60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (7)

 

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 her interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Carolyn Hester recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"...He [Dylan] had Grossman as manager and he had the distribution of Columbia Records behind him..."

And according to the text of his interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Barry Kornfeld recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's 1960's life:

"...Through the `Don't Look Back' period...success...really...fucked him up a lot and he's insulated himself a lot and surrounded himself with the sycophants who told him that his every fart was `art'.

"...I found that, the singing, as far as singing, I absolutely cannot listen to that whole period. That whining style that he developed I found to be so annoying, really like a fingernail on glass...

"I found a lot of it to be word salads..."

In addition, according to the text of his interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Izzy Young also recalled the following about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"...He [Dylan] was very competitive. He really didn't look at anybody else. And he would just sort of wait his turn, you know, to sing and sing and then go out.

"Yeah, back at the store [Folklore Center]. Everyone would be playing.

"Bob Dylan was performing--all the time.

"...In `61 he was very competitive about the other singers...

"...He knew how to use people. And when the point came not to use them anymore, he dropped them. And he always was making like it was never for him to say, for other people to say it. He was associated with the Beatles. He never said he was associated with the Beatles..."

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (6)

 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, Izzy Young also recalled the following additional biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"...It was around this time that the blacklist letter about Pete Seeger [in which a group of early 1960s folk music scene musicians protested against Seeger being blacklisted from ABC's Hootenanny television show in the early 1960s]--I was the secretary of that group, and we had a big meeting...And everybody signed. Except Bob Dylan.

"He said, `It doesn't mean anything...'...

"...He was there. He was there. He was at the big meeting [of folksingers] at the Village Gate.

"...He didn't sign. That I can say definitely. Then the second point, where he was supposed to record `Talking John Birch Society Blues' [but allegedly was never allowed to include this on a pre-1965 vinyl album].

"...That song...did go on the album. And...I have the original downstairs.

"First you do the shit, then you can do what you really want to do when you get more famous. And then--so that's the album and then the attack on the Civil Liberties Union. But that came later.

"And still people accepted him as a revolutionary, as the person changing things. Well, because in my mind now I see the pattern...There's no such thing as a person not knowing when he sells out...There's no such thing as a person consciously changing, unconsciously changing...

"...This is how it works...The artist has to start from a point. Eventually they accept you...But the instant you make it into the mass thing, then you have to say goodbye to the starting group, no matter what it is. And that's what the sellout is, really.

"...Making $1,000,000 is what's killing everybody, what's making the wars necessary, that sense of competition with the whole world. And then they're saying life is beautiful, which it is to them...

"Dylan didn't start it, but it really comes after him, like in Woodstock. On one side they're getting, grabbing, grubbing all the money. On the other side they're the `sensitive artists'. Now with Dylan what I found is--to this day the kids will not accept the fact that he's a sellout. I do not understand this..."

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (5)

 

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, Izzy Young recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"Now with Dylan, what's happened, the kids refuse to believe that Dylan was a cop-out, and what Dylan really is...I spoke to 500 kids at Rutgers. They booed me when I explained how the movie Don't Look Back is a cop-out. The only person that he's attacked so far in America is the...Civil Liberties Union. That's the only thing he's been angry about...

"...The latest cop-out of Bob Dylan is accepting a doctorate from Princeton...

"...When he wrote `Positively 4th Street,' at least 500 people in a few months asked me if I was the one in the song.

"...It's unfair, and I'll explain why. I'm living in the Village 20 years...I'm one of the representatives of the Village because I've been here.

"But he comes in and uses my resources and everyone else's resources in the Village, and you know, the bars and the clubs, and then he leaves. He gets bitter, he writes the bitter song...You never heard me say what a son of a bitch Dylan was...He's the one that's complaining. He's the one that left. And it's really his problem...

"...Bob Dylan is in exactly the same position now that Carl Sandburg was...In other words, Carl Sandburg's poetry was in the protest magazines of the time, the '20s. You know, `I Am the People, the Mob'...And then when he died, he didn't know anything about Vietnam...

"...In fact, without Grossman I don't think Bob Dylan would exist.

"The sellout is completely engineered by Al Grossman..."

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (4)

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 an interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Carla Rotolo recalled Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life in NYC and also recalled her initial response to the lyrics Dylan wrote to a song, titled "Ballad in Plain D", that Dylan recorded on his early 1960s "Another Side of Bob Dylan" album, which CBS's Columbia Records then marketed and distributed:

"The song [`Ballad in Plain D'], such an absolute screech. I was going to sue the pants off him [Dylan]. I decided--my lawyer said, don't even bother. Because `parasite', the `parasite' is someone who feeds off somebody. And I was the only person who was working at that time...Bobby [Dylan] of course, he makes me the `parasite' when I was working...It wasn't a nice thing to do, particularly when it was all made up out of whole cloth...

"...I think a good part of his guilt was he couldn't be real. I know it was. And he couldn't sort things out himself at that point, because of where his career was going. Just couldn't get himself out of himself...

"...Dylan needed victims, you know what I mean?...When he was a kid, he wasn't being that mean. As he got older, he started getting very nasty. But when he was first in the city, he was a very sweet kid Just not too articulate...He got tighter and tighter and nastier and nastier...He decided he would pick out your weakness and then suddenly grab it and use it on you. Which is what he did with everybody. Find their vulnerable spot and that was it...

"...I remember him saying once about his `Masters of War' song, for example, saying `it's just a whole big put-on, a whole crock of shit. That's what they wanted'...And I got the feeling...he wasn't befuddled and a confused little kid that he came on as...He was using that befuddled act as a weapon, because it worked..."

 

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (3)

 

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 an interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Sid Gleason recalled how, between 1959 and March 1961, Woody Guthrie came to spend part of each weekend at her house in New Jersey; and how it was apparently in her house, not at Greystone Hospital, where Dylan first met Woody Guthrie and also apparently listened to many rare Woody Guthrie tapes, during Dylan's early pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"`Bound for Glory' [radio program]...announced that Woody [Guthrie] was out at Greystone Hospital and asked people to write him...I rode out to Greystone...to see Woody....

"...We went out to visit him at the hospital. They allowed us to take him out...He was very alert, except for the fact that he just had trouble expressing [himself] because of the speech problem...The doctor told [her husband] Bob [Gleason] yes, that we could come out and get him and bring him to our home. [But] he had to be back in the hospital by 10"30 or 11:00 p.m.. The next weekend we got him...

"And I started answering his mail then...It was Mother's Day `59...

"...He [Dylan] never made a visit to the [Greystone] hospital. You see, our place was halfway out. They could come out from New York very easy...

"...I couldn't begin to tell you how many times Bobby was at the house and how many times he stayed...

"The story Bobby told us is, many times--I mean many, many times...He told us he had been in a number of foster homes, that he did have parents but he'd been in foster homes all over.

"...He would come out and he'd spend hours going through the tapes [of Woody Guthrie]. Spent hours, literally, for days..."

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (2)

 

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 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, Dave Van Ronk recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"You could say Dylan was always vicious from time to time. This was no lollipop singer, you know. The only trouble about his viciousness, until he became famous, he couldn't get away with it...

"I remember sessions at the Kettle of Fish, where Dylan was especially obnoxious to Ochs...

"The big thing to keep in mind is that Bobby wanted to be a superstar. When he discovered the reality of being a superstar, he freaked out..."

And according to the text of her interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Terri Thal also recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life:

"...Dylan's two-night stand at Caffe' Gena was not an overwhelming success.

"...The Club 47 in Cambridge refused to hire him...The owner of the Second Fret in Philadelphia...told me, `Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitation when I can get Jack Elliott for nothing?' Elliott had just filled in at Second Fret for no pay for a benefit.

"I spoke to an executive at Vanguard Records who said he wasn't interested in Dylan..." 

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (1)

 

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 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 her interview with Anthony Scaduto in the late 1960s, Gretel Hoffman recalled the following biographical information about Dylan's pre-Newport Folk Festival 1965 life::

"David Whitaker, my ex-husband, is a phenomenal reader...Bob had not really heard about Woody Guthrie, except as a name that sort of everybody knew--that there was a folk singer named Woody Guthrie. He didn't know much more. And David gave him Guthrie's book to read, the autobiography...

"When I first met Bobby, he claimed he was an Okie...The whole initial set of stories when I first met him was that he was an Okie, that he was an orphan, and that he'd been on the road for years as a piano player. This big thing was that he was a piano player and just starting to play the guitar. That he lived in California.

"...I suppose I learned about Zimmerman within a few weeks of the time that I met him.

"What he said was that Dylan was his mother's name...

"...It was very interesting to watch Bob build the myth, the legend of himself. And he did it, I think, very consciously and very deliberately. Because I can remember having a conversation with him...after he had come back to New York with success...

"...We had a conversation about this character that he was creating. And this was a very explicit story about creating such a character...

"...He said he was building a character that would sell...

"...He had a terrible need to be the center of attention or a star, back in Minneapolis, at the Scholar, or at a party...I just remembered a party where Bobby was playing...He realized people weren't listening closely to him and...he threw down the guitar and really stomped off in great anger..."

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