“By now, this kid is outselling Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis,” Bob Dylan’s recording producer said in 1964, of the 23-year-old musician. “He’s speaking to a whole new generation.”
The word “folk” in the term “folk music” used to connote a rural homogeneous community that carried on a tradition of anonymously created music. No one person composed a piece; it evolved through generations of communal care. In recent years, however, folk music has increasingly become the quite personal—and copyrighted—product of specific creators. More and more of them, in fact, are neither rural nor representative of centuries-old family and regional traditions.
“He’s got a wider range of talents than he shows,” Wilson told me. “He kind of hoards them. You go back to his three albums. Each time, there’s a big leap from one to the next—in material, in performance, in everything.” Another friend of Dylan’s arrived, with three children, ranging in age from four to ten. The children raced around the studio until Wilson insisted that they be relatively confined to the control room. By ten minutes to eight, Wilson had checked out the sound balance to his satisfaction, Dylan’s friends had found seats along the studio walls, and Dylan had expressed his readiness—in fact, eagerness—to begin. Wilson, in the control room, leaned forward, a stopwatch in his hand.
The engineer muttered again that he might get a better take if Dylan ran through the number once more. Dylan seemed surprised that I had considered it necessary to make the comment. “There are. That’s what makes them so scary. If I haven’t been through what I write about, the songs aren’t worth anything.” He went on, via one of his songs, to offer a complicated account of a turbulent love affair in Spanish Harlem, and at the end asked a friend, “Did you understand it?” The friend nodded enthusiastically. “Well, I didn’t,” Dylan said, with a laugh, and then became sombre.
“Intensity, that’s what he’s got,” Wilson said, apparently to himself. “By now, this kid is outselling Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis,” he went on, to me. “He’s speaking to a whole new generation. And not only here. He’s just been in England. He had standing room only in Royal Festival Hall.” After the recording session resumed, Dylan continued to work hard and conscientiously. When he was preparing for a take or listening to a playback, he seemed able to cut himself off completely from the eddies of conversation and humorous byplay stirred up by his friends in the studio. Occasionally, when a line particularly pleased him, he burst into laughter, but he swiftly got back to business.
By one-thirty, the session was over. Dylan had recorded fourteen new songs. He agreed to meet me again in a week or so and fill me in on his background. “My background’s not all that important, though,” he said as we left the studio. “It’s what I am now that counts.” Musically, Dylan has transcended most of his early influences and developed an incisively personal style. His vocal sound is most often characterized by flaying harshness. Mitch Jayne, a member of the Dillards, a folk group from Missouri, has described Dylan’s sound as “very much like a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire.” Yet Dylan’s admirers come to accept and even delight in the harshness, because of the vitality and wit at its core.
“I get letters from people—young people—all the time,” Dylan continued when she had left us. “I wonder if they write letters like those to other people they don’t know. They just want to tell me things, and sometimes they go into their personal hangups. Some send poetry. I like getting them—read them all and answer some. But I don’t mean I give any of the people who write to me anyto their problems.” He leaned forward and talked more rapidly.
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