A Freewheelin' Time (21 page)

Later on, when Bob caused an uproar by going electric at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 and at the concert in Forest Hills that year, I wondered who was doing all the booing. It is perfectly understandable that when your favorite artist, musician, or writer does something different from an established format, fans will be shaken. It will take time for the audience to accept the new work.

But I had an uncomfortable feeling about the strong objections to the new music Bob was making. He was abandoning “protest” music, folk music, and going commercial—selling out—to rock and roll, people said. I heard dogma and orthodoxy in all the discussions going on about his new direction—his betrayal, as many called it. There was more behind those condemnations than merely the reactions of an audience of shocked fans. It made me think about Brecht and the censoring of artists.

Anyone who was capable of writing the songs Dylan wrote had not abandoned anything at all. He continued writing about what was on his mind. Adding a band and playing an electric guitar was an exploratory passage musically—after all, music is about sound. He had grown as a person and as a writer since coming to New York City in the winter of 1961. Four volatile and intensely lived years had gone by in which he’d experienced much more in his life. He wrote about those things. How many times must a person write the song he has already written?

Bob always did as he saw fit. He was rarely swayed by outside demands or requests. He went where he wanted to go, even if it meant alienating his public, fans, friends, and lovers. He did not make anything easy for anyone, or for himself.

There
but for
Fortune

Gil Turner followed
Pete Seeger the way Jack Elliott and Bobby followed Woody Guthrie. He was a big, sincere man who in addition to his music worked in the civil rights movement, as did many other folk performers. Gil, Happy Traum, and Rob Cohen formed a group called the New World Singers and in July 1963, with Pete Seeger and Bob, they put together a concert in Greenwood, Mississippi, in support of the voter registration drive. I was working on
Brecht on Brecht
and couldn’t go, so I organized a clothing drive and before they left I loaded the car with donations.

For a time Gil was an emcee at Gerde’s and, like others, he pushed Mike Porco to hire Bob for a solo gig. Gil was one of the first folksingers to champion Bob as a songwriter. He encouraged Bob to show him more of his songs, which was all Bob needed to hear. He latched on to anyone who understood where he was headed.

I believe it was Gil who introduced Bob to
Broadside
magazine. Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen started
Broadside
as an alternative to
Singout!,
the self-described “magazine for folk music.”
Broadside
would focus solely on songwriters who wrote about the concerns and troubles of the times in the mode of Guthrie and Seeger.

Len Chandler, one of the folk musicians involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement, had his songs printed in
Broadside.
Bob spent time with Len and when I met his wife, Nancy, who was also an artist, we hit it off just fine.

The
Broadside
meetings were held at Sis and Gordon’s uptown apartment, where the singers would gather to sing their latest songs into a tape recorder. Either Sis or Gordon would then type out the lyrics and handwrite the musical notes—with guitar chords—and print copies of the magazine on their mimeograph machine. They were the first to print a song by Bob Dylan.

This was the time when the appellation
singer-songwriter
and the term
protest singer
were coined. Both labels seemed confining to me. There were many performers really good at interpreting songs written by others who weren’t necessarily good at writing songs (protest or otherwise) themselves. It was unfortunate that it became de rigueur for all singers to write songs instead of interpreting the work of other, better songwriters. To cite the wisdom of Dave Van Ronk: singers have been covering songs by Puccini and Verdi for ages to great effect. No one would have expected Luciano Pavarotti to write his own arias.

S
ongwriters of all stripes came and went at the
Broadside
gatherings. I remember everyone as very earnest and dedicated, and Sis was more than happy to showcase the talents of Bob Dylan. Certainly I was happy to have my drawings illustrate Bobby’s songs in the magazine.

After Bob had moved on, he wrote a letter to Gordon and Sis. In it he recounted his conflicted feelings about his growing fame, lamenting that some of his fellow musicians were still undeservedly unrecognized and struggling economically. He wrote about morality, fear, and love, which was very touching. Gordon and Sis published it in the January 1964 issue.

When Phil Ochs arrived at
Broadside
he made a notable difference. He had a fine tenor voice with a Joan Baez–like vibrato. His songs were good and he was already a polished performer. Phil’s songs were journalistic, restricted to a specified subject or event. To write topical songs is risky because as time passes the songs lose their relevance: they have a built-in expiration date. But that doesn’t lessen the validity of a well-written song; it serves its purpose within its designated shelf life. Phil was good at what he did.

Bobby and Phil had respect for each other as writers; they shared an affinity and a rivalry they both reveled in for a time. But their friendship was complicated. Phil Ochs came to know his limitations as a songwriter in the context of his admiration for what he believed were the unlimited abilities of Bob Dylan. At first they challenged each other, but as time went by, Phil was in awe of each new song Bob wrote. As Bob’s fame grew, he in turn would chide Phil for confining himself within a genre. Phil, like Baez, was politically active; he used his talent and popularity to promote his political beliefs. Dylan worked outside the border.

Phil was living with his girlfriend, Alice, in a roomy apartment on Bleecker Street at the corner of Thompson. It was another Village hangout, and the four of us spent a lot of time together. Alice never seemed to mind people showing up whenever and staying until all hours of the night, even into the morning. She was relaxed and easygoing. The location of the apartment, in the midst of all the music clubs, became problematic as Bobby became more well known. He took to leaving via the fire escape in the back of the building to avoid being recognized by the people wandering from club to club along Bleecker Street.

When Phil and Alice got married I was a witness at their wedding. By then Alice was visibly pregnant, and both of them were very nervous and giddy. During the ceremony at City Hall, we tried to stifle our giggles. The justice of the peace had to interrupt the proceedings to chastise us for not taking the situation seriously. No one was more serious about what they were doing than Alice and Phil. But that is precisely why it struck all of us as so funny.

I
last saw Phil toward the end of 1966, when I ran into him at the Limelight one night before I left New York for Italy again. He was drinking a lot by then and he was bloated and disheveled, volatile and dark.

Phil began telling me a long, convoluted tale that made no sense. He laughed and cried and his manner frightened me. I tried to act as if nothing was wrong with his behavior or appearance. I gave him my address in Italy and half begged him to get away, take a long break, and come visit me. Phil Ochs had a good career and people who loved him but the demons he struggled with eventually engulfed and overpowered him. He committed suicide in 1976 at the age of thirty-six.

Hide
and
Seek

In youth loneliness is but the discovery of life

(NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1962)

Bob’s parents were ordinary in a way that he was not. He didn’t feel he came from the right place considering how he felt about himself in the world.

Quite a few of the folk musicians playing in the Village had grown up in the suburbs in middle-class families and didn’t advertise it. Some of them were from left-wing families that owned albums by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Josh White but had to be quiet about it because of Red baiting and McCarthyism. There were also many in the Village who felt the same about their families as Bob did about his—that they were just plain ordinary folks; they were not talking about their backgrounds any more than he was. When my mother was around, she was trouble, but in all fairness she was interesting and nothing about the way I grew up was ordinary. Yet I didn’t feel like talking about my family, either. Those were the times; everyone was busy reinventing his or her wheels. Families were baggage.

W
hen I was in Italy Bob wrote me letters about his family, his feelings growing up, his name change, and about truth and lies. He spoke of his family’s goodness—how well they treated him—and how bad he felt when he could not please them in a traditional manner, as his younger brother could.

Bob didn’t keep his parents informed about his life in New York City. Having read in some newspaper or magazine that Albert Grossman was his manager, his father called Albert’s office in New York asking Bob to get in touch. John Court, Albert’s partner, relayed the message and Bob, although not pleased, called home.

When he was ready for his parents to see who he had become, and he was ready to have me know them, he brought them to New York for the Town Hall concert in April 1963, which had been scheduled before the release of the
Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
album. There wasn’t a big turnout, but the concert was definitely a success. It was clear that Bob had the goods to perform beyond the clubs and halls on the folk circuit. He had written so many very good songs, and his assurance as a performer was evident in his perfectly timed stumbles, jerks, and groans. It was ever more apparent how clearly he saw himself and his work, despite his loose-change manner. Watching Bob in the spotlight alone on the stage, with his guitar and harmonica, his voice and his words, I felt the power he had. Seeing him out of the context of the Village, on the Town Hall stage, it was evident that he owned it. I was happy for him and proud. So were his parents.

We went to dinner together at a restaurant near their hotel on the West Side of Manhattan in the Forties. His parents were very pleasant. In hindsight, I’m sure they wished I hadn’t been there so they could have visited with their son alone.

The evening went smoothly, no bumps, no apparent tension. Bob did not prep me beforehand.

New York Times
review of the Carnegie Hall concert

Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman were soft-spoken and his mother, especially, was friendly while his father was more reserved. I see the scene as a series of photographs; no dialogue comes to me. We are sitting at a round table, Bob next to me, me next to his father, and his father next to his mother, his mother next to Bob.

They came to New York again for his Carnegie Hall concert in October, and the next day
Newsweek
wrote about his true identity as Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. His parents were interviewed for the piece.

It was a relief to have that done with at last, but the article was a very nasty piece of work implying with relish that the young man whose “finger was on the pulse of a generation” was a fake. He was just a middle-class kid from the Midwest escaping a nondescript background. The tone belittled the significance of his work and it was disturbing for him to be portrayed that way. Bob was extremely angry; he felt violated and his parents, proud of their son and not wishing to hurt him, were very upset.