Chronicles: Volume One

Dylan played songs for Lou Levy after John Hammond decided to bring him on to Columbia Records. The song that had caught Hammond’s interest was an original tune that was Dylan’s homage to Woody Guthrie.

Dylan first heard Guthrie in the summer of 1959, which he had spent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after leaving his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. Dylan had spent his adolescence “bid[ing] [his] time” (232). He “knew there was a bigger world out there” (232), but he wasn’t in a hurry to join it. In Duluth, Dylan had had a typical childhood of “small town stuff” (234): fishing, swimming, playing ice hockey, and shooting BB guns. He and his family went to the drive-in movie theater, saw the three-ring circus when it came through town, and watched the softball team. In Minneapolis, Dylan “felt liberated and gone” (234). He had arrived in the city with the address of a cousin’s fraternity house, where he slept in a small room upstairs.

In Minneapolis, he was “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it” (235). His life revolved around folk music, “a reality of a more brilliant dimension” (236), but he struggled to find songs that were relevant to the modern world. He found a music store where he listened to records and met other musicians to play with and expand his repertoire. As he learned classic songs like “Old Greybeard,” Dylan began “to feel like a character from within these songs” (240). Folk records were often hard to come by because there was little demand, so Dylan and his new friends often traversed the city to hear something new. One day, a woman named Flo Castner asked if Dylan knew Woody Guthrie. Dylan had heard Guthrie play with other musicians but wasn’t familiar with any of his solo stuff. Flo invited him to listen to records at her brother’s Lyn’s place, insisting that “Woody Guthrie was somebody that [he] should definitely get hip to” (243).

At Lyn’s, Dylan spent the whole afternoon listening to Guthrie “as if in a trance” (244). The music stunned Dylan; the experience “was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor” (244). He got his hands on Guthrie’s autobiography, which he read “cover to cover like a hurricane” (245), and returned to Lyn’s house over and over to listen to his records. He decided to become “Guthrie’s greatest disciple” (246); soon Guthrie’s songs had taken over Dylan’s entire repertoire. He felt as if Guthrie himself giving him his songs and leaving them in his care.

Dylan felt invincible playing Guthrie’s songs until Jon Pankake, a literature teacher, film critic, and “folk music purist enthusiast” (248), called him out on it. Dylan would “never turn into Woody Guthrie” (250), Pankake warned, and he couldn’t even be like Jack Elliott, another singer who had imitated Guthrie. Dylan listened to Elliott’s records and “felt like [he]’d been cast into sudden hell” (251), since Elliot played Guthrie’s songs perfectly and “was a brilliant entertainer” (251). Dylan pretended that he hadn’t heard Elliott play. The other man was far away in Europe anyway, so Dylan continued “hunting for Guthrie songs” (252) and becoming an imitation Elliott.

If Jack Elliott was the folksingers’ king, Joan Baez was their queen. She looked and sounded “like she’d come down from another planet” (254), and the first time Dylan saw her play, “[t]he sight of her made [him] high” (254). Baez was already successful, selling lots of records and singing “in an expert way, beyond criticism, beyond category” (255). Most importantly, she made her listeners believe in her authenticity. 

Dylan headed for New York, hoping to track down Woody Guthrie. By mid-winter in 1961, Dylan was playing regularly at the Gaslight, a gothic basement folk club. It was a good gig; he was joined by the likes of Len Chandler, Hal Waters, and Paul Clayton. There was Dave Van Ronk, from whom Dylan “burned to learn particulars” (261). Dylan admired Van Ronk’s presence, both live and recorded. His folk songs were “surreal melodramas” that held listeners in suspense, and watching him play “felt like […] sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument” (261). When Dylan started recording, Van Ronk’s influence was clear. Van Ronk also let Dylan crash on his couch and helped him get acquainted with Greenwich Village. Terri, Van Ronk’s wife, managed her husband’s bookings and helped Dylan find gigs, too. Dylan didn’t yet have the clout to play at big folk clubs in other cities, but she booked him some shows at smaller places across New England. Mostly, however, Dylan stayed in New York, content to play at the Gaslight, learning from the other performers.

Then, Terri booked Dylan on a live radio folk show, where he met a young woman named Suze and quickly fell in love. When he ran into Suze’s sister in the city, he discovered that Suze felt the same. They began seeing each other and soon became inseparable. Suze’s mother did not approve of Dylan, but that didn’t stop them.

Dylan moved into a simple one-bedroom walk-up above an Italian restaurant on West 4th Street. The apartment was nothing special, but Dylan enjoyed the feeling of having a place of his own. He bought a mattress, a small dresser, a rug, and a used TV. Suze helped “broaden [his] horizons” (267); they went to off-Broadway shows, spent time “where the artists and painters hung out” (268), and saw art shows. Dylan was inspired to draw, sitting at the table where he would soon write songs. One of Suze’s favorite artists was the modernist Red Grooms. Dylan felt Grooms’s work had “all the carnie vitality” (269) of folk music, and he wondered what it would be like to write songs that resembled Grooms’s art.

However, Dylan felt that “the greatest songs” had already been written by Woody Guthrie and felt no need “to reweave the world” (270). He worked on a “slightly ironic” song based on an old ballad by Roy Acuff that was inspired by the fallout shelter craze, but his “little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral” (271). Dylan’s songwriting revelation came when Suze worked on a musical featuring the songs of mid-20th century German composer Bertolt Brecht. Dylan “was aroused straight away by the raw intensity of the songs” (272); they were similar to folk songs, but more sophisticated. One song, “Pirate Jenny,” about a maid in a waterfront hotel who gives the call to kill a line of chained gentlemen, was particularly captivating. The song featured foghorns that took Dylan back to the waterfront of his childhood. Dylan describes the song as “wild” with “[b]ig medicine in the lyrics” (274). Dylan dissected the song, hoping to understand it better. He was “impressed by the physical and ideological possibilities within the confines of the lyric and melody” (276), which pushed him toward understand what kind of songs he might want to write. He tried writing a song about “a tawdry incident about a hooker in Cleveland” (276) that he read about in the Police Gazette.

Dylan and Suze’s relationship eventually fizzled, but they were still together when Dylan began recording for Columbia Records. The recording deal was the result of an unexpected series of events. John Hammond first heard Dylan play when fellow musician Carolyn Hester asked Dylan to play harmonica on some tracks for her upcoming album; Hammond came over to hear what she was thinking of recording. Dylan was totally focused on Hester’s music and didn’t notice Hammond. On his way out, Hammond asked Dylan if he was recording for anyone. After Dylan got a rave from the New York Times for his gig at the prestigious folk club Gerdes Folk City, Hammond read the review and invited Dylan to sign with Columbia Records. Dylan trusted Hammond and accepted the offer without hesitation. Hammond gave Dylan a few unreleased records to listen to and marked a date to start recording. Dylan hurried to Van Ronk’s place, where they listened to King of the Delta Blues by Robert Johnson. Van Ronk felt Johnson’s music was derivative, but Dylan thought that this was true of most great songwriters, including Woody Guthrie, and it didn’t bother him. He went home and listened to the record over and over, picking the songs apart and trying to understand what made them tick. Dylan muses that much of his own music would never have been written if he hadn’t heard “Pirate Jenny” or discovered Robert Johnson.

After Dylan’s first record with Columbia was released, Al Grossman became his manager. Grossman warned that Dylan’s contract with Columbia was illegal because Dylan had signed it when he was under 21. Grossman insisted they negotiate a new deal, but Dylan trusted Hammond and didn’t want to complicate their relationship. He signed an addendum to his contract without involving Grossman. Grossman was furious, but he did help Dylan get out of his contract with Leeds Music, which he had entered into only as a favor to Hammond.

When Lou Levy listened to Dylan’s tape, he asked if Dylan had any songs about baseball players. Dylan didn’t, but he knew about Roger Maris, who was about to break Babe Ruth’s home run record. Maris was from Hibbing, Minnesota, near where Dylan had grown up. Dylan felt proud of this connection. He also felt kinship with other Minnesotans, like aviator Charles Lindbergh, musician Albert Lee, and writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. These “native sons” “followed their own vision” and “would have understood what [Dylan’s] inarticulate dreams were about” (292). He “felt like [he] was one of them or all of them put together” (292).

Although New York’s folk music scene was “like a paradise” (292), Dylan knew he had to leave. Soon, the country would be caught up in the firestorm of the 1960s, and everything would change. The world outside was strange, and the path was dangerous, but Dylan would plunge forward. He knew that the outside world wasn’t “run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either” (293).