Chronicles, Volume One

by Bob Dylan

  I couldn’t play like Glover or anything, and didn’t try to. I played mostly like Woody Guthrie and that was about it. Glover’s playing was known and talked about around town, but nobody commented on mine. The only comment that I ever got was a few years later in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room on Lower Broadway in New York City. Sonny Boy Williamson was there and he heard me playing, said, “Boy, you play too fast.”

  Eventually, it was time for me to get out of Minneapolis. Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be and one snowy morning around daybreak after sleeping in the back room of the Purple Onion pizza parlor in St. Paul, the place where Koerner and I played…with only a few tattered rags in a suitcase and a guitar and harmonica rack, I stood on the edge of town and hitchhiked east to find Woody Guthrie. He was still the man. It was freezing and although I might have been slack in a lot of things, my mind was ordered and disciplined and I didn’t feel the cold. Soon I was rolling through the snowy Wisconsin prairie fields, the looming shadows of Baez and Elliott were not far from my heels. The world I was heading into, although it would undergo a lot of changes, was really the world of Jack Elliott and Joan Baez. However true that might have been, I, too, had the axe in my hands and needed to tear out of there, head off to where life promised something more—felt that my own voice and guitar would be equal to the situation.

  New York City, midwinter, 1961. Whatever I was doing was working out okay and I intended to stay with it, felt like I was closing in on something. I was playing on the regular bill at the Village Gaslight, the premier club on the carnivalesque MacDougal Street. When I began working there, the Gaslight was owned by John Mitchell, a renegade and raconteur, a Brooklynite. I only saw him a few times. He was ornery and combatant, had an exotic looking girlfriend who Jack Kerouac had based a novel on. Mitchell was already legendary. The Village was heavily Italian, and Mitchell hadn’t taken even one step back from the local mafiosos. It was a known fact that he didn’t make payoffs out of principle. The fire marshals, the police and the health inspectors were routinely invading the place. Mitchell, though, had lawyers and he took his battles to city hall and somehow the place stayed open. Mitchell carried a pistol and a knife. He also was a master carpenter. During my time there, some Mississippians bought the place sight unseen from a business opportunity ad in a magazine down South. Mitchell didn’t tell anybody he was selling the club or that it would change ownership. He just sold the place and left the country.

  The gothic folk club was located in the basement below the street, but it didn’t seem like a basement because the floor had been lowered. About six or eight main performers alternated from darkness until dawn. The pay was sixty dollars weekly cash, at least that’s what it was for me. Some performers might have been paid more. It was a huge step above the Greenwich Village basket-house scene.

  Noel Stookey who later became part of Peter, Paul and Mary was the MC. Noel was an impressionist, a comedian and a singer and guitar player. He worked in a camera store during the day. At night he was dressed in a neat three-piece suit, was immaculately groomed, a little goatee, tall and lanky, Roman nose. Some people might have described him as aloof. Stookey looked like someone torn out of a page of some ancient magazine. He could imitate just about anything—clogged water pipes and toilets flushing, steamships and sawmills, traffic, violins and trombones. He could imitate singers imitating other singers. He was very funny. One of his more outrageous imitations was Dean Martin imitating Little Richard.

  Hugh Romney, who later became the psychedelic clown Wavy Gravy, also performed down there. When he was Hugh Romney, he was the straightest looking cat you’d ever seen—always smartly dressed, usually in Brooks Brothers light gray suits. Romney was a monologist, gave long, intimate, unestablishmentarian raps, had squinty eyes, you could never tell if they were closed or opened. It was as if his sight was impaired. He’d walk onstage, squint into the blue spotlight and begin talking like he had just taken a long voyage and come back from a distant realm—like he had just gotten here from Constantinople or Cairo and he was going to enlighten you into some archaic mystery. It wasn’t so much what he said, it was just in the way he said it. There were a few others around who did what he did, but Romney was the most known. Romney had been influenced by but was in no way on the same level as Lord Buckley.

  Buckley was the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels. No sulking Beat poet, he was a raging storyteller who did riffs on all kinds of things from supermarkets to bombs and the crucifixion. He did raps on characters like Gandhi and Julius Caesar. Buckley had even organized something called the Church of the Living Swing (a jazz church). With stretched out words, Buckley had a magical way of speaking. Everybody, including me, was influenced by him in one way or another. He died about a year before I got to town so I never got to see him; heard his records, though.

  Some of the other musicians at the Gaslight were Hal Waters, an interpreter who sang folk songs in a refined way, John Wynn, who played gut-string guitar and sang folk songs in an operatic voice. Someone closer in temperament to me was Luke Faust, a five-string banjo player and singer who sang Appalachian ballads, another guy named Luke Askew, who later became an actor in Hollywood. Luke was from Georgia and he sang Muddy and Wolf and Jimmy Reed songs. He didn’t play guitar but he had a guitar player. Luke was a white guy who sounded like Bobby Blue Bland.

  Len Chandler played at the Gaslight, too. Len had originally come from Ohio and was a serious musician who had played oboe in the orchestra back home and could read and write and arrange symphonic music. He sang quasi-folk stuff with a commercial bent and was energetic, had that thing that people call charisma. Len performed like he was mowing down things. His personality overrode his repertoire. Len also wrote topical songs, front-page things.

  Paul Clayton occasionally played sets down here, too. Paul got all his versions of songs by adapting transcriptions from old texts. He knew hundreds of songs and must have had a photographic memory. Clayton was unique—elegiac, very princely—part Yankee gentleman and part Southern rakish dandy. He dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare. Clayton traveled regularly from Virginia to New York and back, and we got to be friends. His companions were out-of-towners and like him, a “caste apart”—had attitudes, but known only to themselves—a non-folky crowd. Authentic nonconformists—scufflers, but not the Kerouac types, not down and outers, not the kind that run the streets whose activities could be recognized. I liked Clayton and I liked his friends. Through Paul I met people here and there who said to me it was okay to stay at their apartments any time I needed it, and not to worry about it.

  Clayton was good friends with Van Ronk, too. Dave Van Ronk, he was the one performer I burned to learn particulars from. He was great on records, but in person he was greater. Van Ronk was from Brooklyn, had seaman’s papers, a wide walrus mustache, long brown straight hair which flew down covering half his face. He turned every folk song into a surreal melodrama, a theatrical piece—suspenseful, down to the last minute. Dave got to the bottom of things. It was like he had an endless supply of poison and I wanted some…couldn’t do without it. Van Ronk seemed ancient, battle tested. Every night I felt like I was sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument. Dave sang folk songs, jazz standards, Dixieland stuff and blues ballads, not in any particular order and not a superfluous nuance in his entire repertoire. Songs that were delicate, expansive, personal, historical, or ethereal, you name it. He put everything into a hat and—presto—put a new thing out in the sun. I was greatly influenced by Dave. Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It’s not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine.

  Van Ronk’s voice was like rusted shrapnel and he could get a lot of subtl
e ramifications out of it—delicate, gentle, rough, explosive, sometimes all within the same song. He could conjure up anything—expressions of terror, expressions of despair. He also was an expert guitar player. All that, and he had a sardonic humorous side, too. I felt different towards Van Ronk than anyone else on the scene because it was him who brought me into the fold and I was happy to be playing alongside him night after night at the Gaslight. It was a real stage with a real audience and it was where the real action was. Van Ronk helped me in other ways, too. His apartment on Waverly Place had a couch I could crash on any time I wanted to. He also showed me around the regular haunts of Greenwich Village—the other clubs, mostly jazz clubs like Trudy Heller’s, the Vanguard, the Village Gate and the Blue Note, and I got to see a lot of the jazz greats close up. As a performer Van Ronk did something else that I found intriguing.

  One of his patented dramatic effects would be to stare intently at somebody in the crowd. He’d pin their eyes like he was singing just to them, whispering some secret, telling somebody something where their lives hung in the balance. He also never phrased the same thing the same way twice. Sometimes I’d hear him play the same song that he’d done in a previous set and it would hit me in a completely different way. He’d play something, and it was like I’d never heard it before, or not quite the way I remembered it. His pieces were perversely complex, although very simple. He had it all down and could hypnotize an audience or stun them, or he could make them scream and holler. Whatever he wanted. He was built like a lumberjack, drank hard, said little and had his territory staked out—full forward, all cylinders working. David was the grand dragon. If you were on MacDougal Street in the evening and out to see somebody play, he’d be the first and last vital choice of the night. He’d towered over the street like a mountain but would never break into the big time. It just wasn’t where he pictured himself. He didn’t want to give up too much. No puppet strings on him ever. He was big, sky high, and I looked up to him. He came from the land of giants.

  Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics—not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. Intellectually it would be hard to keep up. If you tried, you’d find yourself in alien territory. Both were anti-imperialistic, antimaterialist. “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,” Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”

  Terri had managed to get Dave booked in places like Boston and Philly…even as far away as St. Louis at a folk club called Laughing Buddha. For me, those gigs were out of the question. You needed at least one record out even if it was on a small label to get work in any of those clubs. She did manage to come up with a few things in places like Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Hartford—once at a folk club in Pittsburgh, another in Montreal. Scattered things. Mostly I stayed around in New York City. I didn’t really want to go out of town. If I wanted to be out of town, I wouldn’t have come to New York City in the first place. I was fortunate to have the regular gig at the Gaslight and wasn’t on any wild goose chase to go anywhere. I could breathe. I was free. Didn’t feel constrained. Between sets I mostly hung out, drank shooters of Wild Turkey and iced Schlitz at the Kettle of Fish Tavern next door and played cards upstairs at the Gaslight. Things were working out fine. I was learning all I could and stayed keyed up. Once Terri offered to bring me over to meet Jac Holzman, who operated Elektra Records, one of the companies that released some of Dave’s stuff. “I can get you an appointment. Do you want to sit down with him?” “I don’t want to sit down with anybody, no.” The idea didn’t contain too much for me. Sometime later in the summer Terri managed to get me on a live radio folk extravaganza broadcast from Riverside Church up on Riverside Drive. Things were about to change for me again, to get new and strange.

  Backstage the humidity was soaring. Performers came and went, waited to go on and milled around. As usual, the real show was backstage. I was talking to a dark-haired girl, Carla Rotolo, who I knew a little bit. Carla was Alan Lomax’s personal assistant. Carla introduced me to her sister. Her sister’s name was Susie but she spelled it Suze. Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled by my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard. Suze was seventeen years old, from the East Coast. Had grown up in Queens, raised in a left-wing family. Her father had worked in a factory and had recently died. She was involved in the New York art scene, painted and made drawings for various publications, worked in graphic design and in Off-Broadway theatrical productions, also worked on civil rights committees—she could do a lot of things. Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1,001 Arabian nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a particular type of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life. She reminded me of a libertine heroine. She was just my type.

  For the next week or so I thought of her a lot—couldn’t shut her out of my mind, was hoping I’d run into her. I felt like I was in love for the first time in my life, could feel her vibe thirty miles away—wanted her body next to mine. Now. Right now. Movies had always been a magical experience and the Times Square movie theaters, the ones like oriental temples were the best places to see them. Recently I’d seen Quo Vadis and The Robe, and now I went to sit through Atlantis, Lost Continent and King of Kings. I needed to shift my mind, get it off of Suze for a while. King of Kings starred Rip Torn, Rita Gam, and Jeffrey Hunter playing Christ. Even with all the heavy action on the screen, I couldn’t tune into it. When the second feature, Atlantis, Lost Continent played, it was just as bad. All the death-ray crystals, giant fish submarines, earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves and whatnot. It might have been the most exciting movie of all time, who knows? I couldn’t concentrate.

  As fate would have it, I ran into Carla again and asked about her sister. Carla asked me if I’d like to see her. I said, “Yeah, you don’t know how much,” and she said, “Oh, she’d like to see you, too.” Soon we met up and began to see each other more and more. Eventually we got to be pretty inseparable. Outside of my music, being with her seemed to be the main point in life. Maybe we were spiritual soul-mates.

  Her mother Mary, though, who worked as a translator for medical journals, wasn’t having it. Mary lived on the top floor of an apartment building on Sheridan Square and treated me like I had the clap. If she would have had her way, the cops would have locked me up. Suze’s mom was a small feisty woman—volatile with black eyes like twin coals that could burn a hole through you, was very protective. Always make you feel like you did something wrong. She thought I had a nameless way of life and would never be able to support anybody, but I think it went much deeper than that. I think I just came in at a bad time.

  “How much did that guitar cost?” she asked me once.

  “Not much.”

  “I know, not much, but still something.”

  “Almost nothing,” I said.

  She glared at me, cigarette in her mouth. She was always trying to goad me into some kind of argument. My presence was so displeasing to her, but it’s not like I’d caused any trouble in her life. It wasn’t me who was responsible for the loss of Suze’s father or anything. Once I said to her that I didn’t think she was being fair. She stared squarely into my eyes like she was staring at some distant, visible object and said to me, “Do me a favor, don’t think when I’m around.” Suze would tell me later that she didn’t mean it. She did mean it, though. She did everything in her power to keep us apart,
but we went on seeing each other anyway.

  This stifling scene was becoming problematic, signaling to me that I needed to get my own place, one with my own bed, stove and tables. It was about time. I guess it could have happened earlier, but I liked staying with others. It was less of a hassle, easier, with little responsibility—places where I could freely come and go, sometimes even with a key, rooms with plenty of hardback books on shelves and stacks of phonograph records. When I wasn’t doing anything else, I’d thumb through the books and listen to records.

  Not having a place of my own now was beginning to affect my supersensitive nature, so after being in town close to a year, I rented a third floor walk-up apartment at 161 West 4th Street at sixty dollars a month. It wasn’t much, just two rooms above Bruno’s spaghetti parlor, next door to the local record store and a furniture supply shop on the other side. The apartment had a tiny bedroom, more like a large closet, and a kitchenette, a living room with a fireplace and two windows that looked out over fire escapes and small courtyards. There was barely room enough for one person and the heat went off after dark and the place had to be heated by keeping both gas burners up full blast. It came empty. Quickly after moving in I built some furniture for the place. With some borrowed tools, I made a couple of tables, one which doubled as a desk. I also put together a cabinet and a bed frame. All the wood pieces had come from the store downstairs, and I fastened everything together with the accompanying hardware—galvanized nails, knockers and hinge plates, 3/8-inch square pieces of wrought iron, brass and copper, roundheaded wood screws. I didn’t have to go far to get that stuff, it was all downstairs. I put it all together with hacksaws, cold chisels and screwdrivers—even made a couple of mirrors using an old technique I learned in a high school shop woodworking class using plates of glass, mercury and tin foil.