Fact #38842

EYEWITNESS – DYLAN ARRIVES IN NEW YORK
By Johnny Black
Q – Dec 1999

JANUARY 61
24. Bob Dylan and his friend Fred Underhill arrive in a wintry New York, having driven from Madison, Wisconsin, in a four door Pontiac. That night he performs a couple of songs at Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village.
Bob Dylan : New York was the center of activity for folk music, the mecca. Everything was coming out of New York, but I didn't go there as quickly as I could. I managed to get there in a roundabout way. It was all that I ever thought it was supposed to be. It was happening.

Jac Holzman (owner, Elektra Records) : The Village scene was a few square blocks of clubs, bars, red-sauce Italian restaurants that had been family-run for generation and, of course, the coffee houses.

Bob Dylan : It (Café Wha?) always used to open at noon. It opened at noon and it closed at six in the morning and it was just a non-stop flow of people. Usually they were tourists who were looking for beatniks in the Village.

28. Dylan visits Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal St.
Izzy Young : Dylan came in, the way everyone else did, as I was the place to go. He played an autoharp, but I cannot say that I noticed him especially. He didn't look so interesting and everyone was playing all the time in my place.

29. Dylan visits Woody Guthrie at the home of Sid and Bob Gleason in East Orange, New Jersey.
Camilla Dams Horne (friend of the Gleasons) : That first time, Bob didn’t say a word for a long while. He was just sitting there most of the time, very quietly. I remember he kept that cap on. And finally he did sing something, and it was impressive … it was probably one of Woody’s. And I do remember that night Woody saying, ‘He’s a talented boy. Gonna go far.’

FEBRUARY
20. Dylan starts performing regularly at the Monday night hootenanny in Gerde's Folk City.
Tom Paxton (singer-songwriter) : Van Ronk and I were sitting together and this kid got up and sang and we both thought that he was just marvellous - no limit to his potential.

Joan Baez : He was singing his Song To Woody, and he knocked me out completely. As I remember him, it seems he was about five feet tall. He seemed tiny, just tiny, with that goofy little hat on …and I just thought about him for days.

MARCH
27. Mike Porco,owner of Gerde’s, offers Dylan a two-week support slot with John Lee Hooker.
Mike Porco : I called him into the kitchen, which was my office. I said, "You did a nice set, Bobby. Tell me, would you like to work a couple weeks?" He said, "With who?" I said, "With John Lee Hooker." "Oooh, yeah," he said. "Oooh, Mike," he said. "Great, great, oh man, great."

APRIL
5. Dylan plays at the Loeb Music Center for the University of New York Folk Society. In the audience is Suze Rotolo.
Mike Porco : He started to go out with Suze Rotolo, and she used to come in with him or I would go to their apartment for dinner, or some nights Suze would come in and make the circulars for the clubs. She used to draw for me. She was pretty good. So we became a little more friendly. He came in every week to play for a couple of months.

11-25. Dylan plays a five song set as support to John Lee Hooker at Gerde's Folk City.
Mike Porco : They didn't break the doors down to come in. John Lee Hooker was the headliner, and Bobby didn't get the applause John Lee Hooker got. But he built up a following from the show.

Dava Van Ronk (singer) : He did Letter To Woody, with a long set of harmonica breaks consisting of one note at a time spaced so as to be so totally unpredictable that you could never tell when he was going to hit that one chord on the harmonica. He had the audience in stitches. He also did his version of Hava Nagilah - you know, "Have Nagilah, have two nagilahs..."

John Lee Hooker : After work we'd sit there and drink white wine. He was kind of a fun person to be around. His talk was real funny, his conversation. He wasn't trying to make jokes, it was just there. he said he wanted to become a star - and a good star.

MAY
Early May. Dylan tries to secure a recording contract.
Bob Dylan : I went up to Folkways. I says, “Howdy. I’ve written some songs.” They wouldn’t even look at them. I had always heard that Folkways was a good place.

Izzy Young : I took him to Jac Holzman at Elektra Records. When I asked Jac about that years later, he said that he doesn’t remember me bringing him… then I took him to Vanguard Records. Manny Solomon later said, “Listen, Izzy, I’m glad I didn’t put him out on a record, because I don’t want a freak on my label.”

SEPTEMBER
26. New York Times critic Robert Shelton attends the opening night of Dylan’s two-week residency at Gerde's Folk City, supporting The Greenbriar Boys.
John Herald (Greenbriar Boys) : Dylan took us by storm when he opened for us that gig. He was getting a bigger hand than we were. I was getting a little envious. He was a friend of mine, but I didn't really understand what he was doing. We were supposed to be the main act, and he just won the place over. I couldn't get the gist of why he was so popular.

29. In the New York Times, Robert Shelton raves over Dylan’s gig at Gerdes Folk City.
Suze Rotolo : Robert Shelton's review, without a doubt, made Dylan's career, because that brought the establishment. He couldn't have gotten the Columbia thing, in a way, without that. That review was unprecedented. Shelton had not given a review like that for anybody.

30. Dylan meets Columbia Records producer John Hammond Sr, during a Carolyn Hester album session.
John Hammond, Sr : She had him playing harmonica and guitar on her session. It was at a rehearsal on West Tenth Street. I was so delighted with what I heard, I suggested he come up to the studio. I asked him if he could sing and he said, "Yeah." I asked him if he could write, and he said, "Yeah." And that's how I signed Bob Dylan in 1961.

OOCTOBER
26. Dylan signs a five year contract with Columbia Records.
John Hammond Sr : They all thought I was crazy. Dylan thought I was crazy. He had been turned down by Folkways and every other label there was at the time. But I thought he had something.

Marc Silber (folk musician) : The night Dylan signed his Columbia Records contract I was at the Gaslight Cafe with my friend Perry Lederman, who was one of the outstanding folk pickers of the day. Perry knew everybody and Bob actually asked Perry to be his guitarist! Perry responded with "I don't think so...see, I am going to go to the top of music world and be famous!” We often laughed about that in later years.

29. Dylan appears on Oscar Brand's radio show, Folksong Festival.
Izzy Young : I took him to Oscar Brand around the corner who recorded him for his radio program on WNYC and so he could brag forever after that he was the first to have him on the radio. I was embarrassed to take him there as it wasn't often that I called up people to say that they should listen to so and so. I was not a plugger. The performance was not so hot, mumbling too much.

NOVEMBER
4. Dylan’s first concert hall appearance, at New York's Carnegie Chapter Hall, promoted by Izzy Young.
Jean Ritchie (folk musician) : About forty minutes late, Bob Dylan walks up on stage and talked about what a little country boy he was, and how he got lost on the subway. Then he started tuning his instruments. We thought, "Poor thing."

He had a table with about twenty harmonicas on it and he was blowing into each one. After about fifteen minutes of experimenting, he said, "I think I won't sing that song." The whole concert was like that.

Izzy Young : The agreement I had with Bob Dylan was that we would share the profit. Well, 52 people came. I took the loss but, coming from my working class background, I gave him ten or twenty dollars because I thought that a man should get paid for his work.

Gerry Goffin (songwriting partner of Carole King) : After Carole and I first went to see Bob Dylan at Carnegie Hall in '61, we took all our old demos and broke them in half. We said, ‘We have to grow up.'

20 - 22. Recording debut album, Bob Dylan, at Studio A, Columbia Records, Seventh St.
John Hammond Sr : My first album with Dylan cost $402, because all it was, was union scale for him as an artist.

Bob was writing three or four songs a day and was unused to mike techniques. His guitar playing, let us say charitably, was rudimentary, and his harmonica was barely passable, but he had a sound and a point of view and an idea. He was very disenchanted with our social system. I encouraged him to put all his hostility on tape because I figured this was the way, really, to get to the true Bob Dylan.

DECEMBER
22. On his way home to Hibbing for Christmas, he records a tape in the Minneapolis sorority house room of Bonnie Bleecher, which will become the basis of the first bootleg, Great White Wonder.
Bonnie Bleecher (friend) : I ended up shoplifting for him, stealing food from my sorority house. This is how unfamous he was … he sits down to make a tape …and he says to me, “I don’t want you ever to let anyone copy these tapes, so that when someone from the Library of Congress asks you for them, I want you to sell them for $200.” What kind of a remark is that to make to somebody that is shoplifting food for someone so incompetent that he can’t even shoplift his own food? But I promised him, and I never did let anybody make copies of those tapes. And then they were stolen…


THANKS : Special thanks to Izzy Young for keeping me right on the details, but this feature could also not have been written without - Hoot! A 25 Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene by Robbie Woliver (St Martin's Press); Wanted Man - In Search Of Bob Dylan by John Bauldie (Penguin); Follow The Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws (First Media); Behind The Shades by Clinton Heylin (Penguin); No Direction Home by Robert Shelton (Penguin) and the website - Olof’s Yearly Chronicles - www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/3427/1961.html

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ADDITIONAL QUOTES RELATING TO THE SAME TIME PERIOD …
Bob Dylan : Where I came from there was always plenty of snow, so I was used to that, but going to New York was like going to the moon. You just didn't get on a plane and go there, you know? New York! Ed Sullivan, the New York Yankees, Broadway, Harlem ... you might as well have been talking about China.... It was some place which not too many people had ever gone, and anybody who did go never came back.

New York was the center of activity for folk music, the Mecca. Everything was coming out of New York, but I didn't go there as quickly as I could. I managed to get there in a roundabout way. It was all that I ever thought it was supposed to be. It was happening. It was a learning process because there were so many people there who knew more than I did. I picked up on what I could and I worked at it. When I got to New York, there was a small crowd of people my age, but most of the people I met were five to ten years older than I was. As far as I could remember, the scene there stayed that way until the middle-Sixties when things started to turn toward more professional-type things.

Jac Holzman (owner, Elektra Records) : The Village scene was a few square blocks of clubs, bars, red-sauce Italian restaurants that had been family-run for generation and, of course, the coffee houses.

David Barry (folk singer) : It was a grubby awful scene there (Café Wha!). It was a basket house. We were all treated like shit. The customers were tourists...

Bob Dylan : It always used to open at noon. It opened at noon and it closed at six in the morning and it was just a non-stop flow of people. Usually they were tourists who were looking for beatniks in the Village.

Phil Ochs (singer-songwriter) : That period in the Village was incredibly exciting, super-euphoric. There was total creativity on the part of a great number of individuals that laid the bedrock for the next ten years.

Bob Dylan : I sung down there during the afternoons. I played my harmonica for this guy there who was singing. He used to give me a dollar to play every day with him, from 2 o'clock in the afternoon until 8.30 at night. He gave me a dollar plus a cheese burger.
(Source : not known)