Dylan Week: Bob Dylan's Love Affair With New York City
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It's the place Bob Dylan set off on his calling, surrounded by the musicians, personalities and culture which would irrevocably shape the rest of his life. It's the one place he has returned to time and again over his career, whenever he was sapped of the hunger, when inspiration seemed harder to find than rooster's teeth. Or as he recollected telling his father in the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles, it was the "capital of the world" for him: "New York City was the magnetâthe force that draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and everything will fall apart."Over the course of his enigmatic career, Dylan's relationship with NYC has defied his own cynical nature; this is the man who once sang, "You can always come back, but you canât come back all the way," a man who has played more than 2300 shows over the last 13 years on his "Never Ending Tour." It's safe to say that he's someone who is not comfortable sitting still anymore. And yet, the most indelible images of his career almost all come from here: walking with Suze Rotolo down Jones Street on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, sitting in the Chelsea Hotel writing "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands," telling off an ex-girlfriend on "Positively 4th Street." You can see a lot of those places in the video below:Click through to hear his first impression of NYC in song.
There are the venuesâsome still here, some long departedâhe frequented during those early years: Gerdeâs Folk City, Gaslight Cafe, Town Hall, Cafe Wha?, White Horse Tavern, Cedar Tavern (you can read a great article about Dylanâs NYC debut at Gerdeâs Folk City here). Then there are the locations mentioned in his lyrics, which create an alternative map of the city: Grand Street in "Stuck Inside A Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," Montague Street in "Tangled Up In Blue", and even Red Hook in "Joey." It's not without good reason that there is a Dylan Walking Tour which covers many of those spots, along with his apartment with Rotolo at 161 West Fourth Street and his townhouse at 94 MacDougal Street.In his earliest songs, you can hear the mix of exuberance and suspicion he initially had for the city, all topped off with an effervescent energy, like a kid who just tried his first Coca Cola. In "Talkin' New York," from his first album, Dylan's impressions sound surprisingly close to a diary entry: "Thought Iâd seen some ups and downs/âTil I come into New York town/People goinâ down to the ground/Buildings goinâ up to the sky." In the original draft of the song, he says he "rode the subway for a couple days" as well. In "Hard Times In New York," he takes a more comical approach to the subject: "From Washington Heights to Harlem on down/Thereâs a-mighty many people all millinâ all around/Theyâll kick you when youâre up and knock you when youâre down"Next Up: his relationship with Dave Van Ronk
If Dylan was first inspired (as he claims) to journey to the city to visit a sickly, bed-bound Woody Guthrie in a Brooklyn hospital, then it was another Brooklynite who nurtured him into adulthood. Legendary folk singer Dave Van Ronk (pictured with Dylan and Suze Rotolo) let Dylan crash on his couch for months, introduced him to the Greenwich Village sceneâand Van Ronk's wife even booked gigs for him. Most importantly, Dylan absorbed elements of Van Ronk's larger-than-life personality, as well as his interpretative skills: "He turned every folk song into a surreal melodrama, a theatrical piece...Every night I felt like I was sitting at the feet of a timeworn monument...Later, when I would record my first album, half the cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did. It's not like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more than I did mine." Below, you can hear Dylan and Van Ronk hilariously covering Woody Guthrie's "Car Song."Next Up: how hearing a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil number inspired him to write some of his greatest protest-songs
As Dylan became a fixture around the Village, his sponge-like nature and unquenchable curiosity truly blossomed; he was introduced to the writing of Rimbaud, heard Robert Johnson, and met John Hammond, the Columbia Records producer who would sign Dylan and usher him to stardom. Oddly, perhaps the most important moment was hearing a Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil number at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street (now known as the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation), as he described in Chronicles:In a few year's time, I'd write and sing songs like "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),""Mr. Tambourine Man," "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," "Who Killed Davey Moore," "Only a Pawn in Their Game," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and some others like that. If I hadn't gone to the Theatre de Lys and heard the ballad "Pirate Jenny," it might not have dawned on me to write them, that songs like these could be written.Along with those tunes came protest-anthem "Blowin' In The Wind," a song so culturally big, it inspired Sam Cooke to write the superior, "A Change is Gonna Come." Check out an interview below with Dylan's first manager, Roy Silverâ"the only [guy] in the entire Village that wore a suit"âabout the song. The interview was recorded, but unused, for the fantastic Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home.Next Up: going electric, crashing his motorcycle, and getting tangled up in blue
Remarkable moments piled up as Dylan matured and became an icon: introducing the Beatles to marijuana at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964; hanging out with Andy Warhol and Nico at the Decker Building in Union Square; recording "Desolation Row" and "Like A Rolling Stone" at Columbia's Studio A in midtown; and the whisper of escapades on the D Train in "Visions of Johanna."After his motorcycle crash in 1966, Dylan retreated to Woodstock and shed his thin wild mercury sound. Even so, he was pulled back to NYC over the course of the 70s whenever he got restless: in "Behind the Shades," biographer Clinton Heylin wrote, "Perhaps, he reasoned, he needed 'the New York atmosphere' to write songs." Of course, that also led to confrontations with obsessive fans such as notorious garbage-sifter AJ Weberman.There were the haunted initial sessions for his mid-period masterpiece Blood on the Tracks back at Columbia Studios in 1974; then while he was recording Desire in the summer of 1975, he hung out at the Bitter End, playing pool with Patti Smith. And when he randomly drove past a beguiling Scarlett Rivera with violin in hand walking through the Lower East Side, it ended up being one of the puzzle pieces that led to the massive Rolling Thunder Revue. Watch a clip of "Tangled Up In Blue" from that tour below:Next Up: "New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice."
Leave it to Dylan himself to best sum it up. In Chronicles, Dylan described that enduring moment when he first arrived in the city:The biting wind hit me in the face. At last I was here, in New York City, a city like a web too intricate to understand and I wasn't going to try.I was there to find singers, the ones I'd heard on recordâDave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of othersâmost of all to find Woody Guthrie. New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.