By Chris Morris
The story of Bob Dylan’s early life and career is an epic of self-invention and unprecedented artistic evolution. That explosive period of creativity is reconsidered in “Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966,” an exhibit running Feb. 8-June 8 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Curated by the Experience Music Project in Seattle and supported in part by Amoeba Music, it recounts Dylan’s innovations through more than 160 artifacts, including a previously unheard recording of his first concert. It tells quite a tale.
In Martin Scorsese’s 2005 film No Direction Home, about the musician’s early life and his career through ’66, Dylan himself says that throughout the metamorphic stages of his career he was “constantly in a state of becoming.” Vocalist Liam Clancy, a Greenwich Village folk scene contemporary, aptly compares him in the documentary to the shape-shifters of Celtic mythology: “It wasn’t necessary for him to be a definitive person.”
He had reason to become someone else. Young Robert Zimmerman longed to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, a few blocks of frigid Midwestern concrete bordering a pit of played-out iron mines. He fled through the music he heard on the radio (Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Gene Vincent, Webb Pierce, even Johnny Ray), the films of Marlon Brando and James Dean, and the bop prosody of Jack Kerouac. Then he sought refuge playing rock ‘n’ roll: As a teen, he emulated Little Richard, and sometimes told the credulous that he was the teen idol Bobby Vee, in whose group he briefly played piano.
With folk music flourishing in its late-‘50s renaissance, Zimmerman soon turned in his Stratocaster for an acoustic guitar, and began his folk epoch in 1959 as an indifferent college student in Minneapolis. Rechristening himself Bob Dylan, he hitchhiked to New York City in 1961, seeking a career and an audience with his hospitalized avatar, Woody Guthrie. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — another pseudonymous, middle-class, Jewish folk musician and Guthrie acolyte — was a key model for the younger vocalist. Dylan flung himself into the Village’s rarefied atmosphere of folk music “basket houses,” Old Left saber-rattling, and Bohemian cultural cross-breeding.
But Dylan stood apart from the earnest, traditionalist, politically engaged musicians with whom he shared stages. A tunesmith first and foremost, he didn’t consider himself a topical songwriter (though many others did, with ultimately disastrous results). He was at first deemed too raw for the folk establishment: Maynard Solomon, head of Joan Baez’s label Vanguard Records, declined to sign him, dismissing Dylan’s music as “too visceral.”
No purist, he did not eschew alliances with the record industry: Nonpareil talent scout John Hammond signed him to Columbia, the biggest label of the day, and the bare-knuckled manager Albert Grossman advanced his career. He was not above seriously bending the truth to enhance his image; his first interviews are often-hilarious experiments in bald-faced fictional reinvention. And he would take what he needed from anywhere, damn the consequences: The late folk singer Dave Van Ronk lamented, with a mixture of humor and bitterness, the appropriation of his arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” for Dylan’s 1962 debut album.
The May 1963 release The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album, was filled with brilliant original compositions, and it announced the true arrival of a bold new folk talent. By his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in August 1963, Dylan was an icon of the folk and Left communities. The newly crowned king led a host of Newport stars, including his then-paramour Baez, in a festival-closing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
And then Dylan said “No” — or rather, “No, no, no, no, no.” He rejected the folk movement’s smothering embrace and began his journey into new, more commercial — and controversial — musical terrain.
In late ’63, Dylan bluntly shot down the Old Left in a drunken speech at an Emergency Civil Liberties Commission awards ceremony. Quickly, the jeans and workshirts disappeared, replaced by leather jackets, polka-dot shirts, and Edwardian suits, and Dylan the pop star reared his head. One change succeeded another: his assumption of a sophisticated, impressionistic lyrical style, his dismissal of agit-folkies like Baez and his early champion Pete Seeger, his move into rock hit-making, and his noisy confrontation with the outraged ’65 Newport festival audience. In the summer of 1965, he scored his biggest popular hit with “Like a Rolling Stone,” which climbed to No. 2 on the Hot 100; he had also neatly divided his audience into warring factions.
“Things had gotten out of hand,” Dylan says in No Direction Home. On tour in 1966, he was quickly embroiled in a tragicomic face-off with enraged folkniks and uncomprehending journalists during his first electric sortie, backed by a Canadian-American group called the Hawks (later the Band). He left a May 1966 gig in Manchester, England, with a stinging cry of “Judas!” ringing in his ears. Traveling at warp speed, embattled on all sides, and consuming dope like candy, Dylan finally withered under the pressure of stardom.
His fateful July 1966 motorcycle accident led to another startling shift in artistic direction, a period of personal seclusion, and an eight-year touring hiatus. The first chapter of Bob Dylan’s artistic Odyssey had ended. There was none other like it, before or since.
