It was Bob Dylan’s 83rd birthday yesterday, and this post was written after listening to the great British folksinger Martin Carthy reminiscing about hanging out with Dylan in late 1962 when he visited London for a few weeks. Carthy is an almost exact contemporary of Dylan’s, and this is a story of two 21-year olds finding their feet in the world. It was first published a few days ago at the modest folk music blog Salut! Live, where I am a contributor.
During his ‘In Conversation’ with Jon Wilks last year, Martin Carthy inevitably got to talking about the young Bob Dylan, who spent some time in London right at the start of his career. Dylan was brought over by the BBC to take part in a television play, ‘Madhouse on Castle Street’, which involved several weeks of rehearsals at the end of 1962.
While Dylan was here, Carthy had picked up a copy of the American folk magazine Sing Out! in Collet’s Music Shop on New Oxford Street, which had a Dylan cover. That evening, Carthy was playing a gig with the Thameside Four at the folk club at the King and Queen in Foley Street, in central London. During the first set, he said,
I looked at the audience and saw the cover of Sing Out! looking back at me.”
By Carthy’s account, Dylan’s new manager Albert Grossman was with him in London. Grossman was a fan as well as a manager, and he wanted his musicians to hear as much music as they could.
Standing ovation
Carthy also noted that the House Un-American Activities Committee was quite virulent in late 1962, in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and hinted that Grossman might have found it convenient to get Dylan out of the country for a while.
At the King and Queen Carthy asked Dylan if he’d like to like to come up on stage, and Dylan told him to ask him again later. After the interval, he noticed that Dylan now had his guitar with him, and sure enough he played three numbers. One of them was the ‘Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues’, which was greeted with a standing ovation, which it probably wouldn’t have got in the United States.
Samurai sword
The following night, Carthy was playing the Troubadour folk club in Earl’s Court and suggested that Dylan should come and play again. This time, he played ‘Masters of War’, although for a while Carthy was expecting to hear ‘Nottamun Town’, the traditional folk tune that Dylan had adapted for ‘Masters of War’. At the end of the song, Carthy recalled,
There’s a particular silence that comes at the end of a wonderful performance of a wonderful song, and that’s what happened here. And then everyone started clapping.
Dylan apparently, would sometimes go home after gigs and write out all the songs he had heard that evening. But there’s also a story about going back to Carthy’s flat in Belsize Park after a Troubadour gig in that freezing winter and needing some wood for the heater. Carthy had an old and broken piano in the front room, which he’d been breaking up for wood, and a samurai sword that he’d been given by his “pretend aunt” Emily, who said she was an actress but seems to have been a spy.[1]
Scarborough Fair
As Carthy prepared to hack more wood off the piano with the sword, Dylan appeared between him and the piano, saying “You can’t do that! It’s a musical instrument, man.”
Carthy suggested that its playing days were behind it, and that it was very cold. After he’d made the first cut, Dylan piped up again: “Can I have a go?”
Like Paul Simon, Dylan was intrigued by Carthy’s arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’, and Carthy wrote it out for him. After being in London, Dylan spent some time in Spain before going back to the States. He turned ‘Scarborough Fair’ into ‘Girl From The North Country’, which he recorded that April for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
As for ‘The Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues’, that was intended for Freewheelin’ as well, and appeared on a rare pre-release copy of the LP. It was one of four tracks removed and replaced before Freewheelin’ was released.
The John Birch Society
The politics of this are murky, but Dylan had proposed singing the song on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS in an appearance in May 1963. The network told him he couldn’t sing it, because it might defame the John Birch Society. While you might think the John Birch Society, which believed and said publicly in the 1950s that President Eisenhower was a communist agent, was quite hard to defame, it seems you would be wrong.[2] As a result Dylan refused to appear on the show.
The controversy affected his label, Columbia, which was also owned by CBS. When its lawyers learned that the song was slated for release on Freewheelin’, they ordered it removed.
Dylan took this opportunity to reshape Freewheelin’, removing three additional songs that he now felt were old-fashioned. Among the songs added to the record in their place: ‘Masters of War’ and ‘Girl from The North Country’.
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[1] When I was re-posting this I suddenly thought that Aunt Emily might have been the inspiration for Rosemary in ‘Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts’.
[2] When you read the Wikipedia entry for the John Birch Society, it is striking that their views of the world—way to the right of the mainstream Republican party in the early 1960s—are now the mainstream views of the party.
Around the edges 