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ambition to meet his hero; some would play jokes on him when he was drunk, telling him Guthrie was outside or on the phone. But he did try and contact the singer one snowy night in December 1960, Whittaker affirms, phoning Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where Guthrie was dying of Huntington’s Chorea. The ward doctortold Dylan that Woody was too sick to come to the phone. That seemed to settle matters once and for all. “I’m going to see him,” Dylan told Whittaker, “I’m going to New York right now.” And he was off, hitch-hiking East through a blizzard.
    Dylan got to meet his idol in late January or early February 1961, at the home of Bob and Sid (Sidsel) Gleason, a folk-enthusiast couple with whom Guthrie spent weekends at their place in East Orange, New Jersey, where Sundays were a kind of open-house hootenanny session for such noted luminaries of the folk scene as Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, along with lesser lights such as Peter LaFarge, Logan English, Lionel Kilburg and Guthrie disciple Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Dylan had apparently hitched out to Greystone Hospital a few days earlier, and had visited Guthrie’s family home in Howard Beach, Queens, where he gave Woody’s young son Arlo an impromptu harmonica lesson, but the Sunday session at the Gleasons’ was probably the first time Guthrie —or any of the folkie crowd, for that matter—was made aware of his existence. Having heard of the Gleasons in his first few weeksas a coffeehouse folkie in Greenwich Village, Dylan had called on them and secured an invite to the following Sunday’s session, where he sat quietly on the floor by the couch where Guthrie lay, frail and palsied, while Houston chatted to Guthrie about his own illness (which claimed his life later that year), and Elliott tried vainly to cheer proceedings up. It was, by all accounts, a somewhat dismal afternoon. When Dylan finally sang a few songs, the old master was impressed. “He’s a talented boy,” one of those present recalls Guthrie saying, “Gonna go far.”
    Shortly after this first meeting, Dylan wrote ‘Song To Woody’, basing the melody on Guthrie’s own ‘1913 Massacre’. A sincere, if sentimental, tribute from an acolyte to an icon written in a gentle waltz-time, the song acknowledges the pupil’s debt to the master, reflects with longing upon the master’s earlier, rambling days and concludes with an assurance that the pupil, too, will seek out experiences with the same diligence and integrity. Over the following weeks, Dylan visited Guthrie several times in hospital and frequently attended the Gleasons’ weekend soirees where, much to the envious chagrin of Kilburg and English, he became a firm favorite of Woody’s. The first question Guthrie would ask when the Gleasons arrived at the hospital to pick him up was “Is the boy gonna be there?”; and when, one Sunday, the boy played ‘Song To Woody’ for him, Guthrie beamed with pleasure and assured him, “That’s damned good, Bob!” After Dylan had left, Woody told the Gleasons, “That boy’s got a voice. Maybe he won’t make it by his writing, but he can really sing it.”
    The boy was growing up, however, and he grew to realize that Woody was far from the idealized hero of his imagination, that, though touched with genius, he was just as petty, irresponsible and egotistical as the next man. This undoubtedly had a significant effect on Dylan’s songwriting and performing styles and his attitude to life. A few years later, he told Nat Hentoff of The New Yorker magazine, “After I’d gotten to know him, I was going through some very bad changes, and I went to see Woody, like I’d go to somebody to confess to. But I couldn’t confess to him. It was silly. I did go and talk with him—as much as he could talk—and the talking helped. But, basically, he