Chronicles - Bob Dylan [112]
Suze was there by my side when I began recording for Columbia Records. The events which led up to it were very unexpected, and I had never really fixed my gaze on any big recording company. I would have been the last one to believe it if you’d have told me I’d be recording for Columbia Records, one of the top labels in the country and one with big name mainstream artists like Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett and Mitch Miller. What put me there amongst that crowd came about because of John Hammond. John had first seen and heard me at Carolyn Hester’s apartment. Carolyn was a Texan guitar-playing singer who I knew and played with around town. She was going places and it didn’t surprise me. Carolyn was eye catching, down-home and double barrel beautiful. That she had known and worked with Buddy Holly left no small impression on me and I liked being around her. Buddy was royalty, and I felt like she was my connection to it, to the rock-and-roll music that I’d played earlier, to that spirit.
Carolyn was married to Richard Fariña, a part-time novelist and adventurer who people said was with Castro in the Sierra Madre Mountains and had fought with the IRA. Whatever that was about, I thought he was the luckiest guy in the world to be married to Carolyn. We met over there at her apartment, me and guitarist Bruce Langhorne and stand-up bass player Bill Lee, whose four-year-old son would become the filmmaker Spike Lee. Eventually, Bruce and Bill would play on my records. They’d played with Odetta and could play everything from melodic jazz to rockin’ blues. If you had them playing with you, that’s pretty much all you would need to do just about anything.
Carolyn had asked me to play harmonica on some songs for her debut record on Columbia and to teach her a couple of other things that she had heard me do. I was happy to do that. Hammond had wanted to meet us and get everything in running order, to hear the songs Carolyn was thinking about recording. That’s what the meeting was all about. That’s where he first heard me. He heard my harp playing and guitar strumming, even heard me singing a few things in harmony with Carolyn, but I didn’t notice him noticing me. I wouldn’t have done that. I was just there for her and that was all. Before leaving he asked me if I recorded for anybody. He was the first authoritative figure who ever asked me that. He just kind of said it in passing. I shook my head, didn’t hold my breath to hear him respond and he didn’t and that was that.
Between that time and the next time I met him, it seemed like a tidal wave had happened, in my world anyway. I’d been playing at the most prominent folk club in America, the one called Gerde’s Folk City, and was on the bill with a bluegrass band, The Greenbriar Boys, and had been given a rave review in the folk and jazz section of the New York Times. It was unusual because I was the second act on the bill and The Greenbriar Boys were hardly mentioned. I had played there once before and had gotten no review. This article appeared the night before Carolyn’s recording session and the next day Hammond saw the newspaper. The sessions went well and as everyone was packing up and leaving, Hammond asked me to come into the control booth and told me that he’d like me to record for Columbia Records. I said that, yeah, I would like to do that. It felt like my heart leaped up to the sky, to some intergalactic star. Inside I was in a state of unstable equilibrium, but you wouldn’t have known it. I couldn’t believe it. It seemed too good to be true.
My whole life was now about to be derailed. It seemed like eons ago since I’d been in Flo Castner’s brother’s apartment in southeast Minneapolis listening to the Spirituals to Swing album and the Woody Guthrie songs. Now, incredulously, I was