Fifty Years Ago Today: Bob Dylan Arrived In New York
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/fifty-years-ago-today-bob-dylan-arrived-in-new-york-20110124
'I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis,' Dylan
wrote in 'Chronicles.' 'But that was all about to change - and quick'
By Andy Greene
January 24, 2011
While it's next to impossible to confirm the exact date, it's widely
agreed upon that today is the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan's arrival
in New York City. The 19-year-old folk singer (who had recently
dropped out of the University of Minnesota) had spent the past 24
hours driving east with fellow folksinger Fred Underhill and a young couple.
"The big car came to a full stop on the other side [of the George
Washington Bridge] and let me off," Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir
Chronicles: Volume 1. "I slammed the door shut behind me, waved
good-bye, stepped out onto the hard snow. The biting wind hit me in
the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too
intricate to understand and I wasn't going to try."
New York's winter of 1961 was the city's coldest in 28 years. "The
cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd
started out from the Frostbitten North Country," Dylan wrote in
Chronicles. "I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing
metropolis but that was all about to change and quick."
In a 1961 interview Dylan said they got off at 42nd Street before
heading down to Greenwich Village. In 1966 he expanded on the story
to biographer Robert Shelton. "We hustled for two months," Dylan
said, in one of the most fantastical lies he ever told. "Sometimes we
would make $150 or $250 a night between us, and hang around in cars.
Cats would pick us up and chicks would pick us up. And we would do
anything they wanted, as long as it paid. It was very cutthroat...I
almost got killed."
What actually happened is that Dylan immediately trudged down about
40 blocks to Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. There he met the club's
MC Fred Neil five years before he recorded his signature song
"Everybody's Talkin." "He asked me what I did and I told him I sang,
played guitar and harmonica," Dylan wrote in Chronicles. "He asked me
to play something. After about a minute, he said I could play
harmonica with him during his sets. I was ecstatic. At least it was a
place to stay out of the cold. This was good."
Manny Roth (uncle of Van Halen's David Lee Roth) ran Cafe Wha? and he
took a liking to Dylan, making him a regular on the afternoon shift.
"You never really did get popular because nobody knew you on the
outside," Dylan said in a 1984 interview. "Nobody was billed on the
outside. You passed the basket. That's why I started wearing hats."
On the album jacket to Peter, Paul and Mary's 1963 LP In The Wind
Dylan described his earliest days in the city. "Snow was piled up the
stairs an onto the street that first winter when I laid around New
York City/It was a different street then/It was a different
village/Nobody had nothin/There was nothing to get/Instead of being
drawn for money you were drawn for other people...It is 'f these
times that I remember most sadly/For they're gone/And they'll not
never come back again."
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
