Amid all the rumors and untruths that obscure the true story of Bob Dylan, experts and Dylan himself agree agree that the young, curly-haired songwriter born Bob Zimmerman first came to New York on January 24, 1961—which is, as the Village Voice notes, exactly 50 years ago today. (All week at the Sound of the City blog they’ll post a trove of Bob-related materials.) That winter was apparently the coldest in decades, but it wasn’t enough to faze the recent University of Minnesota dropout, who quickly made his way to the Café Wha? and secured a spot playing harmonica with Fred Neil.
The Voice’s blog has a picture of Dylan performing, a couple of weeks after getting to town, with a heartbreaking young banjo player and blues singer named Karen Dalton, and Neil, whose hit "Everybody’s Talkin’" Harry Nilsson would later make eternally famous. And so the story goes, after applying some elbow grease and fine-tuning his Guthrie-indebted backwater affectation, Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan. With all of these fame-bound folks around, something, it seems, was in the water.
The Bob Dylan story—the whole Greenwich Village in the 1960s thing—has done much to convince young artists of today that moving to a big city (and for Charlottesvillians, that city in particular) is an essential step toward greatness. For networking, perhaps. No New York probably would’ve meant no Albert Grossman for Dylan; and the Brill Building sure ain’t in Charlottesville. But when thinking about the "scenes" of yore, from whence many a famous person came, I often return to a book that doesn’t have much to do with art per se: Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, a great book about what small communities can do.
McKibben notes that historically, that those communities that breed greatness—for lack of a better word—were cut "closer to the human measure." The Florence of Boticelli and Michelangelo had a bite-sized population (by today’s standards) of 40,000. It was when Boston and New York had populations of about 18,000 and 33,000, respectively, that they produced "Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Franklin roughly at the same time." (Read more here.)
He also notes that communities take many different shapes and sizes. The Greenwich Village of the early 1960s took one shape and one size, perhaps a small group in a huge sampling, and housed the brightest minds of a generation. The brightest of those may be Dylan’s. But as the Village Voice celebrates one of its city’s success stories, it’s worth asking: Would lightning have struck Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota (today’s pop. 85,000), had he stayed there?
New York or bust?
Bob Dylan, "Talkin’ New York" Gerde’s Folk City, New York, April 1962
Karen Dalton’s "Something on Your Mind"
