My Vinyl Collection 35
An alphabetical listing with commentary of the LPs collected over six decades. New Year's Eve with Bob Dylan. The first installment. All 33 rpm.
35. Bob Dylan Part One: From the North Country
264. Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (1961)
By the time the newly named Bob Dylan reached New York City Jan. 24, 1961, he had a head full of ideas. Even though he grew up in far away Minnesota, this Midwest waif, new to the big city, had an edge from the beginning. That was because his father, Abe, had an appliance store, giving young Bobby access to radios of every size and sort. Movies and television blossomed into full flower, the fifties sprinkling fairy dust among the masses, even in the far north. Beatty, Bob’s mother, was popular in town. She liked a house full of people. Bobby was quiet as a child, first in Duluth then further north in Hibbing from six years old in 1947 when the family moved deeper into the North Country, not far from Thunder Bay on Lake Superior, close to the Canadian border, 130 miles east of Lake Itasca (Elk Lake in Ojibwe), the source of the Mississippi River.
Young Bob Dylan began writing poems in Hibbing when he was ten, then taught himself to play the guitar. Music rolled up from the Delta on his radio, up the Mississippi to lodge permanently in Bobby’s memory. His first electric guitar was a $39 turquoise Silvertone bought mail-order from Sears Roebuck when he was 14; then came a new Supro Ozark (the same model Jimi Hendrix had) that Bobby picked up at Mr. Hautala’s store in Hibbing at a discount $60 because Bob and a friend each bought one at the same time. Bob listened and learned — Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis. Bob began forming bands. The Golden Chords. Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers.
In 1956, on Christmas Eve, Bobby (15), and pals Larry Kegan and Howie Rutman paid five bucks to make a record in the Terlinde Music Shop in Saint Paul. Five dollars for a 78-rpm acetate by the Jokers, about four minutes singing songs they had heard on the radio. “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Be-Bop A Lu Bop,” “Earth Angel,” “Ready Teddy,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Looking back, this probably amounts to Dylan’s first record. Unofficial, of course. But still. Bob sang and played piano, tried to be serious but the guys kept singing off key. The songs stopped when they forgot the words. Not much of a start for such a career. Ha-ha. Larry kept the disc for years in a safety deposit box, got it out and played it, then put it back where it apparently still resides.
When high school let out in June 1959, age 18, Dylan left the North Country and headed off to fame and fortune, first to Saint Paul then into Dinkytown, the Greenwich Village of Minneapolis. Appearing there as “Bob Dylan,” he sang the songs he’d stuffed his head with while the wind was heavy near the border. He sang his songs well, edge-of-the-grave mountain ballads, straight ahead covers of Woody or Leadbelly, or something from the Child Ballad Book. He sang “Call the Wind Maria,” and “House of the Risin’ Sun” at Ten O'Clock Scholar near the University and Purple Onion Pizza Parlor in St. Paul. He told friends he was going to New York as soon as he memorized all of Woody Guthrie’s songs. Then poof, he was gone.
In 1961, Dylan plunged into the (real) kaleidoscopic Greenwich Village coffee houses and night clubs, meeting the musicians, getting known in the scene. Having a mad love affair with the daughter of a left-wing journalist; singing his odd tunes from the countryside. Typing out stories from the paper. Rattling off the new lyrics he wrote for an old Bentley Brothers novelty song “Down on Penny’s Farm.”
This became his first officially recorded original: “Talkin’ New York”: I blowed inside out and upside down/ The man there said he loved my sound/ He was raving about it/ he loved my sound/ Dollar a day's worth. By the time the first album, Bob Dylan, was released March 19, 1962, a trove of tapes of shows existed of his performances the Village and of those from people’s houses, in tiny clubs, in upstate New York, in Jersey. He was known to many but heard by few.
He played his songs for Woody, in person, in the hospital room. His most personal songs on the debut record in ’62 are “Song For Woody,” and “Talkin’ New York,” the only two originals. Dylan cut his groove in the Village as the guy who takes the old songs and makes them new, a old skill from vaudeville he deployed with dazzling, ironic, glib, surreal lyrics; lyrics of the country hipster, the riverboat gambler. Lyrics that stunned The New York Times critic Robert Shelton, who raved up Bob’s performances at Gerde's Folk City. Dylan, said Shelton, was a singer "bursting at the seams with talent.”
These were Dylan’s days of Cafe Wha?, the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish. He’d been rejected by three labels, Electra, Folkways and Vanguard. Later that summer, he heard Carolyn Hester, at Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., Boston. He asks: “I’m looking for gigs, I’m having kind of slow time. I don’t have a record contract yet. Do you have any more gigs? Maybe I could join you.”
All he got was a harmonica slot on the next Hester record.
Mother Beatty said Bobby “was ready to come back to Minnesota. But he stuck with it. He’s a beautiful poet. I have things he wrote for me when he was five or six, he’s full of compassion; he has no ego. No one helped Bobby — they shut doors in his face, no one helped him.
“And then, when he was ready for Carnegie Hall, he called.”
John Hammond, Jr., Columbia record scout, had seen lightening at the Hester session where Dylan was playing the harp. Hammond signed Dylan to a contract and the 20-year-old singer from the Iron Range of coldest Minnesota was on “the bill at Carnegie Hall.”
Nov. 4, 1961: Folklore Center presents BOB DYLAN in his first New York Concert. SAT. NOV. 4, 1961 8:40 p.m. Carnegie Chapter Hall 154 West 57th Street New York City All Seats $2.00.
Just 53 people showed up at a 200-capacity side room to the main hall.
Not long afterward, Nov. 20, Dylan and Suze Rotolo strolled into Columbia’s Studio A at 799 Seventh Avenue. Hammond was pushy. Dylan was agitated. Rotolo remembered Bob being “intense and unsure” in the studio. “Afterward he’d ask ‘What do you think? What did you think?’”
The songs were all over the map. The crash of an excursion boat on its way to a picnic on Bear Mountain, a Roy Acuff riff, a guitar fretted by a lipstick holder, a house in New Orleans they call the Risin’ Sun, a gospel plow, and … I have forgotten something. It goes by fast.
Dylan was not at all happy.
“I just wanted to cross this record out and make another record immediately. I thought I had recorded the wrong songs, and had already written a few of my own that I thought maybe I should have stuck on there.”
There would be more records to come. By 1990, 30 million of them were sold. By 2022 the count would be 125 million. With his latest record Rough and Rowdy Ways in 2020 the Nobel Prize-winner became the the first performer with a new Billboard Top 40 album every decade from the 1960s to the 2020s, seven decades.
(To Be Continued)