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..." 

60 Years Since Newport 1965: Scaduto's `The Dylan Tapes' Revisited (8)

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

"...The executive vice-president of our company [CBS's Columbia Records] was furious because I had not signed Joan Baez...Joan had come up, you see, and [Albert] Grossman was representing her. But just before I was with Columbia, I was with Vanguard Records...So Joan came up--and I was at Newport, you know, when Joan was there...Albert [Grossman] was asking a large advance for Joan. I said, `...Albert,...I'll give you a $1,500 [equal to around $16,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] advance and, of course, top royalties.'

"Vanguard, I understand offered a $3,000 [equal to around $32,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars]. So, she signed with Vanguard. Now this is not for--just turn the machine off for a second.

"...Bob [Dylan]'s first album came out...And so, we had a wonderful publicity guy at that time called Billy James. And Billy and Bob [Dylan] really became very tight. And Billy got Bob [Dylan] full-page spreads in Seventeen and all the Leed publications and made a real character out of Bob [Dylan]. Columbia did a good job in promotions.

"But the first album was a dud...

"...So then, we were working on the second album...Then Bobby came into the office one day and he said, `John, do you know Albert Grossman?'

"I said, `Sure, I know Albert Grossman...' And he said, `Well, Albert has got a deal for me to go over to England and do a pilot for BBC.' And he said, `There's a lot of loot involved'--It was 2,000 bucks [equal to around $21,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars], which I could show you, because I've been lending Bob [Dylan] money...You know $75 [equal to around $800 in 2025 U.S. dollars], $100 [equal to around $1,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars]--things like that, when he needed it. I also got him a publishing deal. Leeds. He didn't have a publisher, and so [to] Lou Levy, I said `Lou, I got a real talented guy here.'...He said, `Send him over, I'll give him a $500 [equal to $5,300 in 2025 U.S. dollars] advance.' So, Bob [Dylan] signed with Duchess Music [an imprint of Leeds].

"He [Dylan] said `What do you think of Albert Grossman?' And I said, `Well, I can work with Albert...If you want to sign with Albert... go ahead.'

"...Turn the tape machine off..."

Why Did Bob Dylan Shift From Protest Folk Music To Commercial Folk Rock Music In 1965?

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?..."