DISGRACELAND - Bob Dylan (Part 1): How Does It Feel to Be Booed, Heckled, Hated, and Attacked?

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Bob Dylan was booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival – but not for the reason you’ve been led to believe. He went from Folk Music Jesus to Rock ‘n Roll Judas, alienating thousands of fans with ear-splitting, confrontational music. Many of those fans heckled him. One even tried to attack him on stage with a knife. He returned home from a European tour that nearly killed him….only to get into a motorcycle accident that, it was said, left him either disfigured, paralyzed, or dead.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.This episode was originally published on May 28, 2024.To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Bob Dylan are insane. He was booed at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, but not for the reason you've been led to believe. He traded in his status as a folk music Jesus to become a rock and roll Judas,

alienating thousands of fans with ear-splitting confrontational music. Many of those fans heckled him. One even tried to attack him. him on stage with a knife. He was in a motorcycle accident that, depending on which paper you read, left him either disfigured, paralyzed, or dead. This happened at a time when he was making great music, music that scandalized one genre while simultaneously revolutionizing another. Unlike that loop I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Tick-a-Tape Toepper MK2. I played you that loop because I can't

afford the rights to Hanky Panky by Tommy Janes and the Chondells. And why would I play you that specific slice of hornedog, voyeur, cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on July 29, 1966. And that was the day Bob Dylan crashed its triumph on the back roads of Woodstock, New York, an accident that changed not just him, but music forever. On this episode, booed, hated, heckled, attacked, disgruntled fans, a rock and roll Judas and Bob Dylan. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. 1965, London.

23-year-old Bob Dylan stepped off the plane at Heathrow Airport, fully aware that something was ending. He was over it. Greenwich Village, McDougal Street, Dave Van Runk, the Clancy Brothers. Four years in the New York City folk trenches was four years too long. Three decades later, he'd explained himself in a song that earned him as one and only Academy Award. He used to care, but things have changed. Right now, though, in 1965, he couldn't set it any better than he did on the final track of the album he'd released one month prior. It's all over now, Baby Blue. Bringing it all back home may have been his fifth studio album overall,

but it was his first to feature electric instrumentation, if only on side one. As soon as that record hit the shelves, the writing was on the wall, and not everyone was willing to read it. Bob Dylan stood there, one foot in the old and one foot in the new. Imagine yourself in his shoes. You're here in England to perform, but the songs everyone wants you to play, aren't the songs you're interested in anymore.

Those songs are stuck in time, and you're an artist for all time, because if it's not for all time, it's not worth doing. Hey, that's a pretty good line. You stashed away in your mind to day out later. Right now, you're busy thinking about all the new songs you're writing.

There's a typewriter in your room here at the Savoy Hotel, and you put it to good use. Soon, the pages are as full of words as the ashtray is full of half-smoked cigarettes. But DA Pennebaker's handheld 16-millimeter camera is rolling non-stop, documenting every keystroke. It's suffocating, and you got to get out, get some hair.

So you hit the town, which means you hit the media circuit, which means journalists. They ask you questions like, how do you write your songs? Why do you wear your hair long? What do you do with all your money? The last one's easy, beaver skins and rabbit furs. What else do you do with money? You're attracted to smart-ass comebacks like that one, just like you're attracted to dated Gillespie and a reception in your honor.

The appropriate thing to do is check out her die job, but her 44-inch bus proves undeniable. She's got tits like mountains, and this makes you start to laugh, which pisses Stained Gillespie off to no end. Says she's got a starter pistol in her room and she's not afraid to use it. Marianne Faithful isn't laughing, though, not even at your jokes, probably because Joan Baez is standing right there and she's the butt of most of them. The Beatles have jokes for days, but back in your hotel room,

they just want to reminisce about that time you get them all stone for the first time, but all you really want to do is talk to John alone. John is far more interesting than Alan Price, who you ask why he left the animals as he's playing the piano in the dressing room, and it's an innocent question, but it gets under his skin. again, and he slams the piano to down on the key, says he's not fucking talking about it, man, just like you're not talking about Donovan, even though everyone here wants to know what you think of him, so you do what comes natural, you mess with anyone who asks.

Donovan, is that some kind of British food? You say this because you've got to maintain your cool, cool, as in hip. Bobby is the one punching the hip cards? That's Bobby Newark. What would you call him exactly your concierie, or is that Al Cooper? It doesn't matter. All that matters is that Bobby has that style, that same one that oozes from you. Each time you step out of the bathroom, wired on an amphetamine, so fucked up with the words.

don't come out right. But who are you kidding? Everyone's fucked up here. The wine is spiked with LSD for Christ's sakes. That shit sends you to the hospital and leaves you wondering the trip. Trip hasn't the acid. Trip hasn't dragging your ass from Sheffield to Liverpool to Manchester. Well, how does it feel? It feels like this. 20 pages of vomit. At least that's what you'll tell the press later when the song comes out, even though the words have been cold lesson inside your head for weeks and months. You're the conduit, the vessel, flesh, and bone through which words flow. You don't really know how it happens. It just does, man. Which is how you find yourself at a piano, writing a song about that time you dress so fine through the bums of dime in your prime and you catch a plane back home with the states jet lag more pills and red wine you make your way in the columbia studio a new york city you leave your sunglasses on you got to do that bobby new earth what evoke your hip card and you get a bunch of other cats lay down that you were working on earlier before you know it like a rolling stone is everywhere your biggest hit to date

released five days before you play Newport Folk Festival for the third straight year. Newport, where the diehards pretend to be offended that you're not playing with Joan again this year or that you're playing this like a rolling stone bullshit with the Butterfield Blues Band. But the focus of all, people should know that the times, man, they are a changing. Plus, the real reason they're upset at Newport is because whoever's running the soundboard can't mix for shit and you sound awful. You heard that right. The longstanding myth about Bob Dylan's appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, A performance in which he went electric and thus offended his coffee-drinking turtleneck wearing bass is simply not true.

First of all, Dylan had already gone electric. His album, Bringing It All Back Home, which, as I said earlier, featured one entire side with electric instrumentation, was released four months prior. His latest single, The Very Loud and Very Long Like a Rolling Stone, was currently all over the charts. Bob Dylan was not booed at Newport because he surprised everyone with a Stratocaster instead of an acoustic guitar. That's just bullshit rock and roll mythology. Bob Dylan was booed because the sound system was not equipped to handle electric instruments. All the crowd could hear was noise. Now, where Dylan really did get booed for the new music he was playing was shortly after Newport

when he made one of the single greatest hiring decisions in music history. Levin and the Hawks were four Canadians, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danco, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, along with Arkansas native Levant Hel on drums. Before long, they'd be reborn as the band. That's capital T, capital B. But at this moment, they were best known as the guys who played the club circuit with that crazy motherfucker Ronnie Hawkins.

Little did they know that Bob Dylan was even crazier. Playing with Dylan was like flying blind. Dylan didn't tell the boy's shit. Not how to play, not where to play, not what to play. They had no clue because Dylan had no clue. How could he? His only experience up till then was strumming an out-of-tune acoustic guitar. Dylan and the Hawks made it up as they went along

in front of audiences expecting to see folk singer Bob Dylan. Instead, they got their fucking wigs blown back by Dylan's contemptuous sneer and Robbie Robertson's switchplay and telecaster. Every night, the schedule was grueling, so pills made it easier. Pills helped Dylan forget how much he missed Sarah. The girl he'd been seeing behind the back of Joan Baez, just like he once saw Joan behind the back of Susie. But he was pretty sure Sarah was it, the one, pregnant with his baby,

and he really did love her. Unlike the audience is on this tour, they used to love Bob Dylan. Now they weren't sure anymore. Some didn't hold back their hatred. Hatred that Dylan learned to weaponize. He wore it like a badge. This was Dylan's idea of protest music now. This, right here, he told the Hawks to turn it up, way up,

and take all that hostility that the crowd was given them and throw it right back in their faces. The guy is happily obliged. All but Levan. Levan was struggling. He couldn't find the pocket in the music. He couldn't understand Dylan's weird fucking songs and he'd never been booed so much in his damn life, and he wanted out.

Maybe it was the thick-skinned Dylan had built up from the thankless months on the road. Maybe it was the pills. Either way, he watched one of the greatest drummers in the world walk away from him, and he thought, well, fuck it, Levan. What you're going to do? Go back to Arkansas and do what? Settle down? Bob Dylan, for one, was not settling down.

Well, technically he was, but not in the sense that it meant that he was giving up. In November of 1965, he took a day off from his whirlwind schedule and tied the knot with Sarah Lounds at the Long Island Registry Office, some three hours away from Woodstock, New York, where he'd recently bought his first house. Less than two months later, their first son was born. His wife, his family, his house out in the country, this life was now calling to him. But first, Bob Dylan had to go back to England and spread the news. Things had changed, and this time he was bringing reinforcements. This time, he was bringing his band. Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, told the drummer to lose the Nazi helmet. Mickey Jones, the guy sitting in for Levant Helm on the European leg of Dylan's world tour,

thought the helmet was funny. He couldn't believe he could just walk into a store here in London and buy one. But his warped sense of humor didn't matter in this situation. When Albert Grossman told you to do something, you did it. Don't let the genteel gentleman's hat he was wearing fool you. They call Grossman the bear, and for good reason, he was either the teddy kind or the grizzly kind, depending on who you were and what you represented. Right now, Mickey Jones represented a potential PR snafu, not to mention the wrong kind of subversion

of Dylan's hip image. Grossman was doing his job. Not that said job didn't entail a certain amount of provocation. Grossman was every bit of an agitator as his biggest. client, Bob Dylan. It was Grossman's idea to hang that giant American flag as a backdrop behind the band at that show in Paris. That really got the French riled up, annoyed them as much as Dylan himself did, tuning his guitar

on stage for like 20 fucking minutes. Now that was the right kind of subversion. Dylan puncturing a hole in the first set of each evening show, the acoustic set, the kind of thing he used to do and didn't want to do anymore. Now, the second set, the electric set, that was an attack. A Total Sonic Attack. A truth attack is Dylan called some of the songs he was writing now. Songs like Ballot of the Thin Man and Positively Fourth Street.

Steady-handed screeds about people who had a lot of nerve to say he was their friend. He was certainly not their friend and neither was the music. Ear-shattering music he was making with the Hawks. Those guys had Dylan's back every night at every show, shows that became increasingly contentious as the tour rolled on. The Hawks had Dylan. back, just like Albert Grossman did. And Grossman didn't put on airs like the Beals manager, Brian Epstein.

Nor did he parade Dylan around like a monkey in a cage as the colonel did with Elvis. Though eventually Dylan would sue Grossman over, yeah, money, honey. But I digress. At the time, Grossman was Dylan's eyes and ears, the moat and drawbridge surrounding his impenetrable fortress of Cool. And Grossman was the only guy you wanted next to you when the shit hit the fan. In 1966, Melbourne. Just days earlier, the warring camps of Dylan fans nearly came to blows in the audience.

Now Bob Dylan and the boys were simultaneously relishing in that memory and also trying to put it behind them. Don't look back and all that. A big party helped, a party with a huge chunk of hashish at the center, which they were now picking apart to light up and smoke. The hash supply was spread out across a few hotel rooms. So was the party. not just the band and crew, locals, women. One woman in particular that Dylan's tour manager had brought back after the show, the daughter of Melbourne's chief of police,

and that little fact was important, as was the presence of all that hash. Both things suddenly more important than anything else when the banging started on Dylan's hotel room door. Someone was yelling, Bob, the cops are here, and they want to search your room. That chick, the police chief's daughter. How old was she? Fuck!

Albert Grossman wasted no time, problem solver that he was. He grabbed the big chunk of hash and placed it on top of his head underneath that gentleman's hat that made him look less grisly and more teddy. The cops came bursting in. Dylan put on that straight face, the one he put on for reporters when he gave them absurd answers to their dumb questions. The police never suspected that the rock star's respectable manager

was hiding a huge pile of drugs under his lid. One less thing to worry about. Grossman knew that Dylan had plenty of other shit to worry about, just like everyone was now worrying about Bob. His weight was down, his color was sickly, refusing to eat anything besides honey, lemon, and tea, taking more and more of those pills, not Dexies or Benis like everyone else,

but some bespoke variety, pills that were half-uppers, half-downers, according to Robbie Robertson. Those pills kept Dylan wired but mellowed out, A constitutional balancing act necessary when you're up on stage with the Hawks practically daring the audience to revolt. Turning songs like One Too Many Mornings from a restrained folk anthem into a barn-burning hellraiser. Mickey Jones hammering his drum kit into oblivion. Rick Danka's hound-dog harmony is so forceful.

The music revealed half of every crowd to be sleeper agents, awakened by the noise, so offended that they couldn't stop from heckling. One girl even rushed the stage, approaching with a lot of the stage, approaching with a lot of anger and speed and knife clutched tight in her fist. She was on the level now, headed straight forward Dylan, ready to sink the blade deep into him, or whoever she thought this was, a traitor, an imposter, Judas himself. The girl, naturally, was stopped by security before she did any damage, and Judas, of course, is the most infamous heckle of Bob Dylan's career. Judas is what someone in the crowd called Dylan during a show at the Manchester Free Hall on May 17th,

1966, not at the Royal Albert Hall, which was what was mistakenly written on the box containing the tapes of that night's performance. Tapes, which quickly became one of the most bootleg rock shows for decades. Not just because Dylan yelled, I don't believe you, you're a liar at his heckler, and also not just because Dylan then turned around to face the hawks instructing them to play a fucking loud. But because the rendition of like a rolling stone that immediately follows all this sounds like a hammer of the fucking gods. Explosive, destructive, maximum rock and roll. Dylan didn't shy away from the controversy.

He created it, and then he ran headfirst into it, despite being underweight, underfed, and overdrugged. Unlike his pal Johnny Cash, who burst into Dylan's hotel room looking for a place to hide. Johnny was drunk and stoned and paranoid too, that at any moment June Carter was going to appear and make him a tone for his sins. Sins of the bottle.

bottles of liquor and bottles of dexedrine. Long before Johnny had Dylan on his TV variety show, and before Dylan returned the favor by having Johnny guest on his record, Johnny Cash hit out in the closet of Bob Dylan's hotel room, feeling about a half-past dead, hoping he wouldn't get all the way there once his woman got her hands on him. Dylan related to that about a half-past-dead feeling. Just days later, it hit him, after the final show of the tour,

this one actually at the Royal Albert Hall. His body, the adrenaline, the pills, his cool. They had gotten him this far, but now that it was all over, his system shut down. He went full catatonic. Back at the hotel room, Grossman couldn't get him to talk. Robbie drew him a bath. There was a knock at the hotel room door. It was the Fab Four, ready to get all dizzy Miss Lizzie.

Dylan was already there, wherever there was. Dropped into a hot bath by his manager and his control. Tar player, where he slowly sank down, his ears plunging below the waterline, silencing the outside world. The Scow's accents now giggling from the next room. The hecklers, Judas, the Hawks. He made his point. He spread the word. He played it fucking loud. Now it was time to be quiet. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Stepping off the merry-go-round of a confrontational world tour and into a house nestled in quiet Woodstock, New York, felt like stepping through the gates of Eden.

Woodstock was a welcome reprieve from life on the road. It was where Bob Dylan went when he returned from Europe to view his wife, Sarah, their newborn son, Jesse, Sarah's four-year-old daughter Maria, whom Dylan was in the process of adopting, and two dogs, Buster and Hamlet. Their 11-room arts and crafts house built around the turn of the century, sat in the hills above town. The locals called it

Highloha. But though rest and relaxation was on the docket for the summer of 66, Bob Dylan couldn't help but think about what was coming down the pike. It didn't help that Albert Grossman lived up the road and was putting the finishing touches on an impending 64-date tour of the States.

Dylan was also finding it hard to wean himself from the lifestyle he'd been living the last four months. By all accounts, he was still popping pills, and by his own personal recollection, He was staying up for three days straight at a time because even though he wanted to chill, he had shit to do. First, he had to edit all the footage

D.A. Pennebaker had shot during the first tour of England, the acoustic tour. ABC was planning to air the completed documentary and was breathing down his neck for a final cut. He was also behind on approving the galleys for Tarantula, his first book of prose poetry. Finally, most important of all, Dylan was frantically putting the finishing touches on blonde on blonde, his seventh studio album, which, much to Columbia Records' dismay,

had already been delayed numerous times over. From the start, Blonde on Blonde was a grind. Sessions that started with the Hawks in New York the previous fall quickly came to a hall when Dylan couldn't get the sound he was looking for. His producer, Bob Johnston, suggested he try Nashville, where the session players were as serious as a goddamn heart attack. Dylan gave it a shot, but he did it his way, which meant that bona fide Nashville cats like Charlie McCoy and Pig Robbins

stood around Columbia recording studios for hours with their dicks in their hands while Dylan wrote and rewrote on the payroll and on hold. Nashville didn't operate this way. Not then and not now. Charlie McCoy and Pig Robbins had never seen anything like it, waiting for 10 hours at a time on the clock, mind you, before Bob Dylan summoned them all back into the studio, ready to cut a seven or 11-minute song.

It wasn't just unorthodox to these guys. It was complete insanity. And in its own way, blonde-on-blon did sound insane. As Dylan's frequent collaborator, Al Cooper famously put it, nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album. Nobody, not even Sinatra, gets it as good.

And nobody was writing songs like these at the time. Songs like, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, so dense, so important, penetrable, yet so beautifully downcast, and so long that it took up an entire side of the record on its own, which is part of the reason why, when it was released on June 20, 1966, Blonde on Blonde was a two-record set. The sound of 3am was now on turntables and radios all over the world. It was also Bob Dylan's permanent state of mind, or so it seemed anyway.

Years later, Dylan described that state of mind and that sound as that thin, wild mercury sound, metallic and bright gold. But as far back as 1966, he'd already defined it, if only in his head. Thin, wild mercury, metallic, and gold, it rattled inside his head as he remained awake all through the day and then all through the night, and then the next day and the next night. Pennebaker's movie footage in the galleys of his book hanging like albatrosses around his neck. Work, pills, stress, the lifestyle he should have left behind in Europe, the life. The life lifestyle he wanted to leave behind so he could focus on his family. But it clung to him, but refused to let go.

Thin, wild, metallic, and bright gold. July 29, 1966. Bob and Sarah Dillon at Albert Grossman's house. Blonde on blonde, barely cracking the top 100 on its album chart debut. At least that's what Grossman was going on about. Dylan didn't want to think about it. About any of it. He just wanted to go home.

Dylan on his Triumph motorcycle and Sarah following behind him in their Ford station wagon. He wanted to hear his triumph engine to feel the wind blow through his thick curly air. That same feeling he'd had in the bathtub back in the hotel room in London. Blot everything else out. Outside, he climbed on the Triumph seat. His hands and feet moved instinctively. Carboree, clutch, kickstart. The Triumph belched mightily and kicker.

came to life, rumbling beneath him. That thin, wild mercury sound, easily blown out of his head by a deep guttural idol. He hit the gas, and he took off down Strieville Road, Sarah following close behind. He took a riot onto Glasgow Turnpike. Sarah did too. The sun was bright, so bright, it was like he was driving straight into it. He thought about what someone had told him years ago. Maybe his mother, maybe not.

Don't look directly into the sun or you'll go blind. He knew this. Everyone knew this. But still, he couldn't help it. He looked directly at the sun. And suddenly everything was bright white. He panicked. The triumphs swerved.

He hit the brake. The real wheel locked up. The bike skidded. Rubber burning up the pavement. Now the bike was out of his control, spinning, screeching. And Bob Dylan was tossed into the middle of the road like a raggle. Dylan's upcoming tour, was immediately cancelled.

News of his motorcycle accident trickled to the press. Time magazine reported that he had not been wearing a helmet and as a result had suffered severe face and back cuts. The Daily News, on the other hand, said that Dylan was so severely disfigured that it was possible he'd never perform again. Other stories followed.

He was getting plastic surgery. He was paralyzed. Albert Grossman offered up very little information, not even to Dylan's parents who were in the dark for weeks following the incident. And then Bob Dylan's father got a phone call, not from Albert Grossman and not from his son. The call was from a reporter asking if the family had details on the funeral arrangement. Much to his father's shock, it seemed that Bob Dylan was dead.

In 1966, news traveled very soon. slowly. This is difficult to imagine now, given the 24-7 news feed doom scrolling that is central to our culture. But 60 years ago, it could take weeks, even months for news to be delivered. You got it in a newspaper or on the evening news on television. Most of the time, however, news came to you from someone else, person to person. And just like now in 2024, back in 1966, people were often misinformed. Thus, many people were left guessing about what really happened the day Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle and promptly disappeared from the public eye. For months, reporters drove up to Woodstock searching for Dylan's home. One reporter did manage to find his way to Hiloha,

only to meet Sarah Dylan on the doorstep, who told him to get lost or she called cops. It wasn't until May of 1967, almost one year after the accident, that someone finally got through This journalist was luckier than the last guy who approached Dylan's house. He was welcomed not by Sarah's stern warning, but by Bob Dylan himself, who was not dead after all, though it seemed he had changed. He looked different. He sounded different. And though he claimed to still be a conduit, a vessel, flesh and bone through which words flowed,

he was refusing to write down the songs collecting in his head. Not until, as Dylan said, some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened. That comment was cryptic and strange. As strange as some of the things now happening in total secrecy. Jam sessions in the basement of a big pink house that Rick Danko was renting in Woodstock. Jam sessions that Dylan was taking part in regularly with the Hawks, even leave on helm, now back in the fold. The details surrounding the music they were making

were as sketchy as the details about Dylan's accident. But the official story was this. Bob Dylan suffered serious injuries and took time off to recover. cover. But the facts we are aware of now seem to suggest something else. Facts like these. Police were never called to the scene of the accident. No report was filed. No investigation, no lawsuits. Albert Grossman's wife's recollection of that day is that after Dylan and Sarah left her house, Dylan on his triumph and Sarah following in the station wagon, they quickly returned, both of them now in the car.

Dylan collapsed on the Grossman's porch, in pain, yes, but not hurt enough to actually go to the hospital. Instead, he was taken an hour southeast to the private home of Dr. Ed Thaler, who watched over Dylan for approximately 10 days. Thaler's wife later said that Dylan never showed any actual signs of injury. Journalist Al Aronowitz saw Dylan wearing a neck brace but said it looked like a prop. Al Cooper said, if he'd had a serious accident, I would have known more at the time. Hence the reason Dylan's family and other close friends were not contacted,

because Bob Dylan was not in a serious accident. Did he get momentarily blinded by the sun and fall off his bike? Probably. Did it hurt? Sure. But did it require at least a year to recover from? Hell no. This dramatic life and death story surrounding the motorcycle accident, all the mystery and intrigue, was purposely designed for one reason to buy Bob Dylan some time. Time to kick his addiction to pills, time to recover from his grueling tour. It gave him a convenient excuse to further delay his book in the Pennebaker documentary, not to mention making another record, which Columbia Records had already been on his ass about.

Most of all, however, retreating from the spotlight, kicking pills, it offered him incredible clarity on his life and career, Which brings us back to that cryptic thing he said to a journalist in May of 1967, that he wasn't making new music until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened. Something was happening here, and Bob Dylan, unlike Mr. Jones, knew exactly what it was. Businessmen drinking your wine, plow men digging your earth, your own manager, the moat and drawbridge surrounding your fortress of cool, taking way more money from you than he deserved.

Dylan was receiving 100% of his songwriting royalties, but he realized the money he was making from publishing, and in the world of popular music, publishing is where the real money is at. That money was being split 50-50 with Albert Grossman. To Albert Grossman, it was just business. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, was shocked by his own naivete. Only now did he understand. Nestled in the songs of his next studio album,

John Wesley Harding were details about the rift beginning to separate Dylan from his grizzly bear manager. The sound of John Wesley Harding was scaled back from Dylan's last three albums, and just like the transformation of how he looked, his voice sounded different. Despite all that, John Wesley Harding was well received when it was released in December of 1967. Jimmy Hendricks, for one, loved it, so much so that his band the experience immediately got to work on recording their own version of one of the album's standout tracks. Not even a year later,

Jimmy Hendricks' cover of All Along the Watchtower transformed Dylan's original into a sprawling psychedelic rock masterpiece. Once Dylan heard Jimmy's version, that was it. He never played it the way he originally wrote it ever again. He only played it Jimmy's way. Because things had changed. Bob Dylan had changed.

And he who is not busy changing, well, he's a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Scraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to Disgracelampod.com slash membership.

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