| February 2nd, 2005 02:11 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Bob Dylan in the darkroom
By Steven Rosenberg The Boston Globe Tuesday, February 1, 2005
AMESBURY, Massachusetts In Douglas Gilbert's darkroom here, the black-and-white silhouettes slowly emerge, revealing images of a person and a time that changed the face of rock 'n' roll history. The person is Bob Dylan, the time is the summer of 1964 and the photos were hidden from the public for four decades.
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That will change when the photographer, now a psychotherapist, holds his first public showing of the prints at the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles. The show, "Bob Dylan: Unscripted," travels to Boston in the autumn. The 42 photos are a fraction of the 900 pictures Gilbert took of a 23-year-old Dylan over a seven-day period during the summer of 1964 in Woodstock, New York, in Manhattan and at the Newport Folk Festival.
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Most of the photos were taken at a retreat in Woodstock that was owned by Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. The photos show Dylan at ease with such friends as the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Terry Southern and the musicians John Sebastian and Ramblin' Jack Elliott.
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The photo shoot was Gilbert's first assignment as a 21-year-old staff photographer for Look magazine. He remembers driving while Dylan played the harmonica and Sebastian sang "Mr. Tambourine Man"; Ginsberg holding a large tree limb over his shoulder and laughing hysterically, and Dylan placing an empty picture frame around his neck at the Kettle of Fish bar in New York, and saying, "Take one now, the picture's already framed." But Look never published the photos.
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"The editor just thought that he was not fit for a family magazine, and Look prided itself on being a family magazine," said Gilbert, who continues to work as a professional photographer. "He said he thought the photos looked too scruffy." A year later, Look ran a major story on Dylan but did not use Gilbert's photos.
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When the magazine folded in 1971, Gilbert was given the negatives from the shoot. He kept them under wraps. Unsure of who owned the rights, Gilbert was content to let them go unpublished. He never bothered to print and frame a Dylan photo for himself. He went on to win photography awards for other work and published a book on the writer C.S. Lewis.
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But two years ago, another former Look photographer, Douglas Kirkland, told Gilbert that he did, in fact, own the rights to the photos. A year later, when PBS began work on a Dylan documentary, Gilbert's daughter asked the producers if they might be interested in the photos. Then came the call from Dylan's office in New York. They wanted to see the entire collection.
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Gilbert printed 31 contact sheets, and sent them to New York. Soon afterward, Gilbert learned that several had been chosen to run in a booklet included in the CD "The Bootleg Series Volume 6: Bob Dylan Live in 1964."
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"I think they're remarkable. They were all amazing. We were just floored," said Geoff Gans, Dylan's art director. Gans was a week away from finishing up the artwork for the CD when he saw the photos. He quickly pulled 11 photographs that had been scheduled to run and replaced them with Gilbert's pictures.
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Gans said Dylan was a fan of the photos. "One of the things Bob really liked is you can see the furniture, which to him really dates the time. He also liked the photos of him sitting around with a bunch of people because they weren't just focused on him," Gans said.
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Gilbert's instincts told him to focus on Dylan's interactions, but not become a participant in the conversation. The one time he asked Dylan to pose for a photo, the musician declined. "I was trying to set up an interaction with him and someone else, and I said, 'Could you do this because I would like to make the situation look real?"' Gilbert said. "And he stopped and he looked me right in the eye, and said, 'Nothing's real, man.' So I didn't do anything more after that. And the point was really clear. It was more than the words.
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"I knew that just my presence changed a few things, and I tried to be as inconspicuous and quiet as I could be. I believe he appreciated that. He never asked me to stop photographing. He would let me wander around where he was and we got along fine."
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The photos of Dylan in New York City tell the story of a young poet and musician enjoying life. Gilbert, who is now 62, has not identified a theme from the collection, but believes it reveals a vulnerable side of Dylan that is rarely seen in photos after 1964.
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"I knew that it was a pretty rare experience, even at that point," Gilbert said. The pictures were taken before Dylan produced much of his seminal work, such as "Like a Rolling Stone," "Just Like a Woman" and "Lay, Lady, Lay."
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"It wasn't long after that when he began to be much less accessible," Gilbert said, "and I really felt as if I was able to spend some time with him when he was not as guarded, not as private, and it's part of what makes the photographs unique."
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One picture shows Dylan drinking red wine and watching late-night TV alone. Many were taken in a Woodstock café, where Dylan wrote on a manual typewriter in a second-floor office. Once, when Dylan had stepped away, Gilbert read what he was writing. Months later, in 1964, when he purchased the album "Another Side of Bob Dylan," Gilbert recognized some of the poetry on the liner notes and realized that it had been written during the photo shoot.
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Gilbert has read Dylan's recent book, "Chronicles: Volume 1," and still listens to the musician. "His work was really helpful to me in clarifying a lot of what I was sensing, and feeling, but didn't have words yet to put it all together," Gilbert said. "When I would hear his work it would kind of come into focus."
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| February 2nd, 2005 12:07 PM |
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| Martha |
"And he stopped and he looked me right in the eye, and said, 'Nothing's real, man.'
Reading that quote just made my day. Thanks TTM. |
| February 2nd, 2005 01:18 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
Martha wrote:
"And he stopped and he looked me right in the eye, and said, 'Nothing's real, man.'
Reading that quote just made my day. Thanks TTM.
Well, I don't know how true it is, but it sounds good. |
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