According to David Hadju's 2001 book, Positively 4th Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farnia and Richard Farina:
"...Highway 61 Revisited was...Dylan's best-selling album by far, his first to reach a spot as high as number three on the Billboard album chart. `His move into that music just seemed so calculated,' said Geoff Muldaur. `It just seemed to me like he decided, "Okay, now I'm going to be a rock and roll star and sell a lot of records."'"
An examination in the Billboard magazine archives of the 1965 issues seems to indicate that during the then-24-year-old Dylan's May 1965 tour of England, his "Subterranean Homesick Blues" song (which some have claimed was derived, somewhat, from Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" song) reached number 6 on the Brit charts. And during that same month, the Byrds' folk-rock version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" song was also rising in the United States near to the top of Billboard's U.S. single record hit charts by early June 1965.
So on June 21, 1965 then-Columbia University Trustee William Paley and then-Columbia University Trustee and then-Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] Executive Committee Member William A.M. Burden's CBS/Columbia Records corporate media conglomerate announced that it was going to spend money on a special Bob Dylan "singing his own songs" promotional campaign (which may have helped,perhaps, generate some of the additional "Dylanmania" that developed among U.S. teenage rock fans in mid-1965, in addition to what was generated by Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" folk rock song).
Yet on July 28, 1965 Pete Seeger wrote, in a memo to himself, the following reference to Dylan's artistic shift from protest folk music to an apparently more commercially successful, hip capitalist folk rock musical direction:
"It isn't pretty to see a corpse--man or beast...
"I knew that last week at Newport, I ran to hide my eyes and ears because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd nor some of the most destructive music this side of Hell. Bob Dylan, the frail, restless, homeless kid who came to New York in '61 was now the frail, restless, homeless star on the stage.
"When we see a flaming streak across the sky, we all exclaim, though the light has died before the echo of our voices. But I am glad I saw this shooting star...The songs Bob wrote in 1962 and 1963 will be sung for many a year...
"...What is the reason for the change--I don't know. A girl gone perhaps. A manager come. The claws of fame. Or was he killed with kindness?..."
.............Why Did Bob Dylan Shift From Protest Folk Music To Commercial Folk Rock Music In 1965?............
ReplyDeleteBob's highschool-ambition was "to play with Little Richard".
Si it's not a 'why" but a "when" question.
Did Bob fully disclose to John Hammond what his highschool-ambition was when he was part of the non-commercially-motivated folk music subcultural scene in Manhattan prior to 1963?
DeleteYes, he did. The first single, "Mixed Up Confussion", was a rock & roll song, and in the "Freewheelin'" sessions they also recorded a version of Elvis's "That's All Right"... with exactly the same intro of 1965's "Maggie's Farm".
DeleteJohn Hammond's autobiography seemed to indicate that (around time Robert Shelton's 1961 NY Times review portrayed him as a folk performer rather than a Little Richard admirer) his being originally signed by Columbia Records was based more on his change-the-world social commitment (reflected in his "Song for Woody" early song lyrics, etc.) than any then-disclosure of the highschool ambition. Maybe that's why the version of Elvis's "That's All Right" that he recorded wasn't included on the released "Freewheelin" album which included the "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" song (whose melody, that he copyrighted/privatized, was apparently obtained from a folk song that Paul Clayton used to sing)? Was the first single, "Mixed Up Confusion," released before or after his first Columbia Records album wasn't initially purchased by many people and he was apparently nicknamed "Hammond's Folly" at one time?
DeleteAll true, (though he was already signed to Columbia before he'd written "Blowin' in the Wind" or any of his other such songs) but he never hid his rock & roll passion from Hammond, who was far from being a participant in the non-commercially-motivated folk music subcultural scene. Though he shared Dylan's social concerns, Hammond was from the world of jazz and blues, and I don't think he shared the anipathy towards rock music of the folk scene. In his autobiography, he mentions Highway 61 Revisited with admiration.
DeleteCould be that his rock & roll passion was then mainly hidden from folk music subcultural scene/Broadside/Sing Out! circles, perhaps? Hammond apparently was partially a participant in 1950s folk music subcultural scene (even before his son became involved in 1960s in that scene, somewhat). In 1954 the Vanguard record label released Brother John Sellers Sings Blues and Folk Songs; and the release carried sleeve notes penned by Hammond, who then wrote:" In the rich and varied contribution of Negroes to American music, there have been constant cross-currents between gospel songs, blues and what have come to be known as folk songs...The blues singers have their own secular and improvisational literature, distinct even from the popular hit tunes. Folk music is confined to what is done in the concert hall or studied in school and library.".
DeleteI agree with all you say and quote. The only point I was making is that while Dylan certainly kept his passion for rock & roll hidden in the more doctrinaire circles of the folk scene (or at least didn't advertise his love for it), he laid down a few rock & roll tracks with Hammond producing, so it wasn't hidden from him.
DeleteLike you say, he apparently didn't totally hide the r&r interest from Hammond. But, in retrospect, the doctrinaire circles of the folk scene probably would have ended up promoting folksingers like Bill McAdoo and Len Chandler more than he was publicized in the pre-1964 period (in Broadside, Sing-Out and on WBAI local radio station, etc.)--if the commercial pop rock star ambition had not apparently been hidden from the doctrinaire folk scene circles, perhaps?
DeleteWho knows? They might have. But to my ears, his songs on Freewheelin' and Times are simply better than most of the other songs of his contemporaries, as was his delivery. But for whatever reason, I just don't think Len Chandler or Phil Ochs would have had such an impact, no matter how much support they got.
DeleteBut I'm not sure how much he hid his rock & roll leanings, as opposed to just leaving such ambitions aside. (This is how he seems to operate: he immerses himself in something -- folk, rock, country, gospel, Sinatra songs -- and then moves on... while still retaining elements of what went before.)
He writes with real feeling for that time in Greenwich Village in Chronicles and I don't imagine such songs could have been written cynically, without any belief in what they were expressing. In the autumn of 63, after Newport, it hit him that he didn't want to be the spokesman of a movement. And then there was the Kennedy assassination, and then the arrival of The Beatles. So when he decided to play with a rock band Bringing It All Back Home, it made perfect sense.
Could be that one reason his first album for Columbia wasn't initially purchased by many folks, was that his delivery and voice initially didn't seem particularly better (or perhaps seemed worse or inauthentic to some) than the delivery and voice of most of his early 1960s folk scene contemporaries, previous Guthrie-imitators, or older folks like Pete Seeger, to the kind of early 1960s folk music fans who had earlier purchased Joan Baez's records, perhaps?
DeleteAnd some of the songs with great lyrics that he recorded on the Freewheelin' and Times albums utilized melodies from songs created by other folk--although his publishing company apparently copyrighted their melodies as well as his lyrics. (And what still doesn't seem to have been fully disclosed is exactly how much money he's collected in song royalties or from selling of copyright of songs between 1962 and 2022, from any of the individual songs in which traditional folk melodies created by other folks were used, but then copyrighted in his name?)
Agree that the pre-1964 songs likely were not written cynically. But, in retrospect, it's possible that Richard Farina, early Donovan (who came from a left-wing family) and Phil Ochs might have had as much impact if backed by the NYTimes/Shelton, Columbia Records and the sectarian folk scene-types as much as him, before1964. Especially after Ochs wrote There But For Fortune and after original fans of him were surprised by the 1965 Newport concert, which one writer recalled in the following way: "The audience's reaction to the electrified set was instantaneous, with boos and yelling filling the venue...Most agree the ultimate cause of the booing that continued throughout the set was precipitated by a sense of betrayal that fans of the Newport Folk Festival's golden child had abandoned them... Subsequent concerts that year were met with further boos, shouts and cries of betrayal...His move was significant at the time because fans felt he was an icon, their spokesman of the Folk and Protest movement."
Apparently Phil Ochs wasn't invited to perform at Newport in 1965 for some reason (although whether this is true or not might need to be checked). But, given the fact that in April 1965 Ochs had previously been cheered enthusiastically at the anti-Vietnam War march in D.C. that sds organized, it's possible that if Ochs could have been called out to sing a topical folk song like "There But For Fortune" or "I Ain't A-Marchin' Anymore" or "Love Me, I'm A Liberal" following the booing of his contemporary's shift to rock, the demoralization felt by some of the anti-Vietnam war folk music fans after the 1965 transformation of the protest folk icon into commercially-oriented rock star, might have been resisted longer by more folk music fans, perhaps later in the 1960s; and later pop cultural music trends and U.S. history might have developed differently during the following 6 decades, perhaps?
If you haven't figured it out by now, Dylan was looking for new ways to express himself with his music. He's done Folk, Rock, Country, Gospel, Blues, American Classics and whatever you want to classify his current work as.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps Dylan and Hip Capitalist Albert Grossman were also looking in 1965 for a new way to make much more money by tapping into the more commercially lucrative AM-radio's pop-rock 1960s U.S. youth market (that the Brit Beatles group had tapped into between 1964 and 1970, before John Lennon raised questions in his late 1960s or early 1970s Rolling Stone Magazine interview about the actual artistic and musical/lyrical worth of some of the pre-1967 Beatles group's commercially-motivated pop- rock songs)?
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