Every now and then I can’t help but getting lost in Bob Dylan’s world. Yes, it can be quite a lonely world. A lot of people either hate or barely tolerate Dylan: “That voice, that wretched harmonica…” Well, i’m a sucker for 2 things: music and history. If there’s anything that brings those 2 things together for me, it’s listening to Dylan. Here’s a career that stretches back to the sixties, with a repertoire that draws on folk and blues from far before that, and an influence on popular music that lasts far beyond. His world is interwoven with 20th century history. These are some escapades into that world.

Part 2 – Live at the Gaslight Café

One of the New York “baskethouses” that Dylan used to play down in Greenwich Village in the early sixties was The Gaslight Café. It was started by John Mitchell in 1958, at the height of the Beat Generation era. It was a basement, subterranean, dark and steamy, a typical hangout in the Village, where poets and performance artists could entertain the small beatnik crowd. Original Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso are both known to have read there.

Around the corner from the Gaslight, you could find the Folklore Center, run by Izzy Young, which had become a meeting place for musicians. By 1962 the Gaslight itself had been adopted by the young folkies. Throughout the sixties folk and blues artists like Dave Van Ronk, Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Jose Feliciano, Odetta, Charles Mingus, John Hammond Jr., and Richie Havens all played at the club.

Dylan himself played the Gaslight on several occasions, of which some have been recorded. The songs below are from a recording made in October 1962. This particular recording is one of the first where you can hear Dylan (only 21 years of age) really demonstrating his capacities as a performer and songwriter. It has become known as the second Gaslight tape. His repertoire is diverse. He plays some traditional folk and blues songs with tremendous force, as well as premiering some of his own songs, that would appear on his forthcoming album: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Notice that he doesn’t play his trademark ‘wretched’ harmonica.

Barbara Allen

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This song is known in dozens of versions. The author of it is unknown. Its origin might be England, Ireland or Scotland. What’s sure is that the earliest known mention of the song is in a Samuel Pepys’ diary entry for January 2^nd 1666, where he refers to the “little Scotch song on ‘Barbary Allen’”. This reference of the song makes it almost three and a half centuries old.

The song counts at least 16 verses. With its eight minutes, Dylan’s sweet voiced interpretation can be called a summary.  Most versions tell the story of Barbary Allen as a tragic one: a young man is dying of unanswered love for Barbara Allen; she is called to his deathbed, but all she can say is, ‘Young man, I think you’re dying.’ When he dies, she is stricken with grief and dies soon after. Often, a briar grows from her grave and a rose from his, until they grow together.” Dylan tells it in this same line (as does John Travolta in the film “A Love Song For Bobby Long”, where I first heard it).

No More Auction Block

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This song is a so-called spiritual. According to Alan Lomax‘s, “The Folk Songs of North America”, the song originated in Canada and was sung by former slaves who fled the United States after Britain abolished slavery in 1833. The lyrics are simple and plain, and soberly celebrate the freedom from the suffering of slavery.

The melody and feeling of the song served as an inspiration for Dylan’s own “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In 1978, Dylan himself acknowledged it as the source when he told journalist Marc Rowland: “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song called ‘No More Auction Block’ — that’s a spiritual and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ follows the same feeling.”

Hezekiah Jones (Black Cross)

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“Black Cross” was originally a poem written by Joseph S. Newman in 1948. This poem was translated to song in the sixties by Lord Buckley, a hipster aristocratic performance artist (avant la lettre).  It tells the sarcastic and tragic story of a black man named Hezekiah Jones, who reads books and questions religion, and pays the price for it.

Dylan must have picked the lyrics up at one of Buckley’s performances around the Village. As Dylan explains in Scorsese’s “No Direction Home”, he had “a very agile mind back then,” and could learn a song by hearing it once. He plays “Black Cross” (loosely interpreted) as Woody Guthrie-style talking blues and displays some of the acting skills, which can bring music to life. It had even more power and relevance when he sang it in ’62, with the Civil Rights Movement in full swing.

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

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This is one of Dylan’s own songs which would appear on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album. Dylan had just written this song earlier that month, and this Gaslight recording might be the first recording there is of the song. Maybe this was even the first time he performed it publicly. Unlike the album recording, he doesn’t use the elaborate and beautiful fingerpicking style (which might have been played by folk musician and guitarist Bruce Langhorne), but flatpicks the song. He often had to flatpick it when playing the song live, to amplify the sound of the acoustic guitar. It loses some of the beauty though.

The song expresses a meager consolation of a man towards a woman that, like Barbara Allen, was too late to appreciate his love and efforts. Dylan wrote it around the time that his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (who would later appear on the Freewheelin’ cover) announced that she would be prolonging her stay in Italy indefinitely. This experience might have inspired the spite Dylan laid in the lyrics.

“Don’t Think Twice” remains a classic song, looking at the list of artists who covered it alone. Dylan took the melody, as well as some lines from friend and Village folksinger Paul Clayton’s song “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbons When I’m Gone”. This song was in turn based on another song called “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone”, which was public domain.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

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The last song shared here, is the opening song of the Gaslight session. This was also the song that would have the heaviest impact that evening, that decade, and throughout the century. It’s the song that preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s the song that sparked remarks claiming that Dylan had his finger on the pulse of the generation. It’s the song that made Allen Ginsberg feel like the torch had been passed to a younger generation. As did Pete Seeger. “A Hard Rain” was and remains a powerful protest song of anthemic proportions.

Dylan had written “A Hard Rain” a month earlier, in September of 1962. It is based on a very old Anglo-Saxon ballad called “Lord Randall”, which shares the question-answer structure:

“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha you been, my handsome young man?”
”I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”

But where in “Lord Randall” the answer is used to reveal the identity of the person who poisoned him, Dylan uses the answer to spell out an apocalyptic future. The repetition and poetry used also echo Allen Ginsberg’s own poem “Howl” from 1955. The song had a similar impact on (folk)music, as “Howl” had on poetry. And on the same stage where Ginsberg had recanted the troubled stanzas of “Howl” a few years earlier, Dylan now stood singin “A Hard Rain” in the same spirit (the two would later inevitably meet and become friends). Towards the end of the song in the Gaslight recording, the audience is singing along the chorus, doing justice to the word chorus.

In the months following the Gaslight recording, Dylan would, having definitely found his writing voice, continue to write and record the songs that would appear on his second and breakthrough album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, which would appear in May of the following year. As for the Gaslight, it would be a popular Village venue throughout the Sixties, especially in the folk scene. It closed in 1967, but reopened a year later under a new owner Ed Simon; until it finally shut down for good in 1971.

Also read History through Dylan Pt 1