20 LIFE BOB DYLAN
Once the folkies and folk fans had returned to the Village
from their summer festival outposts in September of 1961,
the buzz was strong. That month, two things happened that
set the young performer on his course. Dylan performed
at Gerdes Folk City and Robert Shelton, with whom Dylan
would much later cooperate on a biography, wrote a posi-
tive review in The New York Times. Dylan and his friends,
reading Shelton’s appraisal, must have felt precisely as Jack
Kerouac and his pals had four years earlier, when Gilbert
Millstein had declared On the Road to be a book to which
attention must be paid. Even back in Hibbing, the impor-
tance of the review registered. “We figured that anybody
who can get his picture and two columns in The New York
Times is doing pretty good,” said Abe Zimmerman, who
surely knew at this point that his kid wasn’t going back to
college anytime soon. “Anyway, it was a start.”
Meantime, that same September, Dylan was hired to
play harmonica on folksinger Carolyn Hester’s new album,
which she was recording with producer John Hammond for
release on Columbia Records. Hammond, already a legend-
ary kingmaker in the recording industry (he had boosted
the careers of Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday and Pete
Seeger, among others, and would sign Bruce Springsteen
and Stevie Ray Vaughan in the years to come), offered
Dylan a deal immediately, and the artist’s eponymous firstIN THE POSTCARD, DYLAN WRITES FROM
Rome to his girlfriend back home, Suze.
When he is back in their shared Greenwich
Village apartment, there is pretty good (or
not too bad) plonk, and quiet time to think
about the future—the future of the world,
future songs waiting to be written, their own
futures. Both of these photographs were
made in January 1962—Dylan’s first album
now just weeks away.STAN HONDA/AFP/GETTY
TED RUSSELL/POLARIS (2)
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