Table of Contents |
Preface |
Excerpts |
|
|
Order |
Home |
1962
Long Ago, Far Away
Marc Silber, aka Big Boy Once, is a musician, luthier, and vintage instrument dealer who lives in Berkeley, California. In 1963, he opened Fretted Instruments in Greenwich Village, which quickly became the gathering point for the musicians who helped shape the folk revival of that era. A typical day might find Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur, David Grisman, and Mance Lipscomb hanging out and jamming. He is currently the owner of Marc Silber Music in Berkeley and can be reached through his web site at www.marcsilbermusic.com.
In 1961, I was a student at the University of Michigan, more interested in learning to play guitar than studying English, history, or economics. The great folk and blues revival was really starting to grow, and we had a small group of people who got together regularly to listen to music, talk about it, and learn how to play it.
A few of the players were quite advanced, and the rest of us were learning from them. One of the good ones was from New York, so a few of us decided we’d go there on sort of a field trip over one of the school holi-days. The first folk place we went to was the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, where there was a hootenanny going on. For those too young to remember, a hootenanny was a show where a lot of people each did three or four songs. I remember it well because Reverend Gary Davis was there, and his singing and guitar playing just blew my mind. Then Dylan came on with Jim Kweskin, and they did ragtime songs with the kazoo—just razzmatazz sort of stuff. I thought they were terrific. What really thrilled me, though, was that they were my age and doing this old stuff.
The next time I really thought about him was when our little group was helping plan the 1962 University of Michigan Folk Festival, as it was called then. It wasn’t the grand size that it later became as the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, but they were starting to have concerts with audiences of about 3,000 people. We had this ongoing discussion about why folk songs had to be old. How come you couldn’t write a folk song? It was always a big topic. We decided that since Woody Guthrie did it, it was possible to write a folk song, but we didn’t know how to do it.
Then I remembered that Dylan was doing the same sort of thing—creating songs that you thought were old. So, I said, “Why don’t we just get Bob Dylan in the concert?” His album hadn’t come out yet, so only those of us who’d gone to New York knew who he was. But we convinced them to put him on the show. Somebody drove Dylan from New York City and back, and we paid him a grand total of something like $100 for the weekend, including the car and driver. He did a few songs on Saturday and performed an entire concert by himself on Sunday.
That was a really good festival with a lot of terrific people like Jesse Fuller, Danny Kalb, Jim Kweskin, and Nick Gravenites. I was asked to participate, even though I’d only been playing a year or so and didn’t sing too much. I think I was really confident with about three songs, but one of them was Dylan’s “Song to Woody.” The first album came out a month or so before the festival, so I had a chance to learn it. Of course, it made me feel hip to do a Dylan song. Just about everyone in the audience was hearing him for the first time, and I already knew one of his songs. While I was warming up backstage, he poked his head in, and I said, “Hey, Bob, I just want to tell you I’m going to sing a song off your album. I hope you don’t mind.” He sort of growled, “rruuuuuhhh.” I told him, “Well, it’s too late now because I only know three songs, and that’s one of them,” and he laughed.
Dylan didn’t seem to want to hang with us; he really wasn’t the friendliest type of fellow in those situations. But I think about it now and realize he was thinking about a very different world than we were. It was way advanced. He was already an artist; we were just thinking we’d become artists, because it was more fun than being a worker. Dylan had a much more purposeful musical existence; he had something to do.
There was also a curious personal side note to that festival. My sister’s school roommate was the daughter of Walter Reuther, the president of the United Autoworkers Union and one of the most powerful men in the country. He and his brother Victor had been severely beaten, shot at, and had acid thrown on them while walking the picket lines in the ’30s, when the autoworkers were trying to unionize. They’d actually fought and put their lives on the line for freedoms we now enjoy. We figured Walter would love this guy who was so much like Woody Guthrie, so we convinced him to come to the Sunday concert. But to our surprise, he was infuriated by Dylan’s arrogance and didn’t much like him at all. We loved him. Bob was a master at figuring out the hook and recrafting old songs to make them his.
By fall of 1963, I’d moved to New York and was living in the Village. I’d originally gone just to hang out awhile, and had brought several really nice vintage instruments with me. When I was ready to leave, I tried selling one to finance my trip. Much to my surprise, no one wanted to pay anything for them or actually knew much about them. So I was complaining to Izzy Young, who ran the New York Folklore Center. He said, “Well, I don’t know anything about them. When people ask me to sell something on consignment, I just ask how much? I don’t ask if it’s fair.”
He’d had quite a few good instruments over the years and said he thought it would be a good idea if someone opened up a guitar shop. Then he said, “Hey, I just saw a guy put a sign in a window this morning around the corner. Let’s go look at it.” So off we went, and suddenly I was in business. I started Fretted Instruments with exactly four bucks in my pocket. We opened in late November, the week after President Kennedy was assassinated. The minute I opened for business, the first customers in the door were Dylan and Joan Baez. He bought some fingerpicks for a quarter.
He was around the Village a lot during that time, and was friends with people I knew, mainly Artie and Happy Traum. I opened at noon, so Artie sometimes taught guitar in the back of the store in the morning. At one point, Dylan, or maybe it was Artie, suggested we get together on Saturday mornings to swap songs before the students showed up. The third time we met, I got there early to open the door and there were about 30-35 kids milling around. There was a movie theater on the ground floor below my shop, so I was thinking maybe they were waiting to get in there. But it was 8:00 in the morning, so I asked them, “What’s going on?” They said, “We hear Bob Dylan hangs out in one of these stores on Saturdays.” I said, “What?” but was thinking, “Oh, noooo.” We managed to get together that day, but the next week there were about 200 kids milling around. We knew then it was over. If Dylan had showed up that day, he wouldn’t have even been able to get inside the shop. By then, his second record was out, the one with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and he was starting to become very important to a lot of people.
Soon he couldn’t even go out, and that had a profound effect on me. He was the first person I knew who got so famous that he couldn’t even go out tripping around being nobody. Once you’re somebody like that, you can’t just be nobody. Dylan was highly energetic in those early years. The liner notes on the back of his record albums had a certain kind of flow to them, with him writing about the lyrics and the dreams about the lyrics. I think he was highly motivated by magic substances.
I didn’t really see him too much after that, although I sold him a couple of guitars along the way during the ’60s. That 1930s Gibson Nick Lucas Special he played in “Don’t Look Back” had belonged to my sister. It was in mint condition when I sold it to him, but it got a little wrecked. He had that guitar for a long time. Later, probably in the early ’70s, I drove up to Woodstock to sell him a really nice late-’60s Martin. He was a tough guy to do business with, though, because he didn’t have any idea what the guitars were worth.
That’s the last time I talked to him. But I do remember coming back from Tangier with my girlfriend in 1975 and hearing that song with the line, “She might be in Tangier” [“If You See Her, Say Hello”]. I always wanted to ask him, “Hey, Bob, what’s that about?” The last time I saw him play was in 1987, and I thought he was fabulous. It was with the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum. The sound was perfect, and the Dead blended well with Dylan.
The real Dylan I knew was in Don’t Look Back. It really shows how candid he was and how playful and creative he could be while dealing with stardom. He’s a great artist. I especially like his piano playing. And he’s a great singer to be able throw a rhythm on an old song to get it in the mood he’s in that day. I really like that.
Long Ago, Far Away
Marc Silber, aka Big Boy Once, is a musician, luthier, and vintage instrument dealer who lives in Berkeley, California. In 1963, he opened Fretted Instruments in Greenwich Village, which quickly became the gathering point for the musicians who helped shape the folk revival of that era. A typical day might find Mississippi John Hurt, Elizabeth Cotten, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur, David Grisman, and Mance Lipscomb hanging out and jamming. He is currently the owner of Marc Silber Music in Berkeley and can be reached through his web site at www.marcsilbermusic.com.
In 1961, I was a student at the University of Michigan, more interested in learning to play guitar than studying English, history, or economics. The great folk and blues revival was really starting to grow, and we had a small group of people who got together regularly to listen to music, talk about it, and learn how to play it.
A few of the players were quite advanced, and the rest of us were learning from them. One of the good ones was from New York, so a few of us decided we’d go there on sort of a field trip over one of the school holi-days. The first folk place we went to was the Gaslight on MacDougal Street, where there was a hootenanny going on. For those too young to remember, a hootenanny was a show where a lot of people each did three or four songs. I remember it well because Reverend Gary Davis was there, and his singing and guitar playing just blew my mind. Then Dylan came on with Jim Kweskin, and they did ragtime songs with the kazoo—just razzmatazz sort of stuff. I thought they were terrific. What really thrilled me, though, was that they were my age and doing this old stuff.
The next time I really thought about him was when our little group was helping plan the 1962 University of Michigan Folk Festival, as it was called then. It wasn’t the grand size that it later became as the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, but they were starting to have concerts with audiences of about 3,000 people. We had this ongoing discussion about why folk songs had to be old. How come you couldn’t write a folk song? It was always a big topic. We decided that since Woody Guthrie did it, it was possible to write a folk song, but we didn’t know how to do it.
Then I remembered that Dylan was doing the same sort of thing—creating songs that you thought were old. So, I said, “Why don’t we just get Bob Dylan in the concert?” His album hadn’t come out yet, so only those of us who’d gone to New York knew who he was. But we convinced them to put him on the show. Somebody drove Dylan from New York City and back, and we paid him a grand total of something like $100 for the weekend, including the car and driver. He did a few songs on Saturday and performed an entire concert by himself on Sunday.
That was a really good festival with a lot of terrific people like Jesse Fuller, Danny Kalb, Jim Kweskin, and Nick Gravenites. I was asked to participate, even though I’d only been playing a year or so and didn’t sing too much. I think I was really confident with about three songs, but one of them was Dylan’s “Song to Woody.” The first album came out a month or so before the festival, so I had a chance to learn it. Of course, it made me feel hip to do a Dylan song. Just about everyone in the audience was hearing him for the first time, and I already knew one of his songs. While I was warming up backstage, he poked his head in, and I said, “Hey, Bob, I just want to tell you I’m going to sing a song off your album. I hope you don’t mind.” He sort of growled, “rruuuuuhhh.” I told him, “Well, it’s too late now because I only know three songs, and that’s one of them,” and he laughed.
Dylan didn’t seem to want to hang with us; he really wasn’t the friendliest type of fellow in those situations. But I think about it now and realize he was thinking about a very different world than we were. It was way advanced. He was already an artist; we were just thinking we’d become artists, because it was more fun than being a worker. Dylan had a much more purposeful musical existence; he had something to do.
There was also a curious personal side note to that festival. My sister’s school roommate was the daughter of Walter Reuther, the president of the United Autoworkers Union and one of the most powerful men in the country. He and his brother Victor had been severely beaten, shot at, and had acid thrown on them while walking the picket lines in the ’30s, when the autoworkers were trying to unionize. They’d actually fought and put their lives on the line for freedoms we now enjoy. We figured Walter would love this guy who was so much like Woody Guthrie, so we convinced him to come to the Sunday concert. But to our surprise, he was infuriated by Dylan’s arrogance and didn’t much like him at all. We loved him. Bob was a master at figuring out the hook and recrafting old songs to make them his.
By fall of 1963, I’d moved to New York and was living in the Village. I’d originally gone just to hang out awhile, and had brought several really nice vintage instruments with me. When I was ready to leave, I tried selling one to finance my trip. Much to my surprise, no one wanted to pay anything for them or actually knew much about them. So I was complaining to Izzy Young, who ran the New York Folklore Center. He said, “Well, I don’t know anything about them. When people ask me to sell something on consignment, I just ask how much? I don’t ask if it’s fair.”
He’d had quite a few good instruments over the years and said he thought it would be a good idea if someone opened up a guitar shop. Then he said, “Hey, I just saw a guy put a sign in a window this morning around the corner. Let’s go look at it.” So off we went, and suddenly I was in business. I started Fretted Instruments with exactly four bucks in my pocket. We opened in late November, the week after President Kennedy was assassinated. The minute I opened for business, the first customers in the door were Dylan and Joan Baez. He bought some fingerpicks for a quarter.
He was around the Village a lot during that time, and was friends with people I knew, mainly Artie and Happy Traum. I opened at noon, so Artie sometimes taught guitar in the back of the store in the morning. At one point, Dylan, or maybe it was Artie, suggested we get together on Saturday mornings to swap songs before the students showed up. The third time we met, I got there early to open the door and there were about 30-35 kids milling around. There was a movie theater on the ground floor below my shop, so I was thinking maybe they were waiting to get in there. But it was 8:00 in the morning, so I asked them, “What’s going on?” They said, “We hear Bob Dylan hangs out in one of these stores on Saturdays.” I said, “What?” but was thinking, “Oh, noooo.” We managed to get together that day, but the next week there were about 200 kids milling around. We knew then it was over. If Dylan had showed up that day, he wouldn’t have even been able to get inside the shop. By then, his second record was out, the one with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and he was starting to become very important to a lot of people.
Soon he couldn’t even go out, and that had a profound effect on me. He was the first person I knew who got so famous that he couldn’t even go out tripping around being nobody. Once you’re somebody like that, you can’t just be nobody. Dylan was highly energetic in those early years. The liner notes on the back of his record albums had a certain kind of flow to them, with him writing about the lyrics and the dreams about the lyrics. I think he was highly motivated by magic substances.
I didn’t really see him too much after that, although I sold him a couple of guitars along the way during the ’60s. That 1930s Gibson Nick Lucas Special he played in “Don’t Look Back” had belonged to my sister. It was in mint condition when I sold it to him, but it got a little wrecked. He had that guitar for a long time. Later, probably in the early ’70s, I drove up to Woodstock to sell him a really nice late-’60s Martin. He was a tough guy to do business with, though, because he didn’t have any idea what the guitars were worth.
That’s the last time I talked to him. But I do remember coming back from Tangier with my girlfriend in 1975 and hearing that song with the line, “She might be in Tangier” [“If You See Her, Say Hello”]. I always wanted to ask him, “Hey, Bob, what’s that about?” The last time I saw him play was in 1987, and I thought he was fabulous. It was with the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum. The sound was perfect, and the Dead blended well with Dylan.
The real Dylan I knew was in Don’t Look Back. It really shows how candid he was and how playful and creative he could be while dealing with stardom. He’s a great artist. I especially like his piano playing. And he’s a great singer to be able throw a rhythm on an old song to get it in the mood he’s in that day. I really like that.