I’ve happily spent a good amount of time this week immersed in old issues of Broadside (the entire run can be found on the website of Sing Out!), reading about this history of topical songs in the United States and trying to come to terms with the development of Bob Dylan’s song-writing in 1962.

A word about Broadside. While topical songs had a long tradition in the United States (listen to anything by the Almanac Singers from the 1940s, for example), Pete Seeger was apparently of the idea by 1960 that the tradition had been allowed to die out. On tour in the UK in 1961, he was reportedly struck by the number of topical songs (many about the threat of nuclear war) that he was hearing, and he hopes to put some life into the movement in the US. Working with Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Broadside was born as a mimeographed pamphlet collected contemporary topical songs by folksingers from Greenwich Village, including Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, Len Chandler, Bonnie Dobson, Pete Seeger, and, of course, Bob Dylan. The musicians would gather in the apartment of Cunningham and Friesen where they would be recorded on a reel to reel provided by Seeger and then the songs would be transcribed and printed. Many of the songs, including those by Dylan (like “Emmett Till” and “Blowin’ In the Wind”) were based on the melodies of older songs, while others were entirely original.

About two years ago I decided that I no longer needed music CDs in my life, so I burned everything that I wanted to hard drives and sold them all to a used record store (for a truly pathetic sum). I kept only two CDs. One of them was the five disc collection The Best of Broadside (1962-1988), a truly remarkable collection of material with a tremendously informative book about the magazine, the singers, and the songs. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Dylan was involved with Broadside for its first two years, regularly contributing and recording songs for them (since he was exclusive to Columbia, and since Broadside’s records were released by Folkways, Dylan used the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt). He was initially listed as a contributor, and his song “Talking John Birch” was included in the first issue. In 1962, with which we are concerned here, he contributed seven songs to the magazine, including “Blowin’ in the Wind” (issue six), and he would place nine more there in 1963 (including “Masters of War” and “Fare Thee Well”, which is used at the end of Inside Llewyn Davis) before his increasing fame made his contributions more sporadic. In the January 1964 issue (#38) he contributed a letter to Sis and Gordon, and then gradually drifted away.

The topical song is not necessarily the same thing as the protest song. A song like “Oxford Town”, about James Meredith attempting to enrol at the University of Mississippi, is inspired by those events, but deals with the topic only indirectly and obliquely, while “Masters of War” is much more directly a scathing indictment of militarism and war-profiteering. Dylan’s earliest songwriting was almost all based on existing tunes and on the Talking Blues, and he continues that for a while in 1962, before segueing strongly towards writing his own tunes.

Dylan is commonly credited with making protest music – or topical music – mainstream, but when you read Broadside it is clear that he was only one (strong) voice of many. Certainly things broke for Dylan in a way that they never did for a more militant songwriter like Phil Ochs (who never had a top forty hit), but it would be simply wrong to suggest that others were following his lead. In topical songs, Dylan found a way to transition away from the Guthrie covers and traditional music, while still staying faithful to the Guthrie tradition (who was more topical than Woody? No one, that’s who). In retrospect, of course, the movement seems entirely natural and inevitable, but reading the history of Broadside makes it abundantly clear how much work was involved.

Dylan’s recordings for Broadside, which include more than a dozen songs done at the apartment, plus an appearance on WBAI-FM in May 1962, are a great record of the development of his songwriting over a very short, but extremely productive, period in 1962. While the Leeds and Witmark Demos include a wider range of material – including blues numbers – the Broadside tapes are much more socially engaged, such as the great anti-war song “John Brown”.

Bob Dylan’s live performance at the Finjan Club in Montreal from 2 July 1962 is named a “must have” by a number of bootleg sites. One of Dylan’s earliest post-debut album concerts, the sound quality is exceptional – you can actually hear a stage assistant rummaging through his guitar case looking for a capo. (Here’s a sample of Emmett Till from a German website that illustrates the outstanding sound quality). The show itself? A bit of a mixed bag. There seemed to have been about a dozen people there, and Dylan spends half his time tuning his guitar and starting and restarting songs. Sound quality can only take you so far…

For me, listening to a playlist set to present everything chronologically it has the remarkable moment of hearing Dylan introduce a song he wrote that he calls “How Many Roads Must A Man Walk Down?”  Wikipedia says that there is an earlier recording of “Blowin’ In The Wind” known to collectors, but I haven’t heard it. This version differs a bit from his mega-hit, and not just in title, but I want to save that for 1963, since I’m trying not to skip ahead. I should note, though, that Dylan recorded the version of “Blowin'” that appears on Freewheelin’ exactly one week after he played it in Montreal.

For me, listening to this set, I was interested in the Finjan Club. I did my graduate work at McGill University in Montreal from 1993 to 1999, a time when the Finjan was long gone. Apparently it was on Victoria Street, a small street just immediately south of McGill. When I was a student there I certainly never knew Dylan had played so close to campus thirty years earlier.

Indeed, according to the records on BobDylan.com, Dylan performed twice in Montreal while I lived there. In 1996 he played at the Verdun Auditorium and the next year he had a show at DuMaurier Stadium. I attended neither of these. I don’t remember hearing about them, or wanting to go. I asked Rebecca if she recalled us considering them, and she didn’t. I don’t think I thought about Dylan at all during that entire six years I lived there.

What I recall about music in Montreal is that it wasn’t that important to me. I had all my vinyl but my record player was broken and I don’t think I ever got it fixed. I was pretty anti-CD at the time, and, besides, living on a student stipend I had no money for them. I certainly wasn’t willing to rebuy things I had on vinyl, so I just didn’t listen to Dylan.  I think I owned Biograph on CD and so that I probably played on occasion, but that was it. For the most part, Dylan became something I had listened to in high school, and, to a lesser degree, during my undergrad years. I maintained a residual interest in folk – I bought the O Brother soundtrack when everyone else did – but Dylan was not part of my Montreal experience any more than the Finjan Club was.

My parents lived in Montreal in 1962, with my mother at nursing school just up the hill from the Finjan. Neither of them claim to like Dylan though (Elvis fans), so I doubt they were there. From the thin applause I think few people were there to see the man with the poor selling debut album offering an early take on a song that would help transform popular music.

Bob Dylan, the singer’s self-titled debut album, was released on 19 March 1962. Of the thirteen songs on the album, only two were written by Dylan, with the rest being traditional folk and blues songs. Some of those covers are really great (Highway 51; Baby, Let Me Follow You Down) and some seem like bizarrely inappropriate choices for a twenty year old to be singing (In My Time of Dyin’; Fixin’ to Die; See That My Grave is Kept Clean). The album has a certain death drive to it that makes me think that the young Dylan thought all these dark songs about dying would lend the album a gravitas that it might otherwise lack. He sings them that way – trying to sound as old and as world-weary as he possibly can. Listening to this album again today, too much of it seems forced to me. There’s a self-mythologizing going on that will become central to the Dylan persona, but which doesn’t serve the album that well. Some of these songs were ones that Dylan hadn’t included in his set lists prior to recording them here, and he didn’t add them afterward – they seem like trial balloons for a different singer that he might have become had things worked out differently.

The one song about death and dying on the album that sounds the most genuine is the one that he wrote: Song to Woody.

In Chronicles, his 2004 autobiography, Dylan writes: “The first song I’d wind up writing of any substantial importance was written for Woody Guthrie”. The legend is that Dylan came to New York to meet Guthrie, who was hospitalized at the time and would remain so until his death in 1967. He would visit his idol numerous times, building a relationship with him, while at the same time he was gradually reducing his reliance on Guthrie material and moving towards writing his own songs.

In one of the better passages in Chronicles (which is a simply superlative autobiography), Dylan writes about meeting the great Mike Seeger, and how Seeger just seemed to know the entire history of folk music in the core of his being. He realizes that to be the best, he’d have to know the material even more thoroughly than Seeger did, which seemed impossible, or he’d have to write folk songs that Seeger didn’t know yet. Obviously, he went in the latter direction.

From Chronicles again:

“Greenwich Village was full of folk cubs, bars and coffeehouses, and those of us who played them all played the old-timer folk songs, rural blues and dance tunes. There were a few who wrote their own songs, like Tom Paxton and Len Chandler, and because they used old melodies with new words they were pretty much accepted.”

I found this one of the most important passages in the first part of that book, because it provides a glimpse of how fixed the folk revival was in its earliest form. Dylan is writing about the period immediately before the formation of Peter, Paul and Mary. The Kingston Trio were already a commercial success, and Joan Baez was emerging as one. At another point he talks about all the young women with gut-strung guitars singing Pastures of Plenty. It was a scene ripe for change, even if it didn’t know it yet.

Dylan’s earliest songs – the Talking songs or I Was Young When I Left Home – are ones that put new lyrics on top of well-established tunes, in just the way Paxton and Chandler did it. Not songwriting so much as re-writing or adaptation. Over-writing. It’s the half-step towards writing something like Blowin’ In the Wind (which he would do in 1962), where you craft lyrics that are your own long before you craft a tune that is your own.

I wasn’t really conscious of this development in the early Dylan until this week, but it makes a ton of sense. Using established traditions as a template is one of the ways that we teach creativity, and it is fascinating to listen to him pass through this phase – something that he does incredibly quickly. Rebecca and I have been talking about this blogging project, and she has noted that I don’t yet have a clear sense of what it entails. Part of me now thinks I should just overwrite a successful one, changing Julia Child and cooking every time to Bob Dylan and singing. It’s how we learn.

Recorded in just two takes, Song to Woody sounds like a Guthrie song, but is a Dylan song. Maybe the first “real” Dylan song. Musically based on Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre, Song to Woody is a lament for an idol laid low in a hospital bed. It is a song that acknowledges a tremendous debt that can never be paid, and a song that is fundamentally humble and hopeful about the future. Dylan sings it beautifully, and it seems like the most genuine thing on the album. It sounds like the birth of a new talent, one who has shed the cocoon of his influences, the very men he is now celebrating as he embarks on his own path.

A couple of months ago, when I was first contemplating this project, I thought “I should buy a Bob Dylan poster and put it in my office!” So then I googled Bob Dylan Posters and, it turns out, I pretty much hate them all. All but one – the very spare and austere poster for the Carnegie Chapter Hall concert from November 4, 1961. I didn’t buy a copy, but if I do buy a poster it will be that one. The image of Dylan with his corduroy cap and harmonica is completely iconic, and I like the fact that’s it is so clearly a mimeographed handbill that has been typeset on a typewriter.

Robert Shelton’s biography says that fifty-three people attended Dylan’s first ever non-coffee house New York concert (in a room that sat one hundred). Apparently he performed twenty-two songs that night, the vast majority of them covers and traditional songs (four written by Woody Guthrie). He would record Bob Dylan less than three weeks later, so it is not surprising that nine of the songs he recorded at those sessions (and seven that made it onto his debut album) were performed that night.

Martin Scorsese chose to use the version of Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” on No Direction Home. I can understand the impulse to connect Dylan’s Guthrie period directly to his best-known song, but I don’t like Dylan’s version of this. He does a good enough version on 1960’s Karen Wallace Tapes, but in the fall of 1961 he was doing a very slow, dour, and positively joyless version of the song (the same can be heard on the First McKenzie Tape), and that’s what he plays here. It seems like a totally wrong interpretation. Fifteen years later Dylan closed the Rolling Thunder shows with raucous group performances of “This Land”, and those are the complete opposite of this, which sounds like a 45 RPM record played at 33 RPM. Dylan essentially speaks the lyrics here. The guitar part works, but not much else about it.

I can’t find that version online, but here is an earlier version from the Minnesota Party Tape. This is a little bit more up tempo than the Carnegie version:

There is a cd release of this show Canada and the UK (Carnegie Chapter Hall 1961) but in the US it seems to be only available as an import, so I’m not exactly certain about its legal status. It seems that either a third of this show was never recorded or that the tapes were lost or that someone is simply sitting on them. They shouldn’t – it’s a great show that would make a good addition to the official Bootleg Series aside from its obvious historical importance.

One note about Dylanology: I’ve been using Bob’s Boots to sort out some of the historical confusion that (for me) surrounds these pre-Columbia releases, but now I’ve found Olof Bjorner’s incredibly detailed chronologies of Dylan’s life and recordings and have bookmarked that. I’ll be using this as my primary fact site until further notice. It has a level of obsessive detail that is incredible and it is incredibly well organized.

So I’m standing in line for a flu shot – since children can only get them at clinics and we have an H1N1 outbreak – and there is a record store here. I was drawn to the vinyl Dylan albums on the wall -New Morning, Blood on the Tracks – and wandered in. Flipping through the CDs I found the special edition of Love and Theft (which I don’t own) and, upon opening it, learned that “I Was Young When I Left Home” is, as I always thought, traditional!

Now I’m wondering why BobDylan.com credits it to him?

My previous comments about how great it is stand, but I’m no longer impressed that he wrote it!

This has been the first of approximately two hundred errors I will make this year on this project.