Chronicles - Bob Dylan [113]
Hammond was a music man through and through. He spoke rapidly — short, cut phrases — and was edgy. He talked the same language as me, knew everything about the music he liked, all the artists he had recorded. He said what he meant and he meant what he said and could back it all up. Hammond was no bullshitter. Money didn’t make much of an impression on him. Why would it? One of his forebears, Cornelius Vanderbilt, had stated somewhere, “Money? What do I care about money? H’ain’t I got the power!” Hammond, who was a true American aristocrat, didn’t give a damn about record trends or musical currents changing. He could do as he pleased with what he loved and had been doing it for a lifetime. He’d been giving opportunities to the humbled and the vulnerable for longer than anybody could remember. Now he was bringing me to the Columbia Records label — the center of the labyrinth. The folk labels had all turned me down. That was okay now. I was glad about it. I gazed around Mr. Hammond’s office and saw a picture of a friend of mine, John Hammond Jr. John, or Jeep as we knew him on MacDougal Street, was about my age, a blues guitar player and singer. Later he’d become an acclaimed artist in his own right. When I met him he had just gotten back from college, and I think he had only been playing guitar for a short time. Sometimes we’d go over to his house, which was on MacDougal Street below Houston, where he’d grown up, and we listened to a lot of records out of an amazing record collection…mostly blues 78s and grassroots rock and roll. I never made the connection that he was the son of the legendary John Hammond until I saw the photograph and only then did I put it together. I don’t think anybody knew who Jeep’s father was. He never talked about it.
John Hammond put a contract down in front of me — the standard one they gave to any new artist. He said, “Do you know what this is?” I looked at the top page which said, Columbia Records, and said, “Where do I sign?” Hammond showed me where and I wrote my name down with a steady hand. I trusted him. Who wouldn’t? There were maybe a thousand kings in the world and he was one of them. Before leaving that day, he’d given me a couple of records that were not yet available to the public that he thought might interest me. Columbia had bought the vaults of ’30s and ’40s secondary labels — Brunswick, Okeh, Vocalion, ARC — and would be releasing some of the stuff. One of the records that he gave me was The Delmore Brothers with Wayne Rainey, and the other record was called King of the Delta Blues by a singer named Robert Johnson. Wayne Rainey, I used to hear on the radio and he was one of my favorite harmonica players and singers, and I loved The Delmore Brothers, too. But I’d never heard of Robert Johnson, never heard the name, never seen it on any of the compilation blues records. Hammond said I should listen to it, that this guy could “whip anybody.” He showed me the artwork, an unusual painting where the painter with the eye stares down from the ceiling into the room and sees this fiercely intense singer and guitar player, looks no more than medium height but with shoulders like an acrobat. What an electrifying cover. I stared at the illustration. Whoever the singer was in the picture, he already had me possessed. Hammond told me that he knew of him from way back, had tried to get him up to New York to perform at the famous Spirituals to Swing Concert but by that time he had discovered that Johnson was gone, had died mysteriously in Mississippi. He’d only recorded about twenty sides and Columbia Records owned all of them and was now about to reissue some.
John picked out a date on the calendar for me to come back and start recording, what studio to come to and all that, and I left high as a kite, took the subway back downtown and raced over to Van Ronk’s apartment. Terri let me in. She’d been in the kitchen doing the domestic thing. The small kitchen was a mess — bread