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the terrific 1967 film Dont Look Back. Pennebaker, who was
well inside the Dylan orbit, observed the singer’s opera-
tion closely and with clear eyes, and later said of Grossman
and his handling of the enterprise: “I think Albert was one
of the few people that saw Dylan’s worth very early on, and
played it absolutely without equivocation or any kind of
compromise.”
In other words: The fans, the festivals, the press, the whole
wide world could take Dylan on his and Albert Grossman’s
terms, or not at all.D
ylan’s musical terms, beginning in 1964 and con-
tinuing through the recording of Bringing It All
Back Home’s electric sessions in 1965, were changing
rapidly. Lyrically, he was moving away from narrative tales
and so-called protest songs wherein the message was more
or less directly stated; he was, in his writing, becoming more
abstract, opaque, allusive. In some songs, he wrote in a stream
of consciousness vein clearly influenced by Jack Kerouac
and his Beat Generation confreres.
In the summer of ’64 he spent much time out of the
Greenwich Village orbit, staying often at Grossman’s place
in the small upstate hamlet of Woodstock, where he could
think and compose. Among the things he was thinking
about, in a positive way, was the electric blues sound his
friend John Hammond Jr. was working on in Chicago. (Just
incidentally, Hammond, who was the son of producer John
Hammond, had recruited for that effort a group that included
three musicians who would be members of Dylan’s famous
backing collaborative known first as the Hawks, later as the
Band.) Dylan was restless with energy, recalled Joan Baez,who stayed with him that August at Grossman’s Woodstock
home: “Most of the month or so we were there, Bob stood at
the typewriter in the corner of his room, drinking red wine
and smoking and tapping away relentlessly for hours. And
in the dead of night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a ciga-
rette, and stumble over to the typewriter again.” Late that
month, Dylan traveled down to the city, where he met the
Beatles for the first time. The story is always told about how
this summit influenced the Englishmen, who were turned
on to marijuana by Dylan and subsequently began to look
for a Dylanesque introspection and depth in their own
compositions. But perhaps the inspiration cut both ways, as
Dylan was already thinking about electric music and rock
’n’ roll, and now here were these super-popular moptops
who were actually pretty fine fellows. (He and the Beatles
would remain close; he and George Harrison would become
something like best friends.)
A couple of the songs that would be featured on the largely
acoustic Side Two of Bringing It All Back Home—“Gates of
Eden,” “Mr. Tambourine Man”—had already been written
but hadn’t made it onto Another Side of Bob Dylan. Now, on
January 13, 1965, Dylan sat with Tom Wilson in Columbia’s
Studio A in New York City and worked on, among others,
eight songs that would be presented to a rock band over the
following two days, “She Belongs to Me,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th
Dream” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” among them. On
January 14, with no rehearsal, the band—three guitarists,
including Dylan, a pianist, electric bass, drums—charged
ahead. In only three and a half hours that afternoon, master
takes of the three just mentioned songs plus “Subterranean
Homesick Blues” and “Outlaw Blues” were waxed. Back in36-59 LIFE_Bob Dylan 2020 Plugging.indd 43 FINAL 1/13/20 4:24 PM