About the Book
Book 2 tells the story of Bob Dylan's meteoric rise to stardom.
In January 1961, Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Within weeks, he traveled to the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey, to visit Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from Huntington's disease, a progressive degenerative brain disorder. Dylan played songs for him during his visits.
Shortly after his arrival, Dylan made his way to the epicenter of New York's cultural center: Greenwich Village. There Dylan made his name quickly known to the folk community, taking the stage as often as he could at the many basket-houses like the Cafe' Wha?, Gerdes Folk City, and the Gaslight café, where young performers could cut their teeth, earning whatever was in the hat after it was passed around after each set.
Dylan got his first big break on April 11, 1961, when he began a two-week stint opening for bluesman John Lee Hooker at Gerdes Folk City. The gig marked the start of a rapidly ascending career that would see Dylan signed to one of the world's largest record labels within the year.
In September 1961, Dylan arrived at Columbia Recording Studios to contribute harmonica to the music of Texas folksinger Carolyn Hester. Legendary talent scout John Hammond Sr. had seen Dylan perform a fortnight before, and so impressed was he by the young musician that he offered to sign him up for a five-year contract.
In November of that year, Dylan recorded songs for his first album, Bob Dylan, which was released the following year in March. It received little critical notice or commercial sales, yet it was a start. Dylan was now recording for one of the largest and most important companies in the world.
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, released in 1963, demonstrated the budding songwriter's distinctive talents with songs like "Girl from the North Country," "Masters of War," and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," which remain timeless classics forming the bedrock of Dylan's reputation.
Establishing himself as a new songwriter, Dylan performed for the first time ever on the West Coast at the Monterey Folk Festival in 1963 with Joan Baez singing harmonies, and at the Newport Folk Festival sharing the stage with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. In October of that same year he performed at Carnegie Hall to a sold-out crowd of thirty-five hundred people, from which a live album was prepared but never released, In Concert.
Dylan's third album, The Times They Are A-Changin', was released in early 1964, and included his most politically overt songs to date. Later that year, Dylan composed one of his most well-known songs, "Chimes of Freedom," a turning point for Dylan lyrically, expanding his style with symbolic and at times fragmented imagery, drawn from his immersion in French symbolist poets and the Beats, some of whom he had just met, such as Allen Ginsberg.
About the Author :
Mark Davidson is the Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive and Senior Director of Archives and Exhibitions for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California-Santa Cruz with an emphasis on folk music collecting, and an MSIS in archiving and library science from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written widely on music and archives, including his dissertation, "Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936-1941," and the essay "Blood in the Stacks: On the Nature of Archives in the Twenty-First Century," published in The World of Bob Dylan (2021).
Parker Fishel is an archivist who served as co-curator of the inaugural exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center. His company, Americana Music Productions, provides consulting, research, and production work for artists and estates, record labels, and other entities looking to preserve archives and share the important stories found in them. His selected credits include Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969 (Third Man Records), the Chelsea Hotel-inspired Chelsea Doors box set (Vinyl Me, Please), and several volumes of Bob Dylan's GRAMMY Award-winning Bootleg Series (Sony/Legacy). Fishel is also a board member of the Hot Club Foundation and a co-founder of the nonprofit improvised music archive Crossing Tones.
Jeff Gold is a GRAMMY Award-winning music historian, author, and former record label executive, profiled by Rolling Stone as one of the five "top collectors of high-end music memorabilia." As a top executive at Warner Bros. Records and A&M Records, Gold worked with artists including Prince, REM, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Iggy Pop, The Police, and Cat Stevens. A four-time GRAMMY-nominated Art Director, Gold won the 1990 Best Album Package GRAMMY for Suzanne Vega's Days of Open Hand. Gold has consulted for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Experience Music Project, and appeared as an expert on PBS's History Detectives. He and colleague Laura Woolley appraised the Bob Dylan Archive for Dylan's management, and his discovery of previously undocumented tapes has led to major label releases, including Bob Dylan in Concert at Brandeis University 1963. Gold's books include 101 Essential Rock Records: The Golden Age of Vinyl; Total Chaos: The Story of the Stooges, As Told by Iggy Pop; and Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s. Gold owns music collectibles website Recordmecca and writes about topics of interest to collectors on its blog.
Barry Ollman is a lifelong singer/songwriter and a longtime collector of rare letters and manuscript material of famous people, particularly in the fields of music, literature, science, and social movements, with a special focus on Woody Guthrie and his circle, including Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Bob Dylan, and '50s- and '60s-era rock 'n' roll. Ollman has gathered the largest private collection of Guthrie's letters and artworks over the past thirty-five years and was closely involved with the initial formation of Tulsa's Woody Guthrie Center beginning in 2007.
Lucy Sante is the author of numerous books including Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a GRAMMY (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. She teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard.
