Episode 35 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Children from the Downtown Co...

Episode 27 - Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest: Paul Draper and Coleridge Perk...

Dylan's 1960s Super-Rich Vanderbilt Dynasty Connection Revisited

Like the longtime 21st-century CNN tv news show anchor Anderson Cooper--the son of the now-deceased super-rich Vanderbilt Dynasty heiress Gloria Vanderbilt--the singer-songwriter/musician (who wrote and recorded the pro-IDF song, "Neighborhood Bully", in the 1980s and helped Big AIPAC Donor Les Wexner's Victoria's Secret firm market its products in a 2004 commercial), Bob Dylan, historically had a connection to a now-deceased member of the Vanderbilt family in the early 1960s, named John Hammond.

According to a 2006-published book by Dunstan Prial, titled The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music, Hammond--the then-CBS/Columbia Records business executive who provided Dylan with a Columbia Records contract in late 1961 and helped produce Dylan's initial Columbia Records label vinyl album recordings--as long ago as 1931 had been "bankrolled by a Vanderbilt-channeled annual trust-fund allowance of about $12,000 [equal to around $250,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] a year...around the same amount high-level corporate executives were paid at the time;" and Hammond, historically, "used his inheritance to create opportunities for himself, and he never shrank from the charge that he had used his wealth to buy into the music industry."

And, according to the same book, the father of early Dylan record producer Hammond, in the early 20th-century had "dedicated himself...to helping maintain the Vanderbilt fortune in his various roles as banker, lawyer and railroad executive."

In his 1977 autobiographical book, titled John Hammond On Record: An Autobiography, Dylan's early vinyl album record producer Hammond also recalled:

"My father married Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, the daughter of Emily Thorne Vanderbilt...Emily T.V. Sloane, my maternal grandmother was the eldest daughter of William H. Vanderbilt and granddaughter of the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon...

"My mother was born in 1874 in East 44th St., between Madison and Fifth Ave., but before my great-grandfather, William H. Vanderbilt, died, he built twin mansions on 5th Ave. between 51st and 52nd Streets for my Great-Uncle William K. Vanderbilt and Grandmother Emily...

"...Mother was not one to hide her wealth completely, although she was careful never to reveal its extent. She would never allow my father to sell any of her securities, even to advantage, for fear someone would find out how much she had...

"...My grandmother did for my mother and my Aunt Adele (Mrs. James A. Burden) what her father had done for her. She built twin houses on East 91st St. for them and their families...Located just east of Fifth Ave. and Central Park...among the most elaborate private mansions in the city...

"A few years before I was born my father bought a dairy farm in Mount Kisco, a fashionable retreat in Westchester County, as the Hammond Country house...Dellwoods..." 

Episode 26 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Frank Warner

Episode 24 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Alexander Zelkin

Episode 21 - Rainbow Quest by Pete Seeger: Pat Sky, and the Pennywhistlers

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes'' Revisited (10)

 

Sixty years ago a singer-songwriter/musician (who, in later years, wrote and recorded a pro-IDF song, "Neighborhood Bully", in the 1980s and, in the early 21st-century, entered into a business agreement with a firm, Victoria's Secret, which the BDS campaign has called for a boycott of), Bob Dylan, was booed by the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

And in 2022 the University of Minnesota Press published a book, titled The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan, which Stephanie Trudeau edited, that contained some of the transcribed texts of interviews that writer-journalist Anthony Scaduto did, while doing research for his early 1970s biography of Dylan.

According to the text of his interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, John Hammond Sr. recalled, additionally, the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"...It was my son who originally told me that Bobby [Dylan]'s name was Zimmerman, because John was doing a gig out in Minneapolis. He said, `Dad, did you know that Bob's real name is Zimmerman, Bob Zimmerman, and that he went to the University of Minnesota?' And I said no, I didn't.

"Before he was signed...

"He didn't want to be the son of a--of a middle-class hardware dealer in Hibbing, Minnesota. Right?

"And of course, the...really bad thing that Bob [Dylan] and Albert Grossman did that I'll never forgive them for, they tried to get Billy James fired here for the Newsweek piece. And that was miserable, because Billy did more for Bob [Dylan] than anybody you can conceive of.

"...Newsweek wanted to do a cover piece on Bob Dylan, and Grossman wouldn't allow Bob Dylan to be interviewed.

"So...he did his own research then. And found out this whole story on the telephone. They asked a neighbor if they ever heard Bob sing before, and the neighbor said, `Don't you remember? We heard him at his bar mitzvah.'

"Herbert Saul, the music editor at Newsweek, who's a great guy. One of the best journalists in the business.

"...This was done to Grossman. This was done purposely to Grossman.

"...The other thing I always held against Bob [Dylan] was the treatment of Joan [Baez] in that Don't Look Back picture. I think that was a disgrace, because it was Joan who made Bob in England.

"And you know--he cut her right off. I thought that was unforgivable..."

And according to the text of her interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Joan Baez then told Anthony Scaduto:

"...I didn't really like `Highway [61]' until 3 years after it was written. I was mad at it. You know I was furious.

"I thought it was a bunch of crap...I felt as though he was inching away from being committed. He was...He did leave a lot of us in the lurch..."

As the following excerpt from the text of Anthony Scaduto's interview conversation exchange with Dylan, prior to Scaduto's biography of Dylan being published in the early 1970s, contained in The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talking Early Bob Dylan book which U. of MN Press published in 2022, indicated, Scaduto apparently allowed Dylan, himself, to exercise some control over the text included in Scaduto's early 1970s biographical book about Dylan:

SCADUTO: "Okay. Your notes about my book...At this stage I'm trying to see how I can sum you up. Basically, the problem is that everybody around town, all the cats in the Movement, are running around calling you a capitalistic pig who's ripping off the youth culture and say you should be giving your millions...It's pretty much of a campus attitude, among at least among people who are still involved in SDS and, you know the rest of that revolutionary kind of `nonsense'...You know, it's obvious that...these people...now feel you deserted them...This is what they feel about you now...

"The thing is, I want to make it clear that I cannot in any way take Sara and the children out of the book. I have cut it to a minimum...

DYLAN: "Well, I'm known to retaliate, you know.

SCADUTO: "I know you are. But first of all, you can't scare me.

DYLAN: "I'm playing in the big league and I'm sorry, you know...

SCADITO: "...Talking in terms of retaliation, that's being a little...okay, retaliate, man. No, seriously, I must mention Sara and the children. We can kick it around, we can talk it around, and if you've got ideas...

DYLAN:"...I'll tell you if I don't approve of it or not.

SCADUTO: "Okay.

DYLAN: "And if I don't approve of it, I'm past playing games too.

SCADUTO: "Okay.

DYLAN: "But I'm serious about it. And I'm just not going to stand for it anymore.

SCADUTO: "I don't know why you're getting tough.

DYLAN: "I'm just not going to stand for it. That's all.

SCADUTO: Yeah. But I don't really think there's anything you can do. Really.

DYLAN: Are you kidding?

SCADUTO: "I've taken a large step by letting you see the book in advance...And by sitting down with you and saying, sure, I'll knock out Rosemary McCarthy, if you object to that, to what that chick told me, I'm knocking it out...

DYLAN: "Well, that sounds pretty fair. Now this last part here about my wife and my children. I would like to see what you're going to write...

SCADUTO: "You've seen what I've written so far. You have it there...Okay, I'll show it to you when I write it.

DYLAN: "Okay."