Word: folk
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...never met. Which must be one of the great regrets of his life. But as a kid who loved folk music, I heard his stuff on a Philadelphia FM station and attended his first concert at our Town Hall. The local folk club, The Second Fret at 19th and Sansom Streets, hosted most of the singers Dylan hung out with and learned from. Dave Van Ronk played there; the gravel-voiced Brooklyn bear was one of my favorites, and an inspiration to the young Dylan. Indeed, I thought Dylan's "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" was a radio-friendly...
...also had the privilege to know Carolyn Hester, the beautiful "Texas songbird" of folk, who had secured Dylan's first professional recording gig as a backup harmonica player on her first Columbia Records album. (Hammond, Carolyn's producer, heard Dylan and promptly signed him to Columbia.) Carolyn, who was inexplicably omitted from the final cut of No Direction Home (though she had been interviewed for the film), had recorded with Buddy Holly back in Texas, and, according to The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Holly "followed her to Greenwich Village" in 1958. He wasn't the only one infatuated with Carolyn. Robert...
...took a while for traditionalists to cotton to Dylan's lurid vandalizing of the language, his faux-folk patois: "If'n ya don't know by now... The light I never knowed... Like ya never done before..." That was the Guthrie influence, which this hip hillbilly mixed with all the other sung and spoken poetry he'd ingested to create his own voice, grammar and verdant, wildly associative language. "I needed to sing in that language," he says in the Scorsese movie, "which was a language that I hadn't heard before." Maybe you had to be young back then...
...Direction Home makes much of the aggrieved reaction to Dylan's going electric: to the howls of the faithful when he sang "Maggie's Farm" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. (They should've listened to the lyrics, if they could've heard them: "Well, I try my best to be just like I am, / But everybody wants you to be just like them.") In Britain the following year he was greeted with screams of "Traitor!", Judas!"and "How about switching it off?" Backstage, the burnt-out singer vowed, "I'm gonna get me a new Bob Dylan...
...switch to rock was fine with this Dylan fan; I loved rock 'n roll as much as folk and was exhilarated to think of the impact Dy;an could have in bringing an adolescent musical form to maturity. But by 1966 he wasn't having nearly as much fun making music as I was listening to it. The kid who wanted to be Elvis could now imagine dying like Buddy Holly: "You end up crashing in a private plane in the mountains of Tennessee. Or Sicily. ... I just wanna go home." He went home to upstate New York and crashed...