On October 26th, 1961, Bob Dylan signed for Columbia Records. Everything that happened before that in popular music is merely prologue; the rest is ancient history. As ever with the original vagabond, the tale of him being signed was far from straightforward and his journey to the top that followed was wavering.
Dylan grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota. Having moved there from the smaller neighbouring town of Duluth, he became aware at an early age of the wider ways of culture beyond your immediate surroundings. This lesson stayed with him as he listened to the likes of Hank Williams when he was 11 years old. “I became aware that in Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of poetic songwriting,” Dylan would later recall regarding the lessons Williams laid out for the songsmiths who followed. “The architectural forms are like marble pillars.”
This sense of depth beyond pleasantry would eventually collide with the works of Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac who were capturing the changing times on the wing. So, with those influences, Dylan was fated to become a travelling folk musician. He cut his studies short and headed off for the beat mecca of Greenwich Village when he was a boy of 19, hoping to shoulder out a space in the frontier of the new literary side of emerging pop culture.
Five days after arriving in New York, Dylan tracked Guthrie down at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Morris Plains, New Jersey. Here, he would quickly learn the ways of folk songwriting. When he first started playing shows in Greenwich Village, the scene was obsessed with authenticity. Your songs and performances had to hark back to the past. As the line in Inside Llewyn Davis decrees: “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.”
Dylan, however, craved something more original, something that was new. “I always kind of wrote my own songs but I never really would play them. Nobody played their own songs, the only person I knew who really did it was Woody Guthrie,” Dylan recalled. “Then one day,” he continues, “I just wrote a song, and it was the first song I ever wrote, and it was ‘A Song for Woody Guthrie’. And I just felt like playing it one night and I played it. I just wanted a song to sing and there came a certain point where I couldn’t sing anything, I had to write what I wanted to sing because what I wanted to sing nobody else was writing, I couldn’t find that song someplace. If I could’ve I probably wouldn’t have ever started writing.”
This radical approach was divisive, but it drew enough attention to get him inside a Columbia recording studio. In 1961, the very singular folk stylings of the scruffy young kid were brought in for a session with Carolyn Hester. As fate would have it, John Hammond, Columbia’s senior pioneer of catching new trends, happened to be on hand to hear this session.
Hammond had previously championed social boundary-breaking acts like Billie Holliday. Thereafter, Hammond would continue championing social change and spot talent as though he was ensnared by class like a baited mousetrap. Having returned from service in World War II, Hammond had grown disillusioned by bebop and other scenes that seemed, at least to him, to miss the cognizant point of reflecting the horrors that the world had seen and the introspective reverberations. This resulted in a musical itch that was only scratched when he heard Dylan’s originality.
He quickly opined: “Dylan was a born rebel, and I figured that, you know, Dylan could capture an audience of kids that Columbia had lost years before.” So, he signed this weird new anti-star onto Columbia in a heartbeat and he was ridiculed just as quickly. His fellow executives referred to Dylan as simply: ‘Hammond’s Folly’. In fact, as Hammond recalled: “The vice president of Columbia Records said just right off, the most horrible thing he’d ever heard in his life,” he said. “Hammond’s folly.”
Thus, Dylan’s new life as a recording artist was in jeopardy. Only seven years later, however, such a perilous position seemed impossible to believe. Dylan was rightfully being hailed as an artist who changed the world forever. This was, in part, seeded by Hammond’s assertiveness. “What I wanted to do with Bobby was just to get him to sound in the studio as natural, just as he was in person, and have that extraordinary personality come through,” Hammond recalled. “After all, he’s not a great harmonica player, and he’s not a great guitar player, and he’s not a great singer. He just happens to be an original. And I just wanted to have that originality come through.”
It shone through like an assegai in the otherwise congested folk scene of the time. While his self-titled debut was met with derision in many quarters and failed to chart in the US, it made enough waves in the folk circle and in the UK to register on Albert Grossman’s radar. He later became Dylan’s manager and helped to launch his career. Dylan later described him as “kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure,” I reference to Elvis Presley’s hands-on manager.
A mere 20 months after being signed, Dylan released perhaps the most culturally pivotal album ever made with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Thereafter, he even became The Beatles’ “hero”. Over half a century on, Dylan is still making music. With the exception of Planet Waves, Dylan has since released all of his records on Columbia forming one of the most iconic partnerships in modern music.