Status Updates From The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A ...

He liked to visit his grandson's kindergarten class in Calabasas and play for the children. In May 2007 some of the youngsters told their parents "a weird man" had come to class and played "scary songs," and the story made the newspapers.

Mavis was fascinated to see her old friend scribbling new verses in the studio. He would write a line and show it to her, write a few more and ask her what she thought. "Bobby, you write so little," she said, struggling to read the words. "He said he couldn't help it. When a person writes like that," Staples remarked, "they're humble." When she told him that, he said he'd never heard such a thing before.

And at that point, Bob Dylan lost his cool.
"Tony," he asked his bass player "how many times you heard me sing?"
And Tony shrugged and said he didn't know.
"Well? You heard me sing a thousand times?"
"Yeah."
"You heard me sing two thousand times?"
"Yeah, I guess so."
"You ever heard me sing it the same way twice?"
There was dead silence in the room.

[When asked by Daniel Lanois to repeat a song the same way.]

Understanding Bob Dylan's life and work since the 1990s depends mostly upon knowledge of his conduct on the road and in the studio with other musicians. This is in part because the mature man in his sixth decade succeeded in his struggle to keep his private life secluded, and largely because he has organized his affairs around his intense touring, writing, and recording schedule.

The Basement Tapes, as they have come to be called, are a precious record of Dylan’s creative process—his antecedents and influences, as well as the improvisational, spontaneous shaping of the lyrics in the rhythm of the moment, so what begins as a howl, mumbling, or gibberish gradually takes shape as articulate language.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” says Pennebaker, as if he were puzzling over a problem of particle physics. “I’ve talked to Eric [Andersen] about it. What was Dylan like when I first knew him? It was like the first time you saw a black hole, you thought, what is that? And you keep thinking, I will figure it out. I will watch it and I will figure it out, and you never do.”

His timing was supernatural. He wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” a month and a half before Kennedy’s death (just as he had composed “Hard Rain” a month and a half before the Cuban Missile Crisis). In Washington on December 14 we were probably the third concert audience ever to hear that anthem of the 1960s student revolution, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.

“Hard Rain” is unlike any song that had ever been written. The poet’s study of Brecht, Civil War newspapers, Rimbaud, Picasso’s Guernica, and the ballad tradition had culminated in an artsong, a cri de coeur that effaced the durable stanza and chorus structures like a great river flooding the countryside. It is three times as long as most contemporary songs and rhymes erratically.

The spirit of Suze Rotolo herself worked the miracle in those years. She believed in his gifts, and in loving her he found everything in life more precious. He began writing love songs and songs of protest against injustice at about the same time, in the spring of 1962.

Carolyn Hester was a dark-haired, delicate-featured singer-guitarist from Texas. Impressed by Dylan’s harmonica playing, Hester invited him to work with her on the album she was making for Columbia Records. ... The young harmonica player served up a virtuoso accompaniment to “Come Back Baby” that nearly stole the show ...

[Come Back Baby on Spotify]

His first* professional recording gig was playing harmonica on the title track of Harry Belafonte’s album Midnight Special.

[*First released in 1962, but actually recorded after the 1961 Carolyn Hester session. Midnight Special on YouTube, Midnight Special on Spotify]

In the company of two college students, Bob Dylan drove from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City in a four-door Chevrolet, a 1957 Impala, arriving in the knee-deep snow on January 24, 1961. “I was there to find singers,” he recalled, “the ones I’d heard on record—Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger . . . The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others—most of all to find Woody Guthrie.”

He read and conversed fluently. His IQ was only a few points above average—perhaps the dreamy child could not focus on standardized tests—and his grades matched, C plus, which in the days before grade inflation was above average. ... He became an audiodidact, one who learns mainly through his ears rather than his eyes, from the sound of voices rather than words on a page.

My mother lost sight of my sister when Bob Dylan was about twenty feet away from us. The crowd was not huge but it was big enough that a child could get lost in it, no joke in the city. My mother became frightened and started calling out, "Linda! Linda!' ... "Ma'am!" Bob Dylan called, in our direction. "Ma'am?" We moved toward the voice. ... "It's all right, ma'am," he called out. "I've got her."

He played a haunting melody on the harmonica, the Irish tune some of us knew from the Clancy Brothers recording “The Parting Glass.” We thought he might sing that air, although thus far he had sung no songs but his own. In fact he had borrowed the Irish tune and made his own song of it, a composition that he called the “Restless Farewell.”

Suddenly he was gone, offstage through the curtains where he had come from more than an hour before; an apparition, leaving behind him the ghosts of a dozen vivid characters his songs had conjured before us.

From April 24, 1962, until April 24, 1963, Dylan was in and out of Columbia Studio A on Fifty-fourth Street in New York on eight different dates, recording more than thirty songs. Thirteen of these would make up The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which came out in late May 1963. During that time he wrote more than a hundred songs. He said he was afraid to go to sleep at night for fear he would miss one.