40 LIFE BOB DYLAN
ABOVE: WRITER MASON HOFFENBERG,
John Sebastian and Dylan chat in a Woodstock
cafe. In 1964, Sebastian is a year away from
forming his own hit-making band, the Lovin’
Spoonful, and is often hanging with Dylan.
Opposite: Sebastian is playing acoustic
guitar and Dylan is on a solid-body electric
bass in the otherwise quiet cafe. Sebastian
will take part in some of the sessions that
produce Bringing It All Back Home.A
lbert Grossman is a very interesting player in this
saga. A hard-charging Chicagoan who sidled into
the folk scene and started managing individuals and
group acts, he hit it big with the trio Peter, Paul and Mary
(he was pivotal in assembling the threesome in 1961) and
would go on to promote the careers of Gordon Lightfoot,
Richie Havens, the Band and Janis Joplin among others.
Dylan signed with him in 1962. In Chronicles: Volume One the
singer has a marvelous reminiscence of watching Grossman
as he was trolling for talent at the Gaslight, the Greenwich
Village folk mecca: “He looked like Sidney [sic] Greenstreet
from the film The Maltese Falcon, had an enormous presence,
dressed always in a conventional suit and tie, and he sat at a
corner table. Usually when he talked, his voice was loud, like
the booming of war drums. He didn’t talk so much as growl.”
Dylan signed with him in 1962, despite the fact that Gross-
man took 25 percent of earnings versus the standard man-
ager’s cut of 15 percent, Grossman’s rationale being that a cli-
ent became 10 percent smarter the minute he or she spoke
with him. Dylan, as always, was savvy about what he was
entering into; he saw Grossman’s power and sway instantly.
“He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure,” he says in
Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, “you could smell him
coming.” In the same film, John Cohen (who died in Octo-
ber 2019), one of the New Lost City Ramblers and an accom-
plished photographer who, as an integral part of the scene,
was making memorable photographs of Dylan and other
folkies in the early ’60s, says, “I don’t think Albert manipu-
lated Bob, because Bob was weirder than Albert.”
Which took considerable weirdness, a quality Dylan
always possessed in deep quantities. Dylan knew what
he was getting with Grossman, and in a sense turned himloose: a hired gun. Grossman didn’t like John Hammond,
so halfway through The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions,
Hammond was replaced by the young African American
producer Tom Wilson, who would help shepherd Dylan
through four cuts on that record and then all of The Times
They Are A-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing
It All Back Home and the seminal 1965 track “Like a Rolling
Stone,” regarded by many, including the magazine that bears
the same name, as the very greatest cut in rock history.
Skinny little Bob Dylan, with new friends like Joan Baez
and Albert Grossman, was flexing his muscles. Grossman
saw just how strong, determined and talented his new cli-
ent was, and—no sweet-hearted Brian Epstein, he—started
pushing people around in a manner not unlike that in
which Dylan was manhandling the interviewers Grossman
summoned forth. Perhaps the most famous example of the
singer’s own bad behavior remains Dylan’s cruel taunting
of a Time magazine London-based correspondent, Horace
Freeland Judson, during the 1965 tour of England, an inci-
dent still remembered today because it was captured by doc-
umentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s camera and was included inDOUGL AS R. GILBERT (2)
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