Chronicles - Bob Dylan [117]
Lou shut off his tape machine and switched on some lamps. The songs I was recording for him were so unlike the big swinging ballads that he’d been used to. Night was coming on. Amber lights glowing from the windows across the street. The freezing sleet hit the side of the building like steel drums. Out the window it looked like diamonds slung onto black velvet. In the adjoining room I could hear the sound of Lou’s secretary’s racing feet going to shut tight one of the windows.
Lou’s company would never publish any of my greatest songs. Al Grossman had seen to that. Grossman was the big-time manager around Greenwich Village. He had seen me around before but had paid me little mind. After my first record on Columbia had been released, there was a notice-able shift on his part to represent me. I welcomed the opportunity because Grossman had a stable of clients and was getting all of them work. When he began to represent me, the first thing he wanted to do was get me out of my Columbia Records contract. I thought that this was screwing around. Grossman informed me that I had been under twenty-one when I’d signed the contract, therefore I had been a minor, making the contract null and void…that I should go up to the Columbia offices and talk to John Hammond and tell him that my contract was illegal and that Grossman would be coming up to negotiate another one. Sure. I went up to see Mr. Hammond, but I had no intentions of doing that. Not if I had been offered a fortune would I have done it. Hammond had believed in me and had backed up his belief, had given me my first start on the world’s stage, and no one, not even Grossman, had anything to do with that. There was no way I’d go against him for Grossman, not in a million years. I knew that the contract would have to be straightened out, though, so I went to see him. The mere mention of Grossman’s name just about gave him apoplexy. He didn’t like him, said he was as dirty as they come and was sorry Grossman was representing me, though he said he would still be supportive. Hammond said that we should straighten this contract situation out right here and now before it becomes a pressing problem, and so we did that. A new young counsel for the record company came in and Hammond introduced me to him. An amendment to the old contract was drawn up and I signed it right then and there, now being twenty-one. The new counsel for the record company was the up-and-coming Clive Davis. Clive would take over Columbia Records full frontal in 1967.
Later when I told Grossman what I did, he just about went berserk. “What are you talking about?” he said. It wasn’t what he expected. Grossman did get me out of my Leeds Music contract, though. I felt like that agreement didn’t really matter and that Lou Levy hadn’t really discovered me or could do anything with my songs anyway — at least not the ones I was doing then. I’d only been there as a favor to Hammond anyway. On this deal breaker, Grossman had given me $1,000, told me to go up and see Lou Levy, give the money to him and tell him that I wanted to buy my way out of the contract. I did that and Lou was only too happy to oblige. “Sure, son,” he said. He was still smoking that damn cigar. “There’s something unique about your songs, but I can’t put my finger on it.” I gave Lou the $1,000 and he gave me the contract back.
Grossman later put me with Witmark Music, an old line–style publishing company — the epitome of Tin Pan Alley, which published the standards “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “The Very Thought of You,” “Jeepers Creepers,” countless other big songs. My destiny wouldn’t be made manifest up here at Leeds Music, but there was no way to know that in these moments while putting down my early songs into a tape recorder.