LIFE HAD MOVED FAST since Bob arrived in New York from Minnesota in 1961. Following the motorcycle accident of 1966 there was a period of slowing down and reassessment. In many ways the accident was a blessing. ‘I was pretty wound up before that accident happened,’ he later said. ‘I probably would have died if I had kept on going the way I had been.’
The true extent of Bob’s injuries is still unclear. By Bob’s own account, he suffered several broken vertebrae in the accident. Friends saw him wearing a neck brace for a while and say he received ultrasound treatment. He complained of back pain, and took up swimming again partly as therapy. So there is evidence that he had suffered some injury and lasting effects. At the same time, however, he did not require intensive medical treatment.
Bob chose to stay with Dr. Ed Thaler in Middletown for six weeks following the accident. This was despite the fact that he had a comfortable home of his own in Woodstock, and a wife and child waiting for him. Dr. Thaler denies the suggestion that Bob used this time to wean himself off drugs. ‘He did not come here regarding any situation involving detoxification.’ Dr. Thaler’s wife Selma says Bob used their house rather as a refuge, a place where he could have sanctuary from the press. ‘He had some kind of anonymity here. As it turns out the people next door had a teenaged daughter who recognized him, [but] nobody bothered him and they certainly would have in [Woodstock] … maybe we being ten years older than Bob [was] reminiscent of his childhood,’ says Selma Thaler. ‘The house was peaceful [and] he felt comfortable here. His friends were able to visit him. Nobody stalked anybody… He could be alone. I don’t know whether he was writing or thinking or what he was doing, but it was away from [his] ordinary daily life – and I think that provided some peace of mind.’
In the summer of 1966, after an exhausting tour of her own, Odetta visited Dr. Thaler for personal reasons, stating, ‘I needed a dose of my Thalers.’ She discovered Bob was living in a spare room on the third floor. ‘Eddie and Selma had the [room] made so it was like his apartment,’ she says. When Odetta sat down with Bob to talk, he was well enough to complain about artists recording cover versions of his songs with mistakes in the lyrics. ‘He was well on his way to being whole again.’
The convalescence coincided with the expiration of Bob’s contract with Columbia Records. Bob considered switching to M.G.M., for a reputed $1 million advance, and actually signed a contract at one point. But M.G.M. executives had second thoughts and were slow to countersign. Tarantula was another problem. Bob now realized he had embarked on the book for the wrong reasons. As he said, he had agreed to write a book simply because a publisher had offered to publish him. He did not, however, really have a book to write. ‘I just put down all these words and sent them off to my publishers and they‘d send back the galleys, and I’d be so embarrassed at the nonsense I’d written I’d change the whole thing.’ Publication was postponed for the foreseeable future.
After fully recuperating, Bob settled down to a relatively quiet domestic life at Hi Lo Ha. A few friends visited, including Allen Ginsberg, who brought a parcel of books. D. A. Pennebaker found Bob engaged in editing Eat the Document. ‘He didn’t seem in peril particularly,’ says Pennebaker. ‘The accident was, to some extent, a period when he was resting up from whatever traumas he was enduring.’ Partly for security, Bob and Sara acquired two huge dogs that lived in a large kennel at the entrance to their property. Their first pet was a giant poodle named Hamlet. The second was an aggressive Saint Bernard they called Buster. Next to the dogs’ kennel on the drive was a sign that warned PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING.
In addition to editing Eat the Document, Bob decided to shoot additional scenes that he thought might be used in that film or for another project he had vaguely in mind, and he invited friends to come to Woodstock to act with him. Rick Danko and Richard Manuel arrived in February 1967. Since Bob’s accident, The Hawks had been a road band without a road to go on, kicking their heels at the Hotel Chelsea. They were still on the payroll and Bob did not know quite what to do with them. Snow was thick on the ground when Danko and Manuel got to Woodstock, giving the town the look of the penultimate scenes of Bob’s favorite film, Shoot the Piano Player. Streams were frozen like glass, and roofs were covered in sparkling white blankets of snow. Danko and Manuel got up at five each morning to work with Bob in the first hours of daylight. ‘That was really my first exposure to Woodstock,’ says Danko, ‘in the wintertime, shooting the snow.’ The other Hawks drifted upstate, lodging initially at the Woodstock Motel. Eccentric performer Tiny Tim became part of the gang. Bob had an idea about working with ‘Mr. Tim,’ as he laconically called him, on what Pennebaker describes as ‘a circus film.’ Tim was also involved in a Peter Yarrow film called You Are What You Eat. ‘Everybody thought you could make money in films after Dont Look Back,’ says Pennebaker. ‘But it seemed very unorganized and casual and off the wall.’
When the light faded each day, Danko and Manuel met friends in a local restaurant. The restaurateur had a house to rent near the hamlet of West Saugerties. ‘She wanted $275 a month. It was in the middle of a hundred acres, a lot of privacy. The way she explained it, it was beautiful,’ says Danko. The house was a large split-level building, painted the color of a strawberry milk shake. Danko decided it would be better than living in a motel. ‘So Garth, Richard, and myself moved into Big Pink,’ he says, using the name they would give to the property. Robbie Robertson rented a separate place with his girlfriend Dominique. Levon Helm was still estranged from the group, presently drifting around the south.
After years on the road, The Hawks were accustomed to a nocturnal lifestyle of working at night and going to bed at dawn. Bob quickly readjusted to a more conventional life. He and Sara, now expecting their second child, were woken early each day by one-year-old Jesse. After breakfast, Bob walked five-year-old Maria to the school bus stop on Upper Byrdcliffe Road. Around noon he got into one of his cars – he now had a baby blue Mustang as well as the Ford station wagon – and drove to Big Pink. Robertson also made his way to Big Pink at the same time. ‘Bob and Robbie, they would come by every day, five to seven days a week for seven or eight months,’ says Danko. ‘[Bob] would show up like clockwork around noon.’ Bob made a pot of coffee and clattered on a typewriter, extra loud if The Hawks were still in bed. ‘It amazed me, his writing ability,’ says Garth Hudson. ‘How he could come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write a song … Also what was amazing was that almost every one of those songs was funny.’
Between February and the fall of 1967, Bob composed more than thirty songs, which he and The Hawks recorded, together with numerous cover songs, on a two-track reel-to-reel system Hudson had put together. Most songs were recorded in the basement of Big Pink with the poodle Hamlet sprawled across the floor. It was a relaxed and happy time for Bob, a period of friendship and sharing with The Hawks, and the musical collaboration at Big Pink proved fruitful and enjoyable for all concerned.
As spring turned to summer, they left the windows of Big Pink open to get a breeze through. The mellow, country atmosphere seemed to influence the music they created. It was a very different sound from the ruckus Bob and The Hawks made on stage in 1965-66, and altogether distinct from the late-night city sound of studio albums like Blonde on Blonde. It was closer to the rural old-timey music of the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, and influenced by the diverse musical tastes of Bob and the individual Hawks. Bob introduced Robertson to traditional folk music. ‘I didn’t care that much for what he was turning me on to,’ says Robertson. ‘[But] when he sang those songs I liked them a lot. And I couldn’t tell which were the songs that he wrote, and which were the songs somebody else wrote. For instance, when we were in the basement, and he would sing all these songs, I didn’t know whether he wrote “Royal Canal” or whether it was an old folk song.* And [it] was an extraordinary education to be connected to all of this great music. A lot of it came from the British Isles and from the mountains of America and down those mountains and into the cities.’ In return, Robertson broadened Bob’s knowledge of rock ’n’ roll. ‘I would play him records. I would turn him on to things.’ Danko’s family had played country music in rural Ontario. Manuel was a fine boogie-woogie pianist and possessed a pop sensibility. Hudson was steeped in Anglican church music, horn playing, and the avant-garde compositions of Aleksandr Scriabin. Everybody had favorite musicians and recordings – knowledge that informed the music they made together – and for the first time in their careers they had months to simply sit around and jam. Out of this convivial mix came singular compositions like ‘Lo and Behold!’ ‘I Shall Be Released,’ and ‘Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood).’ Bob wrote the lyrics, but the music was created largely through improvisation with the Hawks. Bob shared songwriting credits on two major songs. He collaborated with Manuel on ’tears of Rage’ and with Danko on ’this Wheel’s on Fire.’ When Ian and Sylvia became the first of many artists to record a cover version of ’this Wheel’s on Fire,’ Danko began to receive substantial royalties. He referred to the royalties as ‘checks from God.’
These songs became known as ‘The Basement Tapes,’ though not all were recorded in the basement at Big Pink. Some were recorded at Hi Lo Ha – in the so-called Red Room – and others at the Ohayo Mountain home of Clarence Schmidt, the Man of the Mountain. Clarence Schmidt was an eccentric retired mason who dressed in overalls and had a long beard matted with creosote, paint, and tar. This was the sticky concoction he used to construct a large junkyard folly, decorated with oddments of wood, metal, and plastic, car fenders and broken-down kitchen appliances. Schmidt glued fragments of mirror, religious figures, and plastic flowers to the folly, and incorporated shrines to favorite musicians. Bob and The Hawks became friendly with Schmidt and made some recordings in the old man’s house, near the folly. Something of the strangeness of the setting permeated the music. The musicians have forgotten what songs exactly were recorded at the Schmidt house, but Garth Hudson thinks ‘Apple Suckling Tree’ sounds like it may have been recorded there. Surreal numbers that sound like they should have been recorded there include: ‘You Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around,’ during which The Hawks barked like dogs and quacked like ducks; and ‘See You Later, Allen Ginsberg,’ set to the tune of ‘See You Later, Alligator.’ There was a lot of silliness. The Hawks sang harmonies in Elmer Fudd voices. Bob burbled obscenities on ‘Next Time on the Highway.’ Robertson and Manuel sometimes played drums, making sounds like children bashing saucepans. On ‘The Spanish Song,’ Bob and The Hawks wailed like a drunken mariachi band. They also covered such unlikely numbers as ‘Coming Round the Mountain’ and ‘Flight of the Bumblebee.’ At times the sessions sounded, as Robertson has said, like ‘reefer run amok.’ The sessions also sounded like friends having a great time together, enjoying easy companionship and musical freedom.
Although the sessions were loose and friendly, Bob was in charge. He called out in which key he wanted the songs played and told Garth Hudson which songs to tape. After the sessions, Bob would call Hudson on the telephone and ask for recordings of songs he wanted to work on further. Part of the purpose of recording the songs was to use them as demos that Dwarf Music could send to other artists looking for material. In this way, some of the weird and wonderful songs created in Woodstock filtered through to the public via the radio. Manfred Mann had a top-ten hit with one of the most Dada-esque of the ‘basement’ songs, ‘Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn).’ The Byrds charted with ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.’ And Peter, Paul and Mary had a hit with ‘Too Much of Nothing,’ making a mistake in the lyric, just as they had with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ years before. This time the group invented a character named Marion. ‘I do think we did not take care of business on “Too Much of Nothing,”’ admits Noel Paul Stookey, who wondered if the mistake was part of Bob’s disenchantment with the group. ‘We just became other hacks that were doing his tunes.’
Pop versions of the ‘basement’ songs kept Bob’s name in the public consciousness during his seclusion. The fact that he was obviously working, but not appearing in public, added to his mystique. Many people already considered Bob a genius. Now he became that even more intriguing phenomenon, a reclusive genius. The release of D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Dont Look Back in May 1967 also reminded the public of his work. The film was panned in middle America, but was a success in California and New York. Indeed, its release was an excuse for journalists to heap praise upon Dylan for his past achievement. New York Times critic Richard Goldstein wondered whether one film could sum up ‘The man who defined his generation’ and went on to compare Bob with William Shakespeare. It was only five years since ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and two since ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ had been a hit. But already the intelligentsia was elevating Bob to legendary status. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits was released in March. Although the compilation contained only one track not available on a previous album – ‘Positively 4th Street’ – it reached number ten in the album charts, proving Bob’s popular appeal. It went on to become the biggest-selling single album of his career, selling three million units in the United States.*
This sort of success enhanced Bob’s reputation and reminded Columbia Records of his value. On July 1, 1967, Bob signed a new five-year contract with Columbia, after Vice President Clive Davis offered him a very generous deal to stay with the company. Under the terms of his 1961 contract Dylan had received a miserly four percent royalty on albums. Under the terms of the new contract, Columbia guaranteed Bob an advance of $200,000, payable over three years; a twenty percent royalty on new albums; an enhanced five percent royalty on his back catalogue; and an unusually high level of control over his material. For example, Columbia was not allowed to reedit master recordings after Dylan had approved them. Davis figured it was worth treating Bob well, partly because he gave Columbia kudos; other acts – often more profitable acts – wanted to record with Columbia simply because Bob was a Columbia artist. Dylan agreed to record four new LPs over a five-year period, the first album to be delivered within six months.
WHILE BOB WAS SECLUDED in Woodstock during the summer of 1967 – the so-called summer of love – The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hallucinogenic drugs, technological gimmickry, and intellectual pretension were suddenly the order of the day and bands from London to San Francisco tried to take it all one step further. The Rolling Stones made Their Satanic Majesties Request. Jefferson Airplane recorded Surrealistic Pillow, with its pop hit ‘White Rabbit.’ Bob was removed from the pop world, and he was one of the few who considered Sgt. Pepper less than a masterpiece. It was, he said, ‘a very indulgent album … though the songs on it were real good. I didn’t think all that production was necessary.’ In the peace of Woodstock he stayed relatively drug free, raising a family, playing music with his friends that had a vibrant, natural sound, and spending part of each day reading the Bible and the Hank Williams songbook. These were the influences behind John Wesley Harding, his first studio album since the accident and his first album for Columbia under their recently renegotiated contract. ‘Every artist in the world was in the studio trying to make the biggest-sounding record they possibly could,’ recalls producer Bob Johnston. ‘So what does he do? He comes to Nashville and tells me he wants to record with a bass, drum, and guitar.’
With tried and trusted session musicians Kenny Buttrey on drums, Charlie McCoy on bass, and, for the first time, Pete Drake on steel guitar, Bob recorded John Wesley Harding in three curt sessions in the fall of 1967. ‘Kenny and I were amazed at the change from Blonde on Blonde to John Wesley Harding,’ says McCoy. ‘The recording was different. Of course, he sounded different. He looked different… When he first came for Blonde on Blonde it was the wild fright wig. The next time he came back his hair was a lot shorter. His voice sounded different … We just flew through that stuff.’ The three John Wesley Harding sessions totaled nine hours, a fraction of the time The Beatles were then taking to record a single track (Sgt. Pepper was recorded over five months). ‘We went in and knocked ‘em out like demos,’ says Buttrey. ‘It seemed to be the rougher the better. He would hear a mistake and laugh a little bit to himself as if [to say], Great, man, that’s just great. Just what I’m looking for.’ Under the terms of Bob’s new contract, half the cost of hiring musicians was deducted from royalties so it was in his interest to use a small band and work fast.
Unlike Blonde on Blonde, all the lyrics to Bob’s new songs were complete when he arrived in Nashville so he was ready to start immediately. As Charlie McCoy puts it, ‘He knew everything.’ These were radically different lyrics from both the songs on Blonde on Blonde and the words he and The Hawks had recently been singing in Woodstock. They were terse parables. Most unusually, none of the songs on John Wesley Harding had a chorus. The album title, and title track, alluded to the life of Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin (whose name Bob accidentally misspelled). Another song was about Saint Augustine. Gunman and saint, though seemingly disparate, in the landscape of Bob’s imagination became identical outcasts from society, dealing in truth and lies, life and death. These themes and the use of archaic phrases and allusions to scripture gave the album a biblical flavor. This was a record out of time, a fact illustrated by a meeting Bob had with Noel Paul Stookey. The Peter, Paul and Mary singer – intoxicated with flower power – drove to Woodstock in the fall of 1967 to ask Bob about the meaning of life. Bob listened to a stream of rather absurd questions that were then common currency. ‘I’m talking about how I’m really blown away by The Beatles. I love what they’re saying about love, and I’m wondering if he senses what’s happening in their music … what does he feel life’s all about?’ says Stookey. When Stookey paused for breath, Bob asked: ‘Do you ever read the Bible?’ While it is true that Bob had drawn on the Bible for imagery from the start of his career, his comment to Stookey, and the nature of the songs on John Wesley Harding, were clear indications that he was approaching a religious state of mind. His journey toward faith in God was a long one, but these new songs showed that he had seriously begun that journey.
‘All Along the Watchtower’ had echoes of the books of Isaiah and Revelation. When Jimi Hendrix had a hit with a searing cover six months later, he invoked the howl of the apocalypse with even more zeal. References to the Bible also featured prominently in ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ and ‘Dear Landlord.’ The latter would be seen by some as a message to Albert Grossman, the landlord of Bob’s career, though Sally insists, ‘None of us thought about it that way.’
There was also a lighter side to the album. The country pastiche ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ was a delightful love song. ‘Down Along the Cove,’ with its reference to ‘my little bundle of joy,’ might be a song dedicated to a baby. It is perhaps not a coincidence that three months before it was recorded – on July 11, 1967 – Bob had become a father for the second time when Sara gave birth to a daughter, Anna Lea.
Another, more sobering influence on John Wesley Harding was the fact that near the time of recording, on October 3, Woody Guthrie died. At fifty-five, Guthrie had finally succumbed to Huntington’s chorea. ‘Late in the afternoon I got this call from [Bob] wanting to know what’s happening,’ says Guthrie’s manager Harold Leventhal. ‘[He] asked me if I’m planning a memorial concert, and to be sure to let him know.’ Bob was as good as his word and made his first public appearance since the summer of 1966 at the tribute to Woody Guthrie held at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968. Bob shared the bill with artists including Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Arlo Guthrie, now a folk artist in his own right. Bob came on stage with The Hawks, dressed in western-style suits and cowboy boots. Levon Helm, back behind the drums, noticed that although Grossman was at the show he and Bob were not speaking to each other. Indeed, ever since Bob’s accident and decision to stop touring their relationship had been strained. Bob and the Hawks performed three songs rarely heard outside of Woody’s own recordings, injecting fire into ‘I Ain’t Got No Home.’ Bob howled the refrain as if truly dispossessed. The fire he put into the lyric made one’s hair stand on end and showed that, despite the fact he had been secluded most of the time in his idyllic country home, anger and passion still thrived within him.
There were two shows at Carnegie Hall – a matinee and an evening show – and a party afterward at the Dakota, which Bob attended. Even though he was obviously physically well again, and even willing to socialize with old friends, Bob had no intention of returning to touring for the foreseeable future. ‘I won’t be giving any concerts for a while,’ he said. ‘I’m not compelled to do it now. I went around the world a couple of times. But I didn’t have anything else to do then.’ By this he meant that he now had a family to care for. Bob’s elusiveness had the effect of sharpening the public’s appetite for his music and John Wesley Harding sold at a faster clip than had any of his previous albums.
WHEN BOB WALKED MARIA to the bus stop on Upper Byrdcliffe Road each morning he sometimes met neighbor Bruce Dorfman and his daughter, Lisa. As the little girls became friendly, the men fell into conversation. Dorfman lived in a small house in front of Bob’s property. He was an artist who worked each day in an adjacent studio. After a while Bob showed up at the studio with Buster, snarling and barking in an alarming fashion. ‘Just came to pay a neighbor a visit,’ he would tell Dorfman, turning to admonish the dog. ‘Shut up, goddamnit!’
Dorfman was painting life-size pictures of what he called his ‘fantasy women,’ and Bob took a keen interest in the work. As they chatted Bob realized that Dorfman was not interested in his celebrity, knowing little about popular music. The artist reacted to him with refreshing normality. So when Sara bought Bob a box of oil paints for his twenty-seventh birthday, Bob asked Dorfman how to use them. The artist set up an easel in the corner of his studio and asked Bob what he wanted to paint. Bob produced an art book with a reproduction of Girl with Flute, by Jan Vermeer. He did not want to copy the painting but simply to do something in that style. ‘Sure this is where you want to start?’ asked Dorfman, surprised by the audacity of Bob’s ambition. ‘Talk about immaculate painting!’ But he humored him, demonstrating the basics of how to use oil paint. ‘He was very, very attentive, really wonderfully attentive and absorbing it all very carefully.’ Naturally, Bob could not paint like Vermeer. The next day he came with a book of Claude Monet reproductions. He had a series of these art books. ‘Same deal. An hour, a mess.’ The third day Bob had a book of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings, and he had some success using a landscape as a starting point. After skipping a day, Bob appeared with a Marc Chagall book. ’this is the one that worked,’ recalls Dorfman. ‘It was perfect, because you had all these multilayered images – things flying, things walking, clocks flying, rabbits with green faces. It was all there. Chagall was it. He made the connection.’ Bob began making a canvas that was clearly inspired by Chagall’s style, but the images were from ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ Technically, the painting was so-so, but he was enjoying himself.
The neighbors were soon painting together in the studio almost every day, forming a close friendship revealed now for the first time (Bob has never spoken about it and Dorfman has finally chosen to set down an accurate record). The country lifestyle had mellowed Bob enough for him to be able to form a natural, everyday connection with a neighbor; indeed it was like therapy to him after the recent, frenetic years in New York and on the road. Dorfman was a good-humored, calm, and engaging companion of his own age – Dorfman was four years his senior – who was teaching Bob something he found interesting. The fact that Dorfman was not at all interested in show business was probably also attractive to Bob, as was the fact that Dorfman was discreet. Consequently, Bob relaxed and became uncharacteristically open and talkative.
The friends would talk about ‘everything on earth,’ as Dorfman says, but Bob particularly enjoyed talking about his children, which was a subject they had in common. ‘He was a doting parent,’ says Dorfman. ‘He loved to talk about his kids… Best thing in the world.’ Bob came to trust Dorfman so much that he asked him to write a reference, in the spring of 1968, when Bob was going through the process of adopting Maria as his own child. In a reciprocal gesture, Bob wrote a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation recommending his neighbor for a grant (which was not successful, possibly because Bob’s letter was more an exercise in dry humor than a compelling commendation).
There was a lot of playfulness in the friendship, and the two laughed together a lot of the time. Dorfman was experimenting with the idea of remote-controlled mobiles, hanging models from the ceiling of the studio. Talking it over with Bob, they decided the world needed a giant flying art object that could materialize over cities, changing shape and color. ‘There were drawings made,’ says the artist. ‘The concept was mine. The additions, some of them, were Bob’s… The idea would be that somehow you could get this thing to appear suddenly somewhere and get people to stop what they were doing.’ Dorfman knew a financier who might fund the project. Bob said he would get celebrity backing. ‘He was going to talk to Muhammad Ali and The Beatles, and between us we are somehow going to make this,’ laughs Dorfman.
They also shared ideas and experiences. Dorfman taught Bob about art. Bob gave his neighbor a musical instrument as a gift (a type of Middle Eastern string instrument known as an oud) and gave and lent books. After years when he’d had little time for books, Bob was reading voraciously. Hi Lo Ha was becoming a veritable library, as Beatty Zimmerman noted when she visited. Bob lent Dorfman a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s wise and witty folk story Gimpel the Fool, which was a favorite. Bashevis Singer wrote about the existence of God, moral choices, and inexplicable mystery – all subjects close to Bob’s heart. Bob was also reading William Blake and gave Dorfman a handsome edition of Songs of Innocence and Experience as a Christmas gift.
Bob was not normally extravagant with money, but now he could afford anything he wanted. His children had wonderful toys. There was expensive film editing equipment at the house and a pool table in the garage. Although Bobby Neuwirth and Victor Maymudes had temporarily left the entourage, other friends would come by to play games with Bob. ‘If he starts playing Go, we play Go,’ says Al Aronowitz, who came up to the house regularly at this time. ‘If he wants to play pool, we would play pool.’ Dorfman was shocked by their sycophancy, noticing that Bob’s friends allowed him to win when they played basketball in the yard. Other signs of wealth included a Cadillac limousine, a model designed to be driven by a chauffeur. It had a glass screen divider and the most sophisticated in-car sound system available, with speakers built into the doors and a control panel in Bob’s armrest. Bernard Paturel, the former owner of Cafe Espresso, became Bob’s chauffeur. Bob’s wealth meant he also could make impulsive and peculiar purchases. When he needed a vehicle to haul equipment, he bought a Grumman truck. ‘Not something you would normally park near a house,’ says Dorfman. ‘[But] there it was!’ For a while, the truck was Bob’s favorite toy. When Bob needed a suit in order to attend a function with Sara, he and Dorfman set out on a shopping expedition. Instead of being driven in the Cadillac, or taking the Mustang, they went in the truck. Bob could afford the finest clothing from the smartest stores in Manhattan. Yet they went to Sears Roebuck in nearby Kingston. Bob picked a green poplin suit off a clearance rack. Dorfman wondered what Sara would think; despite her humble background, she deported herself like Jackie Onassis. Bob bought the suit anyway, together with a big bag of white chocolate, which he munched contentedly on the ride home.
BOB WAS AT HI LO HA on the afternoon of June 5, 1968, when he received a telephone call from Minnesota. When the conversation was over, he turned to Bernard Paturel and asked if he would get the Cadillac. Bob packed a small suitcase, fetched his guitar, and then Paturel drove him to New York, putting him on a flight to Minnesota. Bob did not tell Paturel why he was going to Minnesota. It was a couple of days later, when Bob returned, that Paturel discovered what had happened. ‘I found out that he’d gone there because his father had died. He never told me. I don’t think he told anybody, except perhaps Sara.’ The afternoon Bob received the call, Abe Zimmerman had collapsed at home and died of a heart attack. He was fifty-six. The fact that Bob could receive such momentous news and not tell Paturel, who was with him at the house at the time and then on the long drive to New York, reveals much about Bob’s self-contained personality. Even at a moment of such deep personal stress he was as impassive as stone. One might think he did not care. In fact, he was deeply shocked and upset, but he did not want to show his feelings. Part of his distress was that he regretted not being close to his father in recent years. His parents did not attend his wedding. They had to find out about the motorcycle accident through journalists. Bob rarely visited Hibbing, and his brother and parents rarely came to Woodstock. Despite the distance between Bob and his family, Abe and Beatty were very proud of their eldest son, and Bob was on good terms with brother David, whose high school graduation he had attended in 1964. (David then took a degree, married, and began working in the music industry in the Twin Cities.) Beatty decorated their basement recreation room with Bob’s album covers and posters. Abe had followed Bob’s career in the trade magazines. In recent years there had been a slight thawing of relations between father and son, but now it was too late to be truly reconciled. ‘Bob felt terrible,’ says his friend Larry Kegan.
Something of his emotion became apparent at the funeral. Although it is not customary to have visitations at Jewish funerals, Abe’s open casket was displayed at the Dougherty Funeral Home in Hibbing so his many friends and neighbors could pay their respects. After the funeral service at the synagogue in town, the funeral cortege made the long drive to Duluth where Abe’s casket was buried in the Jewish cemetery. Bob broke down, one of the rare times in his life that he showed such emotion in public. He later confessed to Harold Leventhal that he had never known his father. Harold urged Bob to get back in touch with his Jewish faith, which he did over the next few years, reading widely on the subject and visiting Israel. The death also brought Bob closer to his mother. Beatty came to Woodstock after the funeral and stayed at Hi Lo Ha for some time. Bob remained close to his mother for the rest of her life, especially as his own children grew up and became attached to their grandmother.
Soon after he returned to Woodstock, Bob sat down at home with his musician friends John Cohen and Happy Traum to do a major interview for Sing Out! He talked about a range of subjects, including Eat the Document, which ABC-TV had rejected. But there was no mention of the death of his father. Neither was there conversation about family life. It was only when Maria came in from school and complained her shoes were pinching that something of Bob’s ordinary life was revealed (‘How was school? You learn anything? Well that’s good. “My shoes hurt right here.” Well, we’ll see what we can do about it.’) The rest of the time he glided through the questions, keeping himself to himself. Bob made a picture for the cover of the edition of the magazine in which the interview appeared, working with Bruce Dorfman in the studio to paint a man with a guitar sitting in a room, with another figure looking in through the window. He did not tell Dorfman what the picture was for. ‘I was really surprised when I saw the thing on Sing Out! magazine. I was almost annoyed … he should have said something.’
A month later, at the end of July, Sara checked into a New York City hospital to give birth to their third child. While Bob waited, he spent some time with poet Michael McClure. They were at the Village Gate club when Dizzy Gillespie walked in. Bob casually introduced Gillespie to McClure, to the poet’s delight. There was still time to kill, so they visited the Guggenheim Museum to look at an exhibition of paintings by Marc Chagall and Odilon Redon. ‘Bob wouldn’t look at the Redons,’ says McClure. ‘He had eyes for nothing but the Chagall. Chagall was the meaningful world to him.’ Bob would continue to paint in the style of Chagall for some time – although it should be remembered that Bob’s paintings were not very accomplished – and something of Chagall’s dreamlike quality would permeate his songwriting in later years.
Bob had recently established an office near Gramercy Park in New York to handle publishing and other business. His chief employee was Naomi Saltzman, who formerly worked for Trio Concerts, a company operated by Albert Grossman and others principally to promote concerts by Peter, Paul and Mary. Saltzman took care of Bob’s bookkeeping, maintained his press clippings, and assumed responsibility for the administration of some of his song publishing. She and her husband Ben became close to Bob and Sara, and it was Naomi Saltzman who drove Bob to and from the hospital when Sara was pregnant. Sara gave birth to a son on July 30, 1968. They decided to name the boy Samuel Abram, the middle name in honor of Bob’s late father. Saltzman was driving Bob to the hospital to see his new son when Bob announced to her that he wanted to change the name of his publishing company, Dwarf Music, to celebrate the birth. Saltzman informed Bob that he was not free to change the name as he wished, because Grossman owned half of Dwarf Music, and they had a ten-year contract. This apparently came as a shock. ‘He couldn’t believe it,’ says Saltzman. ‘He told me I was making it up.’ She assured Bob she was not, and would find the paperwork to prove it. By this time Bob was angry. He said she better find it. Although Bob had signed the Dwarf Music papers back in 1966 – when David Braun brought the documents to Sweden – he had never read them and only now did he comprehend what he had agreed to. Shortly after the discussion in the car Bob called a meeting at Saltzman’s house with attorney Braun and accountant Marshall M. Gelfand. The meeting was the beginning of a long battle to extricate himself and his songs from Grossman’s control. However, the people he chose to advise him in this matter were perhaps not the most obvious choices. Braun was Bob’s attorney, but he also represented Grossman. Bob later admitted: ‘I went to the only lawyer that I knew.’ Gelfand had also worked for Grossman. This should not have surprised Bob; it was Grossman who introduced them when Bob needed someone to prepare his tax returns. Yet Bob did not fully understand Gelfand’s connections until years later. For a man of such intelligence, Bob was proving himself to be remarkably naive in business.
Bob saw less and less of Grossman as his disquiet over their business relationship increased. Even though they were neighbors, Grossman was rarely seen at Hi Lo Ha. Bob and Sara entertained other friends, however. Despite his reputation as a recluse, Bob was at times sociable enough to host dinner parties, particularly at Thanksgiving. Those invited included Jane and Happy Traum, who had also made their home in Woodstock, the Dorfmans, and members of The Hawks. Bruce Dorfman found the one Thanksgiving dinner he went to at the Dylans’ house to be an awkward experience. ‘There were all these people who were waiting on him,’ he says. ‘If he burped somebody would say Amen. It was ridiculous.’
Bob was painting in Dorfman’s studio on Thanksgiving 1968 when Pattie and George Harrison’s car came up the road toward his property. Bob put down his brushes and asked Dorfman excitedly, ‘Aren’t ya comin‘?’
‘Well, Bob, I’ve got work to do. You go ahead.’ It seemed to Dorfman, as Bob left, that his friend was irritated by his lack of interest in such a distinguished visitor.
Thanksgiving dinner that year was enlivened by the outrageous antics of author Mason Hoffenberg. At one point he drunkenly said, ‘I want all the boys over on this side, and all the girls over on this side. The first couple to get all their clothes off and screw wins.’ Bob and George Harrison wrote a song together, ‘I’d Have You Anytime.’ They played some music and posed for photographs. Then the Harrisons went on their way. A couple of days went by without Bob coming to the studio. Eventually Sara rang Dorfman to say Bob felt he had been rude when he had left abruptly to meet the Harrisons. She said he was having a terrible time with himself, and did not know how to apologize. Dorfman said he should forget about it. Then Bob called. ‘You gonna be around?’ he asked, awkwardly, like a small boy getting back together with a friend. He showed up at the studio shortly afterward, muttering that it ‘wasn’t such a hot visit after all.’ To Dorfman this episode showed that behind his facade Bob was a very sensitive man indeed, and that he would reproach himself for a long time if he acted in a way that caused hurt. ‘If he did something that wasn’t altogether thoughtful, he would feel terrible.’
DESPITE THE FAILURE OF Eat the Document, Bob had not lost his enthusiasm for film. In the late 1960s he was asked to write songs for film sound tracks. Otto Preminger wanted Bob to work with him on the melodrama Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, and arranged a screening at his Manhattan town house. The film was abominable, but Bob told Preminger he would like to view it again that evening, with Sara. He wanted Preminger’s butler to serve them dinner and would prefer the director not to be present. Preminger protested that this was his home; he could not be expected to vacate it so that Bob could entertain his wife. Still, he reluctantly agreed. Bob later admitted he had absolutely no intention of watching the film again. He wanted to show Sara the house because it had some interesting features they might incorporate in their own home. Pete Seeger accepted the commission instead.
More significantly, Bob was asked to contribute a song to Midnight Cowboy. He wrote ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ but did not deliver it in time and director John Schlesinger instead used Fred Neil’s song ‘Everybody’s Talkin‘.’ However, ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ became the standout track on Bob’s next album, Nashville Skyline, which was recorded in Nashville in February 1969.
The distinctive sound of ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ was created partly by chance after drummer Kenny Buttrey asked Bob what he heard in his head for the drum part. ‘Bongos,’ Bob replied, with a faraway look in his eye. Buttrey asked producer Bob Johnston, and received the equally strange suggestion that he play cow bell. Determined to prove how nonsensical the suggestions were, Buttrey found a beat-up cow bell and pair of bongos that looked like a souvenir from Tijuana, the skin attached with thumbtacks. (He had to run a cigarette lighter under the skin to tighten it and get a tone.) The young Kris Kristofferson was working as a janitor at the studio and Buttrey asked Kristofferson to hold the bongos and cow bell next to his drum kit during the take. Without having worked out any drum part, the drummer got the signal they were going to record and he improvised a distinctive tick-tock introduction on bongo and cow bell that blended perfectly with the shimmer of organ and Pete Drake’s steel guitar. Bob stepped up to the microphone and delivered the seductive lyric in one take. ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ sounded unlike anything Bob had yet recorded. His voice was ultrasmooth, like a crooner’s. The words were guileless, little more than la la la. If Bob had his way, the song would have been buried. But Clive Davis realized Bob had recorded a classic, and insisted it should be a single. ‘I begged and pleaded with him not to,’ said Bob, who never felt close to the song or thought it was representative of his work as a whole. Davis prevailed and the song became a major hit, reaching number seven and staying in the top forty for eleven weeks in the summer of 1969. By stepping outside himself, Bob had achieved his final pop hit of the decade.
Johnny Cash was at the same studio in Nashville working on his own album. On the spur of the moment, the friends decided to record together. ‘I had microphones set up and stools and tapes, and everything,’ says Johnston. ‘They looked at each other … got their guitars and started playing.’ They recorded approximately eighteen songs, mostly playing acoustic on their own, but also using members of Cash’s band. Bob Johnston called out requests. ‘After about two hours Dylan said, “That’s all of it,”’ says Johnston. Only one song was officially released, a ragged version of ‘Girl from the North Country,’ which became the opening track for Nashville Skyline. Aside from this and ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’ there were two other songs of note on the album: ‘I Threw it All Away’ and ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.’ The other six tracks were short, insubstantial pieces, including an instrumental and the vacuous ‘Peggy Day.’ Critics naturally commented on the shallowness of some of the lyrics when the album was released, in April 1969, and much was made of the apparent transformation of the radical artist into a country act. The fact that Bob’s two previous albums had also been recorded in Nashville, with the same core musicians, was overlooked. Also, although Nashville Skyline sounded like broad country and western to New York critics, and the album title emphasized that impression, it did not play that way in the South. ‘By Nashville standards, I wouldn’t call that a country record,’ says Charlie McCoy. ‘But it wasn’t pop or R&B or anything like that. It had a folk feel to it.’ The debate was of little consequence to the public. The album was a hit, reaching number three in America and number one in Britain. Many of the songs have stood the test of time. ‘I Threw it All Away’ became a powerful concert song in 1976, and Bob performed ‘Country Pie’ with great verve in 2000.
The new songs on Nashville Skyline were published by a company Bob established independently of Albert Grossman as part of his efforts to disengage himself from Grossman’s control. As David Braun explained in the 1980s legal battle between Dylan and Grossman, Big Sky Music was created as a ‘kind of a palliative’ to appease Bob at a time when he was becoming disillusioned with his manager. Under the terms of the agreement, new songs would be lodged with Big Sky Music, rather than Dwarf Music, and Bob’s office would be in charge of administration. However, Grossman still shared profits on Big Sky songs in the same 50/50 proportion as Dwarf Music songs. In essence, the deal gave Bob the paperwork while his manager received royalties as normal. As Braun commented later, ‘It didn’t work for very long.’ Bob would never really be satisfied until Grossman was out of his life altogether, but that would take several years; in the meantime Bob formed other publishing companies that gave him more and more independence.
Encouraged by the commercial success of the slight Nashville Skyline, Bob returned to Nashville two months later in late April 1969 with an armful of songbooks. ‘He said, “What do you think about doing an album of other people’s songs?”’ recalls Bob Johnston, who told Bob that if he could not do it, nobody could. The sessions lasted longer than anyone expected. Self Portrait would be a compilation of songs recorded in both Nashville and New York, utilizing dozens of musicians over eleven months, and Bob would not be done with the record until the spring of 1970. Bob’s core group of Nashville sidemen played on the early sessions, augmented by musicians including Fred Carter Jr. and Charlie Daniels. These sessions yielded such covers as ‘Let It Be Me’ and ‘I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,’ pop tunes that seemed to have no relevance to Bob’s previous work. Bob, though, had appreciation for almost any well-made song. ‘You could tell he really liked them,’ says Daniels, who does not remember any sort of hint that the sessions were meant as a ‘joke,’ as Bob later claimed. ‘I think it was something he wanted to do for a long time.’ There was also an original song, ‘Living the Blues,’ but it was so glib it did not sound like a Dylan song at all.
During the course of the eleven months it took to complete Self Portrait several songs were overdubbed with syrupy string arrangements, horns, and backing vocals. It was partly these ornamentations – unprecedented for a Dylan record – that shocked critics when the record was eventually released in June 1970. The critics were primarily dumbfounded that the greatest songwriter of modern times was recording corny covers. But Bob may have had a hidden agenda. By this stage, he and Grossman were on such bad terms that Grossman did not even attend recording sessions. ‘It was just as well,’ Bob said. ‘His presence made me uncomfortable.’ Bob knew Grossman would get a half share in new songs registered to Big Sky. By recording songs written by other artists, songs such as ‘I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,’ Bob denied Grossman publishing income.
There was another factor. Several of the songs were associated with one of Bob’s musical heroes, Elvis Presley, including ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’ Many of the musicians called upon to play for Self Portrait were veterans of Presley sessions. Bob Moore played bass on virtually every Presley recording for more than ten years. Delores Edgin and Millie Kirkham sang backup for Presley. Working with Bob was very different, however. ‘He was kind of unwashed,’ says Edgin. ‘Very eccentric and kind of earthy.’ By having these people around, Bob was given a flavor of a musical tradition he loved.
Dylan and Presley had mutual respect for each other’s work. Presley performed Bob’s song ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’ at an RCA session in 1966. Bob had always admired Presley’s Sun recordings. Bob Johnston knew both artists and, when Bob wrote a song they thought might work for Presley (Johnston does not recall exactly when this happened, but within this period of time), he tried to arrange a meeting between the artists. ‘I tried to get them to record together. I think Dylan would have done it in a second,’ he says. But Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, blocked it for reasons unknown.
An attempted collaboration between Bob and another hero, Jerry Lee Lewis, also failed. When Lewis was in Nashville recording, and Bob was in town working on his own album, Johnston took Bob to meet the tempestuous rock ’n’ roller in the studio. ‘Jerry Lee, this is Bob Dylan,’ said Bob Johnston, making the introductions.
‘So?’
‘Man, maybe we could do something together some time?’ suggested Bob, politely.
‘No!’ exclaimed Jerry Lee, and pounded his piano with fury as Bob and Johnston made their retreat.
Of all the music stars based in the South, Bob’s warmest relationship was with Johnny Cash. It was a mark of his affection for Cash that Bob overcame his deep dislike of television to appear on the debut of Cash’s ABC television show, recorded live at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium – home of the Grand Ole Opry – on May 1, 1969. ‘[Bob] was very nervous about that,’ says musical director Bill Walker. ‘He was very nervous [because] it was live.’ It was also true that major stars looked down on television at the time. ‘It was considered almost uncool.’
Bob spent some time before the show with fellow guest artist, Cajun fiddle player Doug Kershaw. The so-called Ragin’ Cajun wore an Edwardian-style velvet suit on stage. Bob tried on one of the velvet suits, apparently considering wearing it for the show, but ultimately chose to wear a simple dark jacket that made his face look very pale. He was, in fact, terrified. The studio audience consisted of adoring Cash fans, and there was no way Bob could rectify any possible mistakes because the show had to be wrapped that night. In addition, the Ryman was a small theater, oppressively claustrophobic with all the television equipment, crew, and musicians. It added to the pressure. ‘I think he originally thought he wanted to do it. But that was the first live performance Dylan had done [since the Guthrie tribute],’ says Kenny Buttrey, who played drums in the backing group. ‘He was more or less a recluse.’ When the red light came on, Bob turned and looked pleadingly at his band. ‘I’ve never seen anybody that scared,’ adds Buttrey. ‘He was like a kid at a talent show who was so frightened he was getting ready to run off stage to mommy.’ They played three songs, with Cash joining Bob for ‘Girl from the North Country.’ Although Bob was very uncomfortable, the show was deemed a big success for Cash and became a long-running favorite. It also helped promote the sales of Nashville Skyline.
THE FACT THAT BOB MADE HIS HOME in Woodstock was widely reported in the press and, as his reputation as a recluse became fixed in the public imagination, fans sought him out. Fortunately, local people proved to be very protective. Without being asked by Bob and Sara not to say where they lived, they did not give out the address. However, the more persistent fans had little trouble discovering that Bob lived in a big wooden house a short walk from the center of Woodstock, and they began hiking over to Hi Lo Ha. This became a nuisance and then a serious problem. Fans climbed trees to see into the property. One day Bob found a family of hippies swimming in his pool. Kids ran up to the house in the middle of the night screaming, as if on a dare. When Bob was driving, he found himself followed by fans in cars. When he met fans face-to-face, Bob was polite but firm. ‘He always wanted to [make] people understand that he had a private life and this was not a concert hall – it was where he lived, not worked,’ says Bernard Paturel, who was helping out around the house at the time.
When Bob received a neighborly call warning him that a fan was coming toward Hi Lo Ha, he tried to head them off. Sometimes he asked Bruce Dorfman to come with him. ‘We’d just walk the road until we were face to face with whoever it was who was coming up the road,’ says Dorfman. Usually it was Bob who carried out the confrontation. ‘He would just walk up to the person and say, “You know, you really oughtn’t to be doing this. What do you think you’re doing?” Something like that, which would be so disarming the person would be embarrassed.’ Sometimes fans were not so easily deterred, getting onto the property, even inside the house. One time Bob called Dorfman to come over urgently. Together they walked through the many rooms of Hi Lo Ha. Eventually they reached Bob and Sara’s bedroom. There in the bed – apparently having just had sex – were a couple of hippies.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Bob, with remarkable calm.
‘We’re leaving,’ they replied, getting into their clothes.
Local police chief Bill Waterous was called to Hi Lo Ha to find ‘another nut’ sitting in Bob’s living room. He was reading poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, Bob saw the funny side. ‘He was kind of chuckling,’ says Waterous.
Some of these incidents were threatening. One young man came to the house three times within a month. ‘The first time he tried to break into the house,’ says former Woodstock constable Charlie Wolven. Bob did not want to press charges and Wolven warned the man about trespassing. Shortly afterward the same man got inside the house. ‘I don’t think Bob was too much on locking doors,’ says Wolven. Again, Bob did not want to press charges. Wolven took the intruder to Route 28 and showed him the way to New York. On the third occasion, Bob and Sara woke to find the man watching them. ‘That time he did sign a complaint because we did arrest him,’ says Wolven. ‘He didn’t threaten Dylan, but he was in the bedroom.’ After the intruder was charged with trespass, his attorney surrendered two rifles to police. ‘They sent [the intruder] for a mental exam,’ says Wolven. ‘The next thing I know he was away in a mental hospital.’ These frightening incidents were not reported in the press. Members of the Woodstock constabulary liked Bob, and wanted to protect his privacy. At the same time Bob took measures to protect himself. He acquired a rifle and kept it near the front door. According to Dorfman, Bob referred to the weapon as ‘The great equalizer.’
It was partly because of intruders that Bob and his family left Hi Lo Ha. In May 1969 they moved to a twelve-room Arts and Crafts mansion on the other side of town, high up on Ohayo Mountain Road. The Walter Weyl house was on thirty-nine acres of private land, set back from the road on a dais of lawn with views to the Hudson River. There was a swimming pool, which Bob had enlarged. He had a basketball court built and, just like in the song ‘Lay, Lady, Lay,’ a ‘big brass bed’ was installed in the master bedroom. The house was purchased in the name of his blind property company, Davasee Enterprises, Inc.
In an attempt to ensure privacy on Ohayo Mountain Road, Bob bought an additional eighty-three acres of surrounding woodland, giving him a considerable spread of land. He wanted to buy the cottage at the end of his drive as a gatehouse. But the owner, Danielle Beeh – who kept a menagerie of pets including a donkey that would get into Bob’s kitchen looking for food – declined to sell. One evening Bob and Sara were talking with Beeh, standing on her terrace, when she noticed one of their children nonchalantly urinating over her garden. ‘They were looking at the land and saying, “Oh, it’s nice,” and then suddenly the [child] goes pee pee right through his pants – made a little jet – and nobody said a word. Dylan went right on as if nothing had happened,’ says Beeh, who was greatly amused by the incident. ‘It was very bizarre.’ Despite this incident, the Dylan children were not badly raised. Bob and Sara were actually rather strict parents who succeeded in bringing up remarkably well-adjusted children, especially when one considers the peculiar pressures caused by Bob’s fame.
IN THE COCOON OF WOODSTOCK The Hawks were transformed from Bob’s backing band into a major recording group in its own right. For years they had been known as the band that played with Bob Dylan. Now signed to a management deal with Albert Grossman, and a recording contract with Capitol Records, they became The Band. The songs they wrote were published by Dwarf Music, which meant Bob owned a share in their catalogue. This proved one of his better business deals, earning money for years to come.
The Band’s debut album, Music from Big Pink, grew out of their work with Bob. Dylan was the author of one of its outstanding tracks, ‘I Shall Be Released,’ which was created at the Big Pink sessions. It was one of the most famous songs he ever wrote, yet The Band released their version years before Bob put it on an album of his own. Bob cowrote two of the album’s other outstanding tracks, ’tears of Rage’ and ’this Wheel’s on Fire.’ The cover of the album featured a painting by Bob that was clearly influenced by Chagall. He also offered to play on the album. This last offer was politely declined. Levon Helm for one felt they should not lean too heavily on their famous friend. ‘We didn’t want to just ride his shirttail all the time.’ Despite Bob’s influence, Music from Big Pink avoided being derivative and the personalities of the members of The Band were very evident. Robbie Robertson wrote four of the non-Dylan songs, including ‘The Weight,’ which was destined to become a classic. (When ‘The Weight’ was used for a Diet Coke commercial in 1994, Bob earned in excess of $500,000, which he shared with members of The Band.) The musicianship was superb, the songs were heartfelt, and the voices of all the musicians created a multilayered sound that was highly original. In the age of psychedelia, Music from Big Pink was refreshingly unpretentious and highly praised by critics. It might have sold more strongly if The Band had toured, but Rick Danko broke his neck in a car accident, putting him out of operation for a while. ‘I had to recuperate, and I wouldn’t let Grossman tell anybody that I’d had an accident. So [we] weren’t available,’ he says. The fact that The Band did not tour had a positive effect in the long run, creating a mystique around the group. ‘You know, if people can’t have what they want, that’s when they really want it … there’s something to be said about mystery. That’s why Bob was a good influence,’ says Danko.
The Band’s reputation was further enhanced by interest in the now legendary Basement Tapes. Jann Wenner, publisher of the increasingly influential Rolling Stone magazine, reviewed the tapes on the front page of the June 22, 1968, issue under the headline DYLAN’S BASEMENT TAPE SHOULD BE RELEASED. There was no official Columbia release at the time, but a bootleg double album, Great White Wonder, soon went into production. This record was made up of acoustic songs recorded years earlier in Dinkytown, and some of the songs recorded in Woodstock with The Band. Copies of the tapes Garth Hudson had made had been given to various friends and also to Bob’s office to be sent out on acetate discs to artists looking to cover the songs. Somewhere along the line illegal copies were made and passed to bootleggers who manufactured pirate albums. It was not long before Great White Wonder was being sold openly in stores like the Psychedelic Supermarket in Hollywood. The original bootleggers were a couple of California hippies who spoke to Rolling Stone in 1969. ‘Bob Dylan is a heavy talent,’ said one of the men, identified only as Patrick, ‘and he’s got all those songs nobody’s ever heard. We thought we‘d take it upon ourselves to make this music available.’ Official recognition of the public’s hunger for the music came a few years later when, in 1975, Columbia released a selection of tracks recorded at Big Pink (with some overdubs) as The Basement Tapes. That it took so many years for the recordings to be officially released may, once again, have had something to do with the feud between Dylan and Grossman. The Basement Tapes songs were among the last Dylan compositions Grossman had a fifty percent claim to and, by delaying release, Bob deprived his manager of income. The complete Basement Tapes – the so-called Genuine Basement Tapes – is an astonishing bootleg of one hundred and sixty-one tracks of Dylan and The Band. There is enough material to fill a box set edition. It remains one of the secret masterpieces of Bob’s career, available complete only on the black market.
One of the unique aspects of Bob’s career is that he is the most pirated recording artist in America* (despite being far from one of its best-selling artists on the legitimate market). His most ardent fans have such an appetite for his work that there is demand for recordings of studio outtakes, rehearsals, and virtually every concert performance he has ever given. Great White Wonder was the first significant Bob Dylan bootleg in America. Not only was it reviewed in Rolling Stone, it was played on the radio. Tony Glover was working at a radio station at the time and, to his consternation, he realized that part of the record included selections from his own tapes of Bob in Dinkytown before Bob became famous. ‘It was the first bootleg I had ever seen,’ he says. ‘There was the stuff with The Band and all that. Then there’s these acoustic songs and the titles are familiar … I had a pause button on my machine, and I clicked it out of pause when he was ready to play, so it starts with a kind of keeeooow. I recognized that [sound] and I said, “That’s my fucking tape. What the hell happened?” ’ Glover discovered that a dub-copy of his tape – labeled ‘Dylan / Minneapolis’ – had been stolen from the home of his Dinkytown friend Paul Nelson.
Great White Wonder precipitated an avalanche of illegal Dylan recordings, which Bob and his lawyers could do little to stop, even though they launched numerous lawsuits over the years. The nature of bootlegging made it almost impossible to pin down who was responsible, and even if one illegal recording was removed from the market the recordings would invariably appear on another record under a different name. The trade infuriated Bob, who denounced bootlegging as ‘outrageous’ in a 1985 interview, adding that with exploitation of this kind it was no wonder artists like himself felt so paranoid about their work.
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1969, Bob and Sara vacationed on Fire Island, New York, renting an oceanfront house at Bayberry Dunes near the Davis Park ferry landing. Neighbors included musicologist David Amram who jammed with Bob most days. Paul Simon visited and played music with Bob, and Bob’s mother came to stay. Bob enjoyed the seaside so much he later bought a house not far away in East Hampton, Long Island, spending several summers in the area with Sara and their children. ‘He would ride his bicycle, and he came over to our house a couple of times,’ says Tom Paxton, who lived in East Hampton. ‘One of the things I remember about that – he was over at my house and he had a Clancy Brothers album and he said, “Let’s listen to that. I haven’t heard them in a long time.”’ These were the happy family holidays Bob later wrote about in his 1975 song ‘Sara.’
Bob returned to Hibbing for his ten-year high school reunion in August 1969. ‘I bullshitted with him a little bit, [but] I think everybody was happy [for him],’ says former school friend Luke Davich. Echo Helstrom stood in line to talk to Bob and handed him her reunion booklet to sign. ‘He turned around and told Sara, “It’s Echo.” And I said hello, and that was it because people were jostling to get near him,’ she recalls. ‘I heard somebody tried to pick a fight with him afterward.’ Bob took Sara to see his boyhood home at 2425 7th Avenue. Beatty had sold the house in December and moved to Minneapolis. The new owners were a young couple, Angel and Terry Marolt, who had bought some of Beatty’s old furniture. Consequently, the house looked almost the same as when Bob was a child. He also found time to get together with old Minnesota friends to form a band, The Chart Busters, that played for fun at a couple of parties in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Each member had a pseudonym; Bob’s was Jack Smith.
BY THE LATE 1960s Albert Grossman represented many of the most fashionable acts in music. Aside from Dylan, he managed The Band, Electric Flag, and Janis Joplin. Some of his clients lived in Woodstock; others were frequent visitors. Woodstock was an easy bus ride from New York and hippies started flooding into town, gathering on the village green, playing guitars and drums into the night, drawn by the proximity of their heroes. The actual stars were elusive, of course, and none more so than Bob. Even when he came into town with Sara – giving her a ride to Victor Basil’s hairdressing salon, for instance – he would stay in the car until she was ready to go home again.
There was concern in the town when a group of businessmen, trading under the name Woodstock Ventures, Inc., decided to stage a music festival that capitalized on Woodstock’s notoriety. There had been a craze for festivals since the success of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, not least because festivals were an opportunity to make huge profits. The rush to cash in had resulted in poorly organized, hastily arranged events. Woodstock residents had read alarming reports of violence, drug abuse, and vandalism at recent festivals in California and Colorado. Consequently, the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair – commonly known as the Woodstock Festival (’three days of peace and love’) – was pushed out to the town of Wallkill, and then farther away to Max Yasgur’s dairy farm near Bethel. Yasgur’s farm was sixty miles from Woodstock, but the event was still known as the Woodstock Festival. The event was so far away from Woodstock itself that local police chief Bill Waterous admits he did not know exactly where Bethel was. Yet he still had to deal with thousands of hippies who came through Woodstock because of the name association. There was a sharp increase in drug trading in the town, from marijuana to heroin. ‘Everybody talks about Haight-Ashbury, and we used to say, What the hell are they talking about? It’s worse here,’ says Waterous. ‘The place was so wild after a while, we had to get narcotics people in.’
One day when they were painting, Bruce Dorfman asked Bob what part he was going to play in the festival.
’they’re all going to be waiting on line for you. They expect you to go’.
Bob replied that people’s expectations and realities were not always the same thing.
Normal life was becoming impossible and Bob was more than a little resentful. He had been driven out of Byrdcliffe by fans. Now there were incidents at Ohayo Mountain Road, including a break-in. ‘That Woodstock Festival … was the sum total of all this bullshit,’ he complained. ‘And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family.’ His image as a figurehead of hippiedom was not one that accorded with Bob’s actual lifestyle, or even with his cultural perspective. Although he could be wild and even anarchic in his music, by this stage in his personal life Bob was a quiet, law-abiding family man. He was in some ways rather conventional: he was polite and nicely spoken, expecting his children to be the same; he was faithful to Sara, as far as one could tell; and he was not involved in any type of scandalous or outrageous rock star behavior. There were no drug busts at the Dylan house or riotous parties. He was a good neighbor and on excellent terms with the local police. His old friend Wavy Gravy, who had become an iconic hippy figure (he was master of ceremonies at the Woodstock Festival), says that he never perceived Bob as part of the world of beads, tie-dyed T-shirts, and incense sticks. ‘Bob, in my opinion, was a conduit for the divine. That’s what [the hippies] were reacting to,’ comments Wavy Gravy. ‘The Bobster, I don’t think he was ever [a hippy], never maintained he was that and always turned away from that.’
There was another good reason for Bob not to perform at Woodstock: he had a better offer. Two young Englishmen, Ray Foulk and his brother Ron, wanted to stage a festival on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England. Unlike the Woodstock Festival, which had a plethora of big-name acts, none of whom were well paid, the Foulk brothers planned to build their festival around one big star who would receive the lion’s share of appearance money. Grossman’s associate, Bert Block, of I.T.A., dealt with the booking (relations between Bob and Grossman were so bad by then that they could not deal with each other directly). Bob would headline for $50,000 plus expenses. Bob wanted to perform with The Band, who were then touring the United States. He made a guest appearance with them in Edwardsville, Illinois, on July 14. ‘He was beginning to get itchy,’ says Jonathan Taplin, The Band’s road manager. The fee for The Band was an additional $20,000. It was further stipulated that one other Grossman-managed act would be on the bill, and so Richie Havens was hired for a fee of $8,000. By making the Foulk brothers take all three acts, Grossman earned nearly $16,000 in commission. This was the last big deal Grossman made with Bob before their seven-year management contract expired on August 19, 1969. Ray Foulk agreed to pay Bob’s production company, Ashes & Sand, $50,000 in return for Bob’s assurance that this would be his exclusive festival appearance for the summer. The $50,000 would have to be paid in full before Bob left the United States. If gross profits exceeded a certain figure, Bob would receive additional money.* Bob’s advisers hired Lord Goodman, one of the most eminent solicitors in London, to ensure that the money was paid promptly.
As a result, despite speculation that Bob would make a dramatic last-minute appearance at the Woodstock Festival, he never had the slightest intention of appearing. In fact, on August 15, the first day of the Woodstock Festival – which would draw a phenomenal three hundred thousand people to Yasgur’s farm – Bob and his family boarded the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2, intending to sail to England. Unfortunately, Jesse Dylan hit his head on a doorknob and they had to leave the ship minutes before it departed. When they had established that the boy was not seriously hurt, Bob and Sara caught a flight to London. Al Aronowitz carried their luggage.
When they reached the Isle of Wight, the Dylans were accommodated in a sixteenth-century manor house at Forelands Farm, Bembridge. They were provided with a housekeeper and a chauffeur-driven Humber Super Snipe. An adjacent barn was used for rehearsals with The Band. Bob was nervous about what was – despite the Guthrie tribute, the Johnny Cash show, and his one guest appearance with The Band – his big comeback appearance after years of not touring. It was proving to be a much larger event than he had originally expected, with a weekend attendance of a hundred and fifty thousand people. There were rumors Bob would be on stage for up to three hours and might hold a ’super session’ with members of The Beatles and Rolling Stones. The Beatles rumor was fueled by the fact that George and Pattie Harrison were houseguests at Forelands Farm. Bob knew he could not live up to the hype, and complained to Bert Block about the press coverage. Block passed the complaints on to Ray Foulk, who tried to calm everyone down. Meanwhile, his brother fed stories to the press to publicize the event. Tempers began to wear thin. In the days preceding the show, Ray Foulk tried to give Bob and Sara a holiday. One of the diversions was a chauffeured drive to Osborne House, former residence of Queen Victoria. As they were getting ready to leave, housekeeper Judy Lewis suggested Bob might prefer to drive himself in her little Triumph Herald. ‘That’s a great idea,’ said Bob, taking the keys from her. Then he noticed promotional stickers all over the car reading ‘Help Bob Dylan Sink the Isle of Wight.’ Bob started to peel them off, and then lost his temper. ‘What is this shit?’ he said, and stomped away.
A couple of days before the concert a Daimler limousine pulled up at Forelands with The Beatles’ road manager, Mal Evans, who jumped out and marked out a cross on the lawn. A helicopter then descended, carrying Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. The Beatles played Bob acetates of their new album, Abbey Road. George Harrison complained that he had been allowed only two of his own compositions on the record. In the evening, Bob jammed with members of The Beatles and The Band. It was a night that would live in the memory of those present. Dylan, Harrison, and Lennon sang duets on Beatles songs, but played mostly old rock ’n’ roll numbers.
The concert itself, on Sunday, August 31, turned out to be anticlimactic. The show ran late because of a problem with the press and VIP area. ‘All manner of people suddenly started to arrive about tea time – six o’clock – and the press [enclosure] was getting fuller and fuller to the point whereby it was just sort of ridiculous,’ says Ray Foulk. Apart from members of the national and international press, organizers had to find space for celebrities such as Jane Fonda. The Band did not start their set until after 9 p.m. Bob came on stage at 11 p.m. One couple took his appearance as their cue to strip and make love. ‘Freaky, baby!’ exclaimed an onlooker.
Dressed in a white suit and wearing an orange shirt with cuff links – quite different to the crushed velvet, flared trousers, and beads favored by concertgoers – Bob looked ’very grown-up and adult-like,’ as Ray Foulk says. Bob’s clothes and sound were evocative of Hank Williams at the Grand Ole Opry rather than of the psychedelic sixties. Bob sang in the mellow voice of Nashville Skyline and The Band sounded loose and country, even on ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ The performance was the antithesis of the screaming brilliance of his last British appearance, another performance out of its time. ‘I felt it was slightly low-key,’ says Ray Foulk. ‘Dylan was always going to [be] unpredictable … the way that he just changes his material, changes the tunes, changes the delivery and so on is something he has always done. That is his entitlement and is maybe something that distinguishes him from other artists because he didn’t much care about whether people liked it or not. He just does what he wants to do.’ Bob fulfilled his contract exactly, playing one hour. He would not perform again in public for two years.
SARA DYLAN HAD BEEN NOTICEABLY pregnant during the Isle of Wight festival and, when they returned to America, she and Bob made a decision to find a new home in which to raise their large and growing family. Woodstock had been a secure refuge for several years, and Bob had worked fruitfully at his music during their seclusion in the country. In many ways, the years he and Sara spent in Woodstock were the happiest and most stable they would know. They had dealt successfully with the pressures of Bob’s fame, and they were content together as a couple. But the crazy events of the late 1960s changed the town for the worse and this impinged on their lives to the extent that they no longer felt comfortable or safe in Woodstock. Indeed, society in general seemed to be in a parlous state at the close of the 1960s. Richard Nixon was president. Young Americans were still being killed in Vietnam. The terror of the Cold War gripped the entire world. Brian Jones was among those princes of pop culture whose hedonistic lives had ended in squalid, pointless death. In California, the maniacal Charles Manson was arrested for ordering the killing of actress Sharon Tate and others. Manson claimed to have received his orders to kill from messages discovered in the songs of The Beatles. In many ways the so-called decade of peace and love had yielded a disappointing dividend.
With the birth of another child imminent, Bob and Sara decided to relocate to what they hoped would be the relative sanity of New York City. In the fall Bob bought a town house in Greenwich Village. On December 9, 1969, Sara gave birth in New York to a son, whom they named Jakob Luke. Including Maria, she and Bob now had five children. Their family was complete, and a new era in their lives was about to begin.