Alongside the ads for Paul Newman’s opening in The Hustler and the arrival in New York of the Kirov Ballet, a headline and picture announced ‘Bob Dylan: a distinctive folk-song stylist’. The picture was significant in lots of ways. There was no picture of the headliners but there was one of this kid. It was no accident. Shelton devoted as much of the review to describing Dylan’s appearance as he did to his music (‘he looks like a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik’) – an implicit acknowledgement that what was going on here had more to do with Elvis Presley than Pete Seeger. He glossed over the stories Dylan had been telling about his antecedents and said it mattered less where he came from than where he was going. He then moved on to the Greenbriar Boys, who must have been livid that their limelight had been hijacked by this fortunate new arrival.
It was TV that had broken Elvis Presley, but it was press that would make Bob Dylan. All the way through his career he benefited from the process that only press can provide, whereby the terms of engagement are established before the artist enters the room. For Bob Dylan, this Shelton review was the first of a lifetime of reviews all of which would major on his specialness and difference. The following week he carried the review around in his pocket and would show it to anyone in the folk business without second bidding. He really didn’t need to. They had all seen it and read it, many of them with gritted teeth. This was just the start of it. Shelton spent the rest of his life being ‘the man who first reviewed Bob Dylan’. The review led to further interest from John Hammond Jr and a recording contract with Columbia Records. Hammond spent the rest of his life being billed as ‘the man who signed Bob Dylan’. These men were hitching a ride on the boy’s coat tails just as much as he was benefiting from their old-boy network. In the music business, confidence is key. If something’s on the up, everybody gets on board.
Dylan’s ascent wasn’t as immediate as it might have been. Columbia sat on his first album, which was mainly traditional material, for four months before releasing it. When it came out, in March 1962, it didn’t bother the chart. However there were believers and, miraculously, it found its way to them. For seventeen-year-old Rod Stewart, living in north London with his parents, these songs and this voice suddenly sounded like a new, real America. The transatlantic trade in music meant Bob Dylan was to spend the following Christmas in London, playing the same character he’d developed on the streets and in the coffee houses of Minnesota and Greenwich Village in a play for the BBC. By that time, recognizing the need to come up with material that justified the hype he had begun and the faith others had placed in him, Dylan started playing some of his own new songs. One was called ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, another was ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, and a third was ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’. They came in such a torrent he later said he had no idea how he did it. They came in such profusion that he had no room on his new record The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan for ‘The Death Of Emmett Till’, a song about the murder that had taken place in Mississippi the same year that Little Richard had recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’.
Grossman started to book shows where his boy could appear in his own right. To promote them Dylan went on WNYC’s Folksong Festival, a radio programme presented by Oscar Brand. There he told a pack of lies about who he was and where he’d come from. ‘I was raised in Gallup, New Mexico,’ he deadpanned, almost putting a hillbilly quaver in his voice. ‘I travelled with the carnival when I was about thirteen years old. All the way till I was nineteen. Every year off and on I’d join different carnivals.’ He knew it wasn’t true, wasn’t even half-true, but there was nothing in his delivery to indicate that he was about to laugh. More importantly, Brand must have known it wasn’t true. It didn’t matter. Brand, like most of the listening audience, had such an investment in the romance of the tale that he was prepared to overlook small matters of objective truth for the sake of being able to trip down the yellow brick road the artist had laid out for them. When Robert Shelton sat down with him to write what was supposed to be his official record company biography at around the same time, Dylan extemporized what he must have thought was an ideal CV for somebody who really didn’t have one. He said he’d played with Bobby Vee and Gene Vincent, that he’d learned guitar from Mance Lipscomb and a one-eyed bluesman who went by the name of Wigglefoot. He hinted at a hard life which the most cursory inspection of his soft hands would have contradicted. He said he’d been a farmhand and that he sometimes played slide guitar with a switchblade. He said what people wanted to believe. They loved him for it.
Sophisticates speak knowingly of the music business and something they call ‘hype’. In their account, hype is a dark art employed by malign puppet masters wreathed in cigar smoke from offices in tall buildings. In their account it involves pulling the wool over the eyes of an audience who wish above all to know the truth. They like to think that other people are deceived by hype, but not them. This undersells the truth of hype. Most hype is perpetrated by the audience on itself. The transformation of Robert Zimmerman into Bob Dylan, which took wing in 1961 and within two years was to girdle the globe, was masterminded not by the puppet master but by the puppet himself. It took wing for the simple reason that the audience’s desire to believe in the fictions it proposed was greater than their desire to know the truth behind them.
This was because in this new form of popular music which had been born in the wake of Elvis Presley, it was important to be able to believe that the singer and the song were somehow indivisible. A rock star didn’t perform the songs, a rock star was the songs. At the precise stage in their lives when the young audience were ceasing to believe that John Wayne was a cowboy they were quite happy to embrace the idea that Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota was a hobo who had been blown into New York by the wind of destiny. It was this myth that he forged in 1961, in which he was already an old man inside a young man, that was to make Bob Dylan the defining rock star of our time, making him not just as big as Elvis Presley but in some senses bigger. It also launched an act which at the time of writing is still flourishing, an act that has outlasted Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Woody Guthrie and Al Jolson; an act so enduring in its mystery it would have made even Houdini envious. What the career of Bob Dylan teaches is that if you develop the mystique of a great rock star then you can easily ride out any rocky stages or rough patches in your career. That’s because the greatest investment is in the myth itself. It could even be more important than the songs you sing. Once the myth is established it allows you to perform a striptease act where you never need actually to take anything off – an act Robert Zimmerman has been performing for fifty years. Zimmerman’s greatest creation was Bob Dylan.
Within a year of Robert Shelton’s review appearing in the New York Times there wasn’t a person in the worldwide music business who hadn’t heard of Bob Dylan. Word had even got back to Hibbing. Just four years later these same early adopters, these same earnest, bespectacled undergraduates, were captured in D. A. Pennebaker’s film Dont Look Back as they came out of theatres, recoiling from the sight and sound of their erstwhile hobo hero Bob Dylan accompanied by an electric band. Many were shocked and outraged. Here, it seemed, was Bob Dylan revealed in his true diabolical colours. The embarrassment on their faces betrayed the way they felt about the way they had been betrayed. They had come to admire a folk artist but had been caught at the feet of a rock star. Arguably the biggest rock star of all.
1961 PLAYLIST
Dion, ‘The Wanderer’
The Beach Boys, ‘Surfin”
The Miracles, ‘Shop Around’
Ben E. King, ‘Stand By Me’
Elvis Presley, ‘His Latest Flame’
Gary U.S. Bonds, ‘Quarter To Three’
Dave Van Ronk, Dave Van Ronk Sings
Joan Baez, Vol. 2
Ray Charles, The Genius Sings The Blues
Bill Evans Trio, Sunday At The Village Vanguard
28 SEPTEMBER 1962
SALTNEY STREET, LIVERPOOL
The man who fit in
THE CITY OF Liverpool jealously guards its reputation for toughness. Richard Starkey came from one of its tougher districts. The Dingle was a part of town better known to debt collectors and school attendance officers than respectable folk. Even by the standards of the area the Starkey family were poor. The boy’s parents broke up when he was just three years old. The strongest influence on his upbringing was his grandmother, a woman of nineteenth-century superstitions. One was the belief that any child unfortunate enough to be born left-handed must be trained out of the habit. She set herself the job of making sure young Richard wrote right-handed. He subsequently played a right-handed drum kit with the inclinations of a left-hander. It’s Ringo’s grandmother we have to thank for the characteristic lacunae that made so many of the Beatles’ drum parts impossible for other drummers to play.
In 1947, around the time of his seventh birthday, Richie contracted peritonitis. He spent months in the hospital. On three occasions his mother was told he wouldn’t last the night. When he was finally off the critical list he entered a long period of convalescence during which he was instructed to stay still and do nothing. By the time he was ready to go back to school he’d dropped far behind the rest of the class. If it hadn’t been for the English lessons provided by the daughter of a neighbour the boy would have been functionally illiterate. Richie left school at fifteen. The best his teacher could say of him was he was ‘honest, cheerful and willing and quite capable of making a satisfactory employee’.
The teenage Richie Starkey was keen on music. At Christmas 1956, when he was sixteen years old, his stepfather kindly got him a drum kit. This was a second-hand pre-war dance band set-up which Harry Graves had sourced a couple of hundred miles away in Essex, manhandled on to the London Underground and then transported to Liverpool by train. The educational system may have dismissed Richie but he still had a determination to make things happen in his life. He also had surprisingly big dreams. When in 1958 Johnnie Ray, the American star known as the Nabob of Sob, appeared in Liverpool, Richie Starkey, by then playing drums in the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, saw Ray at the upstairs window of Liverpool’s best hotel, signing autographs and allowing them to flutter down to the fans below. Richie swore that one day it would be him up there.
Richie had drive. When his fiancée gave him the choice of her or the drums it was clear what answer she was going to get. He did a three-month residency at Butlin’s holiday camp which earned him a Musicians’ Union card. He changed his name to Ringo Starr in honour of the jewellery he wore and the role played by John Wayne in the movie Stagecoach. Ringo was always slightly ahead of most of his contemporaries. He wanted to travel and see the world. Even as late as 1961, when he was playing in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and was widely regarded as Liverpool’s best drummer, he wrote to the Chamber of Commerce in Houston, Texas enquiring about jobs because he was interested in emigrating. Ringo was not one to let the grass grow.
He knew the Liverpool band who called themselves the Beatles. They were younger than him, in John Lennon’s case by a few months, in George Harrison’s by a few years. These age differences remained significant even decades later. The Beatles had proper management in Brian Epstein, the son of a wealthy Liverpool Jewish family. They had improved and sharpened their act via long residencies in Hamburg, and they drew large crowds of mainly shop girls to their lunchtime shows at the Cavern; most importantly, they were going to go to London to make a real record for EMI. Nobody anybody knew had ever done that.
Ringo had played with the Beatles on a few occasions when their usual drummer Pete Best had not been available. Best had been in the group for two years. He was recruited because drummers were hard to find, he was good-looking, and he lived in a house big enough for them to play in. But he was a weak player, and he never fitted in with the Beatles as a social group. He spoke so rarely his reticence could almost be construed as aggression. Bands, or groups as they were commonly described in 1962, require above all things commitment. You had to be all-in. By mid-1962, partly at the prompting of EMI producer George Martin, Best was on his way out, even though he was the only one unaware of this fact.
When the band had done their test recording with EMI earlier in 1962, Martin had made it clear to John, Paul and George that when they returned to make a proper record he would have a substitute drummer standing by. The Beatles were as hopeless as any other group when it came to managing a tricky people situation, but they were reconciled to the fact that Best had to go. They knew that if they did get rid of him there was only one drummer they could replace him with. George made the first approach to Ringo, who agreed to join, provided they got on with firing Best. The Beatles didn’t do this themselves. No matter how closely their lives and Best’s had been intertwined they were squeamish when it came to unpleasantness so it was left to Epstein, who was mild-mannered but accustomed to dealing with staff, to dispense with Best’s services in a fashion standard in the world of business but utterly unknown in the rub-along world of rock.
Epstein invited Best to his offices. He sat him down. He asked him how he thought it was going. Pete said he thought it was going fine. Brian said, that’s a shame because we’ve decided to fire you from the group. Pete asked why. Epstein replied, with a baldness that does him credit, ‘because you aren’t good enough’. He then offered him alternative employment in one of his other bands where standards presumably weren’t quite so high.
While Epstein dealt with the inevitable fall-out of this decision the band gleefully got on with bringing Ringo in. John rang him at Butlin’s in Skegness, where he was on a residency. He began with the important stuff. He told Ringo his teddy boy sideburns would have to go. He didn’t resist. When Ringo got home he shaved them off and stood in front of the mirror to get an idea how he would look with his hair flattened on his head and brought forward.
In the previous decade male hair had been overwhelmingly swept back. To achieve the necessary sleekness, hair cream and regular use of a comb were required. The new, more boyish style which the Beatles had copied from Parisian modernists rejected hair cream, the swept-back look and its attendant narcissism. Still, the new hair, as ever, was a statement every bit as profound as any of the music they were making. Untreated and combed forward, it instantly made them appear modern, boyish, classless, unspoilt, possibly even clever. It said Liverpool, not London. It said the sixties, not the fifties. It said cheerfulness, not slickness. Ringo had come from the teddy boy culture but nonetheless accepted they had a look, a look which he was expected to fit in with. He went along with it without complaint. By the time he arrived in the group they had unwritten rules. The other three had all come along before those rules were established. In submitting to the rules without complaint Ringo was in a sense not the last Beatle. He was the first one.
The Beatles could never have gone on to success had Best remained their drummer. Brian Epstein later described the other three’s decision to install Ringo as ‘a quite brilliant move’. George later said that he was the one who was responsible for Ringo joining because ‘every time he played with us the band really swung’. In entertainment, people are apt to confuse the appearance of virtuosity with musical effectiveness. The layman’s view of a great drummer is much like the layman’s view of a great actor. That is, a person showily accomplishing a thing that appears difficult to accomplish. People think a good drummer is somebody who for a start does a great deal of drumming. What Ringo brought to the Beatles could not be seen but it could definitely be felt. If you go back and compare and contrast the recordings made before Best’s departure with those made after Ringo’s installation you hear the difference between somebody timidly trying to keep up and somebody wholeheartedly leading the way. In years to come there would be many pub conversations about whether Ringo was even the best drummer in the Beatles thanks to a barb misattributed to John. Was he the best drummer in the world? It didn’t matter. Was he the best drummer in the Beatles? That didn’t
matter either. Was he the perfect drummer for the Beatles? That did matter. And he was.
In September 1962 not everything was perfectly poised for lift-off. Ringo had joined a group that clearly had many of the things the other Liverpool groups wished they had. An agreement to make an actual record with a proper record company for one, the patronage of Brian Epstein for another, a large following in the north-west for a third. But the record company was far from convinced, and it wasn’t clear whether their first single would have to be Mitch Murray’s egregious ‘How Do You Do It’ or their own insipid Bruce Channel knock-off ‘Love Me Do’. And the further they ventured from their Liverpool home the more likely people were to point out that they had voluntarily saddled themselves with one of the worst names any group ever came up with. Furthermore, people in the music industry didn’t have a way to process a group all of whose members played and sang. This was a new hybrid. They gave the impression that they were making life difficult for themselves. The fact that they managed to transcend these difficulties was the first hint of the melting power of their charm. This charm was magically derived from their qualities as a unit.
George Martin at Parlophone wasn’t convinced about their songs or the way they did them. But he knew there was something about them as a group of people, both socially and musically, which had a winning way. Together they became something far greater than the sum of their individual parts. Musically they became a four-headed organism with a God-given talent for the generation of joy. This performance continued even when they put their instruments down. At press conferences they became a controversy-deflecting cross-talk act. When you watched them play on the television their sheer togetherness could be almost moving. In photographs they were the gang of your dreams. They were the friends you wanted to grow up to have. In the fifties the Crickets had established the prototype for a group. In September 1962 the Beatles, now with Ringo, perfected that prototype. One stand-offish member like Pete Best would have broken the spell entirely. All great groups are a picture every bit as much as they are a song. Once Ringo was there, the picture was complete.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 8
