Original subtitles

I had ambitions to set out and find,

like, an odyssey, going home somewhere.

I set out to find this home that I'd left a while back,

and I couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there.

And encountering what I encountered on the way

was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all.

I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be,

and so I'm on my way home, you know?

Time.... You can do a lot of things that seem to make time standstill,

but of course, you know, no one can do that.

Maybe when I was about ten, I started playing the guitar.

I found a guitar in the house that my father bought, actually.

I found something else in there, has kind of mystical overtones.

There was a great big mahogany radio.

It had a 78 turntable when you opened up the top.

And I opened it up one day, and there was a record on there.

A country record, it's a song called "Drifting Too Far From Shore".

The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else...

...and then....

You know, I was maybe not even born to the right parents, or something.

It looked like any other town out of the '40s or '50s.

Just some rural town. It was on the way to nowhere

and you probably couldn't find it on a map.

Maybe three blocks one way, and maybe three blocks the other way,

and that was like a main street where all the department stores were,

the drugstores, the.... That's about it, you know.

What happens to a town after the livelihood is gone?

All right, it just sort of decays and blows away, doesn't it?

That's the way it goes.

Most of the land was either farmland,

or just completely scavenged by the mining companies.

Very hot in the summertime,

in the winter, it was just rightly cold, you know?

Just all winter it would just hit me.

We didn't have the clothes they have now, so I mean, you just wore

two or three shirts at a time, slept in your clothes.

The pit was on the outer limits of the town.

That's where everybody worked.

You couldn't be a rebel. It was so cold that you couldn't be bad.

The weather equalizes everything very quickly.

And nobody was gonna really pull a stick-up.

There really wasn't any philosophy, any idiom,

any ideology to really go against.

My father and his brothers, they had an electrical store.

Well, first job I ever had was sweeping up the store,

and I was supposed to learn...

...the discipline of hard work or something, you know,

and the merits of employment.

Circuses came through.

There were tent shows at the carnie in Midway.

- And they had barkers. - Got a horse with two heads!

Got a chicken in there with a man's face!

Come see the girl-boy!

It was just more rural back then.

That's what people did. You could see guys in blackface.

George Washington in blackface, and....

Or Napoleon wearing blackface.

There was, like, weird Shakespearean things.

Stuff that didn't really make any sense at the time.

And people had other jobs in the carnie scene.

I saw somebody putting makeup on,

getting back from running the Ferris wheel once.

And I thought that was pretty interesting, you know, wow.

Guy's got, you know....

He does two things, you know, or something like that.

I've got a song here that I'd like to do

that's been awful kind to me and the boys.

It's a tune called "Cold Cold Heart".

We'd have to listen late at night for other stations to come in

from other parts of the country, places that were far away.

Fifty-thousand-watt stations coming out through the atmosphere.

Johnnie Ray, he had some kind of strange incantation in his voice,

like he'd been voodooed, and he cried, kind of, when he sang.

It's Grand Ole Opry time.

Another big folk music show, starring Webb Pierce.

It was the sound that got to me. It wasn't who it was, or....

It was the sound of it.

This is our town, Hibbing, Minnesota, USA.

I began listening to the radio, I began to get bored being there.

I thought about going to military school,

but the military school that I envisioned myself going to,

I couldn't get in, which was West Point.

You know, I could always envision myself

dying in some heroic battle somewhere.

So, I mean, maybe that era, that...

...has gone.

First time I heard rock 'n' roll on the radio,

I felt it was pretty similar to the

country music which I'd been listening to.

I formed a couple of groups, growing up, and we rehearsed and played

where we could play. There wasn't much opportunity...

...to really break out of that area.

Robert was in my class, and that was the era they had the talent show.

Robert, of course, he was up on stage.

His concert began, and it was quite surprising.

I saw Robert stand there at the piano,

and my guess is that he was trying to destroy it.

He was pumping on the thing. It was a most unusual thing to observe.

The principal pulled the curtain on him.

He said to me, "I didn't think that music was suitable for the audience,

so I pulled the curtain."

Nobody liked country music, or rock 'n' roll, or rhythm and blues.

That kind of music wasn't what was happening up there.

The music that was popular was "How Much is that Doggie in the Window"?

That wasn't our reality. Our reality was bleak to begin with.

Our reality was fear that at any moment,

this black cloud would explode, where everybody would be dead.

They would show you in school how to dive for cover under your desk.

We grew up with all that, so it created a sense of paranoia

that, I don't know, was probably unforeseen.

In May 1959, I recorded a tape for Bob Zimmerman.

Bob was real excited to learn I had a tape recorder

and he wanted to know what he sounded like.

I really can't say if the girls took a liking to me or not

from playing around town.

The first girl that ever took a liking to me,

her name was Gloria Story.

Gloria Story, I mean, that was her real name.

Second girlfriend was named Echo. Now, that's pretty strange.

I've never met anybody named Echo.

I serenaded her underneath the ladder that went up to her window.

And both these girls, by the way, brought out the poet in me.

Long after we have gone,

while the flesh of our beginning

has not yet traveled the light years into distance,

it will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came,

destroyed as we began, in a burst of gas and fire.

James Dean, Brando, The Wild One. It didn't kill all the entire past.

It's not like they just appeared and there's a new scene happening now.

Time, you know, time kind of obliterated the past

that was around when I was growing up.

Just time and progress, really.

He's just changed altogether.

He's changed from what he was. He's not the same as what he was at first.

- You don't even recognize him. - No.

About a year ago, I saw him here in Sheffield, at the City Hall,

and I thought he was magnificent.

And, you know, I thought he just couldn't improve if he tried.

Then the next thing that happened was

he went really commercial, with this backing group,

and I didn't like that very much.

I don't know what he's trying to do.

I think he's conceding, you know, to some sort of popular taste.

I think it's a bad thing. I think he's prostituting himself.

I don't think the spirit of the Dylan songs is being portrayed in this....

With this incredibly corny group behind him.

I like his earlier records, as on his Freewheelin' LPs, etc.

but this, I just can't stick.

I found it rather boring. I found there was too much improvising

on his wretched harmonica.

And he tended to lose the rhythm on his guitar altogether at times.

Got out of high school and left the very next day.

I'd gone as far as I could in my particular environment.

I was gonna try to join some other band.

There was only one guy that ever

came out of there, and he was out of Fargo.

I'd actually gone there to play with him.

He had a regional hit called "Suzie Baby".

At that point, I was just playing triplets on the piano.

I didn't have my own piano, so they weren't gonna buy a piano.

But I did play some shows with them.

Nothing much came of it.

He would let people know that he was maybe Bobby Vee.

Bob told everyone, including his, like, cousins and relatives

that, you know, he was Bobby Vee.

And I guess he liked that recognition of being famous.

'Cause people looked at him, and say,

"Hey, that's a pretty good song you got out, Bobby Vee."

I was a musical expeditionary.

I had no past, really, to speak of,

nothing to go back to, nobody to lean on.

I came down to Minneapolis.

I didn't go to classes.

I was enrolled, but I didn't go to classes.

I just didn't feel like it.

We were singing and playing all night.

Sleeping most of, you know, the morning.

I didn't really have any time for studying.

"Praised be man

He is existing in milk, and living in lilies

And his violin music takes place in milk and creamy emptiness

Praised be the unfolded inside petal flesh of tend'rest thought

Praised be delusion; the ripple

Praised be the Holy Ocean of Eternity

Praised be I, writing, dead already, and dead again"

I fell into that atmosphere of everything Kerouac was saying

about the world being completely mad.

And the only people for him that were interesting...

...were the mad people, the mad ones,

the ones who were, you know, mad to live...

...and mad to talk, mad to be saved,

desirous of everything at the same time,

the ones who never yawn, all those mad ones.

And I felt like I fit right into that bunch.

I had heard folk music before leaving the Iron Range.

I'd heard John Jacob Niles somewhere, strangely enough.

I don't know, folk music was delivering me something, you know...

which was the way I always felt about life, you know, and people,

and, you know, institutions, and ideology...

and it was just, you know, uncovering it all.

She played that upstroke-downstroke kind of rhythm,

where you don't need the drum. It's kind of like a Tex-Mex rhythm.

I heard that rhythm

and I thought, well, I could use that rhythm for all kinds of things.

I don't even remember, you know, buying any records.

I went into the booth. I had a very agile mind.

I could learn a song by maybe hearing it once or twice.

I traded my electric equipment for an acoustic guitar.

Started playing almost immediately.

There he is, down at the end of the bar. Dylan! How are you?

Dylan Thomas, and he's looking shocked.

Out in Minnesota...

...there was a young man who was inspired...

to change his name to Dylan...

because of the poet Dylan Thomas.

"Piety sings

Innocence sweetens my last black breath

Modesty hides my thighs in her wings

And all the deadly virtues

Plague my death!"

Why it became that particular name, I really can't say.

There was some intimation that maybe he was changing his name

'cause of a racial thing.

'Cause I later found out

that Minneapolis had a fairly big history of being anti-Semitic,

which I wasn't aware of at all, but....

The name just popped into my head one day.

But it didn't really happen any of the ways that I've read about it.

I mean, I just don't feel like I had had a past, and,

you know, I couldn't relate to anything

other than what I was doing at the present time.

And I don't, you know....

Didn't matter to me what I said, you know. It still doesn't, really.

He sounded, like, average, I would say.

He wasn't the worst, he wasn't the best,

but the repertoire was similar to everybody else's repertoire.

Josh White, Odetta, Belafonte.

Right then and there, I had no goal except learning

all the songs I could.

He was hungry. You know, hungry in a lot of ways,

not just for money, not just for fame,

but he was hungry for experience, for getting out, for doing it...

for seeing what was out there, seeing who he could be.

He was like a sponge in a way, like, pick up people's mannerisms, accents.

I'd forgotten all about the Iron Range, where I grew up.

I'd forgotten about it all.

It didn't even enter my mind.

Woody Guthrie, he had a particular sound.

And besides that, he said something to go along with his sound.

That was highly unusual, to my ears.

He was a radical, his songs had a radical slant.

I was like, you know, I said, "That's what I want to sing.

I want to sing that."

I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of this man.

You could listen to his songs, and actually learn how to live.

One guy said, "You're singing a Woody Guthrie song."

He gave me a book that he wrote, called Bound for Glory,

and I read it. I identified with that Bound for Glory book...

...more than I even did with On the Road.

These songs sounded archaic to most people.

I don't know why they didn't sound archaic to me.

They sounded like... these songs were happening at the moment, to me.

- Rank. - Excellent.

- It was lousy, it was pathetic. - He was great!

It said on the ticket you came to see Dylan, not a group.

Not a pop group.

A special paper, now, with all the pictures.

I was just learning songs and playing them,

and trying to find out who Woody Guthrie was.

Woody's records were almost impossible to find.

They didn't have any of his records in the record stores.

Paul was a folk music scholar. He didn't play at all.

He had a whole lot of records

which probably couldn't be found anywhere else in the Midwest,

except at Paul's house, and he lived there with somebody else, and...

You know, I was listening to records at his house once.

I knew they'd be away for the weekend,

so I went over there and helped myself to a bunch of old records.

About 25 records disappeared,

mostly the stuff that Dylan was listening to.

And we sort of figured out that he'd taken them.

Those records were extremely hard to find. They were like hen's teeth.

If you came across them, somebody like myself,

who was a musical expeditionary,

you know, you just would have to immerse yourself in them.

So we started trying to track Dylan down.

We tried the fraternity house where he had once been.

No luck there. We got another address, and then yet another.

And everybody said, "Boy, this kid must be popular," you know.

"You're about the tenth guy looking for him" you know,

at every place we went.

And I don't know how we finally found him, but we got a current apartment.

This was a John Wayne production number, that John did.

He got a bowling pin, and he got a big cigar,

and John was 6'4" or something like this, and...

And it wasn't ever intending to hit Dylan with the bowling pin

or anything, but he was really gonna do the bit.

John just started waving the bowling pin over his head, and just saying.

"I'm gonna beat the hell out of you. Where are my records?"

And Dylan was very scared for the first time around this routine went.

But he maintained his cool somehow,

and it somehow settled into sort of an absurdist drama

where they would sort of talk,

Dylan would say something interesting and John would get interesting

and they'd start to talk and they'd start to sort of

like each other a little bit,

and then John would remember why he was there,

and he'd start brandishing the pin again,

and they'd play the whole scene out again.

I wanted to get to the East Coast to visit Woody Guthrie.

When I first heard him, I didn't know if he was dead or alive, really,

but then I discovered that he was definitely alive

and he was in a hospital...

with some kind of ailment.

So I thought it'd be a nice gesture to go visit him.

Hitchhiking back then was very acceptable.

I had a suitcase and a guitar.

And I don't know, maybe I had $1 0 in my pocket.

Joan Baez, she was staggering.

Kind of, like, hit my world from a different angle.

She was completely about folk music.

She was an excellent, really excellent guitar player.

When I saw her on television, I thought, you know, like,

"That girl looks like she might need a singing partner. "

I'd say she was someplace in the back of my mind, you know.

Let the word go forth from this time and place

to friend and foe alike

that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

Got out of the car on George Washington Bridge,

took a subway down to the Village.

Went to the Café Wha? I looked out at the crowd.

I most likely asked from the stage,

"Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?"

It was in old Greenwich Village, which was the '20s Bohemia,

and had a very venerable history.

I first came down in 1948

with a red bandana around my neck, on the subway to go

to see if I could find poets...

in Greenwich Village. But there had been poets.

I probably came into the Village around 1952 or '53. I was a kid.

I was living in Queens, not liking it very much.

And for me, it was very sophisticated. I liked that.

I was into jazz at the time.

I didn't like the folk music thing much at all, I was very snobbish.

Over across the street, there was Nick's.

I actually met Tony Spargo,

who was the drummer on the very first jazz records

with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, in 191 7.

When I was young, it was a very laid-back place

intermingled with various ethnic groups

were lots of what we called bohemians

doing their art, walking their dogs.

There was a wonderful creative climate there, although I didn't...

I wasn't fully aware of it, but it was the center of the art world,

happenings, the first art movements, were going on. It was all there.

You were suddenly able to take your clothes off.

You were suddenly free of all the shackles of family,

the baggage...

of tradition, of bad tradition.

I was looking for freedom,

but freedom didn't exist all over America.

Freedom only existed, really, here in the Village, in Greenwich Village.

"America, I've given you all, and now I'm nothing

America, two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956

I can't stand my own mind

America, when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good, don't bother me

I won't write my poem until I'm in my right mind"

The big breakthrough was in an ex-gay bar on MacDougal Street,

formerly the MacDougal Street Bar, I think this was '58 or '59...

then called The Gaslight.

And it was the first poetry reading

in one of these sort of coffee shop/bars,

sort of a folk club/coffee shop/bar.

And it was so astonishing that there was a story on page 3,

a whole page in the Daily News: "Poets Reading in the Coffee Shop."

"America, when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

America, when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket

and buy what I need with my good looks?"

Down the block here was the San Remo.

And every Saturday night you'd have the riots

between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites.

Glasses flying, that sort of thing.

There's an old bitch upstairs who keeps pounding the floor

and she's threatening to call the police all the time.

We used to be out at the bar here with James Baldwin, the writer.

And he used to puff smoke: "This goddamn Irish music!"

And the whole place would erupt.

In Washington Square, early days, it was just a place

for people to hang out on Sundays and talk and play music

and kind of jockey around and express themselves.

It was a place where you could put it together

so someone could hear a little bit.

There weren't many concerts in those days.

People were starting to play little gigs

in these coffeehouses in the Village. We called them "basket Houses."

We didn't get paid a dime but we would pass a little

bread basket around after the set and people would throw change in

and then we'd pack up our guitars and go round to the next club.

They'd put the singers on in between

beat poets, to turn the house, essentially. So you'd get...

three songs, you could sing three songs.

And what it came down to is,

if at the end of your three songs there was still anybody seated...

in the house, you were fired. You weren't doing your job.

Needless to say, we didn't get fired. That we could do.

When we played in the city, who was the audience?

Who were those people walking up and down MacDougal Street?

There was a lot of them.

Some were people from the suburbs coming in to look at the weird scene.

Some were from the city looking at the weird scene.

Some were the weird scene.

It was never clear that this was the audience and this was the singer,

because maybe half the audience, if they had their druthers,

they'd be up on the stage singing as well. It was very interesting.

I was ready for New York.

I started playing immediately, and I realized right away that

I'd come to the right place, because there were many places to play.

I played with Freddy Neil. He was a big star down there.

I did that until about 8:00, he would give me what he could.

The place was usually packed from 1 2:00 to 8:00

with tourists and lunch-hour secretaries.

And then at 8:00, all the rest of the houses would open,

where you'd pass the basket and play.

Check it out.

There'd be a carnie on the street bringing people down.

"Hey, you know, you gotta come down here and see this.

There's so much weirdness you've never seen in your life. "

Just always, there'd be people coming and going.

I have studied at Oxford University,

I've done my research at the British Museum,

and have matriculated at Brooklyn College.

Sawdust on the floor, tourist traps.

Like, a poet, somebody singing a song with a parrot on a shoulder,

Tiny Tim-type characters.

No one who had any recordings out ever played them.

You only played those if you had to.

You would have to make an impression on somebody.

There were many, many singers who were good,

but they couldn't focus their attention on anybody.

They couldn't really get inside somebody's head.

You gotta be able to pin somebody down.

I remember him because he was different.

He was doing Woody Guthrie songs.

He had on a little hat, he had a brace.

There's a quality of determination

and of will that some people have...

...where when they're doing something, they're really doing it,

and you know that you have to pay attention to them.

I first met Bob in the winter of 1961 .

We were awkward. Neither of us really knew quite what to say.

So, as a prop, he pulled out this card.

And he was moving his leg like that and he just hands me the card.

And after he handed it to me, he kind of glances and then

continues to sort of talk about Woody Guthrie.

And on the card it said, "I ain't dead yet," signed, Woody Guthrie.

And it was actually Woody's handwriting,

I guess, because Bob claimed it was.

Woody was very important to both of us.

Bob, I think, wanted to be more like Woody than I did.

He was able to adopt a kind of theater about himself.

Actually, the very first time that I met him,

he was really acting, in a way.

And that was good because you can go anywhere when you're somebody else.

I want to see this person immediately.

- What? - Whoever's gonna shoot me.

How do you find that out, Albert?

Phoned the box office and they say they're gonna shoot me.

Well, do they do this often?

I don't mind being shot, man, but I don't dig being told about it.

Man, I can't believe that.

Don't worry, Mickey. I'll protect you.

I hope so. God.

Don't tell me not to push too hard, man. I'm worried about getting shot.

I'm not gonna push too hard.

Obviously, he was channeling Woody Guthrie.

He was literally channeling him and everything about him.

And I think it was part of his way of finding who he was in the end

by imitating and assimilating Woody Guthrie.

I found out where Woody Guthrie was, and I took a bus out to Morristown.

Basically, I think it was an insane asylum.

I thought about it later, it was a sad thing,

they put him in a mental home because he just had the jitters.

He asked for certain songs and I'd play them.

I was young and impressionable and I think I must have been shocked

in some kind of way to find him where I found him.

Brother John Sellers,

he was the master of ceremonies at Gerde's Folk City.

And there was one night called Hootenanny Night

where anybody could play.

We'd go down there every Monday night.

Peter LaFarge, who was sort of a cowboy/Indian,

and Cisco Houston.

A lot of the old Woody Guthrie crowd was still hanging out there.

We just watched and you picked out the performers

that were doing it for real

and tried to pick up what the essence of what they were doing was.

All of us were interested in seeing what the other guy was doing onstage,

because there was a lot more to be learned

than just songs or picking styles.

Dave Van Ronk, he had that big gruff thing,

but he had this very sweet, sensitive thing going on at the same time.

He was a dichotomy of a performer.

He could take the essence of the song

and only go after that, not go after the frills.

On Monday nights, Bob Dylan used to come over there,

and he would always, like.... He was always just hanging around.

Sometimes you wanted to say, "Go away."

Liam was profound. He would....

You know, besides all of his rebel songs...

...and his acting career, he would have these incredible sayings.

Like once, he said to me after about 30 pints of Guinness,

he was saying, "Remember, Bob, no fear,

no envy, no meanness."

I said, "Right."

What I heard in the Clancy Brothers was rousing, rebel songs,

Napoleonic in scope.

And they were just these Musketeer-type characters.

And then on the other level,

you had the romantic ballads that would just, you know,

slay you right in your tracks, the sweetness of Tommy Makem and Liam.

I mean, it was just like, take a sword, cut off your head,

and then weep, you know. That's sort of what they were about.

All the great performers that I'd seen,

who I wanted to be like, were those kind of performers.

They all had one thing in common. It was in their... eyes.

Now, there was something in their eyes that would say,

"I know something you don't know,"

and I wanted to be that kind of performer.

He was playing at some party or something

and it was like a whole different guy.

You hear those stories about the bluesmen

who go out to the crossroads and sell their soul to the devil,

and come back, all of a sudden able to do stuff.

Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, that whole mythology.

It was one of those kind of deals, almost.

When he left Minneapolis he was just average, you know.

There was five, six other guys doing the same thing.

When he came back he was doing Woody

and he was doing Van Ronk and he was fingerpicking.

He was playing cross harp, and this is a matter of a couple of months.

I mean, this is not like he was gone a year or anything.

He was gone a couple of months, and apparently whatever he got into,

he got into so intensely that he was, like, a real interesting performer.

That's when I went to the crossroads and made a big deal.

You know, like...

...one night, and then went back to Minneapolis

and it was like, "Hey, where's this guy been?

You've been to the crossroads."

I wasn't seeing Woody Guthrie anymore.

I was still singing a lot of his songs,

but I'd replaced them with a lot of the other songs, all of a sudden.

I kind of went through Woody Guthrie in a kind of way.

But I didn't really want to go through Woody Guthrie.

I didn't want to feel that it was something just negligible.

But I really cared,

I really wanted to portray my gratitude in some kind of way.

But I knew that I was not gonna be going back to Greystone anymore.

I felt like I had to write that song.

I did not consider myself a songwriter at all.

But I needed to write that and I needed to sing it.

So that's why I needed to write it.

'Cause it hadn't been written,

and that's what I needed to say, I needed to say that.

So this guy comes in.

He didn't look too prepossessing. He didn't look too interesting to me.

He didn't look wild or....

He looked like an ordinary kid.

He didn't have the commanding presence.

And he said, "Listen, I got some songs I wanted you to hear."

So I was, "Oh, God. Can you come tomorrow?"

I says, "Get out of here." He says, "No, I want to sing you a song."

So I let him sing the song, then I kick him out,

then he comes back, then he came back.

And then I started pointing people,

I said, "Listen, see that guy in the back room?

His name is Bob Dylan. You should listen to him.

The guy's writing good songs. He's terrific."

He told me he never knew the word folk music

before he came to New York City. What bullshit, God!

And he'd never seen somebody playing a banjo

before he came to New York City.

He'd never seen all these things before he came to New York City.

It opened his eyes up wide to what folk music is

after having lived on the Mississippi River and everything.

"I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941 . Moved to Gallup, New Mexico.

Then, until now...

...lived in Iowa, South Dakota,

Kansas, North Dakota, for a little bit.

Started playing in carnivals when I was 14 with guitar and piano.

Arvella Gray taught him blues songs.

A blind street singer from Chicago, about four or five years ago.

Used to know a guy named Mance Lipscomb, from Navasota, Texas.

Listened to him a lot.

Met him through his grandson, a rock 'n' roller."

Now, listened to Arvella Gray in Chicago,

Mance Lipscomb in Texas,

I should have figured out right away, he's bullshitting me.

And I only found out later

that he had borrowed 400 records from Tony Glover,

or something like that, which he still hasn't returned.

And things like that.

So I was a setup, a very easy setup, and I'm proud of it.

Because the guy wrote good songs. I didn't care what he was telling me.

The owner of the place finally gave me a two-week run.

He had me open for John Lee Hooker.

I didn't really feel like I was making a step forward anywhere.

Things were taking its natural course.

Now, November fourth, Bob Dylan will be singing.

That should be a very eventful occasion.

Bob was born in Duluth, Minnesota,

but, Bob, you weren't raised in Duluth, were you?

I was raised in Gallup, New Mexico.

And do you get many songs there?

Got a lot of cowboy songs there. Indian songs.

I didn't start to have any ambition

until I started working more and more.

I wondered how people recorded. I wondered how you get to do that.

There were always talent scouts in the clubs.

No one had ever spoken to me directly about making any records,

so I just assumed they'd passed on me.

The most important new vocal personality of recent years.

Johnny Mathis, who vaulted over a Columbia microphone to stardom.

I always looked for songs that had a kind of excellence, lasting quality,

and artists who produced a beautiful sound with their voice.

From 1953, I was a head of A&R at Columbia.

That was the sound of the day.

People would want to hear a beautiful voice sing a melodic song.

John, are you gonna do one, or was I?

You will.

Okay. I'll do "Man of Constant Sorrow" then with the autoharp.

We recorded for Folkways.

We lived in the clear, pure light of non-commercial,

long-playing, short-selling records for Folkways.

I learned it from a record that was made down in the Southern mountains

in the late 1920s.

We also seemed to represent some idea about, excuse the expression,

integrity, or standing for something authentic or real in music.

We were always pointing to other people's music,

pointing to old singers, Appalachian singers, blues singers.

I think we were set up as a...

pillar of virtue.

The folk singing scene was either commercial folk singing

for, like, a college kind of crowd: Harry Belafonte, Brothers Four...

you know, that commercial... They had records that were on the pop charts.

And then there was the other side, which was intellectual.

People would just sit there, you know, I think....

And playing in the environment that I was playing in

was neither of those.

I took him up to Folkways Records

and that's written about in my notebook here.

where they treated him like shit. They wouldn't talk to him.

And he writes, "God, I thought I came into the wrong place."

"Sing Out" on the door, "Folkways" on the door...

Moe Asch, Irwin Silber, rejects him, throw him out on the street.

And he really felt bad about it and I felt bad about it,

'cause I don't push people every day.

I've only pushed two people in my life.

I take him up to Maynard Solomon, at Vanguard Records.

And they say no.

And many years later I said, "Why did you say no to him?"

And he said, "Well, Izzy, we don't record freaks at Vanguard Records."

I said, "I see. Joan Baez, not a freak.

The other people not... Nobody's a freak, just Bob Dylan."

I was standing in the audience with Maynard Solomon.

Maynard says, "What do you think of him?" I said, "That's good!"

I said, "What do you think of him?" He says, "It's too visceral."

John discovered Billie Holiday, Blind Boy Fuller, Lena Horne,

Count Basie.

Yeah, he was kind of like a Damon Runyon character. Is that the word?

One of these old Broadway guys, buzz-cut haircut.

He was very special in a lot of ways. He was very enthusiastic

and he had great love of music, and it just radiated out of him.

When I met him, a review had just come out of The New York Times

of the set I'd played at Gerde's the previous night.

Hammond had seen the article and asked me right then and there

whether I wanted to record for Columbia Records.

I thought it was almost unreal. I mean, no one would think that...

this kind of folk music would be recorded on Columbia Records.

John called me in my office at Columbia.

He says, "Come on down, I want you to hear something."

He didn't tell me who it was or anything. I come down.

There's this kid, all dressed up, with the boots and the suede jacket,

and he had the harmonica on.

And he was singing in this, you know, rough-edged voice.

I will admit I didn't see the greatness of it.

They recorded the popular hits of the day.

You had people usually with beautiful tones of voices

and great arrangements, and...

I don't know what they thought of my stuff up there.

He has no voice, I mean he doesn't produce a beautiful sound.

I was used to finding guys like Bennett and Damone and Mathis.

But when somebody like John Hammond is so confident of somebody's talent,

you have to respect that, for no other reason than his track record.

I didn't tell anybody for a bit,

because I almost wasn't sure it was happening myself.

So...

Now, I don't think I really told anybody until I actually...

went through with the sessions.

I first heard this from Rick Von Schmidt.

He lives in Cambridge.

I met him one day in...

the green pastures of Harvard University.

I have a habit I picked up someplace along the way.

Whatever works for me, not to give that away...

so easily, you know.

When I did make that first record...

I used songs which I just knew but I hadn't really performed them a lot.

I wanted just to record stuff that was off the top of my head,

and see what would happen.

"The House of the Rising Sun" is on that record.

I'd never done that song before,

but I heard it every night 'cause Van Ronk would do it.

So, you know, I thought he was really on to something

with the song, so I just recorded it.

Bobby picked up the chord changes...

for the song from me.

It really altered the song considerably,

although the lyric was...

pretty much the straight "House of the Rising Sun" lyric,

and so was the melody.

And when he was doing, I guess it was his first album...

he asked me if I would mind...

if he recorded my version of "House of the Rising Sun".

And I had some plans to record it.

So I said, "Well, gee, Bob, I'd rather you didn't,

because I'm gonna record it myself soon."

And Bobby said, "Uh-oh."

The mystery of being in a recording studio did something to me,

and those are the songs that came out.

After he recorded it, I had to stop singing the song,

because people were constantly...

accusing me of having got the song from Bobby's record.

Now that was very, very annoying.

But I couldn't blame that on him and I didn't.

The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot.

And later on, when Eric Burdon and the Animals

picked the song up from Bobby...

and recorded it, Bobby told me that he had had to drop the song,

because everybody was accusing him of ripping it off of Eric Burdon!

When I got the disk, I played it and I was highly disturbed.

I just wanted to cross this record out

and make another record immediately.

I thought I'd recorded the wrong songs,

and I'd already written a few of my own, maybe, that I thought maybe

I should have stuck on there. I was way past that record.

Or part of me was just saying

that I didn't want to record that record anyway, that I just did it...

I didn't want to give away anything that was really...

you know, dear to me or something.

When Bobby signed with Columbia, it was big news on the street.

Everybody wanted that.

People couldn't bring themselves to admit...

that they were that hungry.

They turned it into a moral issue. They had to.

Because otherwise they were going to have to take...

long looks at themselves and might not like what they saw.

Play.

To think that entertainers always have to be happy and funny

is kind of a shallow thing.

In fact, I've often remembered one of Bob's quotes is:

"Happy? Anybody can be happy. What's the purpose of that?"

The original Mexican name was La Feria de las Flores...

...The Festival of Flowers.

The moment I became acquainted with old songs,

I realized people were always changing them.

Think of it as an age-old process.

It's been going on for thousands of years.

People take old songs, change them a little, add to them,

adapt them for new people. It happens in every other field.

Lawyers change old laws to fit new citizens.

So I'm one in this long chain and so are millions of other musicians.

And Woody stepped right in that. He was always making up verses...

songs about real life, real people, real events.

The idea is that you make up a song about something real,

don't expect that it'll ever make any money.

It may never be heard by more than a few dozen people

but who knows? Who knows?

And I look upon us all as Woody's children.

Bob Dylan is... Well, you must be 20 years old now, I assume.

Yeah, I must be 20.

- Are you? - Yeah, I'm 20.

Tell me about the songs that you've written yourself that you sing.

I don't claim to call them folk songs or anything.

I just call them contemporary songs.

The traditional songs gave us ideas

and attitudes about life that you could borrow from,

that you could build your songs on.

I wrote them anywhere I was.

You could write them on the subway or in a Café or wherever.

You could write them talking to somebody else

and be scribbling down a song.

The first time I think I ever saw him perform a topical song,

he was singing,

"Let me die with my boots on, before I go under the ground."

And that was a real feeling in New York at that time.

People were building bomb shelters everywhere, and that we'll live out

our lives in preparation for that kind of crap.

And here we were in the middle of Greenwich Village

like a little pus pimple in the middle of this huge society

saying, "This has gotta go.

We don't-- I don't agree with that. I'm not gonna live my life that way."

I was working at CORE and that was an incredible time.

A call would come in, and people would say, "Oh, my God.

so-and-so was beaten to a pulp and so-and-so's in the hospital."

These were traumatic times to live through.

And just the way I felt was the insane... It was insane.

Why should this be happening?

And I'm sure Bob had that same thing. You just can't live through this.

You live in your own little world and your own interests,

but the outer world is definitely part of it.

I didn't really know if that song was good or bad or...

It just felt right.

But I didn't really know...

that it had any kind of anthemic quality or anything.

I wrote the songs to perform the songs.

And I needed to sing, like, in that language.

Which is a language that I hadn't heard before.

How could he write,

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?"

This is what my father went through.

He was the one who wasn't called a man, you know.

So, where is he coming from?

White people don't have hard times, you know.

This was my thinking back then, because I was a kid, too.

What he was writing was inspirational,

you know, they were inspirational songs.

And they would inspire. It's the same as gospel.

He was writing truth.

By writing good songs,

and writing about contemporary ideas

in traditional forms, which I understood.

And made it like was written today,

but it sounded like it could have been written 200 years ago, also.

It sounded current and old at the same time.

So it wasn't just like singing songs the way Pete Seeger would sing it,

you know, 'cause it's important that you sing these songs.

He sang songs that affected us.

Neither one of us had a fixed place to live, we were both a bit nomadic.

So we kind of had this private little existence, in a way.

I am leading a quiet life on Lower East Broadway

I was an American I am an American boy

I read The American Boy magazine and became a Boy Scout in the suburbs

I thought I was Tom Sawyer, catching crayfish in the Bronx River

and imagining the Mississippi

I had a baseball mitt and an American Flyer bike

Everything was meshed up at that time.

Everything was, like, just all in, like, a blender.

Everyone was interested in whatever was going on.

I stayed at a lot of people's houses which had poetry books,

and poetry volumes,

and I'd read what I found.

You know, I found Verlaine poems or Rimbaud,

you know, Drunken Boat, Illuminations.

Whether it was these wild and crazy poets that were getting up on stage

or whether it was a musician playing some riff in a jazz club

or some bluegrass guy, some old roots music...

it filters through you, and you speak them

when they come out verbally and you play them.

We were doing things totally instinctively.

It was an instinctive awakening.

Lightning strikes every once in a while, and in a different place.

Nobody knows why.

The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis,

the general feeling was, the world was gonna end or something like that.

I mean, it's quite heavy.

I walked into The Gaslight and Bob was there.

Just a few people listening to him sing.

He said, "Why don't you come up, we'll sing some songs together.

Let's do that old Carter Family song, "You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone".

I was playing the nice Carter Family thing, and we're singing.

And I'm thinking, "Who's gonna miss us when we're gone?

We're all gonna be gone, you know.

What the hell is this?"

When I got back from India, and got to the West Coast,

there was a poet, Charlie Plymell...

at a party in Bolinas...

played me a record of this new young folk singer.

And I heard...

"Hard Rain", I think...

and wept.

'Cause it seemed that...

the torch had been passed...

to another generation.

From earlier bohemian or beat...

illumination and self-empowerment.

A very famous saying among the Tibetan Buddhists:

"If the student is not better than the teacher,

then the teacher is a failure."

And I was really knocked out by the eloquence.

Particularly, "I'll know my song well before I start singing."

And, "Where all souls shall reflect it."

Or you know, "Stand on the mountain where everybody can hear."

It's sort of this biblical prophecy.

Poetry is words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end,

that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth

that has an objective reality to it, because somebody's realized it.

Then you call it poetry later.

Take this one you sang, this "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall".

Even though it may have come out of your feelings about atomic rain.

No, no, it wasn't atomic rain, no. Somebody else thought that, too.

- It's not atomic rain. - Go ahead.

- It's just a hard rain. - Hard rain.

It's not atomic rain, no.

All your songs are about more than the actual event

that may have caused it.

- You know what I mean? - I'm not a topical songwriter.

So you're not a topical songwriter.

No, I don't really even like that word.

I mean, it's not a song about a certain event.

- Yeah, it's not, no. - It's beyond that.

The folk idiom is so widespread

that you could take any part of it and rework a song.

I never thought I was breaking through anything.

I was just working with an existing form that was there.

I was definitely not inventing anything

that hadn't been tried before, some part of the picture, you know.

You must learn to control yourselves. Is this on?

Check. Richard?

Is this mike on? Richard.

Don't boo me anymore. Don't boo me. God, that booing, I can't stand it.

Oh, my God. It's hard to get in tune when they're booing.

Yeah, I can't get in tune at all when they're booing.

I can't hear anything. I don't even want to get in tune.

When they yell in this weird nasal tone from here.

Jesus, you know, I don't understand why they...

How can they buy the tickets up so fast?

I mean, you know. Let's get that light off.

Turn the light off!

Bobby Dylan, CBS label, brand new one

in the Caroline Countdown of Sound, lying at number 1 8.

"Let's Go and Get Stoned". Not this time of the day, surely.

Dylan's first albums did not sell.

I don't think we sold an album per store in America. I think, 2,500.

Salespeople, you know, would say, "This is Hammond's folly."

Since he cost so little to record, let John have his folly.

On my second album, all of a sudden people started to take notice

that never noticed before.

Grossman came into the picture around there.

He was kind of like a Col. Tom Parker figure,

all immaculately dressed, every time you see him.

You could smell him coming.

Al Grossman was the first successful folk manager

who knew how to make money out of his singers.

He would own the recording studio,

he would own the music publishing company, he would own Bob Dylan.

He would own Peter, Paul and Mary.

He would sell a Bob Dylan song to Peter, Paul and Mary,

who would sing on a recording in his studio,

which he was getting the rights.

So he would get a salami... He had a salami technique going.

He would get a piece of the action

from six or seven different directions.

He created Peter, Paul and Mary

because he saw people really wanted a fresh, young group like this

that they could relate to.

He changed Paul's name to Paul, from Noel.

So it would have that biblical inference. He was a genius.

I knew Mary Travers, you know, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

I had known her when she was younger.

She used to sing in Washington Square Park.

And she was a nice person and very lively teenager.

One time, in the middle of winter...

and it was cold on MacDougal Street, you know, like February...

I saw her, and I says, "Where have you been, Mary?"

She says, "Well, I've been in Florida for the last couple of..."

I don't know if it was weeks or months.

"A man named Albert Grossman has put me together

with some other guys from the coffeehouses...

and we're trying out a new group there, and we're singing."

And I said, "You mean you were in Florida all this time?

Where's your tan? Didn't you ever go out in the sun?"

She says, "No, Albert told me I shouldn't go out in the sun.

That I was supposed to be the pale, blonde, indoor type."

And it really made my flesh creep, to put it truthfully,

because I was shivering cold in New York

and she had the chance to get out in the sun,

but that she was being manipulated, that the whole thing had an image,

it had a look.

I just felt that this was a bad sign.

I didn't feel that Albert manipulated Bob

because I think Bob was weirder than Albert,

so that he couldn't manipulate him.

And by weird, I don't mean in a bad way,

but I mean that he had enough games.

Now, Bob was also a terrific opportunist,

so if someone gave him an opportunity to do something, he could use it.

I don't know if Bob was a hustler.

I think he just knew what he wanted and he could focus.

He was very astute.

He could pick out somebody who was important.

I mean, any musician would, but he was really good at it.

Albert tells me one day that

he's gonna send a guy over to see me named Bob Dylan.

He's got a guitar, with some kind of a contraption around his neck

so that the harmonica is up to his mouth.

Now, believe me when I tell you,

nobody had ever seen this on Broadway before.

And he starts singing for me.

And one of the things that I pride myself on

is that I think I'm one of the few...

At that time, I may have been the only one in the music business...

who listened to the words.

And when I heard,

"How many years must one man have

before he can hear people cry," I flipped.

I can't even remember what the songs were that he played me that day...

but I said, "Okay, that's it. I want you."

The music business per Se was dominated by music publishers.

In those days, the song was important.

You would pick a song and work on it.

Historically, whenever you see Dylan mentioned in print,

it's always John Hammond who discovered Bob Dylan.

I think the guy who made Dylan popular was me, if I say so myself.

I'm the one who started to get his songs all over the place.

We never had resistance within the company to him.

My boss, the old man, Herman Starr, got on it right away.

Why? Because they smelled dollars, that's why.

I gotta sing you something to tell you something.

It's called "Masters of War".

I did a concert of his in Town Hall. It might have been '63.

And when the concert was over...

Bob called me over and he said:

"Is anybody in the stage door waiting for me?"

The fact is that I do not blame any artist for seeking fame,

which is in a sense, recognition.

You want to know that you've pleased an audience,

you want to know that the audience is interested in you.

He was, in his way, a dynamic performer.

But I think mostly the material that he was doing was so great...

that everybody responded to it.

The topical song movement was a product of the Left.

And the Left, at that time, would have been Pete Seeger,

and the Weavers, and Woody Guthrie.

These people created material based on topical situations.

Pete Seeger, very tall, like a towering figure.

I didn't realize he was a communist.

I really wasn't sure even what a communist was.

If he was, it wouldn't have mattered to me anyway.

I really didn't think about people in those terms.

Bobby was not really a political person.

He was thought of...

as being...

a political person and a man of the Left.

And in a general sort of way, yes, he was. But he was not interested...

in the true nature of the Soviet Union or any of that crap.

We thought he was hopelessly politically naive.

But in retrospect I think he may have been more sophisticated than we were.

The folk music revival was

postponed by almost ten years by the witch hunt.

I mean, when US Army publishes pamphlets on how to spot a communist,

that have lines in them like, "He will sometimes play the guitar,"

that kind of thing had a very...

repressive and suppressive effect.

The song "Goodnight Irene" was all over the country.

You couldn't escape that song

in the United States of America, in the summer of 1950.

Right then, the very moment that Irene was at the top of the Top 40,

a bunch of blacklisters probably said to themselves,

"How did we let these commie so-and-so's

slip through our fingers?"

They started out to see that we were blacklisted,

and about two years later

instead of singing in the Waldorf Astoria,

or Ciro's in Hollywood

we were singing in Daffy's Bar and Grill on the outskirts of Cleveland

and decided to take a sabbatical.

Lee says, it turned into a Mond-ical and a Tuesd-ical.

By the time McCarthy, I think, started to wane,

the folk music thing started to come up.

I say it's in the interest of every human being

in the United States of America

to get some good senators out of Mississippi for a change.

And you can do it, and you will do it soon, I know.

I got him to go with Pete and Theodore Bikel.

They were both going down to the South.

And I encouraged him to go with them and he did, as part of an education.

The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing,

and there was a big field outside Greenwood

with several hundred people.

I heard some speechifying there that I'll never forget in all my life.

And I remember Bob singing a song which really caused people to think.

"He's Only a Pawn in The Game."

He was singing about the man who killed Medgar Evers.

In other words, don't just think of this one man

who did this murder, but think of the whole situation.

To be on the side of people who are struggling for something

doesn't necessarily mean you are being political.

I would say that Bob was gifted, and it was flowering.

He had a great desire to change the world.

We even talked about it.

We thought that segregation wasn't gonna last

and that we were gonna have something to do with ending it.

We really believed we were gonna have a part,

as songwriters, in changing the world.

I had first laid eyes on Bob in Gerde's Folk City.

I had been told about him.

This guy's a genius, and he writes these incredible songs,

and he admires Woody Guthrie, and all this stuff.

I was very dubious, you know,

when people raved about somebody other than myself.

But I went, and sure enough,

he was everything that they had said he was.

We both had our baby fat.

That's what I think of when I look at the early pictures.

Smooth skin, baby fat. We were really young.

Bob looked like a ragamuffin.

Probably one of the things I found so appealing about him.

He would bring out the mother instinct

in a woman who thought her mother instinct was dead.

He came out and stayed with me in a beautiful house in Carmel Valley.

Bob liked to write there.

And he would just stand, tapping away at that typewriter.

He would always say, "What do you think of this?"

And I wouldn't understand the thing at all, but I loved it.

So I went, "Okay, I'm gonna figure this one out." So I read through it.

And I gave back my interpretation of what I thought it was about.

He said, "That's pretty fucking good."

He would say, "See now, a bunch of years from now,

all these people, all these assholes

are gonna be writing about all the shit I write.

I don't know where the fuck it comes from.

I don't know what the fuck it's about.

And they're gonna write what it's about."

Bob would write. Just write and write and write.

And one time, we pulled into some place

and I was okay by then. Bare feet or not, I was famous.

But this scruffy-looking guy I had with me,

and the people behind the desk were having none of it,

and they said they didn't have a room.

And now, of course, I was livid

and pulled all my punches, and got him a room.

And he wrote a song that just was devastating,

"The Hour The Ship Comes In".

And I could see him hanging them all.

He'd never sort of fess up to that sort of thing

but that's what it seemed like to me.

Working out whatever feelings...

...he might have had about not being given a room

in a brilliant song, in one night.

You had country folks and city folks there.

We'd purposely tried to mix it up at Newport.

There was Johnny Cash.

And then you had O.J. Abbott singing some of the ballads he knew

as a young man working in the lumber camps.

Right side by side.

There were 15,000 people, and that seemed to me just immense.

Everyone was there who played folk music. Old and new.

Sort of younger people, too.

We kind of bonded in a way, music-wise, you know?

What we were singing and what he was writing.

I was the only singer there probably singing the songs that he'd written.

And most likely, two years earlier to that,

I wouldn't have been able to get into Newport.

It was quite a sensation.

He was singing a lot of what they called then "protest songs."

I've always hated that designation.

And it was very much...

...in the spirit of the time.

Pete and the crowd around Broadside magazine

had fallen head over heels in love with him.

There was Woody Guthrie, transition to Pete Seeger,

who carried on Woody's tradition.

Now who was to carry on from Pete Seeger?

And in that spot, really, came Bob Dylan.

So we began to recognize that Bobby

would be the continuation in that tradition.

I wrote this song. It tells a story...

...if you like stories.

- Maybe it doesn't do anything. - Maybe it doesn't tell a story.

It was very, very exciting. I felt,

you know, it was, like, Bob was my pal.

We were involved in the same thing.

And I knew he was gonna be a massive star, and I liked that.

Let me say something?

We just have to sing one, that's all. That's the introduction.

I wrote a lot of songs in a quick amount of time.

I could do that then,

because the process was new to me.

I felt like...

...I'd discovered something no one else had ever discovered...

...and I was in a sort of an arena artistically

that no one else had ever been in before, ever,

although I might have been wrong about that.

I was on top of this 1 2-foot station and I had a long lens.

I was looking at Bob Dylan coming out on stage.

He was Charlie Chaplin. He was Dylan Thomas.

He talked like Woody Guthrie. He was constantly moving.

In old Irish mythology, they talk about the shape-changers.

He changed voices. He changed images.

It wasn't necessary for him to be a definitive person.

He was a receiver.

He was possessed.

And he articulated...

what the rest of us wanted to say but couldn't say.

It's almost enough to make you...

...believe in Jung's notion of collective unconscious.

That if there is an American collective unconscious,

if you could believe in something like that,

that Bobby had somehow tapped into it.

And there were always these...

...sometimes very faint resonances.

In taking all the elements that I've ever known

to make wide-sweeping statements which conveyed a feeling,

that was in the general essence of the spirit of the times.

I think I managed to do that.

I thought that I needed to press on

and get as far into it as I could.

I would like to say that he has his finger

on the pulse of our generation.

Bob Dylan.

There will be singing through the night in the town of Newport.