by Bob Dylan
There was other stuff in the room, other delights. A Remington typewriter, the neck piece of a saxophone with a swanlike curve, aluminum constructed field glasses covered in Moroccan leather, things to marvel over—a little machine that put out four volts, a small Mohawk tape recorder, odd photos, one of Florence Nightingale with a pet owl on her shoulder, novelty postcards—a picture postcard from California with a palm tree.
I’d never been to California. It seemed like it was the place of some special, glamorous race. I knew that movies came from there and that there was a folk club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove. At the Folklore Center I’d seen posters of folk shows at the Ash Grove and I used to dream about playing there. It seemed so far away. I never thought I’d ever get out there. As it turned out, not only did I get out there, but I bypassed the Ash Grove entirely and when I finally did arrive in California, my songs and my reputation had preceded me. I had records out on Columbia and I’d be playing at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and meeting all the performers who had recorded my songs—artists like The Byrds, who’d recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Sonny and Cher, who’d done “All I Really Want to Do,” The Turtles, who recorded “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” Glen Campbell, who had released “Don’t Think Twice,” and Johnny Rivers, who had recorded “Positively 4th Street.”
Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down—the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me.
It would be a few more years before I’d reach Sunland. I stared around the room, looked over towards the back window and saw that twilight was coming. Ice was stacked up, thick, all along the fire escape rail. I stared down into the alleyway and then up to the rooftops from tower to tower. Snow was beginning to fall again, covered the cement covered earth. If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn’t seem that way. It’s not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library—everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.
Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it—like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come”—but you don’t know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it—you’re set free. You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score. It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic, but it’s really not like that. It isn’t like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived—your eyes don’t spring open and suddenly you’re very quick and sure about something. It’s more deliberate. It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are—it won’t do any good. It’s a reflective thing. Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door—something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it.
Mike Seeger had that effect on me. I’d seen him recently up at Camilla Adams’s place. Camilla was an exotic, dark haired lady, a full bodied woman who looked like Ava Gardner. I used to see her in Gerde’s Folk City, the preeminent folk club in America. Gerde’s was on Mercer Street near West Broadway at the edge of the Village, an uptown type club not unlike the Blue Angel, but it was downtown. It booked mostly nationally known folksingers with records out and you needed a union card plus a cabaret card to work there. On Monday nights, which were called Hootenanny Nights, unknown folksingers could perform. One of those nights, I was in there and I met Camilla. From then on, I knew her a little bit. She’d usually be with the type of guys that looked like private detectives. She was a superb picture of a woman, close friends with Josh White and also Cisco Houston. Cisco had a terminal disease and he would be doing some of his last few performances at Folk City and I was there to hear him. I’d heard him a lot on the Woody Guthrie records and also on his own records, all the cowboy songs, lumberjack and railroad songs and bad man ballads. He was a perfect counterpart to Woody and had a soothing baritone voice—had traveled extensively and worked all the towns with Woody, made records with him, went to sea with him on a merchant marine ship during World War II. Cisco, handsome and dashing with a pencil thin mustache, looked like a riverboat gambler, like Errol Flynn. People said he could have been a movie star, that he once turned down a starring role opposite Myrna Loy. Burl Ives, who did go on to become a movie star, and Cisco had played together at migrant camps during the Great Depression. Cisco also starred on his own TV show on CBS but it was during the McCarthy era and the network had to let him go. I knew all about him. Cisco was sitting with Camilla during a break in his set, and she introduced me to him, told Cisco that I was a young folksinger and sang a lot of Woody’s songs. Cisco was gracious, had a dignified air about him, talked like he sang. He didn’t need to say much—you knew he had been through a lot, achieved some great deed, praiseworthy and meritorious, yet unspoken about it. I’d watched him perform and even though he was a hair’s breadth away from death, you suspected nothing. Camilla was having a get-together for him later in the week, a bon voyage party, and she invited me to come by. She lived in a large apartment on 5th Avenue near Washington Square Park on the top floor of a Romanesque mansion.
Though I didn’t know it, later she might have been influential with the owners of Gerde’s Folk City, Mike Porco and his brother John, in hiring me for a two-week booking, opposite John Lee Hooker. Because I was underaged, Mike signed for me as a guardian on my cabaret and union cards, so he became like a father to me—the Sicilian father that I never had. I showed up at Camilla’s with my sort of part-time girlfriend, Delores Dixon, the girl singer from The New World Singers, a group I was pretty close with. Delores was from Alabama, an ex-reporter and an ex-dancer.
As we came through the door, I could see the rooms were already swarming with people, the bohemian crowd—a lot of old-timers. The air was thick with perfume and cigarette smoke and the smell of whiskey and a lot of people. The apartment was very Victorian, decorated with a lot of lovely things. Beaux Arts lamps, carved boudoir chairs, couches in plush velvet—heavy andirons connected with chains by the fireplace and the fireplace was flaming. I got up close to it, it made me think of hot dogs and marshmallows. Delores and I didn’t feel out of place, not too much. I was wearing a thick flannel shirt under a sheepskin jacket, peaked cap, khaki pants and motorcycle boots. Delores was wearing a long beaver fur coat over a nightgown that looked like a dress. I saw a lot of people here that I’d meet again not too far off, a lot of the folk community hierarchy, who were all pretty indifferent towards me at the time and showed very little enthusiasm. They could tell I wasn’t from the North Carolina mountains nor was I a very commercial, cosmopolitan singer either. I just didn’t fit in. They didn’t know what to make of me. Pete Seeger did, though, and he said hello. He was with Harold Leventhal who managed The Weavers. Harold spoke in a low, guttural whisper. You had to lean in close to hear what he was saying. He’d later prom
ote a concert of mine at Town Hall.
Another guy there, Henry Sheridan, had been Mae West’s boyfriend. Mae West would later record a song of mine. Everybody was there, avant-garde artists like Judith Dunne, a choreographer whose dance pieces were based on sports activities like wrestling and baseball, Ken Jacobs, the underground filmmaker who made Blond Cobra, and Peter Schumann, from the Bread and Puppet Theatre—his play Christmas Story portrayed King Herod smoking a big cigar and one puppet in a three-faced mask who played all the Magi. Moe Asch, who founded Folkways Records, was also there and so was Theodore Bikel, who played Sheriff Max Muller in the film The Defiant Ones. Theo was an accomplished actor who also sang folk songs in foreign languages. In a few years’ time, I’d travel to Mississippi with both him and Pete to play at a voters’ registration rally. At Camilla’s place I met up with Harry Jackson, who I already knew from Folk City—Harry, the cowboy sculptor, painter, singer from Wyoming. Harry had a studio on Broome Street and would later make a painting of me, which I sat for. He also had a studio in Italy where he made statues for town piazzas. He was a rough, gruff guy—looked like General Grant, sang cowboy songs and was a heavy drinker.
Cisco brought all kinds of people together. There were union guys there—ex-union guys, labor organizers. Recently, there’d been some accounts in the national news of an AFL-CIO executive council meeting that had been held in Puerto Rico and it was pretty funny. It had been a weeklong affair, and the union bosses were photographed drinking mammoth rum drinks, visiting casinos and nightclubs—hanging around at hotel pools in flowing bathrobes, swimming the surf, wearing Hollywood-ish sunglasses—doing handstands on the diving board. It looked pretty decadent. They were supposedly there to discuss the march on Washington to dramatize the unemployment problem. Evidentially they didn’t know they were being photographed.
These guys at Camilla’s place weren’t like that, though, they looked more like tugboat captains or baggy-pantsed outfielders or roustabouts. Mack Mackenzie had been an organizer on the Brooklyn waterfront. I met him and his wife, Eve, who was an ex–Martha Graham dancer. They lived on 28th Street. Later on, I’d be their houseguest, too…sleep on their living room couch. Some people were there from the art world, too—people who knew and commented on what was going on in Amsterdam, Paris and Stockholm. One of them, Robyn Whitlaw, the outlaw artist, walked by in a motion like a slow dance. I said to her, “What’s happening?” “I’m here to eat the big dinner,” she responded. Years later Whitlaw would be arrested for breaking and entering and stealing. Her defense was that she was an artist and that the act was performance art and, incredulously, the charges against her were dropped.
Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out! was there, too. In a few years’ time he would castigate me publicly in his magazine for turning my back on the folk community. It was an angry letter. I liked Irwin, but I couldn’t relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew, a piece of music that didn’t follow the rules of modern jazz, which had been on the verge of breaking into the popular marketplace, until Miles’s record came along and killed its chances. Miles was put down by the jazz community. I couldn’t imagine Miles being too upset. Latin artists were breaking rules, too. Artists like João Gilberto, Roberto Menescal and Carlos Lyra were breaking away from the drum infested samba stuff and creating a new form of Brazilian music with melodic changes. They were calling it bossa nova. As for me, what I did to break away was to take simple folk changes and put new imagery and attitude to them, use catchphrases and metaphor combined with a new set of ordinances that evolved into something different that had not been heard before. Silber scolded me in his letter for doing this, as if he alone and a few others had the keys to the real world. I knew what I was doing, though, and wasn’t going to take a step back or retreat for anybody.
There were Broadway and Off-Broadway actors at Camilla’s place, too—Diana Sands, an electrifying actress who I might have been secretly in love with, and some others. A lot of musicians and singers—Lee Hayes, Erik Darling (Erik had just formed a group called The Rooftop Singers and they’d soon record an old Gus Cannon song called “Walk Right In” that hit the pop charts), Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Logan English. I knew Logan from Folk City, too. Logan was from Kentucky, wore a black neckerchief and played the banjo…was an expert in playing Bascom Lamar Lunsford songs like “Mole in the Ground” and “Grey Eagle.” Logan was like a psychology professor, a good performer, but originality not his long suit. There was something very formal and orthodox about him, but he had a twinkle in his eye and a passion for the old-time music, had a ruddy complexion, and there’s always a drink in his hand—calls me Robert. Millard Thomas, who played guitar for Harry Belafonte, was also there. Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it. He was a fantastic artist, sang about lovers and slaves—chain gang workers, saints and sinners and children. His repertoire was full of old folk songs like “Jerry the Mule,” “Tol’ My Captain,” “Darlin’ Cora,” “John Henry,” “Sinner’s Prayer” and also a lot of Caribbean folk songs all arranged in a way that appealed to a wide audience, much wider than The Kingston Trio. Harry had learned songs directly from Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Belafonte recorded for RCA and one of his records, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, had even sold a million copies. He was a movie star, too, but not like Elvis. Harry was an authentic tough guy, not unlike Brando or Rod Steiger. He was dramatic and intense on the screen, had a boyish smile and a hard-core hostility. In the movie Odds Against Tomorrow, you forget he’s an actor, you forget he’s Harry Belafonte. His presence and magnitude was so wide. Harry was like Valentino. As a performer, he broke all attendance records. He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally. To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re a part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry—who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. He even said he hated pop songs, thought they were junk. I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally. Astoundingly and as unbelievable as it might have seemed, I’d be making my professional recording debut with Harry, playing harmonica on one of his albums called Midnight Special. Strangely enough, this was the only one memorable recording date that would stand out in my mind for years to come. Even my own sessions would become lost in abstractions. With Belafonte I felt like I’d become anointed in some kind of way. He did the same thing for me that Gorgeous George did. Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you. The man commands respect. You know he never took the easy path, though he could have.
It was getting late and me and Delores were about to leave when I suddenly spotted Mike Seeger in the room. I hadn’t noticed him before and I watched him walk from the wall to the table. When I saw him my brain became wide awake and I was instantly in a good mood. I’d seen Mike play previously with The New Lost City Ramblers at a schoolhouse on East 10th Street. He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. H
e was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once—had chivalry in his blood. Like some figure from a restored monarchy, he had come to purify the church. You couldn’t imagine him making a big deal out of anything. I also heard him play on his own up in Alan Lomax’s loft on 3rd Street. Lomax used to have parties twice a month where he’d bring in folksingers to play. They weren’t really parties or concerts. I don’t know what you’d call them…soirees? You might see Roscoe Holcomb or Clarence Ashley or Dock Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Robert Pete Williams or even Don Stover and The Lilly Brothers—sometimes, even real live section gang convicts that Lomax would get out of state penitentiaries on passes and bring to New York to do field hollers in his loft. The invitees to these gatherings would most likely be local doctors, city dignitaries, anthropologists, but there’d always be some regular folk there, too.
I’d been there once or twice and that’s where I saw Mike play without The Ramblers. He played “The Five Mile Chase,” “Mighty Mississippi,” “Claude Allen Blues” and some other songs. He played all the instruments, whatever the song called for—the banjo, the fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, and the guitar, even harmonica in the rack. Mike was skin-stinging. He was tense, poker-faced and radiated telepathy, wore a snowy white shirt and silver sleeve bands. He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, played in all the genres and had the idioms mastered—Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel—being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. I was so absorbed in listening to him that I wasn’t even aware of myself. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood. Nobody could just learn this stuff, and it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns…that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale…that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself.
