FEATURE:
Highway 51 Revisited…
Looking Back at Bob Dylan’s Eponymous Album at Sixty
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RATHER than this being a grab-bag…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in 1962/PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Alper
of articles about Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album, I wanted to try and thread together some features that give us some background and details about a hugely important release. Released on 19th March, 1962, it is almost sixty years since a legend of music made his introduction. Even though Bob Dylan is not often ranked alongside Dylan’s best work, its immediacy, simplicity and importance puts it in my top ten Dylan works. With only a couple of originals (including Song for Woody), maybe people feel Dylan is at his best when showing his genius as a songwriter. A young man barely in his twenties making an album that would launch this incredible career, it is just Bob Dylan and producer John H. Hammond. Whereas Dylan would recruit other musicians for future albums, this is a more intimate and stripped-back record. Wikipedia provide some details regarding the recording of Bob Dylan:
“Dylan met John Hammond at a rehearsal session for Carolyn Hester on September 14, 1961, at the apartment shared by Hester and her then-husband, Richard Fariña. Hester had invited Dylan to the session as a harmonica player, and Hammond approved him as a session player after hearing him rehearse, with recommendations from his son, musician John P. Hammond, and from Liam Clancy.
Hammond later told Robert Shelton that he decided to sign Dylan "on the spot", and invited him to the Columbia offices for a more formal audition recording. No record of that recording has turned up in Columbia's files, but Hammond, Dylan, and Columbia's A&R director Mitch Miller have all confirmed that an audition took place.
On September 26, Dylan began a two-week run at Gerde's Folk City, second on the bill to The Greenbriar Boys. On September 29, an exceptionally favorable review of Dylan's performance appeared in the New York Times. The same day, Dylan played harmonica at Hester's recording session at Columbia's Manhattan studios. After the session, Hammond brought Dylan to his offices and presented him with Columbia's standard five-year contract for previously unrecorded artists, and Dylan signed immediately.
That night at Gerdes, Dylan told Shelton about Hammond's offer, but asked him to "keep it quiet" until the contract's final approval had worked its way through the Columbia hierarchy. The label's official approvals came quickly.
Studio time was scheduled for late November, and during the weeks leading up to those sessions, Dylan began searching for new material even though he was already familiar with a number of songs. According to Dylan's friend Carla Rotolo (sister of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo), "He spent most of his time listening to my records, days and nights. He studied the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, the singing of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd, Rabbit Brown's guitar, Guthrie, of course, and blues … his record was in the planning stages. We were all concerned about what songs Dylan was going to do. I remember clearly talking about it."
The album was ultimately recorded in three short afternoon sessions on November 20 and 22. Hammond later joked that Columbia spent "about $402" to record it, and the figure has entered the Dylan legend as its actual cost. Despite the low cost and short amount of time, Dylan was still difficult to record, according to Hammond. "Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike," recalls Hammond. "Even more frustrating, he refused to learn from his mistakes. It occurred to me at the time that I'd never worked with anyone so undisciplined before."
Seventeen songs were recorded, and five of the album's chosen tracks were actually cut in single takes ("Baby Let Me Follow You Down", "In My Time of Dyin'", "Gospel Plow", "Highway 51 Blues", and "Freight Train Blues") while the master take of "Song to Woody" was recorded after one false start. The album's four outtakes were also cut in single takes. During the sessions, Dylan refused requests to do second takes. "I said no. I can't see myself singing the same song twice in a row. That's terrible”.
I often wonder whether we will see a biopic of the young Bob Dylan recording in 1961. Recorded over two days that year, the sound is Dylan inspired by New York's clubs and coffeehouses Folk musicians. Dylan arranged some of the numbers on the album, and he provided a couple of originals. His debut album did not get huge acclaim at the time. Many felt Dylan could not sing well. Surely one of the most important recordings ever, Bob Dylan received little attention when it came out. I am going to come to a feature that gives us facts about an album that launched a soon-to-be genius. Bob Dylan’s official website gives us the linear notes of an album that, years after its 1962 release, would be seen in a different light:
“Produced by John Hammond
Columbia records is proud to introduce a major new figure in American folk music -- Bob Dylan.
Excitement has been running high since the young man with a guitar ambled into a Columbia recording studio for two sessions in November, 1961. For at only 20, Dylan is the most unusual new talent in American folk music.
His talent takes many forms. He is one of the most compelling white blues singers ever recorded. He is a songwriter of exceptional facility and cleverness. He is an uncommonly skillful guitar player and harmonica player.
In less than one year in New York, Bob Dylan has thrown the folk crowd into an uproar. Ardent fans have been shouting his praises. Devotees have found in him the image of a singing rebel, a musical Chaplin tramp, a young Woody Guthrie, or a composite of some of the best country blues singers.
A good deal of Dylan's steel-string guitar work runs strongly in the blues vein, although he will vary it with country configurations, Merle Travis picking and other methods. Sometimes he frets his instrument with the back of a kitchen knife or even a metal lipstick holder, giving it the clangy virility of the primitive country blues men. His pungent, driving, witty harmonica is sometimes used in the manner of Walter Jacobs, who plays with the Muddy Waters' band in Chicago, or the evocative manner of Sonny Terry.
Another strong influence on Bob Dylan was not a musician primarily, although he has written music, but a comedian -- Charlie Chaplin. After seeing many Chaplin films, Dylan found himself beginning to pick up some of the gestures of the classic tramp of silent films. Now as he appears on the stage in a humorous number, you can see Dylan nervously tapping his hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it, as the Chaplin tramp did before him.
Yet despite his comic flair, Bob Dylan has, for one so young, a curious preoccupation with songs about death. Although he is rarely inarticulate, Dylan can't explain the attraction of these songs, beyond the power and emotional wallop they give him, and which he passes on to his listeners. It may be that three years ago, when a serious illness struck him, that he got an indelible insight into what those death-haunted blues men were singing about.
-- His Life and Times --
Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. After living briefly in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Gallup, New Mexico, he graduated from high school in Hibbing, Minnesota "way up by the Canadian border."
For six troubled months, Bob attended the University of Minnesota on a scholarship. But like so many of the restless, questioning students of his generation, the formal confines of college couldn't hold him.
"I didn't agree with school," he says. "I flunked out. I read a lot, but not the required readings."
He remembers staying up all night plowing through the philosophy of Kant instead of reading "Living With the Birds" for a science course.
"Mostly ," he summarizes his college days, "I couldn't stay in one place long enough."
Bob Dylan first came East in February, 1961. His destination: the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. His purpose: to visit the long-ailing Woody Guthrie, singer, ballad-maker and poet. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the two. Although they were separated by thirty years and two generations, they were united by a love of music, a kindred sense of humor and a common view toward the world.
The young man from the provinces began to make friends very quickly in New York, all the while continuing, as he has since he was ten, to assimilate musical ideas from everyone he met, every record he heard. He fell in with Dave Van Ronk and Jack Elliott, two of the most dedicated musicians then playing in Greenwich Village, and swapped songs, ideas and stylistic conceptions with them. He played at the Gaslight Coffeehouse, and in April, 1961, appeared opposite John Lee Hooker, the blues singer, at Gerde's Folk City. Word of Dylan's talent began to grow, but in the surcharged atmosphere of rivalry that has crept into the folk-music world, so did envy. His "Talkin' New York" is a musical comment on his reception in New York.
Recalling his first professional music job, Bob says:
"I never thought I would shoot lightning through the sky in the entertainment world."
In 1959, in Central City, Colorado, he had that first job, in rough and tumble striptease joint.
"I was onstage for just a few minutes with my folk songs. Then the strippers would come on. The crowd would yell for more stripping, but they went off, and I'd come bouncing back with my folky songs. As the night got longer, the air got heavier, the audience got drunker and nastier, and I got sicker and finally I got fired."
Bob Dylan started to sing and play guitar when he was ten. Five to six years later he wrote his first song, dedicated to Brigitte Bardot. All the time, he listened to everything with both ears -- Hank Williams, the late Jimmie Rodgers, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Carl Perkins, early Elvis Presley. A meeting with Mance Lipscomb, Texas songster, left its mark on his work, as did the blues recordings of Rabbit Brown and Big Joe Williams. He speaks worshipfully of the sense of pace and timing the great blues men had, and it has become a trademark of his work already. His speed at assimilating new styles and digesting them is not the least startling thing about Bob Dylan.
The future:
"I just want to keep on singing and writing songs like I am doing now. I just want to get along. I don't think about making a million dollars. If I had a lot of money what would I do?" he asked himself, closed his eyes, shifted the hat on his head and smiled:
"I would buy a couple of motorcycles, a few air-conditioners and four or five couches."
-- His Songs --
The number that opens this album, "You're No Good," was learned from Jesse Fuller, the West coast singer. Its vaudeville flair and exaggeration are used to heighten the mock anger of the lyrics.
"Talkin' New York" is a diary note set to music. In May, 1961, Dylan started to hitchhike West, not overwhelmingly pleased at what he had seen and experienced in New York. At a truck stop along the highway he started to scribble down a few impressions of the city he left behind. They were comic, but tinged with a certain sarcastic bite, very much in the Guthrie vein.
Dylan had never sung "In My Time of Dyin'" prior to this recording session. He does not recall where he first heard it. The guitar is fretted with the lipstick holder he borrowed from his girl, Susie Rotolo, who sat devotedly and wide-eyed through the recording session.
"Man of Constant Sorrow" is a traditional Southern mountain folk song of considerable popularity and age, but probably never sung quite in this fashion before.
"Fixin' to Die," which echoes the spirit and some of the words of "In My Time of Dyin'," was learned from an old recording by Bukka White.
A traditional Scottish song is the bare bones on which Dylan hangs "Pretty Peggy-O." But the song has lost its burr and acquired instead a Texas accent, and a few new verses and fillips by the singer.
A diesel-tempoed "Highway 51" is of a type sung by the Everly Brothers, partially rewritten by Dylan. His guitar is tuned to an open tuning and features a particularly compelling vamping figure. Similarly up tempo is his version of "Gospel Plow," which turns the old spiritual into a virtually new song.
Eric Von Schmidt, a young artist and blues singer from Boston, was the source of "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down." "House of the Risin' Sun" is a traditional lament of a New Orleans woman driven into prostitution by poverty. Dylan learned the song from the singing of Dave Van Ronk: "I'd always known 'Risin' Sun' but never really knew I knew it until I heard Dave sing it." The singer's version of "Freight Train Blues" was adapted from an old disk by Roy Acuff.
"Song to Woody," is another original by Bob Dylan, dedicated to one of his greatest inspirations, and written much in the musical language of his idol.
Ending this album is the surging power and tragedy of Blind Lemon Jefferson's blues -- "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The poignance and passion of this simple song reveals both the country y blues tradition -- and its newest voice, Bob Dylan -- at their very finest.
-- Stacey Williams”.
It is amazing to think that, on 19th March, 1962, there was not a lot of love for Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album. Mental Floss published a feature of ten facts concerning Bob Dylan:
“Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album, released on March 19, 1962, is Dylan before he became Dylan. The 20-year-old folk singer had clocked less than a year in New York City by the time he recorded it. Only two original songs are on the album, alongside 11 recordings of classic folk songs. Here are 10 facts about Bob Dylan, an album that only took two afternoons to record.
1. A POSITIVE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW HELPED PUT DYLAN ON THE MAP
Robert Shelton, the folk music critic for The New York Times, was impressed by Dylan’s performances at house parties and hootenannies. According to Clinton Heylin’s biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades, the young Minnesota transplant pestered Shelton to write about him, but Dylan didn’t have a gig Shelton saw as worthy of the Times' attention until September 1961, when he opened for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City. Shelton wrote a glowing review.
“Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap,” wrote Shelton. “His clothes may be in need of a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is busting at the seams with talent.”
Accounts vary about to what degree the review prompted Columbia Records executive John Hammond (who had already had been keeping tabs on Dylan) to offer the artist a five-year contract, but Dylan was signed by the record company shortly after the performance.
2. THE ADVANCE ALLOWED DYLAN TO GET HIS OWN APARTMENT
The singer/songwriter was sleeping on couches and staying with a series of friends in the folk music scene, according to Heylin. He moved to 161 West 4th Street, and the photo for the cover of his second studio album, 1963's The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was shot around the corner.
3. DYLAN WROTE JUST TWO SONGS FOR THE ALBUM
As was typical before Dylan himself helped usher in the age of the singer/songwriter, most of the songs were takes on well-known standards. His own “Talkin’ New York” is a “talking blues” song about his early life in Greenwich Village. The line about “blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day” was likely a reference to his gig playing harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album. “Song to Woody” is a tribute to his idol, Woody Guthrie, whom he met shortly after arriving in the city.
4. DYLAN WROTE "SONG TO WOODY" IN A BLEECKER STREET BAR
The handwritten lyrics for the song wound up with Bob Gleason and his wife, Sidsel, a New Jersey couple who were friends with Guthrie and often hosted his Sunday get-togethers with emerging folk singers. They include the inscription: “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.”
5. IT WAS RECORDED OVER TWO AFTERNOONS
Hammond and Dylan used a studio in Columbia’s New York City headquarters and cut the album on November 20 and 22, 1961. Dylan was unaccompanied, musically. Dylan and Hammond recorded 17 songs and did only one take each. “Mr. Hammond asked me if I wanted to sing any of them over again and I said no,” Dylan said in 1962. “I can’t see myself singing the same song twice in a row.”
6. COLUMBIA'S PRESIDENT STOPPED BY, BUT DYLAN WAS MORE CONCERNED WITH IMPRESSING THE JANITOR
Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia and a longtime friend of Hammond, stopped by and voiced his approval from the engineer’s booth. According to No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by The New York Times’ Robert Shelton, Dylan found it more important that an elderly African-American janitor stopped his work to listen to him play “Fixin’ to Die,” a song popularized by blues singer Bukka White. According to Shelton, "It impressed [Dylan] more than anything Hammond or Lieberson said."
7. IT SOUNDS BETTER IN MONO
Hammond used just two microphones: one on Dylan’s voice and one on his guitar. Because of this, “[m]any hardcore fans will only listen to the record in mono,” writes Brian Hinton in Bob Dylan Complete Discography. “[T]he stereo separation of this album is brutal, with vocal and guitar each occupying a virtual exclusive zone.”
8. SHELTON HELPED OUT WITH THE LINER NOTES
Hammond enlisted Dylan's first reviewer, Robert Shelton, to write the liner notes for Bob Dylan. “The Times music department had an unwritten code that members should have nothing to do with the production of recordings that they might review,” Shelton wrote in No Direction Home. “But nearly every member earned supplementary income by writing liner notes, anonymously or pseudonymously.” As “Stacey Williams,” Shelton wrote that Dylan’s steel-string playing “runs strongly in the blues vein, although he will vary it with country configurations.”
9. DYLAN'S GIRLFRIEND AT THE TIME DISPUTED A TIDBIT FROM THE LINER NOTES
While Shelton wrote in the liner notes that Dylan's girlfriend Suze Rotolo lent the singer her lipstick holder to use as a bottleneck during the recording sessions, Rotolo disputes this claim. "I didn't wear lipstick," she wrote in her 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin' Time.
10. IT FAILED TO CHART
Bob Dylan flopped, and around the Columbia offices the young singer began to be known as “Hammond’s Folly.” By the time it was released, Dylan had already changed his focus to original material, according to Hinton's Bob Dylan Complete Discography. That April, Bob Dylan sat down in a café and began work on “Blowin’ in the Wind”.
Even though there are some mixed reviews for Bob Dylan, one cannot overlooked how important it is! Listening back, Dylan’s distinct voice gives these songs new gravitas and meaning. He is a fantastic interpreter! Originals like Song for Woody gave us a glimpse of where he would go and what he was capable of. In a positive review for Bob Dylan, this is what AllMusic wrote:
“Bob Dylan's first album is a lot like the debut albums by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones -- a sterling effort, outclassing most, if not all, of what came before it in the genre, but similarly eclipsed by the artist's own subsequent efforts. The difference was that not very many people heard Bob Dylan on its original release (originals on the early-'60s Columbia label are choice collectibles) because it was recorded with a much smaller audience and musical arena in mind. At the time of Bob Dylan's release, the folk revival was rolling, and interpretation was considered more important than original composition by most of that audience. A significant portion of the record is possessed by the style and spirit of Woody Guthrie, whose influence as a singer and guitarist hovers over "Man of Constant Sorrow" and "Pretty Peggy-O," as well as the two originals here, the savagely witty "Talkin' New York" and the poignant "Song to Woody"; and it's also hard to believe that he wasn't aware of Jimmie Rodgers and Roy Acuff when he cut "Freight Train Blues." But on other songs, one can also hear the influences of Bukka White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, and Furry Lewis, in the playing and singing, and this is where Dylan departed significantly from most of his contemporaries.
Other white folksingers of the era, including his older contemporaries Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk, had incorporated blues in their work, but Dylan's presentation was more in your face, resembling in some respects (albeit in a more self-conscious way) the work of John Hammond, Jr., the son of the man who signed Dylan to Columbia Records and produced this album, who was just starting out in his own career at the time this record was made. There's a punk-like aggressiveness to the singing and playing here. His raspy-voiced delivery and guitar style were modeled largely on Guthrie's classic '40s and early-'50s recordings, but the assertiveness of the bluesmen he admires also comes out, making this one of the most powerful records to come out of the folk revival of which it was a part. Within a year of its release, Dylan, initially in tandem with young folk/protest singers like Peter, Paul & Mary and Phil Ochs, would alter the boundaries of that revival beyond recognition, but this album marked the pinnacle of that earlier phase, before it was overshadowed by this artist's more ambitious subsequent work. In that regard, the two original songs here serve as the bridge between Dylan's stylistic roots, as delineated on this album, and the more powerful and daringly original work that followed. One myth surrounding this album should also be dispelled here -- his version of "House of the Rising Sun" here is worthwhile, but the version that was the inspiration for the Animals' recording was the one by Josh White”.
Ahead of its sixtieth anniversary, I wanted to spend some time looking deeper at Bob Dylan’s eponymous debut album. With a fascinating range of songs reinterpreted by a passionate and wonderful young Folk artist, this is the album that started things. Dylan would follow his debut with 1963’s The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. This album is much more fondly regarded. Dylan wrote most of the tracks on it. One knows he could have penned more originals for his debut, though I feel he wanted to salute Folk and Blues songs that meant something to him. It is intriguing step between that sparser debut and a follow-up that is bolder, slightly bigger and more of Bob Dylan. I did want to acknowledge his 1962 debut, as sixty years is a big anniversary to mark! Few listening to and reviewing the album on 19th March, 1962…
QUITE knew what was to come!