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Topic: Flash-back -Bob Dylan's first pivotal visit to Britain... Return to archive
September 18th, 2005 03:52 AM
Ten Thousand Motels Flash-back

This is the story the Scorsese documentary won't tell you: that of Bob Dylan's first pivotal visit to Britain to star in a play for the BBC.
By Caspar Llewellyn Smith

Sunday September 18, 2005
The Observer


The coldest winter since records began greeted Bob Dylan on arrival in England. It was mid-November 1962 and the singer's first-ever trip outside America, at a time when his career had yet to flare into phosphorescent life. Still only 21, he was the talk of the New York folk scene, but his debut album had sold disappointingly, and protracted sessions for his second, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, were proving difficult. With the encouragement of his new manager, Albert Grossman, and hungry always for experience, he seized on an invitation from the UK and flew into London Airport. But from there, Dylan headed straight not to the folk clubs of the capital, but to rehearsals for a BBC television play called The Madhouse on Castle Stree.

The work of white Jamaican playwright Evan Jones, this was a prime example of the 'boarding house' dramas of the era, and Dylan was to take the lead role of Lennie, 'an anarchic young student who wrote songs'. The recording was 10 days away. Dylan arrived after the others, including actors of the reliable pedigree of Ursula Howells, and sat at the end of a long table for a script-reading, beside director Philip Saville. They reached Lennie's first speech, Saville nodded to the singer and Dylan said: 'I don't know what I'm doing here. These guys are actors. I can't act!'
'Oh great,' Saville thought, as he called a coffee break. 'Now is the time to tell me.'

Nonetheless, Dylan did feature in the play, screened on the BBC on 13 January, 1963, pitched against Sunday Night at the Palladium on ITV (a bigger ratings success). Barring a brief appearance on the Cynthia Gooding radio show in New York in February '62, this was his first broadcast experience. Five years later, in an act of possibly deliberate cultural vandalism, the corporation destroyed the tapes of the recording, and no copy of it has ever yet surfaced. It is only now that any cogent picture of the making of the play has emerged, along with shaky audio recordings of the four songs that Dylan performed in it, including 'Blowin' in the Wind'. But the trip proved crucial to Dylan, introducing him at first-hand to the English folk scene, as well as to the influence of Madhouse, and shaping his discovery of who he was fast becoming.

Bobby, as some in England insisted on calling him, had never acted on stage but - a movie fan - he constantly sought to disguise the truth of who he was, fashioning different personas and acting his way into each part. In the sleeve notes to Freewheelin', written by the critic Nat Hentoff, he would be described as having lived in Gallup, New Mexico, Cheyenne and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Phillipsburg, Kansas, when none of this was true. In England, he could be reserved or aggressive, polite or rude, drunk, stoned and an artist concentrated in his work; obscure to the public still, a figure of charisma to most of those who came to know him, but not universally liked or even admired - most likely, mysterious even to himself.

Saville had seen the tousle-haired Woody Guthrie aficionado with puppy-fat cheeks performing in New York that autumn. 'I was talking to WH Auden who lived in, I think, West Fourth Street in New York,' the future director of Boys From the Blackstuff recalls. 'He mentioned I should go to [the club] Tony Pastors: "Everybody goes there who is anybody. It's like going to the place up in Liverpool, that place that the Beatles were found". You know, things like that.'

Saville was amazed by what he heard and saw and determined to cast Dylan in Madhouse. 'When I heard Bob play, well, I thought this is too good to be true. If I can get the BBC to agree to it.' But first, Albert Grossman had to agree. He had just become Dylan's manager, sending shockwaves through the US folk community: managers were suspect on point of principle, even if Grossman had run folk clubs himself. He thought Saville's request would allow Bob to 'enlarge his repertoire' - no doubt recognising that many other American singers had developed second careers as actors, from Al Jolson to Elvis. Under the terms of his contract, he would also earn 25 per cent of 'any motion picture, or recording of any kind' that Dylan agreed to do. The fee in this instance was 500 guineas, expenses such as the flight to England and accommodation excluded.

Grossman was already in London, along with the singer Odetta, and saw Dylan put up in the raffish Mayfair Hotel near Berkeley Square. That first evening, the singer set about exploring the network of London folk clubs, visiting a different one almost every evening for two weeks: Bunjies Coffee House, possibly the Establishment and Les Cousins, certainly the Roundhouse and the celebrated Troubadour on Cromwell Road, where he headed after a tip-off from the American folk revivalist Pete Seeger.

There was some traffic between the US and British folk movements and a common left-wing bent, but also differences. Pete Seeger's half-sister, Peggy, who had moved to London from America in the late Fifties, recalls: 'What might have puzzled Dylan was the non-nightclub atmosphere the folk clubs had. There were no lights, there were no microphones... there was no ritualised nightlife to it. It was a bunch of ordinary people coming to their pub.'

The culture was stirring with the recent launch of Private Eye and That Was the Week That Was on TV. The Beatles released their first single, 'Love Me Do', in October 1962. In that winter, the folk scene seemed inured to such change in the outside world, but it was riven by internal disagreements between purists and a more progressive element - and Dylan proved a flashpoint.

Anthea Joseph, who ran the Tuesday night sessions at the Troubadour, knew of Dylan from the American folk magazine Sing Out!, available from Collets record shop on Tottenham Court Road. (In lines subsequently also quoted in the Freewheelin' sleeve notes, readers learnt that Dylan had 'listened to the blues singers, cowboy singers, pop singers and others - soaking up music and styles with an uncanny memory and facility for assimilation.') When Dylan hurried down the stairs into the unventilated cellar that first freezing evening, Joseph recognised him and said he could have his entrance fee back if he performed. But as she once recalled: 'Dylan didn't seem as interested in performing as he was in listening. I felt quite like a native in the presence of an anthropologist.'

The young English folk-singer Martin Carthy was also a regular visitor to Collets and he had seen the same magazine. 'There is this guy, Bob Dylan, on the front and a few days later, it was a Friday, I'm singing a song at the King and Queen and I look out into the audience and I see this Sing Out! cover sitting in front of me,' he remembers.' I finished a couple of songs, walked over to him and said, "You're Bob Dylan".' Carthy asked him to sing. 'We carried on with the evening for about 20 minutes and he just looked up at me from the audience and nodded, so I called him up.'

Carthy remembers 'he had fabulous presence and a great sense of comedy', singing three songs including 'a sort of rag-timey thing' and a version of 'Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues' (a dig at McCarthyite America). Then, come the cry of 'last orders, please!' and chucking out time on the stoke of 11, Dylan accompanied Carthy back to a friend's house in Hampstead, where they drank tea and Dylan sang again, including 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown', at Carthy's request. This was the start of a process by which Dylan and the English folk singers learnt from each other, anticipating the transatlantic artistic exchange that would later transpire between the author of 'Like a Rolling Stone' and the Beatles.

At some point in this period, Dylan briefly met a young Andrew Loog Oldham, shortly to become the manager of the Rolling Stones. He had heard of Grossman's reputation, and inveigled an introduction at the Mayfair, taking from him the job of Dylan's 'press representative' for a week for the fee of a fiver. He took Dylan shopping to Dobells on the Charing Cross Road (like Collets, a nexus of the folk scene) and remembers him 'looking like a busker: grey face, eyes both dead and knowing. Neutral colours, neutral army and Greenwich Village clobber. Dylan was Bob Dylan already, just as he's Bob Dylan now. It wasn't an act, even if it was.'

Not all the luminaries on the scene could appreciate Dylan for what he was, however. Even Peggy Seeger was oblivious when she first saw him play, and she remained unimpressed. 'We were on stage at the Pindar of Wakefield,' she remembers. She and her partner, Ewan MacColl (whose songs include 'Dirty Old Town' and 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'), ran the Singers Club night there. 'Somebody's whispered, "Bob Dylan's here", and I seem to remember saying, "Who is Bob Dylan?" I didn't really know who he was but I do remember he was very withdrawn and when he stood up to sing he made literally no impression because you couldn't hear him singing. But he did one song, and stepped down.'

According to the highly partisan folk historian Karl Dallas, quoted in David Hajdu's book Positively 4th Street: 'The first time I heard Dylan perform, I thought he was awful. Everyone appeared to agree. He went to a great many of the clubs, and he learnt a great many songs, and he played some of his own, and he was greeted with derision wherever he went.' He was also told to 'fuck off' from the Roundhouse, possibly after he was caught smoking pot there.

From Carthy, Dylan picked up traditional songs such as 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Lord Franklin' (or 'Lady Franklin's Lament'). The basic melody of the former was used by the American to write two new songs of his own, 'Girl From the North Country' and 'Boots of Spanish Leather', while 'Lord Franklin' was reinterpreted as 'Bob Dylan's Dream'. From another singer, Bob Davenport, Dylan learnt a handful of tunes, while the Scottish musician Nigel Denver seems to have taught him Dominic Behan's 'The Patriot Game', which became 'With God on Our Side'. But somewhere along the way, that relationship soured, out of disdain for Dylan's abilities or through jealousy.

In late December Dylan and Denver had a row. As Anthea Joseph told Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin: 'It was [over] the fact he considered Bob couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag, couldn't play a guitar, and couldn't play a harp, and that Nigel was infinitely better.'

On 22 December, Dylan performed at the Singers Club again. The doorman had heard of the Roundhouse incident and told Seeger: 'I don't want to let that shit in.' Seeger insisted he stay but remained aloof when Dylan brought the house down with 'Masters of War' and 'Hollis Brown'. 'Perhaps we weren't welcoming enough,' she later acknowledged. Dylan showed he could be mean-spirited too. On New Year's Day 1963, he heckled Denver back at the King and Queen, talking loudly at the back of the club, asking 'What's all this fucking shit?' Only this was more Carthy's domain and Dylan rang in the new year drinking ale in his company and singing 'Auld Lang Syne'.

By now, the two were close friends. One evening, Dylan accompanied Carthy back to his flat in Belsize Park where, to beat the bitter cold, the Englishman attacked an old piano with a Samurai sword for firewood. Dylan was at first appalled to see an instrument treated in this way. 'Then I felt the shadow at my shoulder and looked around. He said: "Can I have a go?!"' But Carthy also recalls visiting Dylan and seeing the young man at work. 'He'd just sit there at his desk, writing and writing and writing, just writing.' Then he would finish, snap out of the moment and only then turn to talk.

Dylan moved from the Mayfair after complaints about his strumming his guitar in the lobby; and according to Phillip Saville, 'he was also having problems with his smoking habit and the management of the hotel sort of lent on his manager, Grossman, and indeed Bob, and asked if he would refrain from that kind of smoking'.

Before Dylan finally relocated to the more congenial Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, he stayed for a spell in the spare room in Saville's house in Hampstead. The director says that Dylan was stoned for much of the time, the contraband most likely supplied by Grossman, and later by his friend and fellow singer Richard Farina, also in London at the time. '[Dylan's] bed times and night times and morning times were all [one] time,' says Saville.

Nonetheless, the morning after Dylan arrived, Saville vividly remembers: 'I got up to have a pee and I heard music. I wandered along the landing and there at the bottom, because I had a little baby then, were our two Spanish au pairs. There he was at the top of the stairs, singing, and these two lovely little girls were like two little robins or starlings looking up at him. He didn't know I was behind him, and I applauded and just said: "Oh Bob, would you sing that on the opening and closing of the production?"' That song was 'Blowin' in the Wind'.

Preparations for Madhouse had continued, with Dylan accommodated in the least demanding fashion. Evan Jones remembers: 'He was clearly a fish out of water and completely unsuited to the drama and to everyone else! But he had a tremendous sense of self-reliance, and we had to find a way to use him.'

Jones left rehearsals after that first day and, after half-a-dozen stops on a Circle Line train home, realised that the solution to his problem was to split the role of Lennie into two: the speaking part (and some of the guitar strumming) would be taken by a professional, aspiring RSC actor David Warner, while Dylan would be left with one speaking line - 'Well, I don't know; I'll have to go home and think about it' - and the chance to sing. 'It worked a treat,' Jones recalls. 'I don't think I was at too many rehearsals after that. I finally saw the first run through of the play, which begins with "Blowin' in the Wind". It was absolutely mind-blowing. Spine-chilling.'

According to David Warner, Dylan 'gave the impression of being hopelessly lost. No one had the slightest idea why he had been sent there. When he started singing, it became clear.'

Jones's play belonged to the post-Pinter and pre-Orton school of anti-glamour. It was challenging, 'a study in despair, but also in the false shibboleths that keep people going through a life of quiet desolation', according to its author. Set in a boarding house - a metaphor for 'what I felt was happening in the Fifties' - it concerns the fate of a lodger, Mr Tompkins, who has announced his retirement from the world and retreated to his room to die. The other members of the household all have their own theories as to his motives: he is suffering from unrequited love; or he has murdered a child; or society simply disgusts him.

Apart from 'Blowin' in the Wind', which Dylan sang at the start and end of the play, he also performed 'The Cuckoo' (clearly learnt from the Clarence Ashley version on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music); 'Hang Me Oh Hang Me'; and 'The Ballad of the Gliding Swan'. This last was an extraordinary update of a traditional Border ballad that had been written by Jones, mixing lines such as 'Tenderly William kissed his wife/ Then he opened her head with a butcher's knife/ And the swan on the river went gliding by', with more modern imagery. When filming began, it seems that Dylan, who apparently played around with the words, chose to omit lines such as: 'The doctor gave Sally a sad surprise, a Thalidomide baby with no eyes' and 'My father has cancer, my mother's insane, the girl I'm in love with takes cocaine.'

Filming eventually took place over two days, 30 December 1962 and 4 January 1963, either side of Dylan's new year's session with Martin Carthy. The play was broadcast on 13 January. 'I was very puzzled,' Carthy recalls. 'I didn't really make anything of it. I think I was probably more excited that my mate was in it than anything else. A lot of people were very confused by it. It got stinking reviews.' Certainly the newspaper critics were unkind - even the self-proclaimed 'way out' reviewer for the Western Daily Mail confessed himself 'baffled' by Jones's entertainment. The Listener magazine noted that Dylan had 'sat around playing and singing attractively, if a little incomprehensibly'.

Others have fonder memories. When Anthony Wall, director of a forthcoming documentary on Madhouse (from which some quotes here are taken), launched an appeal to find a copy of the play on the BBC website, one typical respondent wrote: 'I remember watching Madhouse as a 13-year-old. All my family were disgusted with Bobby's 'singing'; it was then that I thought, "Well, if nobody else likes it, it must be good!" Needless to say, I became a huge fan.'

Indeed, astonishingly, given the historical significance of the broadcast, in 1968, the BBC wiped its own recording of the play, and no copy has ever been found. Philip Saville recalls a purge of reels of old tapes cluttering up the drama department at the time. 'But it wasn't just Dylan's appearance,' Anthony Wall says. 'The play itself seems to me to be truly significant, and not only that but David Warner was at the height of his fame in 1968. Someone must have realised its importance by then - a year of change and revolution. To have junked the recording in 1963 might have been a mistake, but to do so five years later strikes me as verging on the sinister.'

Recordings of the songs that sang have recently surfaced, however. Folk fan Hans Fried worked in Collets and when Dylan turned up at some point in December 1962, they had struck up a conversation about Robert Graves's book The White Goddess. Dylan told Fried he would be singing on an imminent BBC broadcast, so when the play aired, Fried held a microphone up to the TV screen when the songs started, recording the performances on his primitive Baird reel-to-reel machine. These tapes - amazingly by the standards of Dylan collectors - have never been bootlegged, but can be heard on the BBC documentary.

Martin Carthy argues that Dylan's first trip to London had a profound effect on his music: 'His time in England was actually crucial to his development. If you listen to Freewheelin', most of which was made before he came to England, and you listen to the next album after that, there's an enormous difference in the way he's singing, in the sort of tunes he's singing, the way he's putting words together... Bob Dylan's a piece of blotting paper when it comes to listening to tunes.... It had an enormous effect on him.'

Anthony Wall contends that the influence of the play on Dylan should also be considered. 'It was an experience that his peers wouldn't have enjoyed,' he says. 'The Wednesday and Sunday night plays on the BBC were unique to British culture, and they had an effect on a whole generation of songwriters coming through, like Lennon and McCartney and Ray Davies. Madhouse is a brilliant study of alienation, and I'm sure that it must have fed into the imagination of this restless young Bob Dylan too.'

Before Madhouse was broadcast, Dylan had made a brief trip to Rome. There is no record of what he himself thought of his performance when the play was screened. On 14 January, he joined his two friends from America, Eric Von Schmidt and Richard Farina, in the basement of Dobells. The pair were making an album, and a giggling Dylan helped out. Von Schmidt later said: 'I don't know how much pot Bob had ever smoked before. I don't think very much. He was like somebody just discovering something they couldn't get enough of.'

They also drank steadily, and when they rolled into the Troubadour that same evening, they were steaming drunk. Nigel Denver was there and tried to heckle Dylan, but Dylan simply refused to acknowledge his presence, a trick he had seen Albert Grossman employ. As Von Schmidt later recalled: 'Dylan [just] wouldn't let him exist.'

The following night, the three friends finished the album, with Dylan adding whoops of 'Hey hoo ha! Whoop de doo!' to their exuberant folk melange. It was as if he already was heading to another joint. The next day, Dylan left London for New York. It would be more than a year until his return to Britain, by which time he was established as the folk messiah. But the influence of that first visit was profound - for him and for those he met; this was the beginning of a cultural spring.

Gone missing: The lost TV shows

The Madhouse on Castle Street may be the most sought-after lost gem by Dylan aficionados but there are a lot of other TV appearances that may be lurking in foreign archives or in the hands of private collectors or ex-members of the production teams.

Thank Your Lucky Stars was a prestigious ABC pop show which ran from 1961-66 on ITV but is represented by only three editions.

Colour Me Pop was BBC2's Sixties all-colour pop series which featured many top artists of the day playing album tracks and B-sides as well as their singles. Untold acts are on the missing list.

Juke Box Jury's simple premise of having a panel of famous personalities judge whether a new release would be a 'hit' or a 'miss' proved a big hit with audiences. However, only two full editions survive.

Top of the Pops started in 1964 but many early editions are missing, with just half a dozen shows surviving from the Sixties. Some performances exist in foreign archives but tracking such material down is proving difficult.

The Pink Floydperformed as part of the BBC's Moon Night, celebrating the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. This material has gone awol.

Ready Steady Go! (Associated Rediffusion 1963-66) has fared better than many of its contemporaries but still many classic shows are long gone.

· 'Dylan in the Madhouse' airs on 28 September on BBC4 at 10pm. It forms part of BBC 4's Dylan season, which accompanies Scorsese's film for BBC2, 'No Direction Home - Bob Dylan'. More info: bbc.co.uk/bobdylan. With thanks to Anthony Wall.


September 18th, 2005 10:23 AM
Gazza Typical of the lack of cultural foresight by the BBC that the tape of that play has been wiped (as they did with so many music shows from the 60's and early 70's..it speaks volumes that my own archive of Stones BBC footage from that period is probably bigger than what the BBC themselves have left)

I have an audio recording of Bob's two songs on that play (contrary to what it says above, theyve been in circulation for a long time - I've had them for at least 15 years) but the video has proved elusive. Even Scorsese couldnt track a copy down for "No Direction Home"
[Edited by Gazza]
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