Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and The Freedom Singers at Newport Folk Festival, July 1963. Photo / Getty Images
1963 - THE FREEWHEELIN' BOB DYLAN
After the poor sales of his debut album, there was talk at Columbia of Bob Dylan's contract being dropped before he could make a second record. John Hammond, however, would have none of it and blocked David Kapralik's move to offload "Hammond's folly" by appealing over his head again to Columbia president Goddard Lieberson.
Helped by the support of Johnny Cash, one of the label's leading country stars, who made no secret of his admiration for the youngster, John Hammond was able to secure an extension of Bob Dylan's contract — for which Columbia was presumably eternally grateful. A giant leap beyond his raw debut, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that changed the face of first folk, then rock music.
There are two basic driving forces behind the Freewheelin' album: Dylan's involvement in the civil rights movement; and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo's absence in Italy, which spurred him into a prolific fever of songwriting. Since Suze was the person who drew Dylan into the civil rights arena in the first place, her position alongside the singer on the album cover was more than justified. Bob and Suze had bumped into each other a few times before through her sister Carla — who worked for folk archivist Alan Lomax and was an early supporter of Dylan — but the two became a couple following a benefit concert he played on July 29, 1961, for the Riverside Church's radio station WRVR-FM.
The youngest daughter of politically active Italian immigrant parents, Suze was already involved in desegregation and anti-nuclear campaigns, working as a secretary for the Congress On Racial Equality. She helped Bob bring his general concern for the underdog and dislike of injustice into sharper, more specific focus.
The pair began an intense, if problematic, two-and-a-half-year affair. At first, Suze had the effect of smoothing out Bob's spikier side, sweetening his demeanour and encouraging him to smarten up a little. But after the couple took a tiny apartment at 161 West 4th St, the demands of his ego began to encroach upon her own ego-space, and she started to feel smothered by his attention. She was an intelligent young woman with interests of her own in the theatre and visual arts — she introduced Bob to the work of Bertolt Brecht, who would be a big influence on his work — but Dylan seemed to require nothing more of her than that she be "Bob's girl".
As early as November 1961, before Dylan had released any records, she confided in a letter to a friend, Sue Zuckerman, "I don't want to get sucked under by Bob Dylan and his fame. I really don't. It sort of scares me ... It really changes a person when they become well known by all and sundry. They develop this uncontrollable egomania ... Something snaps somewhere and suddenly the person can't see anything at all except himself ... I can see it happening to Bobby ..."
Besides which, Dylan was, even then, not the most forthcoming of people. "It's so hard to talk to him," Suze told another friend. "Sometimes he doesn't talk. He has to be drinking to open up." She sensed a pervasive air of despair about Dylan, a pessimism about people that bordered on paranoia and made him reluctant to leave the flat. Suze's mother, Mary, disapproved of her relationship with this scruffy 19-year-old kid who had dubious personal hygiene and a cavalier way with the truth, particularly concerning his own past. She persuaded her daughter to travel with her in the summer of 1962 to Italy, where Suze took a course at the University of Perugia. The trip, which was meant to be for a few months, was ultimately extended to a total of six months, during which time Dylan pined terribly for her.
Like many an artist before him, however, Dylan successfully learned how to transmute his pain into creative energy: the period of Suze's absence marks the first full flowering of his poetic talent, with songs of high quality pouring out of him at a phenomenal rate. A friend, Mikki Isaacson, recalls going on a car trip with him at the time and being amazed at his industry: "He had a small spiral notebook, and must have had four different songs going at once. He would write a line in one and flip a couple of pages back and write a line in another one. A word here and a line there, just writing away." Another friend, the singer Tom Paxton, recalled strolling late at night through Greenwich Village with Dylan as he scribbled away on scraps of paper. "His mind was on fire. Between the club and wherever he was heading, he'd start as many as five songs —and finish them!"
The most frequently used word to describe Dylan at the time was "sponge" — he would listen quietly to friends' conversations, making notes, and later on they would find phrases, stories and nuggets of information from their conversation appearing in his songs. He was omnivorously open to influences but, unlike most of his contemporaries, he had the drive and application to build something of his own out of the accumulated fragments. During a radio interview with Pete Seeger, Dylan explained his working methods. "I don't even consider it writing songs," he claimed. "When I've written [a song] I don't even consider that I wrote it when I got done ... I just figure that I made it up or I got it some place. The song was there before I came along, I just sort of took it down with a pencil ..."
Having written a song effectively as a poem, he would then try and find a melody for it, often borrowing or adapting an old folk tune, some of which he learned from English folk singers on a trip he made to Europe in December 1962-January 1963. Ironically, just as he rushed over to Italy to see Suze, she was sailing back to New York, where she managed to settle in before Bob returned a few weeks later, hoping to pick up their relationship where it had left off six months before. Suze was reluctant — she had matured considerably in her time away and did not want to become just "Bob's girl" again — but Dylan was persuasive and, after a short time staying with her sister, she moved back into the 4th St apartment.
Things had changed radically, however. Bob's fame had grown rapidly while she was away and it seemed that everyone was trying to get to him through her, that nobody was interested in her for her own sake and that the process of objectification was growing even stronger than it had been before — particularly since songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" in effect made their relationship public. Furthermore, Bob himself, encouraged by his new manager Albert Grossman, was becoming reclusive and aloof, and she found it more difficult than before to communicate with him. Before long, the old stresses and strains began to pull them apart all over again.
Besides several songs, such as "Boots Of Spanish Leather" and "Tomorrow Is A Long Time", which were written specifically about Suze during her absence, Dylan also continued maturing as a protest songwriter, with songs like "Oxford Town" and particularly "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" whose strings of imagery reflected the influence of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, a favorite of Bob and Suze's. With John Hammond again at the helm, recording for the new album began with a couple of sessions in April 1962 but it was not until July that Dylan started laying down the more distinctive material that would set this new album firmly apart from his debut and establish him as a songwriter of great power and individuality.
Several of the protest songs that would appear on Freewheelin', such as "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Masters Of War", were originally published in the folk/protest magazine Broadside, a small but influential disseminator of new views for whom Dylan served as a contributing editor. (Later on, in 1963, he would also contribute to an album of Broadside Ballads using the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt so as not to infringe his contract with Columbia Records.) The first issue of Broadside included the lyrics to one of his earliest songs, an amusing talking blues called "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", which took a satiric swipe at the right-wing anti-communist organisation. In the song, the narrator searches for communists so avidly he finds them everywhere, eventually spotting one in his mirror.
The song, which had been slated for inclusion on Freewheelin', caused a problem when Dylan tried to perform it on The Ed Sullivan Show, the country's premier television variety showcase. He had been booked on the May 12 show by Sullivan's son-in-law, Bob Precht, a folk fan who had managed to smooth over the obvious absurdity of having Dylan share a bill with Teresa Brewer, Irving Berlin, Al Hirt and the mouse puppet Topo Gigio. But when Stowe Phillips, the network censor, heard the song in rehearsal, he had cold feet and refused to let Dylan perform it on the show, fearing that it might libel members of the John Birch Society. Would Bob, he wondered, care to sing something else instead?
He would not. "If I can't play my song, I'd rather not appear on the show," he said, and walked out, hours before curtain time. In one way, it was a fortuitous refusal: Dylan had already come in for criticism from some of the Greenwich Village folkies for selling out when he told them he was due to appear, and his walk-out stopped that flak and generated some more favorable publicity besides. But there were further repercussions: The Ed Sullivan Show was on the CBS network, Columbia Records' parent company, and the same fears of libel brought pressure to remove the song from Freewheelin' as well, on the eve of its release. Since his contract gave them the right to censor such material, Dylan had no option but to comply, particularly since his first album had been a commercial failure.
Though he was angry at first, Dylan quickly got over his frustration and took the opportunity to replace several of the songs that were scheduled to be on the album, which he felt were too old-fashioned, with more contemporary, "finger-pointing" songs. Out went "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", "Rocks And Gravel", "Rambling Gambling Willie" and Let Me Die In My Footsteps" and in came "Bob Dylan's Dream", "Masters Of War", "Talkin' World War III Blues" and "Girl From The North Country" — but not before a few hundred copies of the album with the original running-order had been pressed up and released. (The rarest items in Dylan's back catalogue, they now command thousands of dollars on the infrequent occasions they appear for sale.)
These four substitute tracks had been recorded at a late session in April 1963, four months after the rest of the album had been completed. They marked the debut of Dylan's new producer, a young black man called Tom Wilson, who had previously worked on jazz recordings by performers such as Sun Ra's Arkestra and who would later go on to produce early efforts by such seminal Sixties groups as The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention. Wilson had taken over production duties from John Hammond when Albert Grossman, alarmed at Hammond's casual approach to recording, threatened to walk away from the Columbia contract on the grounds that Dylan had been a minor when he signed it, thus rendering it null and void.
Since Dylan had recorded several times since turning 21, however, Grossman could not extricate him from the contract, although he could still cause enough of a fuss to get Hammond replaced. But Columbia had a policy that dictated that Columbia artists must only use Columbia's in-house producers, and there were no exceptions to the rule—certainly not unproven talents like Dylan. "We don't want anything to do with any producer at Columbia," Grossman told David Kapralik, "because you don't have a producer that understands Bob Dylan."
Realising that because Wilson was black, Dylan and Grossman would not dismiss him out of hand, Kapralik suggested Dylan chat with Wilson a while. His ploy worked: the next day, Wilson was accepted as Bob's new producer and, shortly after, they recorded the songs which completed Freewheelin'.
The album was released on May 27, 1963, with a cover photo of Bob and Suze strolling happily down a slush-covered 4th St. As Freewheelin' picked up airplay, acclaim and sales of around 10,000 a month (particularly when Peter, Paul and Mary scored a huge hit with
Blowin' In The Wind" that July), Suze was the envy of every folk singer's girlfriend and female college student. But even as the record was being released, Dylan was on the far side of the country, following his May 18 appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival by spending a fortnight — unknown to Suze — at the Carmel pad of his new friend, Joan Baez.
Extracted from Bob Dylan: The Stories Behind The Songs, 1962-69 by Andy Gill, (Wellbeck, RRP $55). Photos supplied by Getty Images.
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