Bill Dobbins

REMEMBRANCE OF PAST THINGS

My Life in Music
by Bill Dobbins

I bought a copy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles recently and I confess I had trouble getting through it. Not because it was uninteresting or badly written. Far from it. But his stories about his early days in New York in the 1960s hit too close too home and brought up too many memories that took time for me to process.

Dylan is just a few years older than I am. He arrived in New York City in 1961 and got a recording contract by the end of the year. I got to New York a year later, just as Dylan's career was taking off. But I didn't know this, wasn't aware of who he was and had plans to go live in Europe.

I was an avid reader as a teenager and had visions of bohemian Paris, living the artistic life on the Left Bank, painters like Picasso and Matisse and writers like Hemingway and Henry Miller. Even though I was a folksinger and new this type of music was becoming popularI didn't know the "folk boom" was about to take off in such a big, brief burst, that record contracts would soon be handed out like candy or that playing guitar and singing traditional songs was about to create a lot of young folk-oriented superstars.

So still in my teens I went out to live in Paris, then later in Munich, Germany and I did have a lot of fabulous adventures and somehow managed to avoid the pitfalls that often lead the newly-liberated young down the path to injury, drug addiction, STDs, prison or other disasters.

I played music on the street in Paris for pocket change and at diplomatic parties for food. In Germany I found there was a whole circuit of service clubs on American military bases that booked folk singers. So I continued to play and sing, improved my skills but I was largely cut off from the music scene in the United States where performers like Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton and others were finding success.

Oddly enough, I did get a copy of Dylan's first record – one of the relatively few sold at the beginning of his career as I recall. I don't remember how I came across it but I liked the record a great deal. Not as much, however, as I did the Joan Baez records I was able to find. Like millions of others I was totally enthralled by her incredible voice. I listened to Baez while I was involved in a very serious love relationship at the time and during the time that relationship disastrously ended. Even today it is difficult for me to separate my memories of the girl I loved and lost and of Baez. The two women are forever linked in my mind and emotions.

One memorable musical experience I remember was in Munich when I attended a show that was one stop on a blues tour that featured a number of legends including John Lee Hooker (still one of my all-time favorites). A young white boy who played any blues at all was still enough of a novelty that I got to go backstage and jam with some of the musicians. Of course, it was only years later than I realized how special this experience had been.

I got back to the United States in 1966 and went to graduate school at the University of Maryland. My father was a military pilot and in Europe I'd been able to earn a college degree through a program available to dependants of military and diplomatic parents. The Viet Nam War was escalating and being in school was one way to avoid being drafted – a fact Dick Cheney took advantage of by obtaining five deferments. But I soon realized that even a non-specialized advanced degree such as I was seeking (in American Studies) was primarily a qualification for teaching, which I was not interested in doing.

So I packed up and went back to New York, arriving 5 years after leaving for Europe. There I found I was able to get bookings at the coffee houses and a few college concerts but discovered there was no "career path" happening for folksingers in the later 1960s. I wasn't writing very much at that point and as far as the business was concerned it had all the folksingers it needed...Dylan had moved on, introducing electric instruments at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and been booed - mostly, in my opinion, because he had the wrong backup band; Mike Bloomberg played too hard a style for Dylan's songs, unlike The Band (responsible for the Big Pink album) who accompanied him later. Nonetheless he changed the music business and created opportunities for hosts of singer-songwriters to follow.

At this point, the "purist" folk singers had been replaced to a large degree by commercial groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and the New Christy Minstrels. Folk was being pushed aside by progressive rock and blues-oriented bands that included everyone from The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead and Buffalo Springfield.

So when I got to New York I was in the same position as I had been in Paris – I was looking for an era that was long past and no longer existed. Fortunately, I was able to get gigs right aw