Bob Dylan and the British Sixties

A Cultural History

Tudor Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429788482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Britain played a key role in Bob Dylan's career in the 1960s. He visited Britain on several occasions and performed across the country both as an acoustic folk singer and as an electric-rock musician. His tours of Britain in the mid-1960s feature heavily in documentary films such as D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back and Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home and the concerts contain some of his most acclaimed ever live performances. Dylan influenced British rock musicians such as The Beatles, The Animals, and many others; they, in turn, influenced him.

Yet this key period in Dylan's artistic development is still under-represented in the extensive literature on Dylan. Tudor Jones rectifies that glaring gap with this deeply researched, yet highly readable, account of Dylan and the British Sixties. He explores the profound impact of Dylan on British popular musicians as well as his intense, and at times fraught, relationship with his UK fan base. He also provides much interesting historical context – cultural, social, and political – to give the reader a far greater understanding of a defining period of Dylan's hugely varied career. This is essential reading for all Dylan fans, as well as for readers interested in the tumultuous social and cultural history of the 1960s.

1

FIRST TIME IN LONDON

Winter 1962–63

Bob Dylan arrived in London, and in Britain, for the first time a week before Christmas on December 18, 1962, during the bitterly cold British winter of 1962–63. He had been invited by Philip Saville, a young BBC television director, to act in a play by the contemporary Jamaican playwright Evan Jones, entitled Madhouse on Castle Street. Saville had seen Dylan perform in 1960 at Pastor’s Place, a club in Greenwich Village, New York City, which he had visited on the recommendation of the poet W.H. Auden, a New York resident at that time.¹ Saville had been working on a television production in New York with the American folklorist Alan Lomax, whom he had asked to produce a soundtrack of folk songs for a play entitled Dark of the Moon.²

Impressed at the time by Dylan, Saville later recalled that: ‘I suddenly had the idea that it would be exciting to cast this young American poet in the role of an anarchistic young man.’³ He therefore struck a deal with Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager since August 1962, for the young singer to appear in Madhouse on Castle Street. The deal was at a cost of 2,000 US dollars plus expenses and airfare, a generous offer at the time since no one at the BBC in 1962 had any idea who Bob Dylan was. As far as the Corporation was concerned, Saville later added, ‘Bob Dylan was just an unknown’.⁴

In Britain in December 1962, outside a small number of folk-music enthusiasts in London and elsewhere, Bob Dylan was indeed largely unknown. His musical career had been launched just over a year before his arrival in London by two related fortuitous developments. Robert Shelton, folk-music critic of the New York Times had written a highly favourable review of Dylan’s performance on September 26, 1961, at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, where he was supporting The Greenbriar Boys, a popular bluegrass group. Shelton’s review appeared under the headline ‘Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist’ in the New York Times on September 29, 1961. Dylan’s then girlfriend Suze Rotolo recalled in her memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s how she and Dylan eagerly bought several copies of the early edition of the New York Times from the newspaper kiosk on Sheridan Square and went across the street to an all-night deli to read Shelton’s glowing review.⁵ Suze Rotolo was to be an influential figure in Dylan’s early cultural and political education. A young woman with wide artistic interests, she was also a left-wing political activist, working at the time for the civil rights pressure group CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. She was in many ways Dylan’s muse during three formative years in New York City, remaining in a close relationship with him from the summer of 1961 until their painful split in March 1964.⁶

A second fortunate development in September 1961 was the major opportunity provided for Dylan by the Texan folk singer Carolyn Hester. He had already met her and her then husband Richard Farina both in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hester subsequently invited Dylan to play harmonica on three tracks on her third album, her first for a major label, Columbia. (Dylan had previously played harmonica professionally at a recording session for Harry Belafonte.) During rehearsals and at the recording session itself on September 29 Dylan met Hester’s producer John Hammond Sr.

A legendary figure in the record music industry, Hammond had discovered, launched, or promoted major jazz and blues stars such as Billie Holliday, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton and many others. Interested in finding new figures in the folk-music revival, Hammond was drawn to Dylan’s potential raw talent. As Carolyn Hester later recalled: ‘I could tell Hammond was hooked from the very start. The longer we worked, the more I could see Hammond’s interest in Bob developing, until the two of them were thick as thieves.’⁷ Dylan was also able to show Hammond Shelton’s review in the New York Times, published by a stroke of good fortune the very day of Hester’s recording session. Invited by Hammond to a demo session later that day, Dylan, in spite of his somewhat undisciplined studio technique, impressed the veteran producer to the point where he was offered a contract with Columbia Records that afternoon. Dylan was understandably elated. ‘I couldn’t believe it’, he later recalled. ‘I left there and I remember walking out of the studio. I was like on a cloud…It was one of the most thrilling moments in my life’.⁸ Hammond later told Columbia’s new Director of A&R, David Kapralik: ‘Dylan’s an extraordinary young man. I don’t know if he’s going to sell, but he has something profound to say.’⁹ Kapralik trusted Hammond’s judgement in view of his massive reputation, and Dylan was signed as a Columbia recording artist at the age of 20 at the end of October 1961.

His first album, the eponymous Bob Dylan, was recorded, with Hammond as producer, in a couple of afternoons in late November 1961 at a cost of only $402. It consisted mainly of traditional folk and country blues classics with only two original songs, notably ‘Song for Woody’, a tribute to Dylan’s original musical mentor Woody Guthrie, the celebrated Oklahoma-born folk singer, songwriter, and drifter. Bob Dylan was eventually released by Columbia, under pressure from Hammond, in March 1962 with minimal promotion and sold only 5,000 copies in its first year, reinforcing the view of many in the Columbia building on Sixth Avenue that Dylan was ‘Hammond’s Folly’. Subsequent developments were to vindicate emphatically Hammond’s initial artistic judgement.

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When Bob Dylan arrived in London over a year later, in December 1962, he was initially booked into the May Fair Hotel on Stratton Street, but after an uneasy stay there he moved for a while to Philip Saville’s house in Hampstead, north-west London. There, early one morning, Saville witnessed Dylan playing a song he had never heard before, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, to the rapt attention of Saville’s two Spanish au pairs.¹⁰ Dylan had earlier composed the draft of what was to become one of his most famous, anthemic songs in April 1962, in a coffee house on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. But as Saville later recalled, although Dylan had written the song there, ‘planned it in his mind…he still seemed to be working it out in my house’.¹¹ Saville thereupon asked Dylan to perform the song in Evan Jones’ play Madhouse on Castle Street.

Uncomfortable with dialogue in the play in his assigned role of a young anarchist student living in a boarding house, Dylan was asked by Saville instead to sing some songs for the play, including ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, which was sung over the opening and closing credits, and ‘Ballad of the Gliding Swan’ written by Evan Jones. David Warner, a young Royal Shakespeare Company actor, played the part of the anarchist student. Dylan appeared in the play as Warner’s roommate, in Saville’s words, as ‘a rather uncommunicative American who’s very articulate in song’.¹² Madhouse on Castle Street was eventually broadcast by the BBC on January 13, 1963, but the recording tape of the play was later wiped, to Saville’s regret, by the Corporation in 1968.¹³

Soon after Dylan had first arrived in London it was obvious to Philip Saville that the young singer ‘loved London’ and was ‘very excited about the “new” England’ of the early 1960s, a period when young people’s ‘ideas were spilling out in design, graphics, architecture, clothes’.¹⁴ While in London Dylan was also eager to visit its various folk clubs. In particular, he had earlier been told by Pete Seeger to look up Anthea Joseph, who organised London’s oldest folk club, the Troubadour, on Old Brompton Road in Earl’s Court, south-west London.¹⁵ Pete Seeger had performed just over a year before, in November 1961, at the Royal Albert Hall to a capacity audience of 5,000. It was the first folk-music concert proper, and by a major American folk singer, staged there, apart, that is, from the annual festival of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Seeger’s concert had been co-sponsored and assisted by key London folk-club organisers, as well as by Topic Records, founded in 1939 and associated with the Workers’ Musical Association, and by Collet’s Bookshop on New Oxford Street. Politically, both Topic Records, at that time the only significant record label in Britain dealing in traditional folk music, and Collet’s Bookshop were widely regarded as ‘stalwarts of the hard left’.¹⁶

Bob Dylan consequently visited the Troubadour soon after arriving in London, and Anthea Joseph was taking money on the door that evening. As she later recalled:

The day before I’d been in Collet’s and read the article by Bob Shelton about Bob Dylan. I listened to that first album [Bob Dylan] in the shop…The following day I saw these feet coming down the stairs, cowboy boots and jeans, which was quite unusual, and I thought, Oh God, it’s one of the Southend hillbillies, I can’t bear it. Then he came down a little further and I saw the face, and thought, I know that face. He pushed some money at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 First time in London: Winter 1962–63
• 2 Transatlantic influences: Folk, beat music, and R&B
• 3 Second time in London: May 1964
• 4 The 1965 British tour
• 5 Going electric: Folk-rock and The Beatles
• 6 1965–66 revisited
• 7 ‘Judas’: The 1966 British tour
• 8 Back to the Country: 1967–68
• 9 From Woodstock to the Isle of Wight 1968–69
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index