Bob Dylan Read Online Free Page B

wasn’t able to help me at all. I finally realized that. So Woody was my last idol.”
    The original song manuscript—a sheet of yellow legal paper—ended up with the Gleasons. On it is the song and Dylan’s note, “Written by Bob Dylan in Mills Bar on Bleecker Street in New York City on the 14th day of February, for Woody Guthrie.

THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN
    After the poor sales of his debut album, there was talk at Columbia of Dylan’s contract being dropped before he could make a second record. John Hammond, however, would have none of it, and blocked David Kapralik’s move to offload ‘Hammond’s Folly’ by appealing over his head to Columbia president Goddard Lieberson, an old friend whom he had been responsible for bringing into the company years before. Helped by the support of Johnny Cash, one of the label’s leading country stars, who made no secret of his admiration for the youngster, Hammond was able to secure an extension of Dylan’s contract—for which Columbia was presumably eternally grateful. A giant leap beyond his raw debut, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was the first of a string of Dylan masterpieces that changed the face of first folk, then rock music.
    There are two basic driving forces behind the Freewheelin’ album: Dylan’s involvement in the civil rights movement; and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s absence in Italy, which spurred him into a prolific fever of songwriting. Since Suze was the person who drew Dylan into the civil rights arena in the first place, her position alongside the singer on the album cover was more than justified. Bob and Suze had bumped into each other a few times before through her sister Carla—who worked for folk archivist Alan Lomax and was an early supporter of Dylan—but the two became a couple following a benefit concert he played on July 29, 1961, for the Riverside Church’s radio station WRVR-FM. The youngest daughter of politically active Italian immigrant parents, Suze was already involved in de-segregation and anti-nuclear campaigns,working as a secretary for the Congress On Racial Equality. She helped Bob bring his general concern for the underdog and dislike of injustice into sharper, more specific focus.
    The pair began an intense, if problematic, two-year affair. At first, Suze had the effect of smoothing out Bob’s spikier side, sweetening his demeanor and encouraging him to smarten up a little. But after the couple took a tiny apartment at 161 West 4th Street, the demands of his ego began to encroach upon her own ego-space, and she started to feel smothered by his attention. She was an intelligent young woman with interests of her own in the theater and visual arts—she introduced Bob to the work of Bertolt Brecht, who would be a big influence on his work—but Dylan seemed to require nothing more of her than that she be “Bob’s girl”. As early as November 1961, before Dylan had released any records, she confided in a letter to a friend, Sue Zuckerman, “I don’t want to get sucked under by Bob Dylan and his fame. I really don’t. It sort of scares me… It really changes a person when they become well known by all and sundry. They develop this uncontrollable egomania… Something snaps somewhere, and suddenly the person can’t see anything at all except himself… I can see it happening to Bobby…”
    Besides which, Dylan was, even then, not the most forthcoming of people. “It’s so hard to talk to him,” Suze told another friend. “Sometimes he doesn’t talk. He has to be drinking to open up.” She sensed a pervasive air of despair about Dylan, a pessimism about people which bordered on paranoia and made him reluctant to leave the flat. Suze’s mother, Mary, disapproved of her relationship with this scruffy 19-year-old kid who had dubious personal hygiene and a cavalier way with the truth,