THE MILLION DOLLAR BASH

DYLAN-WHISPERER GREIL MARCUS ON THE 1960 MADISON PARTY TAPE: A DOCUMENT OF THE BARD’S BECOMING.

WHEN BOB DYLAN LEFT MINNEAPOLIS IN THE late fall of 1960, seeking New York City as if he didn’t exactly know where it was, he landed in Madison, Wisconsin, in the bohemian milieu around the university. He has spoken often over the years of a kind of secret society of folk music people: if you knew where to go, who to call, where to wait, within hours you could find yourself within the confines of what he called “like-minded people”, sharing songs, sharing food, sharing tiny apartments, even if you slept on the floor – there wasn’t room for a couch. For Madison, Dylan had a number for Ron Radosh. Born in New York, he was from a Communist Party background; Pete Seeger was his guitar teacher. Now he was a folkie and a graduate student: “I was a 5-string banjo picker and guitarist and wanted to be a professional folk singer,” he wrote to me in 2021, “and gave that up when I realised my limitations.” (As a scholar, notable among his books is, with Joyce Milton, from 1983, The Rosenberg File, a convincing case for the guilt of [nuclear spies] Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Radosh must have flinched when he heard the bootlegged Julius And Ethel, from the same year, perhaps as musically bad and intellectually clueless as anything Bob Dylan has ever written or recorded; it was never released.) Radosh didn’t have room to put Dylan up, but he had those secret society connections: he sent Dylan to Danny Kalb, then an 18-year-old freshman and guitar player. Within hours Dylan was meeting people, staying at different apartments, part of whatever was happening. He was playing at parties; at one Socialist Club night, people complained that he wouldn’t stop singing his Woody Guthrie songs when there were serious politics that needed talking about.

The tape that survives from one of those nights, from November or December, at the house of the guitarist Jeff Chase, with Chase and Kalb sometimes in the background, has a different tone from party tapes made in Minneapolis both before and after, and after Dylan reached New York. You don’t hear mastery, a scholastic command of folk song, authority, an original style, or for that matter humour. You hear someone finding his way into an attitude, where songs can take shape not as icons to be treated with respect, but mere occasions to put one foot in front of the other, trying to find out just what it is you’re looking for. The Memphis Jug Band recorded K. C. Moan in 1929; they were chasing a death-bound train, three voices chiming in over a story that they’ve been told too many times without ever finding an ending they can live with. It was a masterpiece then; today it sounds unearthly, the last kind words of people before they vanish from the earth and memory. Quickening the pace, Dylan, Kalb, and Chase have fun with it. The pace Dylan finds is jaunty.

The rhythm pops. “Hey, hey, ho, ho,” Dylan lets out from the start of the night to the end: this is the one time where it feels part of the song, because it lands square on the beat. It’s an early catch of the uncanny timing Dylan would mine for the rest of his career (I think of the first “all right” in Sitting On A Barbed-Wire Fence): proof, as the late Ralph J Gleason put it, that “Bob Dylan can swing.”

WHEN DYLAN RETURNED TO MINNEAPOLIS FROM New York in the spring of 1961, people were shocked at the change. In Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, Tony Glover recounts how it was like “Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson” – “like he’d gone to the crossroads,” made his deal with the devil, came back better than anyone in town ever thought of being. That night in Madison, it’s clear that wherever the crossroads might be – somewhere down in Greenwich Village, maybe where West 4th Street crosses West 12th? – he hasn’t been there yet. Such timeless songs as Danville Girl and East Virginia Blues don’t begin to come off. You don’t believe the singer was ever on a platform smoking a big cigar – the “big cigar” of the 1944 Woody Guthrie version, making you think that even if the character telling the stor y is waiting for a freight to hop, any cigar has to be a big cigar, like the plutocrats in their tuxedos resting their feet on the necks of honest workers in cartoons in [early-century US socialist magazine] The Masses always had it, rather than the “cheap cigar” the song originally carried, as Dock Boggs sang Danville Girl in 1927, with countless people in the background before him: an image that actually tells you something, that from the bitter tone the word demands lets you picture the singer. And yet the songs are there, something to investigate, something to test yourself against, blues chords curling around a melody: 37 years later, when the singer on Time Out Of Mind, in Standing In The Doorway, tells you he’s smoking a cheap cigar, not only do you believe him, you can see the same man doing the same thing for 20 years, over and over, getting nowhere every time.

It’s interesting that a 19-year-old Bob Dylan is more convincing on Jimmie Rodgers’ Let Me Be Your Sidetrack than on Guthrie’s Hard Travelin’. By the end of 1960 he was doing Woody Guthrie in his sleep, when he sat down to eat, drank coffee, had a beer, shook hands. A few steps away from that little constructed Guthrie world, he had to look for the song, to find out where he was in relation to it, and homage wouldn’t do, because he didn’t yet know the song well enough to imitate it. He had to reach for the song, as if it were a testament and a joke at the same time, and so it is: Let Me Be Your Sidetrack is closer to rock’n’roll than anything that was passing for folk music. That’s the attitude: songs are a way to get from one place to another, in the course of the night, across a life, and who knows what they’re really about? Ramblin’ Railroader, a song so folk it seems to have been composed by the genre as an advertisement for itself, comes up; hidden inside of it are a few lines from Elvis Presley’s Mystery Train. He wasn’t at the crossroads, but you can sense him looking for it on a map.

“PEOPLE COMPLAINED THAT HE WOULDN’T STOP SINGING HIS WOODY GUTHRIE SONGS WHEN THERE WERE SERIOUS POLITICS THAT NEEDED TALKING ABOUT.”