by Bob Dylan
I knew I was doing things right, was on the right road, was getting all the knowledge immediately and firsthand—memorizing words and melodies and changes, but now I saw that it could take me the rest of my life to make practical use of that knowledge and Mike didn’t have to do that. He was just right there. He was too good and you can’t be “too good,” not in this world, anyway. In order to be as good as that, you’d just about have to be him, and nobody else. Folk songs are evasive—the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn’t be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who’s playing and who’s listening.
The thought occurred to me that maybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know. That was a startling thought. Up ’til then, I’d gone some places and thought I knew my way around. And then it struck me that I’d never been there before. You open a door to a dark room and you think you know what’s there, where everything is arranged, but you really don’t know until you step inside. I can’t say I’d seen any performances that were like spiritual experiences until I went to Lomax’s loft. I pondered it. I wasn’t ready to act on any of it but knew somehow, though, that if I wanted to stay playing music, that I would have to claim a larger part of myself. I would have to overlook a lot of things—a lot of things that might even need attention—but that was all right. They were things that I probably felt totally powerless over, anyway. I had the map, could even draw it freehand if I had to. Now I knew I’d have to throw it away. Not today, not tonight, sometime soon, though.
At Camilla’s apartment, Moe Asch was chatting with Mike. They were just standing there like people who knew what they were talking about. Moe’s Folkways Records put out all The Ramblers stuff and that’s the label that captured my attention the most. It would have been a dream come true if Moe would have signed me to the label. It was time for me and Delores to leave, so I said good-bye to Cisco, talked with him for a moment—told him that I’d been visiting Woody Guthrie in the hospital. Cisco smiled, said that Woody never tried to camouflage anything, did he, and told me to say hello to him next time I went. I nodded, said good-bye, walked out into the hallway and down the stairs…went out through the lobby.
Outside Delores and I stopped and looked up at the Romanesque pillars surmounted by carved mythological beasts. It was freezing cold. I put my hands in my pockets and we headed off towards 6th Avenue. There was a lot of action and people on the street and I watched them go by. T. S. Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to and fro, and everybody taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away. That’s what it looked like that night and often would for some time to come. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life…I felt like that, too. Somebody told me a few weeks later that Cisco had died.
America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a place to be as any. My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch. One thing for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out. It would have to come on its own from the outside. Without knowing it in so many words, it was beginning to happen.
Sometimes Paul Clayton and Ray would talk through the night. They called New York City the capital of the world. They would sit at two tables…either they’d lean back against the wall or forward on the table, drink coffee and glasses of brandy. Clayton, a good friend of Van Ronk’s, was from New Bedford, Mass., the whaling town—he sang a lot of sea shanties, had a Puritan ancestry, but some of his old relatives had been from the early Virginia families. Clayton had a log cabin outside of Charlottesville, too, where he used to go from time to time. Later on, a few of us went down there and hung around for a week or so in the mountains. The place had no electricity or plumbing or anything; kerosene lamps lit the place at night with reflective mirrors.
Ray, who was from Virginia, had ancestors who had fought on both sides of the Civil War. I’d lean back against the wall and shut my eyes. Their voices drifting into my head like voices talking from another world. They talked about dogs and fishing and forest fires—love and monarchies, and the Civil War. Ray had said that New York City was the city that won the Civil War, came out on top—that the wrong side had lost, that slavery was evil and that the thing would have died out anyway, Lincoln or no Lincoln. I heard him say it and thought it was a mysterious and bad thing to say, but if he said it, he said it and that’s all there is to it.
When I woke up later in the day, the place was empty. After a while I walked downstairs and left to go meet a singing pal of mine, Mark Spoelstra. We planned to meet up at a creepy but convenient little coffeehouse on Bleecker Street near Thompson run by a character called the Dutchman. The Dutchman resembled Rasputin, the Siberian mad monk. He held the lease on the place. It was mostly a jazz coffeehouse where Cecil Taylor played a lot. I played there with Cecil once. We played “The Water Is Wide,” the old folk song. Cecil could play regular piano if he wanted to. I had also played with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry there. From the coffeehouse, Mark and I were going to walk over to Gerde’s Folk City and run over some songs with Brother John Sellers, a Mississippi gospel blues singer who MC’d the shows there.
I was heading to meet Mark, walking along Carmine Street, past the garages, the barbershops and dry cleaners, hardware stores. Radio sounds came shifting out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline. The coffeehouses and folk music joints were only a few blocks away, but it seemed like miles would go by.
When I got to the place, Spoelstra was already there and so was the Dutchman. The Dutchman was lying dead in the doorway of his storefront. There were splotches of blood on the ice and red lines in the snow, like spiderwebs. The old man who owned the building had been waiting for him and had stuck a knife in him. The Dutchman was still wearing his fur hat, long brown overcoat and riding boots, and his head was propped up on the stoop under the pearl gray sky. The problem had something to do with the Dutchman refusing to pay his rent and being belligerent about it. A lot of times he’d force the old man out physically. The little old man had taken enough and snapped, he must have thrown himself through the air like Houdini. It must have taken much skill and faculty to stick a knife through the heavy brown overcoat. Seeing the Dutchman lying there, his long brown stringy hair and frosted beard, he looked like a mercenary who could have fallen at Gettysburg. The old man was sitting inside with the door open, facing the sidewalk surrounded by a couple of cops. His face was misshapen, looked queer formed, almost mutilated—like putty in color. His eyes were dead, and he had no idea where he was.
A few people were passing by and not even looking. Spoelstra and I walked away, headed towards Sullivan Street. “It’s sad. Makes you sorry as hell, but what can you do?” he said, not like he expected any answer. “Sure it is,” I said. But I wasn’t sorry. The only thing that I was thinking was that it was unpleasant and sick and that I might not ever go back into this joint again, and probably never would.
The power of the scene somehow jarred my mind, though—maybe because I’d just heard talk about it the previous night, but it reminded me of some old still images I’d seen of the Civil War. How much did I know about that cataclysmic event? Probably close to nothing. There weren’t any great battles fought out where I grew up. No Chancellorsvilles, Bull Runs, Fredericksburgs or Peachtree Creeks. What I knew about it, was that it was a war fought about states’ rights and it ended slavery. It seemed odd, but I became curious to know more and so I asked Van Ronk, who was as politically minded as anybody, what he knew about states’ rights. Van Ronk could talk all day about socialist heavens and political utopias—bourgeois democracies and Tro
tskyites and Marxists, and international workers’ orders—he could grasp all that stuff firmly, but about states’ rights he almost looked be-mused. “The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,” he said, “there’s no mystery to it.” But then again, Van Ronk would never let you forget that he had his own way of seeing things. “Look, my man, even if those elite Southern barons would have freed their captives, it wouldn’t have done them any good. We still would have gone down there and annihilated them, invaded them for their land. It’s called imperialism.” Van Ronk took the Marxist point of view. “It was one big battle between two rival economic systems is what it was.”
One thing about Van Ronk, what he said was never dull or muddy. We sang the same type of songs and all of these songs were originally sung by singers who seemed to be groping for words, almost in an alien tongue. I was beginning to feel that maybe the language had something to do with causes and ideals that were tied to the circumstances and blood of what happened over a hundred years ago over secession from the Union—at least to those generations who were caught in it. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem that far back.
Once I was talking to the folks back home and my father got on the line, asked me where I was. I told him that I was in New York City, the capital of the world. He said, “That’s a good joke.” But it wasn’t a joke. New York City was the magnet—the force that draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and everything will fall apart.
Ray had flowing, wavy, blond hair like Jerry Lee Lewis or Billy Graham, the evangelist—the kind of hair that preachers had. The kind that the early rock-and-roll singers used to imitate and want to look like. The kind that could create a cult. Ray wasn’t a preacher, though, but he knew how to be one and he could be funny. He said if he preached to farmers, he’d tell them about plowing the furrows with seeds of love and then reaping the harvest of salvation. He could preach to businessmen, too. He would say stuff like, “Sisters and brothers, there’s no profit in trading in sin! Everlasting life is not bought and sold.” He had a sermon for just about anybody. Ray was a Southerner and made no bones about it, but he would have been antislavery as much as he would have been antiunion. “Slavery should have been outlawed from the start,” he said. “It was diabolical. Slave power makes it impossible for free workers to make a decent living—it had to be destroyed.” Ray was pragmatic. Sometimes it was as if he had no heart or soul.
There were about five or six rooms in the apartment. In one of them was this magnificent rolltop desk, sturdy looking, almost indestructible—oak wood with secret drawers and a double sided clock on the mantel, carved nymphs and a medallion of Minerva—mechanical devices to release hidden drawers, upper side panels and gilt bronze mounts emblematic of mathematics and astronomy. It was incredible. I sat down at it, firm footed, and pulled out a sheet of paper and dashed off a letter to my cousin Reenie. Reenie and I were pretty close growing up—we rode the same bicycle, one of those Schwinns with coaster brakes. Sometimes she’d come along with me when I played at different places, even embroidered a shirt for me to play in that was pretty flashy, and she sewed stripes of ribbon down the sides of a pair of pants.
One time she asked me why I was using a different name when I played, especially in the neighboring towns. Like, didn’t I want people to know who I was? “Who’s Elston Gunn?” she asked. “That’s not you, is it?” “Ah,” I said, “you’ll see.” The Elston Gunn name thing was only temporary. What I was going to do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert Allen. As far as I was concerned, that was who I was—that’s what my parents named me. It sounded like the name of a Scottish king and I liked it. There was little of my identity that wasn’t in it. What kind of confused me later was seeing an article in a Downbeat magazine with a story about a West Coast saxophone player named David Allyn. I had suspected that the musician had changed the spelling of Allen to Allyn. I could see why. It looked more exotic, more inscrutable. I was going to do this, too. Instead of Robert Allen it would be Robert Allyn. Then sometime later, unexpectedly, I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thomas. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. Robert Allyn. I couldn’t decide—the letter D came on stronger. But Robert Dylan didn’t look or sound as good as Robert Allyn. People had always called me either Robert or Bobby, but Bobby Dylan sounded too skittish to me and besides, there already was a Bobby Darin, a Bobby Vee, a Bobby Rydell, a Bobby Neely and a lot of other Bobbys. Bob Dylan looked and sounded better than Bob Allyn. The first time I was asked my name in the Twin Cities, I instinctively and automatically without thinking simply said, “Bob Dylan.”
Now, I had to get used to people calling me Bob. I’d never been called that before, and it took me some time to respond to people who called me that. As far as Bobby Zimmerman goes, I’m going to give this to you right straight and you can check it out. One of the early presidents of the San Bernardino Angels was Bobby Zimmerman, and he was killed in 1964 on the Bass Lake run. The muffler fell off his bike, he made a U-turn to retrieve it in front of the pack and was instantly killed. That person is gone. That was the end of him.
I finished the letter to Reenie and signed it Bobby. That’s how she knew me and always would. Spelling is important. If I would have had to choose between Robert Dillon or Robert Allyn, I would have picked Robert Allyn, because it looked better in print. The name Bob Allyn never would have worked—sounded like a used-car salesman. I’d suspected that Dylan must have been Dillon at one time and that that guy changed the spelling, too, but there was no way to prove it.
Speaking of Bobbys, my old friend and fellow performer Bobby Vee had a new song out on the charts called “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Bobby Vee was from Fargo, North Dakota, raised not too far from me. In the summer of ’59 he had a regional hit record out called “Suzie Baby” on a local label. His band was called The Shadows and I had hitchhiked out there and talked my way into joining his group as a piano player on some of his local gigs, one in the basement of a church. I played a few shows with him, but he really didn’t need a piano player and, besides, it was hard finding a piano that was in tune in the halls that he played.
Bobby Vee and me had a lot in common, even though our paths would take such different directions. We had the same musical history and came from the same place at the same point of time. He had gotten out of the Midwest, too, and had made it to Hollywood. Bobby had a metallic, edgy tone to his voice and it was as musical as a silver bell, like Buddy Holly’s, only deeper. When I knew him, he was a great rockabilly singer and now he had crossed over and was a pop star. He recorded for Liberty Records and was having one Top 40 hit after another. He’d still be having songs hit the charts even right alongside The Beatles when they invaded the country. His current song, “Take Good Care of My Baby,” was as slick as ever.
I wanted to see him again, so I took the D train out to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Flatbush Avenue where he was appearing with The Shirelles, Danny and the Juniors, Jackie Wilson, Ben E. King, Maxine Brown, and some others. He was on the top of the heap now. It seemed like so much had happened to him in such a short time. Bobby came out to see me, was as down-to-earth as ever, was wearing a shiny silk suit and narrow tie, seemed genuinely glad to see me, didn’t even act surprised. We talked for a little while. He asked me about New York, what it was like to be here. “Lot of walking. Got to keep your feet in good shape,” I said.
I told him I was playing in the folk clubs, but it was impossible to give him any indication of what it was all about. His only reference would have been The Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, stuff like that. He’d become a crowd pleaser in the pop world. As for myself, I had nothing against pop songs, but the definition of pop was changing. They just didn’t seem to be as good as they used to be. I loved songs like “Without a Song,” “Old Man River,” “Stardust” and hundreds of others. My favorite of all the new ones was “Moon River.” I could sing that in my sleep. My Huckleberry friend, too, was up there, waiting ’round the bend maybe on 14th Street. At Ray’s, w
here there weren’t many folk records, I used to play the phenomenal “Ebb Tide” by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice—death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much.
Standing there with Bobby, I didn’t want to act selfishly on his time so we said good-bye and I walked down the side of the theater and out through one of the side doors. There were throngs of young girls waiting for him in the cold outside the building. I cut back out through them into the press of cabs and private cars plowing slowly through the icy streets and headed back to the subway station. I wouldn’t see Bobby Vee again for another thirty years, and though things would be a lot different, I’d always thought of him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name somewhere, it was like he was in the room.
Greenwich Village was full of folk clubs, bars and coffeehouses, and those of us who played them all played the old-timey folk songs, rural blues and dance tunes. There were a few who wrote their own songs, like Tom Paxton and Len Chandler and because they used old melodies with new words they were pretty much accepted. Both Len and Tom wrote topical songs—songs where you’d pick articles out of newspapers, fractured, demented stuff—some nun getting married, a high school teacher taking a flying leap off the Brooklyn Bridge, tourists who robbed a gas station, Broadway beauty being beaten and left in the snow, things like that. Len could usually fashion some song out of all that, found some kind of angle. Tom’s songs were topical, too, even though his most famous song, “Last Thing on My Mind,” was a yearning romantic ballad. I wrote a couple and slipped them into my repertoire but really didn’t think they were here nor there.