Postcard Thursday: Bob Dylan's Birthday

Happy 77th Birthday to Nobel laureate Bob Dylan, who was born May 24, 1941, in Duluth Minnesota. His birth name was Robert Zimmerman, and, as we write in Footprints in New York:

he grew up in the tight-knit Jewish community in Hibbing, his mother’s hometown. After graduating high school in 1959, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota but only lasted one year. While he was there, he tapped into the burgeoning folk scene and began consistently using the stage name Bob Dylan. Having been a rock and roller, Dylan’s musical trajectory changed around this time when he was introduced to the music of Woody Guthrie, which, in Dylan’s words, “made my head spin.” 

In January 1961, he arrived in New York City determined to do two things: perform in Greenwich Village, the center of America’s folk music revival, and meet Woody Guthrie. By the end of his first week, he’d done both. Dylan probably got to the city January 23, the day the front page of the New York Times proclaimed it the “coldest winter in seventeen years,” a line Dylan would borrow for one of his earliest compositions, “Talkin’ New York.” In No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on Dylan’s early career, the singer remembers that first day: “I took the subway down to the Village. I went to the Cafe Wha?, I looked out at the crowd, and I most likely asked from the stage ‘Does anybody know where a couple of people could stay tonight?’” 

Singer-songwriter Fred Neil presided over the bar’s eclectic all-day lineup. Dylan showed his chops by backing up Neil and singer Karen Dalton on the harmonica and was hired to “blow my lungs out for a dollar a day.” 

Immersing himself in the music scene, Dylan soaked up everything he heard, from live acts in the bars and coffee houses south of Washington Square to the records he’d spin at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center down the street from Cafe Wha?. In the meantime he continued to embellish his back story. In No Direction Home, Izzy Young recalls Dylan telling him, “I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, moved to Gallup, New Mexico; then until now lived in Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota (for a little bit). Started playing in carnivals when I was fourteen, with guitar and piano. . . .” 

Later, newspapers picked up the fake biography, writing about the cowboy singer from Gallup. Stretching all the way back to the city’s Dutch pioneers, people have come to New York to reinvent themselves, to cast off their old identities and strike out in new directions. Dylan’s fanciful back story may have been an extreme case, but it was effective.

Today, Dylan's career shows no sign of slowing down. In 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first musician to be given the honor. In 2017, he released Triplicate, a triple album of standards, many of which had been recorded by Frank Sinatra. And he continues to tour regularly, with a swing through Asia, Australia, and New Zealand coming up this summer.

This summer we'll conduct a tour of Bob Dylan's New York -- watch this blog for details.

In other news, our blog recently had its millionth visitor. Thank you all so much for your support!

* * * * Read more about NYC history in   Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Bob Dylan Arrives in Greenwich Village: January 24, 1961

Ramblin' outa the wild West,
Leavin' the towns I love the best.
Thought I'd seen some ups and down,
‘Til I come into New York town.
People goin' down to the ground,
Buildings goin' up to the sky.

--Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York

Though specific dates are hard to pin down in the early life of Bob Dylan, it seems likely that tomorrow, January 24, marks the 48th anniversary of the singer’s arrival in New York City. Though he would often tell people he’d hopped a freight train, the truth is that he’d arrived from Minnesota in a 1957 Impala.

Knowing that Greenwich Village was the center of the burgeoning folk scene, he immediately headed to MacDougal Street and sometime on January 24, 1961, or one of the next few days, ended up on stage at Café Wha?, which is one of the few clubs from Dylan’s earliest period that still remains in operation.

In those days, the afternoon sets at Café Wha were presided over by Fred Neil—best known today as the author of the Harry Nilsson’s hit song Everybody’s Talkin’—who both performed his own material and booked other acts. On his first day performing, Dylan accompanied Neil and Karen Dalton on harmonica. One early set—perhaps even that first day—was captured by Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah:

(Karen Dalton—even less remembered today than Fred Neil—was a popular presence on the Greenwich Village folk scene. She released two albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s before fading from public view. Dalton died in 1993 and Neil in 2001. You can hear Dalton performing It Hurts Me, Too, on YouTube.)

If you wish to go to the Village to celebrate Dylan and his impact on American music, you can stop by Café Wha (which is across the street from Minetta Tavern), but most of the other haunts where Dylan fine-tuned his act are gone. The Gaslight (where Dylan recorded the recently released Live at the Gaslight 1962) was at 114 MacDougal—in the basement—below the space now occupied by Esperanto Café. Across the street where Panchito’s now serves what they claim to be “one of the six best margaritas” in New York was once the Fat Black Pussycat. And perhaps the most famous Dylan venue, Gerde’s Folk City at the corner of West 4th Street and Mercer, was torn down in the early 1970s to make room for the Hebrew Union College.

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If you are interested in doing a Rock and Roll tour of the city that includes some of these Dylan spots—and many more—we wrote the script for a tour of famous music spots in the East and West Village. The tour, narrated by DJ Ken Dashow, is available for download at www.citylisten.com.

You can also read about Dylan and New York in the 1960s in Inside the Apple, available for pre-order today.

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