The way Miss May organizes her life would distress any employer less purposefully tolerant than Alexander H. Cohen. He says, “Elaine relates to things that are important, and she knows what’s important. She may be late for half-hour call at the theatre, or forget to comb her hair, but she never misses a dinner with Jeannie.” Some months ago, he tried to reshape Miss May into the model of efficiency that he thought at first she should be, but he soon gave up. The occasion of his change of heart was a strong lecture that he delivered to her in his office one afternoon. In the course of it, he laid out a complete daily schedule for her, reproved her for neglecting a number of chores she had undertaken to do, and gave her various pieces of avuncular advice about how to live her life. She sat speechless through the whole thing, he remembers, her eyes cast down and her hands in her lap, and when he had run out of things to say, she left quietly and with every evidence of contrition. It was closing time by then, and Cohen started clearing the top of his desk—a task he faithfully performs every day, since he is a model of efficiency. Concealed in the mass of papers he found a page from a small memorandum pad. It was covered with Miss May’s handwriting, and read:
Wake up (open eyes), get out of bed.
Get hair fixed.
Take bath (get towel, soap, washcloth; undress; fill tub).
Dry self.
Dress (put on underwear, dress and/or skirt & blouse, shoes).
Comb hair.
Do other things (as thou wouldst have them, etc.).
Correct Alex’s souvenir program.
Look for hat.
Give insurance policies to Ronnie at 6:00.
BUY STAMPS.
Avoid answering phone in case it is Michael (or answer in disguise).
Avoid door in case it is neighbor (or answer in disguise).
BE AT ALEX’S AT 4:00!
Cohen never attempted to lecture Miss May again. He simply gave her the use of a limousine and chauffeur for the run of the show.
In the years since Compass expired, Nichols and May, despite their voluminous improvising, have developed few new full-scale pieces. And since by now they have exposed a good part of their repertory—a fragment at a time on television and almost in toto in the theatre—they do not have the material to do eight spectaculars in a week, or in a year, even if Rollins wanted them to. What’s more, they are not at all sure that working up a new Evening’s worth of numbers—presumably from those Monitor spots—is what they want to do. Both of them apparently have the feeling that if they aren’t careful, their career as entertainers will develop a sinister force of its own that will compel them to keep on doing the same thing long after they have ceased to get any satisfaction from it. Miss May recently quoted with approval something that Nichols said to her soon after they became rich and famous: “You do your work and you have your career, and the two are diametrically opposed.” On her own, she added, “The funniest thing that has happened to us is that we make our living this way—but nobody laughs.” What their career is is made clear to them every day, in a seemingly endless series of interviews with newspapermen, luncheons with advertising-agency executives, conferences with Rollins, and long-distance telephone conversations with movie producers—not to mention the laughter and applause of their audiences and the pay checks that are sent to Rollins every week. They wish they could be equally clear about their work.
Miss May has written a play—a comedy about family secrets, of course—which she hopes will be produced next season. Nichols would like to write a play, too, but he hasn’t yet been able to build up enough resolution to sit down to it. He has been in what he considers a state of torpor ever since Evening settled down to its run. “I can’t think of the show as a full-time job,” he said plaintively not long ago. “There are twenty-two other hours in the day.” As to whether or not, separately or together, they have a message worth delivering, Miss May is a good deal more positive than Nichols, who recently said, with vehemence, “I have no sense of mission about our work. I have nothing I want to tell people.” Miss May has things she wants to tell people. “Remember Swift and the Irish babies?” she asked a friend a few weeks ago. “That’s the way you have to go.” That’s the way she does go, too. “The nice thing is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later,” she says. Note the word “nice.”
Nat Hentoff
OCOTBER 24, 1964 (BOB DYLAN)
THE WORD “folk” in the term “folk music” used to connote a rural, homogeneous community that carried on a tradition of anonymously created music. No one person composed a piece; it evolved through generations of communal care. In recent years, however, folk music has increasingly become the quite personal—and copyrighted—product of specific creators. More and more of them, in fact, are neither rural nor representative of centuries-old family and regional traditions. They are often city-bred converts to the folk style; and, after an apprenticeship during which they try to imitate rural models from the older approach to folk music, they write and perform their own songs out of their own concerns and preoccupations. The restless young, who have been the primary support of the rise of this kind of folk music over the past five years, regard two performers as their preeminent spokesmen. One is the twenty-three-year-old Joan Baez. She does not write her own material and she includes a considerable proportion of traditional, communally created songs in her programs. But Miss Baez does speak out explicitly against racial prejudice and militarism, and she does sing some of the best of the new topical songs. Moreover, her pure, penetrating voice and her open, honest manner symbolize for her admirers a cool island of integrity in a society that the folk-song writer Malvina Reynolds has characterized in one of her songs as consisting of “little boxes.” (“And the boys go into business / And marry and raise a family / In boxes made of ticky tacky / And they all look the same.”) The second—and more influential—demiurge of the folk-music microcosm is Bob Dylan, who is also twenty-three. Dylan’s impact has been the greater because he is a writer of songs as well as a performer. Such compositions of his as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” have become part of the repertoire of many other performers, including Miss Baez, who has explained, “Bobby is expressing what I—and many other young people—feel, what we want to say. Most of the ‘protest’ songs about the bomb and race prejudice and conformity are stupid. They have no beauty. But Bobby’s songs are powerful as poetry and powerful as music. And, oh, my God, how that boy can sing!” Another reason for Dylan’s impact is the singular force of his personality. Wiry, tense, and boyish, Dylan looks and acts like a fusion of Huck Finn and a young Woody Guthrie. Both onstage and off, he appears to be just barely able to contain his prodigious energy. Pete Seeger, who, at forty-five, is one of the elders of American folk music, recently observed, “Dylan may well become the country’s most creative troubadour—if he doesn’t explode.”
Dylan is always dressed informally—the possibility that he will ever be seen in a tie is as remote as the possibility that Miss Baez will perform in an evening gown—and his possessions are few, the weightiest of them being a motorcycle. A wanderer, Dylan is often on the road in search of more experience. “You can find out a lot about a small town by hanging around its poolroom,” he says. Like Miss Baez, he prefers to keep most of his time for himself. He works only occasionally, and during the rest of the year he travels or briefly stays in a house owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, in Bearsville, New York—a small town adjacent to Woodstock and about a hundred miles north of New York City. There Dylan writes songs, works on poetry, plays, and novels, rides his motorcycle, and talks with his friends. From time to time, he comes to New York to record for Columbia Records.
A few weeks ago, Dylan invited me to a recording session that was to begin at seven in the evening in a Columbia studio on Seventh Avenue near Fifty-second Street. Before he arrived, a tall, lean, relaxed man in his early thirties came in and in
troduced himself to me as Tom Wilson, Dylan’s recording producer. He was joined by two engineers, and we all went into the control room. Wilson took up a post at a long, broad table, between the engineers, from which he looked out into a spacious studio with a tall thicket of microphones to the left and, directly in front, an enclave containing a music stand, two microphones, and an upright piano, and set off by a large screen, which would partly shield Dylan as he sang, for the purpose of improving the quality of the sound. “I have no idea what he’s going to record tonight,” Wilson told me. “It’s all to be stuff he’s written in the last couple of months.”
I asked if Dylan presented any particular problems to a recording director.
“My main difficulty has been pounding mike technique into him,” Wilson said. “He used to get excited and move around a lot and then lean in too far, so that the mike popped. Aside from that, my basic problem with him has been to create the kind of setting in which he’s relaxed. For instance, if that screen should bother him, I’d take it away, even if we have to lose a little quality in the sound.” Wilson looked toward the door. “I’m somewhat concerned about tonight. We’re going to do a whole album in one session. Usually, we’re not in such a rush, but this album has to be ready for Columbia’s fall sales convention. Except for special occasions like this, Bob has no set schedule of recording dates. We think he’s important enough to record whenever he wants to come to the studio.”
Five minutes after seven, Dylan walked into the studio, carrying a battered guitar case. He had on dark glasses, and his hair, dark-blond and curly, had obviously not been cut for some weeks; he was dressed in blue jeans, a black jersey, and desert boots. With him were half a dozen friends, among them Jack Elliott, a folk singer in the Woody Guthrie tradition, who was also dressed in blue jeans and desert boots, plus a brown corduroy shirt and a jaunty cowboy hat. Elliott had been carrying two bottles of Beaujolais, which he now handed to Dylan, who carefully put them on a table near the screen. Dylan opened the guitar case, took out a looped-wire harmonica holder, hung it around his neck, and then walked over to the piano and began to play in a rolling, honky-tonk style.
“He’s got a wider range of talents than he shows,” Wilson told me. “He kind of hoards them. You go back to his three albums. Each time, there’s a big leap from one to the next—in material, in performance, in everything.”
Dylan came into the control room, smiling. Although he is fiercely accusatory toward society at large while he is performing, his most marked offstage characteristic is gentleness. He speaks swiftly but softly, and appears persistently anxious to make himself clear. “We’re going to make a good one tonight,” he said to Wilson. “I promise.” He turned to me and continued, “There aren’t any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn’t see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I’m going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally. The way I like to write is for it to come out the way I walk or talk.” Dylan frowned. “Not that I even walk or talk yet like I’d like to. I don’t carry myself yet the way Woody, Big Joe Williams, and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to someday, but they’re older. They got to where music was a tool for them, a way to live more, a way to make themselves feel better. Sometimes I can make myself feel better with music, but other times it’s still hard to go to sleep at night.”
A friend strolled in, and Dylan began to grumble about an interview that had been arranged for him later in the week. “I hate to say no, because, after all, these guys have a job to do,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. “But it bugs me that the first question usually turns out to be ‘Are you going down South to take part in any of the civil-rights projects?’ They try to fit you into things. Now, I’ve been down there, but I’m not going down just to hold a picket sign so they can shoot a picture of me. I know a lot of the kids in S.N.C.C.—you know, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That’s the only organization I feel a part of spiritually. The N.A.A.C.P. is a bunch of old guys. I found that out by coming directly in contact with some of the people in it. They didn’t understand me. They were looking to use me for something. Man, everybody’s hung up. You sometimes don’t know if somebody wants you to do something because he’s hung up or because he really digs who you are. It’s awful complicated, and the best thing you can do is admit it.”
Returning to the studio, Dylan stood in front of the piano and pounded out an accompaniment as he sang from one of his own new songs:
“Are you for real, baby, or are you just on the shelf?
I’m looking deep into your eyes, but all I can see is myself.
If you’re trying to throw me, I’ve already been tossed.
If you’re trying to lose me, I’ve already been lost….”
Another friend of Dylan’s arrived, with three children, ranging in age from four to ten. The children raced around the studio until Wilson insisted that they be relatively confined to the control room. By ten minutes to eight, Wilson had checked out the sound balance to his satisfaction, Dylan’s friends had found seats along the studio walls, and Dylan had expressed his readiness—in fact, eagerness—to begin. Wilson, in the control room, leaned forward, a stopwatch in his hand. Dylan took a deep breath, threw his head back, and plunged into a song in which he accompanied himself on guitar and harmonica. The first take was ragged; the second was both more relaxed and more vivid. At that point, Dylan, smiling, clearly appeared to be confident of his ability to do an entire album in one night. As he moved into succeeding numbers, he relied principally on the guitar for support, except for exclamatory punctuations on the harmonica.
Having glanced through a copy of Dylan’s new lyrics that he had handed to Wilson, I observed to Wilson that there were indeed hardly any songs of social protest in the collection.
“Those early albums gave people the wrong idea,” Wilson said. “Basically, he’s in the tradition of all lasting folk music. I mean, he’s not a singer of protest so much as he is a singer of concern about people. He doesn’t have to be talking about Medgar Evers all the time to be effective. He can just tell a simple little story of a guy who ran off from a woman.”
After three takes of one number, one of the engineers said to Wilson, “If you want to try another, we can get a better take.”
“No.” Wilson shook his head. “With Dylan, you have to take what you can get.”
Out in the studio, Dylan, his slight form bent forward, was standing just outside the screen and listening to a playback through earphones. He began to take the earphones off during an instrumental passage, but then his voice came on, and he grinned and replaced them.
The engineer muttered again that he might get a better take if Dylan ran through the number once more.
“Forget it,” Wilson said. “You don’t think in terms of orthodox recording techniques when you’re dealing with Dylan. You have to learn to be as free on this side of the glass as he is out there.”
Dylan went on to record a song about a man leaving a girl because he was not prepared to be the kind of invincible hero and all-encompassing provider she wanted. “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe,” he sang, with finality.
During the playback, I joined Dylan in the studio. “The songs so far sound as if there were real people in them,” I said.
Dylan seemed surprised that I had considered it necessary to make the comment. “There are. That’s what makes them so scary. If I haven’t been through what I write about, the songs aren’t worth anything.” He went on, via one of his songs, to offer a com
plicated account of a turbulent love affair in Spanish Harlem, and at the end asked a friend, “Did you understand it?” The friend nodded enthusiastically. “Well, I didn’t,” Dylan said, with a laugh, and then became sombre. “It’s hard being free in a song—getting it all in. Songs are so confining. Woody Guthrie told me once that songs don’t have to rhyme—that they don’t have to do anything like that. But it’s not true. A song has to have some kind of form to fit into the music. You can bend the words and the metre, but it still has to fit somehow. I’ve been getting freer in the songs I write, but I still feel confined. That’s why I write a lot of poetry—if that’s the word. Poetry can make its own form.”
The 60s Page 51
