Bob Dylan’s New York: How NYC created the voice of a generation

He came to New York on his own, with no direction home, a complete unknown.

But within hours of arriving, the 19-year-old had a gig playing in a coffeehouse. Before the year was out, he had a record contract.

Robert Zimmerman was born in Hibbing, Minn., but Bob Dylan was born in Greenwich Village, N.Y. And June Skinner Sawyers’ “Bob Dylan’s New York” traces his steps, from his positively Fourth Street adventures as a poor bohemian to his mammoth concerts at Madison Square Garden.

The book’s maps, though, are proof: Little is more fleeting in Manhattan than history. In Dylan’s time, 106 W. 3rd St. was the famed Café Bizarre, one of the Village’s first coffeehouses. More than 150 years before that, it was Aaron Burr’s stable.

Now it’s an NYU dorm.

“Bob Dylan’s New York” isn’t just a sightseeing tour, though. It’s also filled with insights into Dylan’s influences as a young musician. The first and longest-lasting was Woody Guthrie.

“All these songs, one after another, made my head spin,” Dylan once said, remembering the first time he heard the folksinger’s work. “It made me gasp. It was like the land parted.”

Inspired, Dylan soon quit the University of Minnesota and headed to New York to join its booming folk music scene. Arriving on a bitter January day in 1961, he took the subway down to the Village, where he immediately landed a semi-steady job playing the harmonica at Café Wha.

Still operating at 115 MacDougal St., the club was “a subterranean cavern, dimly lit and alcohol-free,” Sawyers writes. “It opened at noon and closed at four in the morning. The daytime acts were chaotic and amateurish, but Dylan didn’t mind.”

Now calling himself Bob Dylan, he started booking gigs. He also started taking the bus out to New Jersey, where Guthrie lay in a hospital, fighting off Huntington’s disease. Woody’s young son Arlo met Dylan around that time and described “a ragamuffin-type human with weird shoes and crazy sort of hair… I took to him.”

Meanwhile, things were moving fast.

By the summer, Dylan was in love for the first time with a 17-year-old named Suze Rotolo. He was also performing at his first big concert, a 12-hour marathon at Riverside Church, headlined by Pete Seeger. And he was creating a persona, telling reporters he was part Native American and had once run away from home to join a carnival.

When a Newsweek story later revealed he was actually the son of a small-town appliance dealer, Dylan was furious. “Perhaps he feels that would spoil the image he works so hard to cultivate,” the magazine sniped, “with his dress, with his talk, with the deliberately atrocious grammar and pronunciation in his songs.”

Others were more forgiving. In July, billed as “the sensational Bob Dylan,” he appeared at Gerde’s Folk City, a musical mainstay (now gone) on W. 4th St. It brought a rare, rave review in The New York Times.

The critic, who interviewed Dylan between sets, called him “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik.” He wryly noted that the singer was fond of making up facts, particularly about himself, but said it wasn’t important.

“It matters less where he has been than where he is going,” the writer concluded, “and that appears to be straight up.”

Reading that story in his office at Columbia Records the next day, producer John Hammond called Dylan. Hammond was no stranger to finding talent. He signed Bruce Springsteen and Aretha Franklin, among others. Hammond heard Dylan sing one song, and offered a recording contract.

Before his first year in New York was over, Dylan was making an album.

Recorded over three days, “Bob Dylan” failed to make a mark on the charts. But Dylan was unfazed. “I had a feeling of destiny, and I was riding the changes,” he said later. “My consciousness was beginning to change, too.”

He spent days reading at the New York Public Library, nights going to avant-garde theatre. He sat at cafes on MacDougal, people-watching, eavesdropping.

“The songs are there,” he explained. “They exist all by themselves, just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn’t do it, someone else would.”

His second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” came out in 1963, sporting a picture of Dylan and Rotolo walking down Jones St. One of its songs, the anti-Right “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” immediately drew attention.

Controversy, too, when Dylan landed a coveted booking on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” A nervous network boss told him at the last moment that he better sing a different song on air. A furious Dylan walked off.

Other albums followed, and each one seemed to contain an anthem: “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changin,’” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and the electrifying “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Although Dylan shrank from the title, he was soon hailed as the voice of a generation.

As his music changed, though, Dylan changed, too. His relationship with Rotolo ended. “I did not want to be a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar,” she said later. He began spending less time in the Village, moving a little uptown, to the Hotel Chelsea. He later moved upstate, near Woodstock.

Then, on July 29, 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle, breaking several vertebrae in his neck.

He survived, obviously, but also retreated. Dylan stopped touring and became more reclusive, more contained. But that became harder to do as the decade wore on, and Woodstock the mammoth festival utterly changed Woodstock, the tiny town. Anonymity became impossible.

So, as the ‘60s ended, Dylan decided to give Manhattan another try. He bought a townhouse at 94 MacDougal St., sight unseen. Maybe a return to the Village would mean a return to those freewheeling days when he could just be himself – whoever that was.

Instead, protestors “paraded up and down in front of (my house) chanting and shouting, demanding for me to come out and lead them somewhere and stop shirking my duties as the conscience of a generation,” he complained. He had loved the Village once, but now “everybody was in a pretty down mood. It was over.”

Time for those boot heels to go wandering.

Eventually, Dylan left New York and started traveling – to Nashville, Minnesota, California. He came back to the Village for a while in the summer of ‘75, hanging out with old friends and even regularly jumping onstage at The Bitter End. But then he was off again.

For years, Dylan’s appearances in Manhattan have been all business – a concert at the Garden, a recording session at Sony Music Studios. But even if he’s rarely here, he is still a part of New York. And it will always be a part of him.

“He is a man who is both out of time and timeless, and that no one particular place could ever hold,” Sawyers writes. “No city, not even New York, is big enough. And yet New York shaped Dylan like no other city or town. It was the place to be, and Bob Dylan had to be there, if only until it was again time to move on.”