Amoeba Music > Bob Dylan's American Journey

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One of the Participating Sponsors of

February 8th - June 8th, 2008

Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

Few figures in the history of American popular culture have attained the status of Bob Dylan. To critics and fans the world over, his distinctly American body of work matches the legacies of Walt Whitman, Louis Armstrong and his own early hero, Woody Guthrie. Don't miss the Los Angeles presentation-and final stop!-of this acclaimed exhibition, organized by Seattle's Experience Music Project.

Featuring more than 160 artifacts, including Dylan's handwritten drafts of classic songs, rare concert posters and a recording of his first concert, which has never been commercially released, Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966 focuses on the first decade of his celebrated career. From his beginnings as Robert Zimmerman in the post-war industrial town of Hibbing, Minnesota, to his debut on the Greenwich Village folk scene, to his rise to unprecedented fame as the rock star/poet who "electrified" contemporary songwriting, the exhibition chronicles Dylan's first ten years as a public figure, an artistic innovator, and a compelling voice of social conscience.

The Skirball presentation of the exhibition will be complemented by a newly developed satellite exhibit, which will offer visitors a unique opportunity to experience the creative process. Simulate playing along with Dylan on keyboards, electric and acoustic guitars, drums and organs, as well as experiment with a mixing board on an authentic Dylan recording.

For ticket information to the exhibition click here or call (310) 440-4500 or (877) SCC-4TIX or (877) 722-4849.

Photos Left to Right by: Barry Feinstein, Daniel Kramer, and John Cohen

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.

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early bob an essential dylan discovideobibliography

Bob Dylan (1962).
The apprentice goes to work. Dylan’s acoustic debut album includes the core of his New York club sets of the day; it’s notable for the original “Song to Woody,” his homage to Woody Guthrie.
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The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963).
The arrival. Comprising mostly original songs, this collection contains such much-covered compositions as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’ A-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” He would struggle to shake off the “protest singer” label that this album and its successor draped upon him.
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The Times They Are A-Changin' (1964).
More classics – the title song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “With God On Our Side.” By now, Dylan was at the helm of the new American folk movement. He would shortly defy everyone’s expectations.
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Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964).
The title tells the tale: Dylan begins to write elusive, personal songs cloaked in extravagant imagery – “Chimes of Freedom,” “My Back Pages,” “To Ramona.” All that’s missing are the electric guitars.
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Bringing It All Back Home (1965).
The rock ‘n’ roll Dylan makes his loud, cage-rattling entrance. This half-acoustic/half-electric package contains the ambitious folk-tinged compositions “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” but the news here is in the blasting roil of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Outlaw Blues.” There would be no turning back.
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Highway 61 Revisited (1965).
With the exception of the subdued yet panoramic closer “Desolation Row,” this is a full-blown rock album. His six-minute hit “Like a Rolling Stone” is here, plus the high-voltage rockers “Tombstone Blues” and “Highway 61 Revisited” and the stately “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Dylan’s most compact rock statement.
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Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Rock’s first two-LP set is also Dylan’s most sublime early work. Cut mostly in Nashville with a hot studio band, it includes timeless tracks like “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” and the long, pulsating “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” A perfectly realized masterpiece.
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The Bootleg Series Vol.7 - No Direction Home: The Soundtrack
A two-CD companion to Martin Scorsese’s documentary, this compendium of magnificent unreleased recordings includes everything from a 1959 home recording to ferocious alternate takes of his best electric material.
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The Bootleg Series Vol.6 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall
Dylan the folk troubadour – shaggy, engaging, funny, sometimes brooding – is captured in a fine live recording of a 1964 New York City concert.
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The Bootleg Series Vol.4 - Bob Dylan Live 1966
This recording of the so-called “Royal Albert Hall” concert (actually the famously combative May 1966 show in Manchester, England, and misidentified in early bootleg issues) includes an impassioned solo set and a stormy, punchy electric throw-down with the Hawks. It’s my favorite Dylan live shot, and simply indelible. (Also see Robyn Hitchcock’s Robyn Sings, an all-Dylan recital that includes the English eccentric’s richly funny note-for-note recreation of the Manchester show, recorded live in 1996.)
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No Direction Home : Bob Dylan
The big enchilada. Martin Scorsese’s three & a half-hour 2005 documentary covering its subject’s life through 1966 is the best film yet made about an American musician, period. Dylan opened his film archives to the director, and he appears throughout (in interviews done by his manager Jeff Rosen); he’s a droll, pointed, and occasionally candid presence. Such familiars as Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, and Pete Seeger also supply revealing testimony.

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Don't Look Back
Director D.A. Pennebaker had total access to Dylan during his 1965 solo tour of England. The superstar-in-the-making is seen in unguarded backstage detail, cutting a comic, occasionally scathing figure as he takes on fans and journalists. The 2006 DVD version includes an entirely new film, Bob Dylan 65 Revisited, assembled from Pennebaker’s outtakes; like the original, it’s superlative, and it offers a neat variant to the original movie text.

SEE THE FILM: Wednesday, May 7th at 7PM at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

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The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965
The title sums it up. Director Murray Lerner used much of his Dylan footage in his feature documentary Festival!, but all of the material – including Dylan’s controversial ’65 electric set – is here. Over the course of 83 breathtaking minutes, we see Dylan morph from Guthrie acolyte to new folk luminary to rock icon.

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Dylan Speaks
Bob uncut, in a 53-minute live 1965 press conference mounted in San Francisco by San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It’s uproarious: An arch, chain-smoking Dylan mocks and deflects the questions, while such onlookers as poet Allen Ginsberg and promoter Bill Graham weigh in with their own interrogations.

The Bob Dylan Scrapbook 1956-1966
This goodie-packed coffee table book was released in conjunction with Scorsese’s film and the Experience Music exhibit. It includes a deft summation of the period by Robert Santelli (formerly director of programs at the Seattle museum, and now director of L.A.’s Grammy Museum), an interview CD, and pull-out replicas of diverse Dylan artifacts.

Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume One
Dylan’s glorious, rambling, must-read 2004 memoir includes some delicious reminiscences about his first days as a struggling folk musician in New York. Where’s Volume Two?

Jonathan Cott (Editor), Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews
This compendium covers Dylan’s entire career, but includes 10 crucial pieces from 1962-66, including Nat Hentoff’s delirious ’66 Playboy interview, reputedly written largely by Dylan himself.

CP Lee, Like The Night (Revisited); Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall
Penned by a former member of the U.K. punk band Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias – who was present at Dylan’s ’66 show as a 16-year-old fan – this one-of-a-kind book recreates that famed collision between the musician and his outraged audience, and finally identifies the man who screamed “Judas!” from the stalls. Originally published by the English house Helter Skelter, it’s possibly hard to find these days, but definitely worth the hunt.

like a rolling stone bob dylan at the crossroads by greil marcus

Grell Marcus, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
There’s a good deal of post-academic bollocks in veteran rock critic Marcus’ look at Dylan’s great moment in ’65, but he also neatly situates the song and the performer in their time. So take it with a grain of salt, or maybe a teaspoon.

HEAR THE AUTHOR:
Greil Marcus at the Skirball's "Bob Dylan Symposium" Sunday, March 30th at 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM More Info...