Dylan’s Debut: Reinventing Rock, 1962
When John Hammond the most esteemed major label record talent scout of the 20th century signed Bob Dylan to Columbia Records to release his self-titled debut album in 1962, his colleagues snickered, called it “Hammond’s Folly.” Ten years later, exactly the same thing happened when Hammond signed a verbose singer-songwriter to Columbia named Bruce Springsteen, and the same suits – perhaps some of the same people, it was only ten years – called him “Hammond’s Folly” as well. Ten years from Bob Dylan’s first album to Springsteen’s: You couldn’t travel that fast in a time machine.
Hammond, a man in a rumpled seersucker suit and a crewcut, a patrician lover of blues and gospel and R&B, was given a lot of leeway by management. A scion of the Vanderbilts, he had signed Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin (still a pop singer), Leonard Cohen, and scores of others. He had integrated Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939 with his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts.
The 1962 debut album, Bob Dylan, did not make the charts when it was released; it sold about 2,500 copies. Nobody I knew had a copy, though I did know of people who liked folk music, such as by Odetta, the Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul and Mary. They had big albums in 1962, a year in which the mainstream music business sold boxcars full of soundtrack albums (West Side Story, Breakfast at Tiffany’s), and comedy albums, including a parody record that anticipated Weird Al Yankovic called My Son, the Folk Singer, by a clever TV writer named Allan Sherman.
Bob Dylan, album cover.
Among the biggest records of 1962 was The First Family, by an enterprising mimic named Vaughn Meader, who did dead-on impressions of President John F. Kennedy and his Hah-vid-educated Bostonian clan. The least sentimental among us had the same strange reaction when JFK was assassinated in 1963: Poor Vaughn Meader is toast!
There were many profitable franchises for CBS’ Columbia Records: Ray Conniff’s easy listening, Andy Williams’ easy listening, and the Sing Along with Mitch series, goosed by a successful TV series of that name (1958 – 1962) and featuring goateed Mitch Miller, who led the sing-alongs (follow the dancing dot on your screen to keep up with the words). Thus was karaoke invented, and its creator and leader of the recording troupe known as “Mitch Miller and His Gang,” was also the head of A&R for Columbia Records. He was said to have hated rock and roll.
Rock and roll was always a singles business anyway, especially in the early 1960s, when everybody was doing the Twist, the Peppermint Twist, the Dear Lady Twist, the Pony, the Fly, the Hucklebuck, the Fly, the Watusi, the Shimmy, the Watusi.
Columbia was also making too much money with Broadway and movie soundtracks to bother much with rock and roll, a field full of “Bobbys”: Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vinton, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans. But Bobby Vinton was a balladeer whose career began in 1962 with his biggest hit, “Roses Are Red,” on Columbia’s sister label Epic. (”Blue Velvet” was much better, and used to better effect, on a later David Lynch movie.) My mother went shopping at S. Klein’s department store in Hempstead, Long Island, and bought me the Vinton single. She didn’t even mind when I looked at it and went, “Yuck!” It had been on sale for 49 cents, so what the heck. Columbia also had big success selling singles and albums by the smooth balladeer Johnny Mathis, whose nearly two dozen albums from 1957 through 1962 were almost always gold, easy listening music for adults, makeout music for teens: “Chances Are,” “It’s Not for Me to Say.”
Mitch Miller could care less that John Hammond signed an unusual rock performer named Bob Dylan, who put out that first album in 1962. Hammond called Dylan “Bobby,” and that debut album is a novelty, a one-man rock-blues band who sang, played harmonica, did comedy bits, and accompanied himself on a ferocious acoustic rhythm guitar, the likes of which wouldn’t be heard again until The Troggs’ plugged in with “Wild Thing.”
The first song on the album Bob Dylan is a nutty song called “You’re No Good,” written by bluesman Jesse Fuller, who himself performed as a one-man band and was famous for “San Francisco Bay Blues.” Dylan, 20 years old, almost breaks out in giggles, either from nervousness or the song’s humor. This woman is so crazy, it’s as if the singer and this gal escaped from a lunatic asylum, took a bus together to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Crawdaddy founder and prolific Dylan historian and close-listener Paul Williams later said “You’re No Good” was one of several songs on the album to “give hints of Dylan’s rock and roll sensibilities.”
The singer runs away, takes the A train alone downtown to West Fourth Street, and tells about what he sees on his first visit to “Green-witch Village,” on the second song and essential nub of the album, in “Talking New York Blues.”
The contrasting comic couplets come hard and fast, one of the few tunes on this mostly hyper blues record that show his songwriting potential. It allows Dylan himself to position himself in the musical cosmos of the day. It’s the post-beatnik/folk music coffee house era of “Green-witch Village,” and Dylan auditions at such a place. The owner is hardly impressed: “You sound like a hillbilly. We want folk singers here.”
Hillbillies were big business to Columbia’s parent company and its TV network, CBS: The big sensation of the fall TV season of 1962 was The Beverly Hillbillies, about the illiterate Clampett family from the Ozarks who strike it rich with oil wells and move to L.A’s famed 90210 zip code. Hillbilly Bobby’s awe at being in New York, with subways and skyscrapers, was something like the Clampetts' move from Arkansas to Beverly Hills: In New York, Dylan sees “People goin’ down to the ground/Buildings goin’ up to the sky.”
The album was produced by John Hammond, and the liner notes say little about folk music: “A good deal of Dylan’s steel-string guitar work runs strongly in the blues vein, although he will vary it with country configurations, Merle Travis picking and other methods. Sometimes he frets his instrument with the back of a kitchen knife or even a metal lipstick holder, giving it the clangy virility of the primitive country blues men. His pungent, driving, witty harmonica is sometimes used in the manner of Walter Jacobs, who plays with the Muddy Waters’ band in Chicago, or the evocative manner of Sonny Terry.” This sounds like a working definition of the roots and future of rock and roll to me.
In two or three years, English bands such as the Yardbirds (and American ones, like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) would be bringing the blues to large audiences. At the time, little notice was taken of how close the 20-year-old Dylan was to turning the blues into rock and roll. The English band The Animals would hit the charts with an old tune Dylan sang on this album, “House of the Rising Sun.” The folk singer Dave Van Ronk felt that Dylan took his version without credit, as if anyone had written this song that in the 1920s probably sounded like it had been around forever. (Later releases credited Van Ronk with the arrangement of this traditional song.) Dylan does credit blues-folk guitarist and singer Eric von Schmidt for the arrangement of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” a folk standard frequently heard in the coffee houses of the Village and of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Dylan, in the spoken introduction, says “Ric von Schmidt” taught him the song in the “green pastures of Harvard Univerisity.”
For some reason, this cracked up listeners back in the day, as people unsuccessfully tried to imagine hillbilly Dylan at Harvard. Von Schmidt credits most of his version to that of a wellspring of the Village scene, the bluesman Rev. Gary Davis, who probably taught everybody everything in the 1950s and 1960s, and what they didn’t get from Davis they got from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
My friend, the Vermont guitar player and teacher Andy Pitt, first told me about Sonny and Brownie, and Gary Davis, as underachieving geometry students at Herricks High School. (I was a senior, Andy in 11th grade, geometry for 10th graders.) Unbeknownst to me, Andy, not a huge Dylan fan, was listening to the first Dylan album during the same recent period I did. His brief report: “On the first album, Dylan does a few of classic blues songs. While not taking on the arrangements of the masters, I think Dylan gives honest and personalized interpretations. I especially enjoy the thump and driving rhythm of his guitar. I find the tone of his guitar to be gutterally pleasing. His harmonica playing (while somewhat frenzied) pairs beautifully with the rhythm of the guitar. On this album, his young voice is clear and passionate, sometimes with a pinch of humor. . .”
Dylan Performs as Elston Gunn at Folk City.
Humor indeed. In the traditional “Peggy-O” Dylan complains he can’t find “Fennario” anywhere in the USA, and for good reason: Fennario is the site of a supposedly haunted Scottish castle. Some of the witty asides are musical: In “Highway 51,” which runs from Wisconsin (not far from the Minnesota border) to west of New Orleans, the rhythm guitar borrows the riff from “Wake Up, Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers. You get the feeling that Dylan will revisit Highway 51, or someplace like it, in the future.
For such a young man, he seems a little death-obsessed, with passionately strung, rabidly sung versions of “See That My Grave is Kept Clean,” the Blind Lemon Jefferson song that closes the album after “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s own tribute to Woody Guthrie, conveys a terrifying vision: “And there’s two white horses following me.”
Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die” is no less scary. The kid is 20 years old and sounds totally convinced “there’s a black smoke rising Lord...and tell Jesus make up my dying bed.”
Rock music and pop culture legends were built from dying and loss young, from James Dean to the two 1960 hits of Ray Peterson, “Tell Laura I Love Her” and a kind of white bread version of “Corinne Corrina,” which was produced by Phil Spector for Peterson’s own Dunes label, for which Spector had also produced Curtis Lee’s “Pretty Little Angel Eyes.”
Funny thing: After the Bob Dylan album was out, he went into the studio and cut two sides on Nov. 14, 1962, released a month later (Dec. 14, 1962, my 13th birthday): “Corinna Corinna” (spellings of the song had varied since 1928 or so), with the other side being a raucous rocker called “Mixed-Up Confusion.” The band on “Mixed-Up Confusion” was blues guitarist Bruce Langhorne and George Barnes, guitars; Dick Wellstood, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; and Herb Lovelle, who played with numerous folk, jazz, and blues aritsts, on drums.
Dylan was electric before he went electric; but Columbia withdrew the single promptly, because it clashed with his “image.”
Dylan’s identity crisis may or may not have been triggered by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, during which the US and USSR stood on the brink of nuclear war. Dylan’s next albums, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are-A Changin’ would introduce the topical singer-songwriter, conveying rage and anger at the potency of such war making machinery.
He’d become a hero to the topical folk community, a rise to stardom in a field that had never experienced such a pop culture phenomenon. But it wasn’t until 1965 and Bringing It All Back Home with “Subterranean Homesick Blues” that brought Dylan the rock and roll stardom that was only hinted at in that 1962 hillbilly debut, Bob Dylan. In 1982, The Hillbilly Cat became the title of a spoken word and musical collection of Elvis Presley at Sun Records. Bob Dylan walked in those same shoes: The Hillbilly Cat.
Header image: Bob Dylan promotional photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Don Hunstein/public domain.
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