The Day I First Heard Bob Dylan -- 1962

Gary North - October 21, 2016

They say that Americans over age 60 remember where they were when they heard of President Kennedy's assassination. I surely do.

But I also remember where I was when I heard Bob Dylan for the first time, about 18 months before Kennedy died. I was in my rented room close to UCLA, which I attended for one semester. I was listening to the Les Claypool show. I tape recorded all but the first of the Dylan selections that he played that night. As soon as I heard the first one, I turned on the recorder. I rarely did that.

I had been listening to Claypool for about three years. He played only folk music on his weekly show. No one else in southern California had a 100% folk music show. It was there, in 1960, that I heard Joan Baez's first solo album on Vanguard. I had never heard a voice like hers. I thought it was like etched crystal. (I should have told her that a year later when I attended a post-concert gathering at her father's home. I had been invited by a girl I dated who was a family friend of the Baez's. I don't recall what I said to Ms. Baez, but it was surely not profound. My muse was on vacation that evening.)

Dylan's voice was not like etched crystal. Mitch Jayne, the patter master of the Dillards, described it in a 1964 album: "He has a voice very much like a dog with its leg caught in barbed wire." When I heard the tracks that Claypool played in the spring of 1962, I thought to myself: "I hope that old man lives long enough to record another album." I had no idea that he was 20 years old when he recorded it.

In 1963, Dylan and Baez sang together at the Newport Folk Festival -- the finest voice and the worst voice in folk music. They soon became a couple. He wrote 'em; she sang 'em. Her career faded a bit after 1964; his soared.

Jayne prefaced his assessment of Dylan's voice with this: "I don't know how many of you know who Bobby Dylan is, but he's probably done more for folk music, or had more influence, than anybody." Yet Dylan's first album had been released only two years before, in March 1962. Jayne was correct: Dylan's influence in 1964 came from the songs he wrote. It had happened in just two years.

His direct influence on pop culture came with "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965. He hit like a bombshell. But he was a rocker by then.

NOBEL PRIZE MATERIAL

He recorded only two of his own songs on the first album, and they were hardly classics. No one listening to "Talkin' New York Blues" would have imagined that he would win the Nobel Prize in literature 54 years later.

Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play
Blowin' my lungs out for a dollar a day
I blowed inside out and upside down
The man there said he loved m' sound
He was ravin' about how he loved m' sound
Dollar a day's worth

A year later came The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. It sold well initially, and it became a huge success retroactively. The Wikipedia entry says:

Whereas his debut album Bob Dylan had contained only two original songs, Freewheelin' represented the beginning of Dylan's writing contemporary words to traditional melodies. Eleven of the thirteen songs on the album are Dylan's original compositions. The album opens with "Blowin' in the Wind", which became an anthem of the 1960s, and an international hit for folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary soon after the release of Freewheelin'. The album featured several other songs which came to be regarded as among Dylan's best compositions and classics of the 1960s folk scene: "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".

It adds this:

The speed and facility with which Dylan wrote topical songs attracted the attention of other musicians in the New York folk scene. In a radio interview on WBAI in June 1962, Pete Seeger described Dylan as "the most prolific songwriter on the scene" and then asked Dylan how many songs he had written recently. Dylan replied, "I might go for two weeks without writing these songs. I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night but I gave all the papers away in some place called the Bitter End." Dylan also expressed the impersonal idea that the songs were not his own creation. In an interview with Sing Out! magazine, Dylan said, "The songs are there. They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn't do it, somebody else would."

There was always something strange about Dylan. He just keeps getting more strange. The Nobel committee could not locate him to send him his check. It took five days for his website to acknowledge the award. Will he show up in Stockholm to collect his money and his award? Nobody knows.

From the day I heard the second album, my favorite song was "Honey Just allow Me One More Chance." Did the Nobel Committee listen carefully to its subtle and moving lyrics? Probably not. There was a co-author. Yet how could the committee have failed to be impressed with this haunting poetry of the soul?

Honey, just allow me one more chance
To get along with you
Honey, just allow me one more chance
Ah'll do anything with you
Well, I'm a-walkin' down the road
With my head in my hand
I'm lookin' for a woman
Needs a worried man
Just-a one kind favor I ask you
'Low me just-a one more chance

Honey, just allow me one more chance
To ride your aeroplane
Honey, just allow me one more chance
To ride your passenger train
Well, I've been lookin' all over
For a gal like you
I can't find nobody
So you'll have to do
Just-a one kind favor I ask you
'Low me just-a one more chance

Honey, just allow me one more chance
To get along with you
Honey, just allow me one more chance
Ah'll do anything with you
Well, lookin' for a woman
That ain't got no man
Is just lookin' for a needle
That is lost in the sand
Just-a one kind favor I ask you
'Low me just-a one more chance

My early assessment was validated a few years later by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs on their final album. Lester, sadly, did not allow Earl one more chance. He split.

More albums came. Dylan was a hot property. But then came album #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965). One side had acoustic guitar. The other side had electric. The hard core purists departed at this point, I among them. There is a place for electric guitars -- just not in folk music.

For a time, I carried a card in my wallet: "I don't care what Bob Dylan means." I typed that card myself. The second half of the 1960's was an era of social protest. That card was my protest.

He kept writing songs and singing. He went through many phases. I missed all of them. So, I missed out on the Traveling Wilburys. But that band of superstars was a rock band, not a folk group. In any case, Dylan was not the heart of the Wilburys. Roy Orbison was.

So, Dylan has won the Nobel Prize. It's OK with me. To each his own. But I still stand by my card's assessment; I just don't sit on it any more. I'm not going to allow him one more chance. We acoustic folkies do not forgive or forget.