baez’s relationship with him. In her memoir, And a Voice to Sing With, Baez wrote, perhaps condescendingly, about ‘dragging my little vagabond out onto the stage’ as a ‘grand experiment.’ Baez was doing a fellow artist a favor but she was also clearly besotted with Bob’s energy, humor, and quirky intelligence.
Baez’s help was only part of the story of Bob’s success. By the summer of 1963 Bob was beginning to stand on his own. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was selling ten thousand copies per week. Many artists wanted to perform and record versions of his songs. Some were good, but when Hamilton Camp treated Bob to a rendition of ‘Girl from the North Country’ Bob put his hands over his ears to show his displeasure. ‘He couldn’t stand it,’ says Camp. However, every cover helped promote the songwriter, partly because fellow artists would often thank Bob warmly in concert. Peter, Paul and Mary in particular rarely missed an opportunity to talk about Bob from the stage; it seems likely that their mutual manager Albert Grossman would have encouraged them in this, although Noel Paul Stookey insists it was all quite natural. Peter, Paul and Mary also had much to thank Bob for because some of their biggest successes were with covers of his songs. In September, the group had another major hit with a cover of the Dylan song ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.’
As the manager of both Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, Albert Grossman was becoming rich. When the big money started coming in, he indulged himself with luxurious living. One of his first major purchases was a Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn, which Bob and Barry Feinstein (a photographer friend of Grossman, and husband of Mary Travers) drove from Denver to New York. One night they raced a freight train across the Nebraska plains at seventy miles per hour, road and rails running parallel for more than a hundred miles. There was a three-quarters moon in the sky, and in the headlights of the Rolls the corn shone like aluminum. Sometimes they would pull ahead of the train, and other times the train would lead, exchanging horn blasts as they flew across the land.
Grossman bought a large stone house on a secluded property in the Catskill Mountains hamlet of Bearsville, a little more than a hundred miles north of New York City. He installed a professional car wash for the Rolls and had a room above the barn converted into an apartment for Bob, who became a regular visitor. The quiet of Bearsville appealed to Bob; the mountain air was clean and nobody bothered him. The neighboring town of Woodstock had been a haven for creative people since 1902 when followers of British philosopher John Ruskin, a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement, assisted in the growth of a burgeoning artistic community in the area. Over the decades, local people became used to well-known and eccentric characters moving into town.
Baez came to join Bob in Bearsville in the summer of 1963. They went swimming in Grossman’s pool, ran movies on his home projector, and rode Bob’s Triumph motorcycle through the backwoods. Part of each day was given over to writing: lyrics, liner notes, or stream-of-consciousness poetry. Bob would sometimes be stirred in the middle of the night to waken, light a cigarette, and start typing. Words came easily at this time in his career; there were more songs than he had albums to put them on. There was no reason to think it would ever be different, although in later years he would find the process of writing far more difficult.
Sometimes Dylan and Baez drove into Woodstock and had coffee at the Cafe Espresso on Tinker Street, owned by Frenchman Bernard Paturel and his wife, Mary Lou. The couple sat at the open fireplace, sometimes singing or drawing pictures. Bob liked to play chess, which he had played with increasing skill ever since his days in Dinkytown where it was a favorite pastime at the Ten O‘Clock Scholar and elsewhere. By this time he was a formidable opponent whom few could beat. When Grossman’s house became busy with guests, and Bob wanted quiet, the Paturels invited him to stay in a room above the cafe. The White Room was thirty feet by twenty with a high, beamed ceiling and a view over Tinker Street. It was a perfect place to write. As the Paturels observed, Bob used different methods to create songs. He went through a phase when he spread photographs, postcards, and other pictures across the floor and walked around them, looking for ideas. ‘He was like an abstract painter composing a picture,’ says Bernard Paturel. Occasionally he came downstairs in the late afternoon with a new song. Mary Lou remembers: ‘[He] would be all excited and ask us if we‘d care to hear it.’ Bob bought a secondhand upright piano for the family so he could play for them. He also loved playing with the Paturel children, laughing with delight when baby Gerard spat eggs over his face because the boy was tired of Bob teasing him.
Although Bob was writing songs that became anthems of the civil rights movement, Joan Baez noted that he rarely took part in rallies or demonstrations, as she frequently did. He was as uninterested in party politics as he had been in Dinkytown. Although he had sympathy for the great social issues of the day, his mind was preoccupied with the tradition of folk music, the blues, French symbolist prose poems, and biblical stories. A song like ‘When the Ship Comes In,’ which he wrote on the road with Baez in mid-August 1963, was seen at the time as a metaphor for the struggle for social change, a song that came directly out of the times. Yet the lyric was most obviously made up of fable and scripture, and also contained a good deal of childlike invention – ‘fishes will laugh’ – and exuberant imagination. It is for these reasons that the song would endure, sounding fresh long after the social concerns of 1963 passed into history.
One of the few overtly political appearances Bob made was at the March on Washington. On August 28, 1963, Bob sang with Baez at the Lincoln Memorial in front of two hundred thousand people. They were feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. as he delivered his keynote ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. (As King spoke, Wavy Gravy leaned over to Bob and whispered, ‘I hope he’s over quick. Mahalia Jackson’s on next.’) To the marchers, and the millions who watched on television, Bob appeared as one of the leaders of the struggle for social justice. Yet it was hard to tell whether he cared one way or another about such matters. Friends like the politically committed Pete Karman assumed Bob was political. ‘He seemed to be [political],’ says Karman. ‘He was associating with a lot of these New York radicals.’ Bob scandalized Baez by telling her he wrote ‘Masters of War’ simply because he thought it would sell. He was probably being deliberately provocative, knowing exactly what to say to irritate Baez, but at the same time he did not write the song simply because it chimed with antiwar sentiments then in vogue. It is noteworthy that he rarely included direct references to current events in even his most socially aware songs, like ‘Masters of War,’ because he must have known that the names of specific politicians, and mentioning specific political events, would date the material (a fate that befell fellow songwriter Phil Ochs). Without these references, the songs would remain relevant as the years went by.
When they were in New York, Dylan and Baez hid from the world at the Earle Hotel on Washington Square, the same place Bob had stayed when he was following Ramblin’ Jack Elliott around. Baez attempted a transformation of her scruffy boyfriend, buying Bob a smart jacket, crisp white shirt, and lavender-colored cuff links. She later described this as the best time in their relationship. When her concert tour took her to California in the fall of 1963, the pair also spent time together at Baez’s house in Carmel Valley. This was also a very happy interlude. She bought a piano so Bob would be able to work at the house. Although he was beginning to make very good money from his songwriting and concert performances, it seems to have amused Baez to treat him as if he were a penniless kid just blown in from Minnesota. Bob did not mind. At this stage in his career he let Albert Grossman take care of all his financial affairs, being content just to draw petty cash when he needed it. If Baez wanted to help him out further, that was fine, too. He played the piano she bought him and set up his typewriter in her kitchen, at a window overlooking the mountains. Each morning he went straight to the typewriter and worked at it through the day. ‘He would stand all day in the kitchen pecking away,’ says Nancy Carlen. ‘He‘d drink black coffee all the morning and then, at lunchtime, he would switch to rot-gut red [wine]. And he would drink rot-gut red the rest of the day.’
During his stay in Carmel, Bob worked on pieces of extended Rimbaud-like verse, later published in a book he titled Tarantula. He also wrote at least one important song at this time. ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ was a compelling account of a court case. A drunken landowner named William Zantzinger, aged twenty-four, had struck fifty-one-year-old hotel maid Hattie Carroll across the head and shoulders with a cane during a charity ball, after abusing her verbally because she didn’t serve him as quickly as he wanted. Carroll, who was waitressing to support her large family, collapsed after the assault, not so much because of the violence of the blows, which were no more than taps with a lightweight cane, but because of the emotional shock of the physical and verbal attack. After complaining that Zantzinger had upset her, Carroll was taken by ambulance to hospital where she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The assault was related in the first verse of the song. Dylan cautioned his audience that the time to weep had not yet come. In the middle verses he described the disparity between the privileged world of Zantzinger and Carroll’s life of servitude. The final verse revealed that Zantzinger had been given a mere six-month sentence for causing the maid’s death. As Bob wrote, ‘Now’s the time for your tears.’ He related the story with the economy of a news reporter and the imagery of a poet, without needing to state the fundamental, underlying fact that William Devereux Zantzinger was white and Hattie Carroll black. Dylan knew the power of subtlety. Perhaps most striking of all was that ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ was not, as one might have thought, a story from slavery days in the Deep South. The crime happened that very year, in Baltimore, Maryland, a short distance from the nation’s capital. William Devereux Zantzinger continued to live in Maryland after he got out of jail, dying in 2009. ‘It’s actually had no effect upon my life,’ he told me, in 2000, of the tune that made him infamous the world over. But he was vitriolic towards Bob Dylan. ‘He’s a no-account son of a bitch,’ he cursed, claiming that the song is inaccurate. (It is in certain details. Most significantly Dylan implies that Zantzinger was convicted of first-degree, rather than second-degree murder as was the case). ‘He’s just like a scum of a bag [sic] of the earth,’ Zantzinger ranted, almost incoherent in his rage. ‘I should’ve sued him and put him in a jail.’ But of course he didn’t.
AFTER RETURNING FROM CALIFORNIA, Bob gave a sold-out solo concert at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963, demonstrating his new star status and grossing over $8,000 for a night’s work. Abe and Beatty Zimmerman came in from Hibbing for the concert, Beatty fussing with Suze about Bob’s scruffy appearance. Beatty was hurt that Bob persisted in obfuscating his background with stories of being an orphan. A few days before the Carnegie Hall concert Bob had spoken with a Newsweek reporter to whom he said, foolishly, ‘I don’t know my parents. They don’t know me. I’ve lost contact with them for years.’ Bob knew mystery enhanced his image as an artist and it was in his nature to enjoy making up stories and having fun with people, as he had been doing all his life. But now he was about to be found out and it proved embarrassing when the Newsweek reporter discovered that, far from being an orphan, Bob’s proud parents were in New York for the Carnegie Hall show. The journalist also contacted Bob’s teenaged brother, David, who said Bob had been home to Hibbing as recently as three months ago. In one of the very few times David Zimmerman would ever be quoted on the subject of his famous brother, he gave Newsweek some insight into Bob’s character. ‘We were kind of close,’ said David, who was seventeen at the time. ‘We’re both kind of ambitious. When we set out to do something, we usually get it done. He set out to become what he is.’ He added a hint that even he did not fully understand Bob’s inscrutable ways: ‘Bobby is hard to understand.’
The November 4 edition of Newsweek duly carried an article that mocked Bob’s image and affectations of speech – a subheading read ‘Dig it, Man’ – and revealed that, far from being the Huckleberry Finn of folk music, his Hibbing background was conventional and middle class. He was portrayed as a vain young man who had manipulated the truth to help his career. Bob virtually screamed with anger when he saw the article, claiming that Grossman should never have authorized the interview and that family should not talk to journalists. (His anger must have been fierce because his family rarely spoke to reporters after this, other than to make the occasional circumspect comment.) Bob sulked afterward, wondering what lasting damage the article would do to his reputation, and perhaps regretting his harsh words.
The memory of the article was soon wiped from everybody’s mind, however. On November 22, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Bob watched the coverage on television. The murder depressed him, but surprisingly he found he could empathize with the alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Nobody might ever have known Bob’s unorthodox feelings on the subject if he had not then been invited to a fund-raising dinner on December 13 in New York for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC). The committee had decided to give Bob their prestigious Tom Paine award. Named after the eighteenth-century English philosopher and political radical, this was an honor given to a public figure who had struck out for social justice. The previous year it had gone to philosopher Bertrand Russell. Bob was uneasy about giving an acceptance speech and drank too much during the cocktail reception and dinner at the Hotel Americana. After accepting the award – a framed picture of Tom Paine – he gave a speech that seemed to be made up of the first thoughts that popped into his head.
He began by insulting the old-school radicals in the audience with what might have been a misdirected attempt at humor, saying he wished he was addressing people with ‘hair on their head.’ This extraordinary remark was greeted with guffaws. Bob went on to say that it was not a world for old people. He wanted ‘youngness’ and told the audience they should not be running things, but relaxing ‘in the time you have to relax.’ There was more laughter. ‘It is not an old people’s world. It has nothing to do with old people,’ he continued. ‘Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out.’ After a few confusing comments about Cuba and race relations, Bob turned to the recent Kennedy assassination. ‘I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where … what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too … I saw some of myself in him.’ This remark caused an uproar. ‘I don’t think it would have gone … I don’t think it could go that far,’ he bumbled on. ‘But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me.’ Beset with boos and hissing, Bob then left the stage.
In a subsequent interview with Nat Hentoff, a friend who was then at The New Yorker, Bob said he simply felt for a man caught up in violent times; he did not condone the assassination. ‘I saw a lot of myself in Oswald, I said, and I saw in him a lot of the times we’re all living in. [And] they looked at me like I was an animal. They actually thought I was saying it was a good thing Kennedy had been killed. That’s how far out they are.’ It is perhaps the single most important aspect of Bob’s talent that he is able to empathize with almost anybody – good or bad – and express that individual’s experience in song. While he is arguably a genius at this, he is far less articulate when called upon to talk extemporaneously. Self-conscious on stage without his guitar, he would always remain uncomfortable with public speaking and the results were invariably curiously fascinating. It was life looked at sideways. If anything, this goes to prove that an artist can have enormous natural ability in one discipline and yet be rather ordinary in other ways. This was certainly true of Dylan who, in everyday life, had elements of being awkward, withdrawn, manipulative, spiteful, egocentric, and chauvinistic. Yet with a guitar in his hand he was transformed into a much greater person.
The third Bob Dylan album, The Times They Are A-Changin‘, was released in January 1964, expressing more eloquently some of the ideas he shared with the audience at the ECLC dinner. The title of the album was proffered as a popular slogan and the cover design – block lettering on white – made it look like a poster. The title song, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin‘,’ was a rallying call to youth as America raced through momentous changes. Parents were asked to step aside if they were unable to lend a hand and, adapting a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, Bob reminded his youthful listeners that they would inherit the earth. ‘With God on Our Side,’ ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ and ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ also expressed dissatisfaction with society. Yet the album was not only a work of protest. ‘One Too Many Mornings’ was a love song, and ‘Restless Farewell’ an apology for past misdemeanors, conscious or not. The liner notes – a piece of free verse entitled ‘4 outlined epitaphs’ – added yet another dimension. Still smarting about the Newsweek exposé, Bob stated that his background in Hibbing was neither rich nor poor. It was just a dusty memory, like the ghost town of North Hibbing. He wanted people to accept him for his work, not to judge him by his past, or by the stories he had told about that past. The Newsweek experience had taught him a lesson. In the future Dylan would be so close-mouthed about his personal life that it would become almost impossible for the press to find out anything significant about him.
As Bob became more famous he built a team of people to look after him and ensure his privacy. One of the key figures in this personal retinue was Victor Maymudes who, in the spring of 1964, became Bob’s first road manager. A tall man six years Bob’s senior with stern, saturnine features, Maymudes appeared intimidating but was in fact a good-natured and gentle fellow. He met Bob in New York in 1962, via mutual friend Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Maymudes’s duties at the start of their association included being chauffeur, bag carrier, bodyguard, and paid companion. One of his qualifications was that he was a match for Bob at chess, pool, and the Chinese game of Go – all of which they played obsessively and all of which Bob was good at. His intelligence lent itself to games of all kinds, and he was happy to spend hours playing in near silence.
Dylan and Maymudes’s life on the road began on February 3, 1964, when they set out on a cross-country trip reminiscent of the novel On the Road. Two friends accompanied them, with all expenses paid by Bob’s new production company, Ashes & Sand. Pete Karman was put forward by Suze because she knew the boys were headed for California, the home of her rival, Joan Baez. Despite the fact that she had moved out of Bob’s apartment, Suze was still seeing Bob when he was in New York. Still, when he was away on the road, she could do little about him seeing other women. ‘Suze suggested I join the trip to keep an eye on him, not as a spy, but as a chaperone,’ says Karman. ‘She was very jealous of Baez.’ The second companion on the trip was Paul Clayton (also known as Pablo), a musicologist and songwriter. The melody for ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was derived from one of his tunes. He did not bear a grudge against Bob for that; instead friends believed Clayton harbored un requited homosexual love for Bob. Clayton was a drug abuser, with a predilection for amphetamines. Part of his luggage was a suitcase that opened out to display an array of pills. ‘It was an apothecary shop,’ jokes Karman.
The four men – Dylan, Clayton, Karman, and Maymudes – clambered into a powder blue Ford station wagon that was Bob’s first touring vehicle and set out to drive to California, where Bob would give a concert on February 22, 1964. There would be a couple of other concerts en route, but the main purpose of the trip was to see something of America, and maybe write some songs. As Maymudes drove, Bob sometimes crawled into the space behind the seats and hunched over a notepad. Other times he used a portable typewriter. In this way he came up with the song ‘Chimes of Freedom.’
They zigzagged across the country, stopping frequently. In North Carolina they called unannounced upon aged poet Carl Sandburg. It was a disappointing encounter because Sandburg had never heard of Bob. They swung down through South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana to New Orleans where Mardi Gras was being celebrated. Nobody had booked a hotel so the four men had to share one room. There was some grumbling when Karman brought a hooker back. ‘There was a good deal of drugs and booze and it was Mardi Gras, so!’ says Karman, who did not see the problem.
As Maymudes drove them west from New Orleans, Bob started writing ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’ This celebrated song was partly inspired by the wild scenes they had witnessed at Mardi Gras, and partly by Bob’s friendship with Bruce Langhorne, the guitarist who played on sessions for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Langhorne had a big Turkish tambourine – Bob described it as being ‘big as a wagon wheel’ – which he carried with him. ‘I had it in a big case, like a cymbal case,’ says Langhorne. ‘I used to sometimes just pull it out and play it, in Washington Square Park, or in a joint, or something, and it always generated a lot of energy – people dancing and banging along.’ Langhorne was Mr. Tambourine Man in the flesh. But there were other influences on the song. Bob himself has cited the Federico Fellini movie La Strada, and the phrase ‘jingle jangle’ – ‘In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you’ – occurs in a Lord Buckley recording. Bob has contradicted the popular assumption that drugs were a major influence on the song. ‘Drugs never played a part in that song,’ he has said, adding that drugs were never that important to him. ‘I could take ‘em or leave ‘em, never hung me up.’ This seems a bit disingenuous because drugs were certainly prevalent during the road trip. The four young men smoked a lot of grass, and Clayton was high on pills. In fact, the one facet of the trip that was properly organized was the drugs. Whenever they rolled into town, there would be a parcel of marijuana waiting at the local post office. Karman says they were stoned the whole time.
Mostly songs came to Bob perfectly formed, as he has stated time and again, and he simply had to write them down. Sometimes, though, he worked hard over a longer period – hours, days, even weeks – sweating over rhymes. ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ had a particularly long and difficult gestation. Bob began writing it on the road trip, but it was weeks before he finished and, conrequently, many people remember him working on it when he was with them.
They drove on, via Dallas, to Colorado and Bob revisited Central City where he had worked briefly in the summer of 1960 at the Gilded Garter. He was unable to show club owner Sophia St. John that he had made good because the Garter was closed for the winter. He gave a concert in Denver, only remembering the engagement at the last minute. ‘It was all very ad hoc and [so] badly organized,’ says Karman. ‘We practically missed the concert.’ The car radio was on as they left town and Bob heard the new smash hit ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by The Beatles. The British group had arrived in America the previous week, causing hysteria at Kennedy Airport, and were introduced to the American public on The Ed Sullivan Show. Bob was startled by the way The Beatles had reinvented rock ’n’ roll, rejuvenating the music he had listened to as a teenager.
They crossed the Rockies in a snowstorm. After gambling in Reno, Nevada, they made it over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into California. Maymudes headed straight for San Francisco, the destination of Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise in On the Road. In the novel, Kerouac wrote of San Francisco as ‘The great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’s most exciting city.’ In many ways Bob was the spiritual heir to the beat poets. He knew their work, he had a similar sensibility, and he was excited to meet them. ‘I think it was in the back of everybody’s mind that this was sort of an On the Road redux,’ says Karman.
Bob had already met Allen Ginsberg, author of the momentous poem ‘Howl’ and the inspiration for Carlo Marx in On the Road. They had been introduced in New York by Al Aronowitz, a journalist who suddenly became ubiquitous at this stage in Bob’s career. Aronowitz met Bob after being assigned to write an article for the Saturday Evening Post. Bewitched by Bob’s charisma, he became a member of the Greek chorus that fawned over and flattered Bob. ‘I loved him. Victor loved him. We all loved him. We all adored him,’ says Aronowitz. ‘We all thought he was God. In fact, I got so crazy I thought he was the new Messiah.’ The journalist introduced Bob to Ginsberg in the winter of 1963. Ginsberg was wary of Bob’s charisma at first, saying, ‘I thought he was just a folksinger, and I was also afraid I might become his slave or something, his mascot.’ After Ginsberg attended Bob’s concert in Princeton, New Jersey, in November 1963, however, he became enamored with the younger man. Although it is true that beat writing influenced Bob’s song writing, Bob arguably had a greater influence on Ginsberg, who tried to become a recording artist in emulation of him. ‘I think Allen Ginsberg’s poetry suffered from his deciding early on that he wanted to be a rock star, like Bob Dylan,’ says fellow beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. ‘Ginsberg realized from the beginning that the unaccompanied voice stood very little chance if you were on the stage following a rock group, or any other kind of musical group.’
Ferlinghetti did not doubt Bob was a fine poet. ‘His early songs are really long surrealist poems,’ he says. ‘I thought that it was too bad he became a successful folksinger. He could have developed as a very interesting writer.’ Bob met Ferlinghetti and talked about writing a book for his small San Francisco publishing company, City Lights Books, since it would make sense to be published alongside the other beat writers. But Bob also had an eye on the commercial value of his writing and eventually signed with Macmillan to write Tarantula.
Bob invited Ferlinghetti to his concert at the Berkeley Community Theater on Saturday, February 22. Joan Baez was going to appear on stage with him as his guest. Bob held the capacity audience captivated, including influential San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason, later a cofounder of Rolling Stone magazine. A few months earlier, Gleason had seen Dylan and Baez together at Monterey and dismissed him as ‘another New York Jew imitating Woody Guthrie.’ He was now a believer, expressing his faith with the gushing language of a convert. He wrote that the audience heard Bob sing his songs of ‘vision and warning,’ heard him confront hypocrisy and celebrate his ‘belief in life’ through poetry. ‘And it was none the less poetry for being delivered in a nasal voice by a slim youth with uncombed hair wearing a chamois jacket, blue jeans and boots.’ Gleason wrote that Bob was a genius and offered an apology for not recognizing this earlier. ‘When I first heard Bob Dylan at Monterey I did not like him. I was deaf. He is truly a great artist and to judge him by the standards of others is a total mistake.’ Now he was charmed and moved by Bob’s duets with Baez. ‘Together they were magnificent Saturday night and Dylan alone is one of the great warning voices of our time.’ Gleason met Bob and drove him around San Francisco, smoking pot during the tour. Suddenly it occurred to Gleason that he might have a wreck, while stoned, and kill the genius, and he quit using marijuana immediately.
Now that Bob was reunited with Baez, Pete Karman, who had been Suze’s eyes and ears during the trip across the country, had to leave the entourage. ‘I had had it,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t getting along too well with Dylan.’ His place was taken by Bobby Neuwirth, the boyish former art student from Ohio whom Bob had met at the 1961 Indian Neck Folk Festival. Neuwirth had pretensions as a painter, singer, and filmmaker, but his main talents were his wit and an ability to make friends with important people. Over the next few years he would become one of Bob’s closest associates. His loyalty has endured through the years (‘I think Bob Dylan is a true artist and the greatest, most influential songwriter of my time,’ he says). At first Neuwirth’s role as Bob’s faithful gofer earned him the not altogether flattering nickname ’tacos-to-Go.’ As they grew closer, their friendship took on an aspect of cruelty. Neuwirth encouraged Bob in the psychological games he enjoyed, an advanced form of Glissendorf that verged on the sadistic now that Bob had the added power of celebrity. ‘Neuwirth was the master of head games,’ says Al Aronowitz. ‘He was nasty as hell.’
Bob continued south after the Berkeley show, traveling with Clayton, Neuwirth, and Maymudes in the Ford, Baez following in her silver Jaguar. They stopped at her house in Carmel and then drove on to Los Angeles, where Bob was scheduled to give a few concerts. He had also been invited to a string of Hollywood parties and was asked to make a guest appearance on Steve Allen’s television show on February 25. This was not altogether successful.
‘Our exchange was undoubtedly one of the more difficult interviews of my fifty-odd years of doing that sort of thing,’ says Steve Allen. ‘It was easy to see [that] Mr. Dylan was indeed uncomfortable working on television.’ After a desultory exchange during which Bob swiveled on his stool nervously, Allen asked Bob for an explanation of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.’ Bob said it would take longer to explain than sing, so he got up and did just that. The Allen show experience was representative of Bob’s discomfort with the medium and he would seldom appear on live television in following years, even though chatting with talk show hosts is a standard way to promote an album. Occasionally he would come on and sing a song, but he became one of very few major stars who would not sit down and talk with the hosts. The reason seems to have been his shyness. ‘He was terrible at small talk, and he still is,’ says summer-camp friend Howard Rutman who, by coincidence, became production assistant on The Steve Allen Show. ‘He’s terrible in an interview. He just doesn’t know what to say, and he’s bashful.’ Bob once asked Rutman to write him gags so he would have material to fall back on at times like this. ‘I looked at him, and I said, “Bob, what are you, nuts? They want to hear you sing, man. They don’t want to hear you tell jokes.”’
Four days after the Steve Allen show, on February 29, Bob played the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. ‘Here was something new,’ says Maria Muldaur, an Italian-American singer Bob was acquainted with from New York. ‘No more little basket house. No more Gerde’s Folk City. No more little funky concerts in the basement of [a] church. Here is the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium which, I’m sure, held a couple of thousand people, filled to the rafters.’ The songs were very different from the routine Muldaur remembered from Bob’s early days in Greenwich Village. ‘These were chilling songs,’ she says. ’this wasn’t about no stinkin’ Bear Mountain picnic.’ A great roar went up after the performance and Bob dashed for the dressing room where Maymudes, Muldaur, and Neuwirth were waiting for him. ‘Man, was that okay?’ he asked. As Bob changed his clothes, fans pounded at the door, some pretending to be relatives so they could get in. ‘Every time we tried to peek out to see if it had died down, it was worse,’ says Muldaur. ‘Dylan was walking back and forth like a caged animal.’ He even considered climbing out through the bathroom window. Eventually Maymudes and Neuwirth forged a way through the crowd, with Bob and Muldaur following behind. ‘I felt like my ribs were gonna be crushed,’ she says. ‘When Elvis did a show in New York, people would press at him and rip his clothes off. It was like that.’ They got to the station wagon, edged onto the road, and then headed for Hollywood, stopping to eject girls who had stowed themselves under a tarpaulin in the back of the car. Fans also followed in cars. To lose them, Maymudes crawled to stop lights, turning quickly when the light changed to red. Elated by the show, the friends tuned the radio to Wolfman Jack and beat out a rhythm on the dashboard. They were going to a party at the Hollywood Hills home of Benny Shapiro, a colleague of Albert Grossman.
’Talk about a swell pad!’ exclaims Muldaur. ‘Here we are, the scruffy little folk musicians from the village, and here we are in [this] gorgeous house with white carpets and sliding glass doors and a pool. We’d never seen houses like this.’ The guests were slightly older, dressed for a cocktail party, and they appeared impossibly sophisticated. Yet, somehow, Bob changed the dynamic of the party when he entered the room. ‘A line was forming of people to talk to Bob,’ says Muldaur. ‘These beautiful women in gorgeous cashmere outfits, young women, were all saying “I’ll follow you anywhere, Bob.”’ She stepped back to observe what was going on. ‘I realized, the Big Star Trip Has Now Officially Begun.’
THE MONTHS SINCE THE Newport Festival, the previous summer, had been miserable for Suze. Bob was conducting a flagrant affair with Joan Baez and yet expecting to continue a relationship with her, too, seeing her whenever his touring engagements and recording dates brought him to New York. When he was in the city, he and Suze attended parties together and went about as a couple, but the relationship was so damaged by Bob’s infidelities and the pressure of his fame that it was clear it would not last much longer. Suze had not moved back into Bob’s New York apartment after her apparent suicide attempt the previous summer, but lived instead with her sister Carla – with whom she did not get along very well – in a depressingly cramped railroad flat on Avenue B in the Lower East Side. The kitchen doubled as entranceway and was lit by a single, bare bulb. There were two cubicle-like bedrooms but no doors so there was no privacy when Bob came to visit. An already difficult situation took a desperate turn when, at some stage during this period, Suze became pregnant with Bob’s child. According to Carla, Suze had the pregnancy terminated. ‘At that time abortions were illegal,’ says Carla, who nursed her sister afterward. ‘There were some bad things between them.’
The abortion precipitated the final, wretched breakup of the relationship. Late one evening in March 1964 Carla Rotolo came home from work to find Suze and Bob arguing in the kitchen. ‘They split up, finally split up, and he didn’t want to go,’ says Carla. The scene became hysterical, with Bob and Suze screaming at each other into the early hours of the morning. With no doors on the rooms, Carla was forced to listen. ‘It was getting so bad that I had to become involved.’
‘Come on, Bobby, leave,’ she told him. ‘You can talk another time.’
Bob refused to leave. Carla pushed him. He pushed back. Soon they were practically fighting. ‘I remember it as being a terrible, terrible experience,’ says Carla. Friends were called and finally Bob was forcibly removed.
Upset by the breakup, and angry with Carla, Bob wrote ‘Ballad in Plain D,’ one of his most directly autobiographical songs, with some of his most nakedly emotional lyrics. He wrote about two sisters. He loved the younger, whose skin was like bronze. The relationship ended in a fight in a room with a bare bulb, the older sister – whom Bob described as a parasite – screaming at him to leave. When Carla heard the song, she had no doubt she was meant to be the parasite. ‘It was about the breakup, sure. It was about that night.’ Carla resented the term, pointing out that she worked to pay the rent, and she rejects the inference that she had been interfering in Bob and Suze’s business. ‘I got dragged into something that, frankly, by then, I didn’t give a fuck about,’ she says. ‘Because [Suze] was going to choose whoever she liked, [but] I couldn’t keep sitting in my no-door room with screaming and yelling going on.’ Carla was left with a very negative view of Bob, considering him selfish, manipulative, and emotionally immature. She also felt maligned by ‘Ballad in Plain D,’ a song she first heard when it appeared on Bob’s next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. He did not warn Carla he was about to record it, much less ask permission.
It seems Bob ultimately came to reproach himself for the song. He hinted as much in the liner notes to the 1985 Biograph box set. ‘I don’t write confessional songs,’ he said. ‘Well, actually I did write one once and it wasn’t very good – it was a mistake to record it and I regret it … back there somewhere on maybe my third or fourth album.’ This cryptic statement was as far as he ever went toward a public apology to Carla or Suze. Around the time Biograph was released, Bob telephoned Carla to reminisce and, in his own awkward way, to try and make peace. It was too late; by this time his life as a superstar was so far removed from his old friends that it was like talking to a stranger. ‘He certainly must have felt terrible about things he did to people in his past,’ says Carla, who also became estranged from Suze partly because of the messy breakup with Bob. Looking back on her relationship with Bob, Suze is guarded in her comments. For her, the songs contain the truth of what happened. ‘If you listen to all the songs, they couldn’t be more clear,’ she says. ‘Anything about our relationship, and about our life together, is very clearly in the songs.’ The memory is a complicated one. ‘It’s all good,’ she says. ‘It’s all bad.’ Unlike his breakups with Bonnie Beecher and Echo Helstrom, Bob was unable to maintain a friendship with Suze.
However bad his personal life, Bob was fortunate in that he always had his music and concerts to distract himself after a crisis. After the breakup with Suze, Bob was kept busy on a tour of New England in April, traveling with Victor Maymudes and a group of friends including musician John Sebastian, later of The Lovin’ Spoonful. ‘It was a very, very moving experience,’ says Sebastian, who watched the performances in colleges and other small venues. ‘Just this guy with one guitar and a spotlight. It was totally riveting. I found myself in tears several nights.’
Bob, Maymudes, and Grossman then flew to London where, on May 17, Bob gave an important performance at the Royal Festival Hall. Bob was doing the sound check when a call came from the stage door to say a John Beeklin was there to see him. ‘Bucklen!’ said a voice in the background. The minute Bob saw his school friend, he ran to embrace him. Bucklen was serving with the United States Air Force, and was on a three-day pass from his base in East Anglia. It was the first time they had seen each other since the winter of 1960 when Bob had set out for New York. ‘He had changed quite a bit,’ says Bucklen. ‘He had lost a lot of weight.’ But much more significant than the change in Bob’s physical appearance was the magnitude of fame he had achieved, as Bucklen now witnessed at firsthand.
The Royal Festival Hall was filled to capacity for the show, and the audience listened with the attention one might expect at a classical recital. Bob received a telegram from John Lennon at intermission. In the five months since Bob first heard The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ the group had achieved a phenomenal four number-one hits in the United States. The Beatles started paying attention to Bob after hearing The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. ‘We just played it, just wore it out,’ George Harrison has said. ‘The content of the song lyrics and just the attitude – it was just incredibly original and wonderful.’ The Beatles had not yet met Bob, but Lennon found time to send a telegram saying they wished they could be at the Festival Hall. Unfortunately, they had a filming commitment. ‘Oh man! That’s pretty neat,’ exclaimed Bucklen. Bob also seemed pleased, but not impressed. He admired The Beatles in many ways, but ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ did not have the weight of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.’
During the second half of the concert, Bucklen struggled to reconcile the fact that the man on stage was Bobby Zimmerman. ‘I couldn’t relate to the image Bob was presenting, and [to] him as a person,’ he says. ‘One of the songs was ‘With God on Our Side’ and after every verse people cheered. What the hell? This is Bob. I remember this guy sitting next me, a big guy, he started to weep.’ After the show, Albert Grossman had to rescue his artist from a crush of fans. ‘Bob, I could tell, was enjoying it,’ says Bucklen, who got into a black cab with Dylan, Grossman, and three girls. They spent the evening visiting parties, meeting old friends like folksinger Martin Carthy, and getting stoned. ‘Here. This is good stuff. You want some?’ asked Bob, offering John Bucklen a joint. It was the first time Bucklen had ever smoked marijuana.
Bob has avoided talking in detail about his use of drugs, saying in one interview that he could take drugs or leave them. There is overwhelming evidence that he frequently smoked marijuana. There is evidence that he experimented with other drugs as well. Record producer Paul Rothchild claimed he introduced Bob to the hallucinogenic drug LSD in April 1964. It was in Bob’s character to experiment, and he was acquainted with heavy drug users, including heroin addicts like Howard Alk, an actor turned filmmaker friend of Grossman from Chicago who became part of the entourage. ‘I never got hooked on any drug,’ said Bob when pressed by a Rolling Stone interviewer in 1984 to talk about the subject. However, he added: ‘[But] who knows what people stick in your drinks, or what kinda cigarettes you’re smokin’?’
Waiting for a cab, Bob asked Bucklen a curious question. ‘What do you think of me now?’ he said. ‘How do I look to you?’
‘Well, you look kind of strung out and seem a little thinner.’ Bob just stared at his old friend. ‘Yeah, well, what do you think of me?’ asked Bucklen.
‘Well, you look a little strung out and a little thinner,’ replied Bob, apparently displeased, and his mood deteriorated during the rest of the evening and culminated in a scene at the Mayfair Hotel when they returned there with a couple of girls. Bob got into a belligerent argument with the management because he wanted to take his girl to his room. ‘They wouldn’t let him do it, and he really got irate,’ recalls Bucklen. ‘I said, “Hey, Bob, let’s just go someplace else.” And he turned [and said], “Mind your own damn business… Let me take care of this. It’s no concern of yours.” I said, “Okay, fine.” I just turned around and walked out… That was the last thing he said to me.’ The friends were to meet once again, twenty-five years later, backstage at a concert in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1989. Bucklen had contacted Bob’s tour company to ask to get tickets so he could bring his children to the show and maybe introduce them to his old friend, and Bob sent word that they would be welcome. Almost the first thing he said to Bucklen was to apologize for talking harshly to him at the Mayfair a quarter of a century before. He said he had been under a lot of pressure. The fact that Bob had held this in his mind for so many years offers a glimpse of his sensitive nature. As other friends would note during his career, if Bob had behaved in an insensitive way he would invariably reproach himself for it for a long time afterward.
After the London concert, Bob traveled through Europe on vacation. He flew with Victor Maymudes and a friend, Ben Carruthers, to France where they met singer Hugues Aufray. Bob was excited to be in the land of Rimbaud and was eager to imbibe the culture. He made Aufray laugh by eating Camembert with a spoon, and they drank good wines. Bob spent a romantic evening with the chanteuse Nico, and met the expatriate writer Mason Hoffenberg, coauthor of Candy. They rented a Volkswagen and drove to Germany to see the Berlin Wall. A few days later Bob concluded his European vacation by visiting Greece. In a village outside Athens he wrote some of the songs that would appear on his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, working on notepaper from the Mayfair Hotel. ‘Mama, You Been on My Mind’ was one of the songs. Although it would not appear on this album,* it was one of the finest love songs he ever wrote. The ravishing opening line described how a chance image – the ‘color of the sun cut flat’ on the crossroads where he was standing – could cause memories of an old love to flood back, perhaps indicating the private regrets he felt over the way he had treated Suze. In real life, he had made a terrible mess of the relationship, but in song he could express himself with delicacy and maturity.
Another Side of Bob Dylan was recorded in one remarkable six-hour session – between 7.30 p.m. on the evening of June 9, and 1:30 the following morning – just after Bob returned to New York from Europe. Columbia wanted the record for a forthcoming sales conference and Bob was happy to work fast to oblige them. A group of friends came into Studio ‘A’ to support him, including Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Al Aronowitz. The visitors brought bottles of Beaujolais, and several children scampered around. The relaxed atmosphere affected the recordings with Bob chuckling on takes of ‘All I Really Want to Do’ and ‘I Don’t Believe You,’ belying the sadness at the root of both songs. And he was not fazed when a four-year-old burst into the studio when he was recording. ‘I’m gonna rub you out,’ Bob admonished the kid, with good humor. ‘I’ll track you down and turn you into dust.’ The visitors were more of a problem for producer Tom Wilson. He tried to confine the children to the control room, which he had to share with Bob’s friends who were making suggestions in support of Bob. When Wilson pointedly ignored them, Aronowitz traced a square in the air behind his head.
The songs had been written over a long period of time. Bob began working on ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ in Italy. ‘Chimes of Freedom’ came from the road trip to California. Other songs were written at Cafe Espresso, and in Greece. The dominant theme was relationships, and many of the songs – including ‘To Ramona’ and ‘Ballad in Plain D’ – seemed to have specific reference to Suze. Although there was a tinge of resentment and melodrama to ‘Ballad in Plain D,’ it featured a memorable description of Suze as ‘The could-be dream-lover of my lifetime.’ The song was performed with care, in contrast to the sloppiness of some of the recordings that evening. The two comic talking songs – ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ and ‘I Shall Be Free No. 10’ – were less engaging than similar songs on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and overall this was a slightly weaker album than that and The Times They Are A-Changin’. ‘My Back Pages’ was strong, expressing the fact that Bob had outgrown the certainties of youth. Unfortunately, the song was recorded in the early hours of the morning, by which time Bob sounded tired, and this lessened the impact of the record as a whole.
There was nothing on the album that could be considered a protest song and the album title, Another Side of Bob Dylan, seemed a turning away from the past, although the truth was that Bob had never seen himself simply as a protest singer. He wrote all types of songs. He blamed Tom Wilson for the title, which played into the hands of those critics who wanted to seize upon an apparent – rejection of what they thought he had been doing. ‘I begged and pleaded with him not to do it,’ Bob said in 1985. ‘I knew I was going to have to take a lot of heat for a title like that and it was my feeling that it wasn’t a good idea coming after The Times They Are A-Changin’… It seemed like a negation of the past which in no way was true.’ Once again, Bob composed lengthy poetic liner notes for the album – ‘Some Other Kinds of Songs’ – that included references to his private life. Apart from thanking the Paturels for the use of their spare room in Woodstock, he could not hide his bitterness regarding the breakup with Suze. He wrote ‘i used t‘hate enzo’ and went on to describe how he became so jealous of Enzo Bartoccioli – the young man Suze had met in Italy in 1962 and subsequently married – that he fantasized about murdering him. Again, here was a real insight into Bob’s truest feelings. Only the deepest hurt and jealousy could have engendered such violent thoughts, although one might consider that Suze had more reason to be angry for the way he had behaved toward her.
Critical reaction to the album was mixed, and the Newport Folk Festival that summer was not quite the – triumph it had been the previous year. Artists like Phil Ochs, who had hitched their careers to the wagon of protest, received the most enthusiastic reception. Bob’s new songs about relationships seemed self-indulgent to some, although he also premiered ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ to acclaim. After the festival, the editor of Sing Out! published an open letter to Bob that was critical not only of his introspective new songs but also of the apparent changes in him as a man now that he was a star. ‘I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people,’ wrote editor Irwin Silber, adding that Bob now traveled with an entourage of drinking buddies, and his songs were tinged with maudlin and cruelty, which was true enough. Despite the mixed reception to his new work, the festival was personally important for Bob because he finally met country artist Johnny Cash, whom he had been corresponding with and whose music he had long admired. Bob and Johnny were so happy to become acquainted that, together with Joan Baez and June Carter Cash, they jumped up and down on the bed in Cash’s motel room, ‘like kids,’ as Cash described it.
A few days after the festival, Bob flew to California and, in the last days of July and the beginning of August, he had a brief romantic interlude with his old girlfriend Bonnie Beecher. ‘I drove him to the airport and ended up getting on the plane and spending a week in Hawaii with him,’ she recalls. Bob gave a concert in Waikiki, after which he said good-bye to Bonnie and flew east to stay at Albert Grossman’s house in Bearsville with Joan Baez, sister Mimi, and Mimi’s new husband, Richard Fariña, recently divorced from Carolyn Hester. Mimi was no easier to handle than Suze’s sister. When she decided Bob was not treating Baez with sufficient respect, Mimi grabbed Bob’s hair and yanked his head back. It was becoming clear to Mimi – partly because Bob flirted with almost every woman he met – that Bob was not as much in love with Joan as she was with him. Joan seemed blind to this, and was as besotted as ever, but their romance had already passed its brief peak period and it would not be long before it ended altogether.
It was during Bob’s stay in Bearsville that a meeting was arranged between Bob and The Beatles. The group was in New York in the summer of 1964 at the end of a second U.S. visit, about to give a fund-raising concert at the Paramount Theater. The Beatles knew journalist Al Aronowitz, who had been assigned to write about them for the Saturday Evening Post. In the process, he became besotted with the group, just as he had with Bob. John Lennon asked Aronowitz to contact Bob and arrange a meeting at their hotel. So Bob came down from Bearsville and he and his entourage were duly ushered into The Beatles’ suite at the Hotel Delmonico, where they were protected from fans by a phalanx of police. The Beatles had just finished dinner with their manager, Brian Epstein, when Bob came in. Aronowitz made the introductions, bursting his shirt buttons with pride. It was one of the greatest moments of his life, and a meeting of considerable importance. The subsequent influence the musicians had on one another had an important effect on popular music as Bob integrated a Beatles-like use of rock ’n’ roll into his music and The Beatles began to write lyrics that had the depth and seriousness of Dylan songs.
The American visitors suggested they all smoke a joint. The Beatles were drinkers rather than drug takers (Scotch and coke being their favorite tipple), and although it has been reported in books about the era that they had never smoked marijuana before, Harrison and Lennon at least had smoked pot.* The point was that none of The Beatles had ever smoked high-quality marijuana. Bob was surprised; he had assumed the middle eight in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was ‘I get high! I get high!’ John Lennon explained the lyric was ‘I can’t hide.’ Bob clumsily rolled the first joint, spilling marijuana. Because there were police directly outside the door, they adjourned to an interior room before lighting up. Bob handed the first joint to Lennon who told Ringo Starr to try it, joking that Starr was his taster. The drummer started smoking as if it were a cigarette, not passing it to the others, so Aronowitz suggested that Victor Maymudes roll another joint. It was not long before everybody was mightily stoned. McCartney decided he had discovered the meaning of life and searched for a pencil so he could write it down. Starr giggled. Brian Epstein said he felt he was on the ceiling.
In the bleary light of the next day McCartney looked at his pencil-written notes to discover the meaning of life boiled down to one sentence: ‘There are seven levels.’
During the next few days Bob and The Beatles saw more of one another, at the hotel and around New York. The bond of friendship was formed most strongly between Dylan and Lennon and Harrison. When The Beatles played the Paramount Theater on September 20, Bob went along to watch his new friends in action. It was pandemonium, with the teenybopper audience screaming so loudly as to render the group virtually inaudible. The diminutive Bob stood on a chair in the wings to get a better view. He remarked with satisfaction that the show was the opposite of his concerts, where audiences listened to every word in silence, applauding at the end. ‘He was proud of that,’ says Aronowitz.
PART OF THE REASON FOR Bob’s increasing coolness toward Joan Baez was that he was spending a lot of time with another girlfriend, model Sara Lownds, whom Baez knew nothing about at this stage. Sara Lownds would soon take over as the main woman in his life and ultimately become Bob’s first wife, mother of his children and inspiration for some of his greatest songs.
Despite her almost aristocratic manner, Sara came from humble beginnings. In fact, she had a very difficult upbringing and, in later life, it seemed there was a lot about her past that she wished to forget, which, together with her refusal ever to give interviews, has resulted in much of her life story remaining mysterious until now. She was born Shirley Marlin Noznisky in Wilmington, Delaware. Although her year of birth has been given as 1940, she was in fact born a year earlier, on October 28, 1939. Her father, Isaac, was a Belorussian Jewish – immigrant who settled in Wilmington shortly before the First World War and ran a scrap-metal business on Claymont Street. He never learned to read or write English. Shirley’s mother, Bessie, ran a dry-goods store at the junction of 8th and Lombard Streets, the latter the street on which Shirley was born. She had one brother, Julius, sixteen years her senior. When Shirley was nine, her mother suffered a stroke, after which her great aunt Esther helped look after her. In November 1956, when Shirley was completing high school, her father was shot dead by a man with a grudge. Shirley’s widowed mother died five years later, leaving her alone in the world.
Shirley was a beautiful young woman, with pale skin and dark hair. But it was her eyes that were most remarkable. They were sad eyes, perhaps expressing the pain of her early life. She attended the University of Delaware briefly before moving to New York City, around 1960, where she worked as a bunny girl at the Playboy Club. She became a fashion model, represented by the Ford agency, and met her first husband, photographer Hans Lownds. Hans was a German Jew, born in 1914 as Heinz Ludwig Lowenstein; he fled to America in the 1930s and changed his name to Henry Louis Lownds (Hans was a nickname). He became a successful photographer of men’s fashion, known for using beautiful young women in his pictures. Despite the fact Hans was twenty-five years older than Shirley, she became his third wife in late 1960 or early 1961. ‘My father was the one who changed Sara’s name,’ says Peter Lownds, who discovered he had a new stepmom – only five years his senior – when he came home from Yale and Sara answered the door. ‘My father said, “I can’t be married to a woman named Shirley.” [So] he had her change her name to Sara.’
Sara and Hans lived in a large five-story house on 60th Street in Manhattan, between Second and Third Avenues. Sara continued with her modeling career – appearing in Harper’s Bazaar as ‘lovely, luscious Sara Lownds’ – and then became pregnant. Her daughter Maria was born October 21, 1961. Within a year of the birth, the marriage began to fail. Sara started going out on her own, driving around town in an MG sports car Hans had given her, and gravitated to the youthful scene in Greenwich Village. According to Peter Lownds, this is where she met Bob. ‘Bob was the reason [she left Hans],’ says Lownds. ‘He was famous and she was very beautiful.’ Hans and Sara separated – soon to divorce* – and Sara went to work as a secretary for the film production division of Time-Life. Sara was in the neighborhood coffee shop in midtown Manhattan when she struck up a friendship with waitress Sally Anne Buehler, who happened to be dating Albert Grossman. Sally invited Sara up to Bearsville and this became another link with Bob. When Sally and Albert Grossman married, on November 12, 1964, Bob and Sara were among the guests at their wedding.
Shortly after the Grossmans’ wedding, Bob gave up his apartment on West 4th Street, which was really too small for two people, and he and Sara lived together for a short while at Grossman’s apartment in Manhattan, while Albert and Sally went on their honeymoon in Europe. Soon after this Bob took an apartment of his own at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street. Built as an apartment building in 1884, the Chelsea was favored by artists, musicians, and writers because suites could be rented cheaply on flexible leases and the management was relaxed about the eccentricities of guests. Willem de Kooning painted there. Aaron Copland composed on a piano wheeled up by management. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001, and the beats regularly partied and wrote there too. The Chelsea was bohemian, but for the most part safe enough for children to stay in. This was important because when Bob moved into room 211 – a modest one-bedroom suite overlooking the street – he did so with Sara and three-year-old Maria, the nucleus of a family that became very important to him.
Hans Lownds threatened to go through the courts to get sole custody of Maria. He did not want his daughter raised by Bob, whom he referred to disdainfully as ‘Zimmerman.’ However, Hans’s attorney told him that he would have little chance of winning and, after receiving this advice, he decided to have no further contact with Maria. Although he lived until 1995, Hans never saw her again, and for all intents and purposes Bob became Maria’s father.
When he was at the Chelsea, Bob lived a remarkably quiet life with Sara. He had a piano in his room, and he composed songs, but few people knew he was there. ‘He was very shy, very quiet,’ says Stanley Bard, who ran the Chelsea. When he craved excitement, Bob went out drinking at the Kettle of Fish in the Village. Sara usually would not be with him on these occasions. Instead, his companion would invariably be Bobby Neuwirth, although other acolytes included Al Aronowitz and singer David Cohen. Bob held court in the upstairs bar, testing friends with mind games. Essentially he and Neuwirth would pick on weaknesses, goading a reaction. When John Herald walked in one evening, Bob and Neuwirth sniggered, ‘Here comes the Armenian secret service guy.’ This was simply a play on the fact that Herald was of Armenian extraction, but if he had taken offense Herald knew he would have suffered the full force of their sarcasm. He was able to laugh about it and was therefore welcome to join their table. Others were not so lucky. ‘I’ve seen them make people cry,’ he says. Bonnie Beecher, for one, was terrified of Neuwirth and hid behind Bob when Neuwirth was in the room. ‘I am extremely shy and, for me, being in a room with Neuwirth was like being in hell. Because he was always parrying to me and I would go blank. I would just be helpless,’ she admits. ‘I would leave a room just shaking, and on the verge of tears.’
On his trips away from the Chelsea, and the companionship of Sara, Bob was drawn into circles of New York society where wealth and fame were revered, where sarcasm was celebrated and exclusivity considered good – the antithesis of the values of the folk revival. Neuwirth was his guide in this superficial underworld. One of the subterranean characters they became friendly with at this time was model Edie Sedgwick, a mentally unstable peroxide blonde whose society family put her in an institution in 1962. By 1964 she was one of the most celebrated figures in New York, famous for living extravagantly. Shortly before Christmas 1964, a Cadillac limousine crunched to a halt in the snow outside the Kettle of Fish. Edie had come to pay court. Together with Neuwirth, Edie and Bob went to look at the lights outside a church on Houston Street. Edie later went on to have an affair with Neuwirth. Although a peripheral figure in the story of Bob’s career, Edie is widely believed to be at least partly the inspiration for some of Bob’s later songs including ‘Just Like a Woman.’
After the Christmas break, Bob recorded Bringing It All Back Home, one of the most important records of his career, the album that integrated what he had learned from the success of British bands like The Beatles with his own, more poetic lyrics. Rock ’n’ roll, a form of music that had begun in America in the 1950s with artists like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard, had dwindled away into formulaic top-forty pop in its native country. The Beatles, however, who had grown up with a love of early American rock ’n’ roll, had come from Liverpool to prove in the space of one year that this form of music could still be exciting and hugely popular. ‘America should put statues up to The Beatles. They helped give this country’s pride back to it,’ said Bob, who recognized the importance of the group in bringing new life to a musical genre he had grown up with but had abandoned for folk music because it did not seem to offer him enough. It was not just The Beatles that were pointing the way forward. In the summer of 1964, another British group, The Animals, had a hit with an R&B cover of ‘The House of the Risin’ Sun,’ a song they learned from Bob’s debut album. By combining the powerful lyrics of this traditional song with swirling rhythm and blues music, The Animals created something slightly different again – a pop song that had the seriousness of traditional music.
Bob himself took the process one crucial step further by combining his self-written, poetic lyrics with rhythm and blues music. By doing so he created folk-rock, although the phrase is misleading. He had stopped dealing in folk songs long ago. Beginning with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his songs were essentially poems set to music; the music just happened to be the acoustic sound of folk. With Bringing It All Back Home – the album title was a reference to the fact that this was American music British groups had borrowed – Bob recorded his songs with rock ’n’ roll backing, demonstrating to musicians everywhere that they could also express their deepest feelings in rock ’n’ roll songs. This was the simple but nonetheless revolutionary idea that emancipated artists from The Beatles through Bruce Springsteen and beyond, allowing them to write pop songs that aspired to the intellectual level of art. In making this transformation, folk music’s brightest star exchanged his acoustic guitar for a newfangled solid-body electric guitar, a sacrilegious symbol to many folk revivalists. ‘He had a lot of balls to do that,’ says Kenny Rankin, who played on Bob’s January 1965 electric sessions. ‘[It was] quite a thing for Dylan just to pick up an electric guitar.’
Despite the momentous nature of what was afoot, there was little sense of nervousness when the musicians assembled in New York on January 13, 1965, for the Bringing It All Back Home sessions. Back in high school, Bob had shown a disinclination to rehearse with his bands. As a solo performer he could please himself. Now that he was working with a full, electrically amplified band of professional musicians, he led whither his fancy took him, and the musicians had to follow as best they could. There were no rehearsals, much less a discussion about what he wanted to achieve. ‘None of the songs that I played on were [even] counted off,’ says guitarist Kenny Rankin. ‘He just started strummin’ and we jumped in after about two or four bars.’ The resulting music was a joyous fusion of freeform verse and good-time rock ’n’ roll. ‘There’s no overdubbing. There’s no patching up. There’s no splicing,’ says Rankin. ‘What you heard is what we did.’
The songs included the rollicking ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ a comic protest, the name supposedly inspired by Maggiore’s Farm, near Kingston, New York, which Bob passed each time he traveled to Woodstock; and the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ set to a Chuck Berry riff.* The lyrics of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ consisted of snippets of images, jokes, and flashing aphorisms that became catchphrases. Best known perhaps is the line about not needing a weatherman to know which the way the wind blows; this reference provided a name for the anarchist terrorist group the Weathermen, formed in 1969. ‘Love Minus Zero / No Limit’ features the wonderful simile ’she’s true, like ice, like fire.’ Although in writing this may look like a cliché, it sounded quite beautiful when sung. Indeed, it is a feature of Bob’s work that, by his vocal phrasing, he can lift a seemingly simple couplet to the heights of lyricism. His spoof on the founding of America, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,’ was begun with such alacrity that he left the band behind. ‘I was ridin’ on the Mayflower,’ he started singing, and then broke down in hoots of laughter because the musicians were just watching him. ‘We didn’t know where to cut the groove. So he went “I was ridin’ on the Mayflower…” and we all should have come in on “ridin‘”, but everyone sat there,’ says Bruce Langhorne. ‘Wait a minute, fellas,’ said Tom Wilson, laughing heartily. ‘Okay, take two.’ The tape was still running and they plunged back in. This was the recording – complete with false start – that was used on the album.
As a conciliatory gesture to his established folk listeners, the four long songs on the second side of the album were acoustic: ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).’ Delivered at a furious pace, this last song was a grim masterpiece. From the opening image of darkness at noon, the song seethed in anger. It was also loaded with some of the most memorable images Bob ever created: flesh-colored Christ figures glow in the dark; money did not talk, it swore; even the United States President had to stand naked. Here was a song that would never date, partly because Bob was shrewd enough not to mention the current U.S. president by name. As a result successive generations would, in their mind, associate the song with the president of the day, and the song never had more power than when Bob performed it in 1974 during Richard Nixon’s Watergate crisis. ‘I’ve written some songs that I look at, and they just give me a sense of awe,’ Bob said in 1997. ‘Stuff like, “It’s Alright Ma,” just the alliteration in that blows me away.’ It was also amazing that he had recorded this remarkable album in just three days.
The cover for this most important album was a minor work of art in itself. It featured a carefully composed and technically innovative photograph by Daniel Kramer that recalled a style of portraiture popular during the Renaissance. Bob posed in a well-appointed room around which were placed objects that had symbolic meaning and constituted visual jokes. Like Flemish painter Jan van Eyck’s celebrated 1434 portrait, The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini, the subject was balanced by the presence of a beautiful, enigmatic woman. The impression was playful and sophisticated. ‘I wanted to do something that would really be special because I was so impressed by what [Bob] was doing,’ says Kramer, who also photographed the recording sessions. He devised an adapter for his camera that allowed him to take a picture of Bob while objects on the periphery blurred, as if moving. ‘I wanted Bob to be the nucleus, the center, and the universe of music turning around him.’ The blurred objects would form a circle, as if Bob were at the hub of a revolving LP. Bob liked the idea and one snowy night he drove Kramer to Grossman’s house in Bearsville. The next morning they set up the scene in the living room. Sally Grossman put on a red pants suit and reclined on her chaise longue, smoking a cigarette. Bob perched at the other end of the chaise longue, wearing a white shirt with blue pinstripes and a black jacket. Artifacts that told a story about Bob’s life and music were arranged on the seat, floor, and mantelpiece. These included albums by Lord Buckley and Eric Von Schmidt, his own Another Side of Bob Dylan, a copy of Time magazine, and a fallout shelter sign. Bob held Sally’s Persian cat on his knee. The final visual joke was the lavender-colored cuff link peeping from his left sleeve. It was one of the pair given to him by Joan Baez.
When Bringing It All Back Home was released in March 1965 it became his most successful album yet, reaching the sixth position in the charts. Some folk purists were disdainful, but many reviewers recognized Bob’s achievement and Bob was inundated with requests for interviews. He gave a press conference in New York to mark its release but said precisely nothing about the record and, instead, used the opportunity to poke fun at the reporters. Asked if he had a rock ’n’ roll band in high school, Bob replied: ‘I had a banana band in high school.’ Questioned about his romance with Joan Baez, he said she was his fortune teller. Asked who could save the world, Bob immediately nominated his sidekick Al Aronowitz. Although his answers were stupendously silly, Bob was playing a shrewd game. By refusing to abide by the conventions of press interviews, and by avoiding talking about his songs in a serious way, he made himself more intriguing to the press and his public. In any case, after the Newsweek debacle, he was not going to be drawn into talking about his personal life.
Bringing It All Back Home proved even more popular in Britain where it reached the number-one position on a wave of publicity generated by Bob’s spring concert tour of the United Kingdom, which started in April. Here, too, he was not exactly forthcoming in his interview comments. Asked by Melody Maker what ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ was about he replied: ‘It’s just a little story, really. It’s not about anything.’ Indeed, how could he possibly give a serious answer to such a question when the song was an almost indefinable amalgam of surreal images and jokes? Bob’s arrival in Britain was made more exciting because he was accompanied by Joan Baez who, as far as the press and public were concerned, was his partner (nobody knew about Sara yet). But behind the scenes the relationship between Dylan and Baez was falling apart. Baez had come to Britain with Bob partly because she thought he was going to introduce her to his enthusiastic English audiences, returning the favor she had done for him in America, where she was more popular. It was a reasonable expectation; they had been touring the United States together as recently as the month before, and Bob had actually invited her to come with him to England. But once they arrived, Bob did not seem to want her around. Possibly he realized that he was so popular in Britain he did not need to share a stage with anybody. Whatever was going through his mind, he did not ask Joan to sing with him on stage and she was reduced to practicing her ear-splitting soprano in hotel rooms and backstage as she tagged along behind him. These embarrassing scenes would be captured on camera for posterity because, along with Bob’s entourage of Albert and Sally Grossman, Bobby Neuwirth (employed as road manager, and also filling the role of court jester), and producer Tom Wilson, Bob was accompanied by a film crew. This last was headed by D. A. Pennebaker, a filmmaker friend of Sara Lownds from Time-Life. Pennebaker had struck a deal with Grossman to make a cinema vérité documentary of Bob’s British tour, to be called Dont Look Back, without an apostrophe. (‘It was my attempt [to] simplify the language,’ explains Pennebaker.) In return for a modest investment, and granting Pennebaker almost unlimited access, Bob and Grossman would receive a share of profits, which were not actually expected to be substantial. ‘[Bob] had no idea anything was going to come of it,’ says Pennebaker. ‘It was just a home movie for him, and hardly even that.’ Assisting Pennebaker was Grossman’s friend Howard Alk, and Howard’s wife, Jones.
One of the first sequences in the film was a press conference at Heathrow airport. Bob held a large lightbulb and parried reporters’ inane questions with nonsense answers. Asked what his ‘real message’ was, he said: ‘Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb!’ Journalists were to be toyed with or ignored, as he explained in one interview during the tour: ‘They ask the wrong questions, like, What did you have for breakfast, What’s your favorite color, stuff like that. Newspaper reporters, man, they’re just hung-up writers… They got all these preconceived ideas about me, so I just play up to them.’
To make a statement that Bob was a star, Grossman had booked Bob into the Savoy, one of the grandest hotels in London. After journalists had been invited to the hotel to be further bamboozled by Bob, celebrities came to pay respects, including all four Beatles and members of The Rolling Stones. The Beatles had sense enough not to be caught by ‘The Eye’ – Bob’s apt name for Pennebaker and his shoulder-held camera – but others were less astute. Pennebaker captured Grossman haggling for appearance money and bullying hotel staff. ‘You’re one of the dumbest assholes and most stupid persons I’ve ever spoken to in my life,’ he ranted at a hotel employee in Sheffield. ‘If we were someplace else I’d punch you in your goddamn nose.’ In other scenes, Neuwirth sniggered, Baez looked miserable, and Donovan and Animals keyboard player Alan Price were ridiculous. Drunken guests trashed part of Bob’s art deco suite at the Savoy by throwing glass shelves out the window. ‘Who threw that glass in the street?’ Bob demanded with righteous anger. ‘Who did it? Now, you better tell me, now if somebody doesn’t tell me who did it, you all gonna get outa here and never come back.’ Tom Paxton stayed off camera. ‘It was a disgusting party,’ he says. ‘Some of the people in Bob’s coterie were really being awful to the hotel employees who had no recourse but to try to do their job. It was an ugly scene.’
The chief prankster was Bobby Neuwirth. He laughed whenever Bob laughed, and aided Bob in the humiliation of Baez who, strangely, was a friend of Neuwirth’s. When Baez floated around in a translucent blouse, Neuwirth picked up on Bob’s apparent lack of interest. (When they were on camera at least, Bob hardly looked at Baez, he did not talk to her much, and he showed no signs of wanting to be with her.) Neuwirth referred to the translucent blouse cattily as ‘one of those see-through blouses that you don’t even wanna.’ Laughing with what seemed false bravado, Baez announced she was sleepy and was going to fag out. ‘Let me tell you sister, you fagged out a long time ago,’ Neuwirth sneered. ‘You fagged out before you even thought you were faggin’ out.’ Off camera, Baez was in tears. ‘There was such a deep affection involved in getting [Bob] on the stage and being with him and presenting him,’ says sister Mimi. ‘It was a stepping stone for him and my sense of it was that he stepped and walked away. So that’s always been uncomfortable. And [Joan] never wanted to see it that way, because her heart was so involved in it. But it’s what her younger sister saw.’ Pennebaker felt Bob was going through a period of transition. When Bob toured with Baez in America in March, they had been a team. Now he was done with team spirit. ‘He was trying to get out from under being her partner, or her companion in song.’
Bob did not ask Baez to join him on stage at any point during the tour of the United Kingdom. In fact, they would not sing together in public again until the mid-1970s. When Bob went to Sintra, Portugal, for a brief break in the British tour, Baez was not invited to come along. Instead, Sara flew in from America to be with him. Baez still did not know of Sara’s existence. During a recent stay at Grossman’s house she had even worn one of Sara’s nightdresses without realizing to whom it belonged. When Bob returned to London and was confined to his hotel suite with a brief illness, Baez visited to see how he was and Sara answered the door. This was how Baez finally found out about the woman Bob had been seeing behind her back for so many months. It was the end of Baez’s affair with Dylan, and she promptly removed herself from the entourage to attend to her own career (she was giving solo concerts in the U.K. at the same time). Although upset, Baez was a strong personality and she took the rejection in her stride, managing to remain friends with Bob, even managing to laugh about it. As friend Nancy Carlen says, ‘The ability to laugh at things is one of her strong points.’ There would also be times in years to come when the romance with Bob would be resumed.
Ever the Don Juan, Bob tried to seduce singer Marianne Faithfull while he was in London, ordering her out of his suite when she refused him. He also spent some time hanging out with sixteen-year-old pop singer Dana Gillespie whom he had met at a party in London and saw when Sara was not around. ‘I guess he was juggling women, like most musicians,’ says Gillespie, philosophically. She carried his guitar and, when Bob had time off, lounged about in Bob’s hotel suite. One time, Bob borrowed Gillespie’s pants, bedecked with pink and orange roses. ‘I was stuck in my underwear because he had taken my trousers. He could fit into mine, but I couldn’t fit into his. I had to sit in the hotel waiting for him to come back. He said, “I’ll only be a few hours.” It was about fifteen hours [before] he came back.’
Often Bob was called away from Gillespie to shoot sequences for Pennebaker’s movie. The memorable opening sequence of Dont Look Back, in which Bob flipped over cards on which were written lyrics from ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ was filmed by Pennebaker in an alley beside the Savoy. This snatch of film was one of the forerunners of the pop music video and it was Bob’s idea. ‘He wondered if it was a good idea for a movie and I thought it was a terrific idea,’ says Pennebaker. ‘We started off in the garden back of the Savoy and we got interrupted by a bobby, who threw us out, so we then went to the alleyway. I think we did one take each place. Then that was it. Put it away and nobody knew what to do with it afterwards. It wasn’t till I was editing the film that I thought maybe I should begin [the film] with that.’
Bob came across well in Dont Look Back – human, humorous, and bristling with energy. Although he lost his temper on occasion, and did not treat Baez well, he was for the most part tolerant of fans, journalists, and visitors. Even when he discovered, to his considerable anger, that one of his guests had thrown glass out of the window of the Savoy, he soon regained his composure and actually ended up shaking hands with the culprit. ‘I just didn’t want that glass to hurt anybody,’ he explained, reasonably. Pennebaker agrees. ‘I thought he was never really mean,’ he says. ‘He didn’t grind his foot down.’
A striking example of Bob’s wrath did make it into the film when he berated a correspondent from Time magazine. The confrontation happened before the first of two important concerts at the imposing and elegant Royal Albert Hall on May 9-10. Bob was in a bad mood during sound check. ‘He was a little pissed at Neuwirth because of his harps. He felt maybe his harps weren’t cleaned out,’ says Pennebaker. ‘I think he was nervous about the concert. It was a big concert and he knew a lot of people were going to be there. The Beatles were going to be there and a lot of people like that.’ After sound check, Bob and his entourage went upstairs to have lunch. Journalists were invited to join them, including Horace Freeland Judson, the London-based arts and science correspondent for Time, who had been waiting for an opportunity to talk to Bob.
Irritated by the events of the morning, and concerned about the upcoming show, Bob launched into a verbal attack on Time, becoming so agitated that he questioned the very worth of Judson’s existence. ‘You’re going to die,’ Bob told the journalist. ‘So am I. I mean, we’re just gonna be gone. The world’s gonna go on without us. All right now, you do your job in the face of that and how seriously you take yourself, you decide for yourself.’ It may be that Bob was nursing hostility toward news magazine journalists in general, stemming from the Newsweek exposé of 1963. Pennebaker does not think Bob planned the tirade, and points out that Bob backed off toward the end as if not wanting to be too cruel. However, Judson believes the confrontation was contrived to make an entertaining sequence for the film. ‘The conversation was flat. Suddenly, however, Dylan leapt to his feet and started berating me,’ he says. ‘He said, for example, something like, ‘You’ll never understand it; it happens so fast it’ll go right past you,’ and more of the same. I was startled, yes, but kept on trying to ask sensible, interesting questions; the attack persisted. I shrugged and left. The whole episode was entirely un provoked … That evening, I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated, and Dylan a self-indulgent whining show-off.’
As far as virtually everybody else was concerned, however, Bob gave a tremendous performance at the Royal Albert Hall. The Beatles and Rolling Stones were in the audience, and everyone clearly hung on Bob’s every word. It was an intense, almost mesmeric performance, one man holding a vast audience enthralled. ‘I feel like I’ve been through some kind of thing, man,’ said Bob as he left the theater with Grossman and Neuwirth. ‘I mean, something was special about that.’ At the age of twenty-four, Bob had now achieved great artistic and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. He was certainly near his peak, but still not quite there. Following his return home to the United States in early June, he would take another huge leap forward both as a songwriter and live performer, pushing himself until he reached the apogee of his success and the limit of his physical and mental health.