Facts about BOB..


I found this on an old wordPerfect file.. Has to be from 90's though, cuz I didn't know how to turn on a computer until then.  or type for that matter.


Remember you told me you had watched a special on Bob Dylan and that he had learned guitar from his dad and that he toured with his dad...Well that was incorrect. I got several biographical books and
looked it up in all of them. The one I found to be the most informational is: No Direction Home: the life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton.
Early years:
It tells the time his mom went into labor, 9 pm. Her name is Beatty Stone. His maternal grandfather Ben D Stone worked a general store south of Hibbing. His dad Abe, born in Duluth in 1911 worked in the shoe factory in Odessa when he was seven, but was working for Standard Oil when Bob was born .. where he was a supervisor. And where his three year old son made his first recorded sound into a dictaphone. "The boy marveled at the recorded sound of his own voice".  In 1946 there was a mother's day  celebration in Duluth, where Bobby was taken with his grandmother Anna. Everyone was getting up to perform, but nobody else but Bobby was listening to what was going on. This little four-year-old codger gets up with his tousled, curly hair and goes to the stage. He stamped his foot and commanded attention. Bobby said: "If everybody in this room will keep quiet, I will sing for my grandmother. I'm going to sing, `Some Sunday Morning'", and sing he did. Tore the place apart."  

His dad Abe, had polio in 1946 and lost his job.. they moved in with family members (Beaty's parents) in Hibbing. Abe and his brothers Paul and Maurice had prospects: consumer goods.
Bob started first grade at the Alice school right next door to the Stones' apartment.  It tells of his Bar Mitzvah.. age thirteen.  
Then he learns the guitar after trying several instruments in high school and jr. high. He ignored the  piano.. but wrote lyrics. His first band was called The Golden Chords in 1955. Featuring Chuck Nara on drums, Bill Marinec on bass, and Larry Fabbro on electric guitar, with Bob on piano, guitar and lead vocals.
In autumn 1955 the four jammed often, exchanging recordings and listening to Bob's plans for a life in music. To the others, music was just a hobby. They appeared at Hibbing High's Jacket Jamboree Talent Festival.  They sang songs of Little Richard and Elvis. The principal cut the mikes off..Bob just pounded his piano more loudly!! Some say he broke the pedal off and may have bruised a few strings.  It goes on
about different teachers and what they said about him being confident, but different.

First sweetheart was Echo Helstrom Shivers.. At least she thought she would marry him someday. She is the one he busts the lock off the door of the hall to play piano for.. 1958 - 1960-61
Dylan graduated the schools most notable graduate since Francis Bellamy, author of the "Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.." in Minneapolis, Minn.  (High school)

New York: Suze Rotolo was his sweetheart in the early New York days. (They are still friends..as of this writing 1986) She said, "He liked wine" She never saw him sober for quite a while..even cold sober he
was prone to car accidents. The worst accident occurred in 1958 when Bob had decided to sell his motorcycle, but wanted to take one final ride, as he slowly turned toward home, a three-year-old boy holding an orange ran into the street from between two parked cars and collided with the side of the motorcycle. Hibbing Hospital said the child needed further care, and Abe arranged for an ambulance to Duluth. The child recovered, but Abe regarded Boy and the motorcycle as a deadly mixture. Bob said he saw that orange for a long time rolling along in his dreams..nightmares.
Second band he started was the Satin Tones.   
When Buddy Holly and Link Wray played at North Country rockabilly at the Duluth Armory, Bob was in the front row. Only three days later Holly was dead. "At one a.m. on Feb. 3, 1959, a beechcraft bonanza chartered in Mason City, Iowa, took off in light snow for Fargo, North Dakota.. Trouble developed in minutes, probably because the 21 year old pilot could not cope with the weather or instruments. The left wing hit the ground first. Killed instantly were the pilot and three musicians, Holly, 22, Ritchie Valens, 17 and JP Richardson, 24 (called the Big Bopper)."

In 1959 Dylan arrived a the University of Minnesota on Highway 61 took byways, blind alleys, detours, and left on Highway 12. Shortly after his abortive encounter with the Bobby Vee band in Fargo in the summer 1959, Dylan ended up in a reconstructed nineteenth century gold-mining town high in the Rockies, singing in a sleazy striptease joint... Bob and his family told me he want to Denver and Central City, Colorado before enrolling at Minnesota others have him placed in Colorado the summer of 1960. I know he returned in early 64. I was with him there in March 66. He made his first trip to Colorado by bus and thumb. He said walking by the Gilded Garter, "This was the place, I was on stage for just a few minutes with my folky songs. As the night got longer, the air got heavier, the audience got drunker and nastier, I got sicker and finally I got fired. It only lasted a few weeks, but I will never forget it.
They paid me very little, but they threw in sandwiches and drinks, and all the strippers I could watch".

Get this!! (note: I lived right here years later) The Exodus Gallery Bar at at:  1999 Lincoln Street was the focal point to the local beats, artists and poets. Denver's trendies gravitated to the Exodus for art shows poetry reading and folk sessions. Dylan tiptoed around there for a few weeks.  
After graduation he was suppose to go to University of Minnesota, but he went to Minneapolis to play university student, and returned perhaps a half-dozen times, on school holidays, or on trips from
New York with some new triumph to report.  
In spring 1964, Bob made a brief appearance home when his younger brother David graduated.
He returned in June 1968 for his dad's funeral. (heart attack)  He took it real hard. Harder than David or Beatty. He later said. "I was actually most afraid of death on those first years around New York. When I started writing all those songs and everyone started calling me a genius - genius this and genius that. I knew it was bull, because I still hadn't written what I wanted to. I had written "Blowin in the Wind", but I wasn't satisfied with that. I was never satisfied with Blowin in the Wind. I wrote that in ten
minutes. Blowin in the Wind was a lucky classic song. No more, no less that "Your Cheating Heart". But it was one dimensional. I've really got a sickness, man. I don't write when I'm feeling groovy, you understand. I play when I'm feeling groovy. I write when I'm sick. I'm not going to push that on anybody. Man, nobody knows what is the matter with me, and I'm not about to go tell anybody. If I had ever been like Woody Guthrie in his situation, I don't know what I would do. A living decay. I can't decay. I would
not let myself decay. I'm against decay. That's nature. all will  decay. I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay. I was so frightened of death when I was in New York. I wasn't turning out anything.
Everything I turned out could be done better tomorrow... I did not want to die. I would ride on airplanes not wanting to die, because I just had to get something said. Because I knew people were going to listen... I don't want to see myself die... I don't want to hear myself dying, or taste myself or smell myself dying.. All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all gong to die"!
By the time of his dad's death, his wife was expecting their second son.
See it jumps around..from 62 to 68.. but then back to 60 College Days.. early 60s
It talks about him hanging in Dinkytown.. Harry hung there for awhile when me and Richard were camping out on Justins front porch over the top of the house on Brian Ave.  I remember his calling up and telling me about it on the phone..  Back to the book: (1959  he majored in music) He carried a notebook that never contained schoolwork. He was playing weekends at the Scholar, earning five dollars a night.
Goes on to his Ginsberg, Dave Morton, Hugh Brown, Dave (Tony) Glover, and others he sort of hung with, acid days. Dylan Dinkytown Dissenters, who couldn't accept the system.

Dylans spiritual father and musical model was Woody Guthrie. Bob described him later: " he was the last idol because he was the first idol I'd ever met that taught me face t' face that men are men shatterin' even himself as an idol....  Woody never made me fear and he didn't trample any hopes for he just carried a book of Man an' gave it t' me t' read awhile an' from it I learned my greatest lesson..."

"Bound for Glory" by Woody.. first editions published by E P Dutton in 1943. After reading that book, for the next 2 years Dylan patterned his life after what he had read.  Bob wanted contact with the ailing Woody, dying of an inherited disease, Huntington's chorea, at Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. Bob would get drunk and call Woody on the phone. Some of us would get on the phone to say hello. Bob told Guthrie that he was coming out to see him. Inevitably there was teasing and once a cruel practical joke.
Someone in Dinkytown phoned Dylan to say Woody had just shown up at the party. Dylan ran over,  panting, flushed and asked: "Where's Woody?" "Where's he at?"   After wasting, decay, trembling, and pain, finally, Woody Guthrie died October 3, 1967.. after 15 years of illness. Dylan gave a benefit concert as a tribute to a ballad-maker. The proceeds could help fight Huntington's chorea, or start a library in Woody's hometown of Okemah. With Dylan pledging his time, the concert was easily arranged at Carnegie Hall on Jan. 20, 1968. Listed were Dylan, Judy Collins, Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Odetta, Tom Paxton, and Pete Seeger. Nearly six thousand seats sold out within hours.
But, he never really traveled with Woody either.. Just idolized him for a while. His dad never was musical..So I can only think maybe you saw a special on Arlo and Woodie.. or someone else. Not Dylan.

"Know thyself". Delphic oracle, 6th century BC "Dig yuhself".. Bob Dylan AD 1961 Bob arrived in New york in Dec 1960. Greenwich Village.  Actually he arrived at Times Square first..
He says:  "I shucked everybody when I came to New York. I played cute. I did not go down to the village when I first got to New York. I have a friend... he's a junkie now, but we came to New York together. He wrote plays. We hung out on forty-third street and hustled for two months and did everything. I got the ride here in Dec 1960. I came down to the Village in Feb. But I was here, in New York in Dec. Hustling, with this cat. I'm not scared of people, you dig?
Sometimes we would make one hundred a night, really, from four in the afternoon until three or four in the morning. We would make one hundred fifty or two hundred fifty a night between us, and hang around in bars. Cats would pick us up and chicks would pick us up.  And we would do anything you wanted, as long as it paid. It was very cutthroat. You gotta shell out a lotta money just to hang around, so we weren't making enough money. We ended up in the village and I had the guitar. I didn't have any place to stay, but it was easy for me. People took me in. It was a dangerous life around Times Square? That's where I almost got killed. Before I came down to the Village. I didn't plan to stay in NY I left anyway in the spring, and didn't plan to come back. I came back because I really missed it. There was no other place that I really could go to. The first places I played in was on forty-fourth and forty-third street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, in any of those bars. I didn't come down to the Village until 2 months later.
Nobody knew that I had been hustling uptown."

Recording days..62 - ?? on and on
Then it gets into the 1964 return to Denver concert .. After the Denver concert, on the way to Reno after the Denver deal the chains in the tire broke. It was during a terrible snow storm, one of the
worst in history..and the chains broke going over Loveland pass so they stayed in Grand Junction. This was the first return (since 1959) to Central City. And nothing had changed.
It tells about this bitch (my word) Suze he was with on and off for a few years before he got with  Sara..the wife.. Broke up with Suze in March of 64.. then played with the Hawks (later the Band) in Oct
1965. About the movie, Don't look Back.. I saw that while I was having a miscarriage.  It was his wife's idea.. she had worked with the camera guy, Pennebaker (some Time-Live dude) for a year. The movie was released in San Francisco in May 67 .. then the film Renaldo and Clara. Then it goes into the Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, Newport festival in July 65.. where he goes electric.
And all that shit. People calling him a betrayer and booing his concerts and all that.

He married Sara Shirley H. Lowndes, private civil ceremony on November 22, 1965.. Only a few close associates attended the ceremony which was generally kept quiet until a report on Dec 25th..which read: "Feb 9, 1966 HUSH, BOB DYLAN IS WED." The couple were divorced on June 28, 1977. Sara was often a prominent image in his work, though he zealously guarded the privacy of his wife and their five children.  She had dark hair, well-sculptured features, a short, graceful body, and she did have sad eyes. Sara had been married to Victor Lowndes, the Chicago and London executive of the Playboy magazine empire and has a daughter, Maria, by that marriage. (Sad eyed Lady of the Low Lands)
Sara had already had her say on the failing marriage with Dylan in the divorce action of 1977.. How ironic that after the biter marital strife should come the film, with Sara as another of Bob's dark-haired women. The woman had been so much a part of Dylan's life, of his retreat from stage life to be husband and father, of the shape of some of his work from "John Westley Harding" to "Street-Legal". The songs "Abandoned Love" released officially on Biography in 1985 speaks volumes about what I can only interpret as Dylan's deepest feelings of the time.
By 1978, getting so deep into opening up for the press to push Renaldo and Clara, he opened up about marriage: "Marriage was a failure. Husband and wife was a failure, but father and mother wasn't a failure. I wasn't a very good husband... I don't know what a good husband is. I was good in some ways and not so good in others ways. But I feel my true family relationship is up ahead of me somewhere. I'd try again. Yeah, I like comin' home to the same woman...if you fail at one job... and you pick up another job, which you like more, well then you can't consider what happened a failure. There aren't really any mistakes in life. They might seem to knock you out of proportion at the time, but if you have the courage and the ability and the confidence to go on, well then...you can't look a it as a failure, you just have to look at it as a blessing in a way..."
"I figured it would last forever. Most people keep some contact, which is great for the kids. But in my case, I first got really married and then got really divorced. I believe in marriage. I know I don't believe in open marriage. Sexual freedom just leads to other kinds of freedom. I think there should be a sanction against divorce. Why should people be allowed to get married and divorced so easily?  People fall in love with a person's body, with who they know, with the way they dress, with their scorecard. With everything but their real selves, which is that you need to love if you're to be happy together. I became disillusioned about finding the right girl... or the right anything for that matter .. Women are sentimental. They get into that romantic thing more easily. But I see that as a prelude. Women use romance and passion to  sweeten you up. A man is no more than a victim of that passion. You give me a woman that can cook and sew and I'll take that over passion any day. I'd like to find a mate, but I can't spend any time with a woman if we're not friends. If we're not friends, I don't want to get involved on a personal level.
On March 1, 1977, Sara's divorce petition was filed in Superior court in Santa Monica. She sought permanent custody of Maria, 15 (by her marriage to Victor Lowndes) and her children by Dylan:
Jesse, 11, Anna, 9, Samuel, 8 and Jacob, 6. She also sought child support, alimony, and court-supervised disposition of the couple's community property. Assets involved included real estate in four states, plus Dylan's holdings in publishing companies, recordings, and literary copyrights. Dylan's lawyers won a ruling to have certain legal documents closed to the public. But the British press, perhaps tipped off by Mitchelson (her lawyer), who certainly likes publicity, made page-one news of the family squabbles.  Sara was granted temporary custody of the children and exclusive use of the Malibu house. The size of the settlement was among the documents hidden under the court's apron. But Mitchelson, soon after, was bursting about a ten-million dollar case he had recently won, and it was obvious that this was the case. In the opinion of some observers, Mitchelson's slice probably was between two and four million dollars.

His girlfriend as of 1979 was Mary Alice Artes, an actress, and had something to do with his  reborn-christianity phase.
It also goes into his motorcycle wreck on July 29, 1966... details about the accident were not easy to ascertain. Dylan told him, "It happened one morning, after I'd been up for three days. I hit an oil slick. The damp weather still affects the wound."  He was riding along Striebel Road, not far from his  woodstock home, taking the bike into the garage for repairs, when the back wheel locked and he went hurtling over the handlebars. After the wreck he was taken by car to Middletown Hospital with reported broken vertebrae of the neck, a possible concussion, and head and facial bruises. A major concert at Yale Bowl, scheduled eight days later, was canceled. Dylan only knows just how severely he was hurt, and at
what point in his convalescence he discovered that he wanted to think, reorganize his life, spend time with his family, and listen to the silence. The accident began seven and a half years of withdrawal to a more tranquil existence. Reporters: He wasn't as hurt as he made out.. Dylan is making a slow recovery from a bad accident. ... I know he wasn't as sick as he made out, this provided the basis of an excuse for delaying delivery of that TV show, which is what he wanted to do. But I know he was at a doctor's. I went to see him a number of times and he was in a brace. I know he's been hurt in other ways, so in either event,
what he was doing, was recovering.  (I got that one!!)

Dylan says, "After Suze moved out of the house I got very, very strung out for a while. I mean, really, very strung out. " I can do anything, knowing in front that it's not going to catch me and pull me.. cause I've been through it once already. I've been through people. A lot of times you get strung out with people. They are just like junk.... The same thing, no more, no less. They kill you the same way... They rot you the same way".
Author: Suggesting it reminded him of the line in Sartre's No Exit: `Hell is other people'.
 Dylan joked, "Whatever it is man, I don't know Sartre. He's cross-eyed, that's all I know about him. Anybody cross-eyed can't be all bad...."  
"I have a death thing. I know. I have a suicidal thing, I know. I haven't explained those things I said against myself. A lot of people think that I shoot heroin...But that's baby talk.. I do a lot of things. Hey, I'm not going to sit here and lie to you... and make you wonder about all the things I do. I do a lot of things, man, which help me.... And I'm smart enough to know that I don't depend on them for my existence, you know, and that's all. Man, that's where it lays, like that."

The first edition of this book was released in 1986, so there is a bunch of stuff that goes on since it was written. (His grammy.. and several albums and shows etc. The author gets into every album and each song and what he thinks it means, and what the press thought it meant, and the fans.. and sometimes Dylan himself. Some of the interviews are so damn funny that I couldn't read them for laughing so hard. He is really funny.
 I will have to quote a few for you:
 Q: You must obviously make a lot of money nowadays.
 D: "I spend it all. I have six Cadillacs. I have four houses. I have a plantation in Georgia. I'm also now working on some kind of rocket."
 Q: Do you have personal things for cameras, watches and that sort of thing?
 D: "No, I buy cars, I have lots of cars. The Cadillacs, a few Oldsmobile. Listen I really couldn't care less what you paper writes about me..The people that listen to me don't need your paper."
 Q: Why so hostile?
 D: "You are hostile to me. You're using me. I'm an object to you. I want not to be bothered with your paper that 's all. Why don't you just say my name is Keessonovitch and I came from Acapulco Mexico and that my father was an escaped thief from South Africa. OK?"
 Q: Are your tastes in cloths changing at all?
D: "I like to wear drapes, Umbrellas, hats."
 Q: When did you start making records?
 D: "I made a race record.. down south. Actually the first record I made in 1935..it was John Hammond came and recorded me, discovered me in 1935 sitting on a farm."  
Some life-line questionnaires and his answers.
First important public appearance:  "Closet at O'Henry's Square Ship".
 Other disc in best sellers: "I lost my Love in San Francisco, But She Appeared Again in Honduras and We Took a Trip to Hong Kong and Stayed Awhile In Reno But Lost Her Again In Oklahoma."
Latest release: "The Queens are Coming".
Albums: "Yes".
Personal Manager: "Dog Jones."
Musical Director: "Big Dog".
Favorite Food: "Turkish Marvin" (a form of eggplant coming from Nebraska) 
Favorite cloths: "Noseªguards".
Favorite bands/instrumentalists: "Corky the Kid".
Favorite composers: "Brown Bumpkin and Sidney Ciggy"
Favorite Groups:. "The Fab Clocks" 
Miscellaneous likes: "Trucks with no wheels. French telephones, anything with a stewed prune in the middle."
 Miscellaneous dislikes: "Hairy firemen, toe-nails, glass Mober forks, birds with ears"  Most thrilling experience: "Getting my birthday cake stomped on by Norman Mailer".
 Taste in music: "sort of peanut butter". 
Personal ambition: "to be a waitress".
Professional ambition: "to be a stewardess". 

 A reporter for the Jewish Chronicle asked him "Are you Jewish?" He replied, "No, I am not, but some of my best friends are." Dylan assuaged the Chronicle, "You'd better interview Tito Burns, the agent for the tour, because I know he is Jewish."
It gets so funny??!! Don't you think so?? Damn it took me about an hour to read this stuff, I was laughing so hard. He did some mean interviews too, where he just got so fed up he really did tell them what was up.. f** off! But I think the funny ones are great.
Anyway. I don't want to record the whole book for ya.. You can't believe how much I like it.
I think the program you saw, you probably confused Woody Guthrie and Arlo.. or something.   because..Dylans dad wasn't musical at all and did not travel with him. He would send his family tickets to some of the concerts.. and stuff like that... At one part it tells how his dad liked music and had a piano in the living room, but that he never could read or play.. But he played old 78's. It also tells about how he changed his name and told everyone he was an orphan at first.
He was real strange then.  It tells about a time when Dylan wanted to play a tune for a girl in high school and busted the lock off the place where the piano was so she could hear him play it. It was like a VFW club or something..

I finished this book today. I am going to copy some of the stuff. Just too much to type it all. Great book! Too bad it is so old. I wonder what all he would have to say about the changes he went on
to make in the 90's.. Oh well. I am tired as hell of typing. I sent my landlord a 3 page bitch out
letter about this dump and the non-managers. and all that I even sent snap-shots I took. I don't know what will happen. I don't care. I am just sick of being in a ghetto.

back to MUSIC

To INDEX