ABSTRACT
When Bob Dylan entered Columbia Studio A to record his first, eponymous album, it was November 1961, and he had just turned twenty. He looked young and scruffy, but he had allegedly lived many lives. Some of them had already been sealed and become part of the past before his arrival in New York, just a few months earlier. He had been a child reared in a Jewish, middle-class family in Minnesota; a daydreamer who spent his adolescence writing poetry, playing guitar and piano, or listening to country and western music; a teenage greaser who led badly rehearsed rock-and-roll bands, and whose main ambition was to “join Little Richard,” as he wrote in his high school yearbook; a piano player for a famous act of the time, the kind of sideman who ultimately does not get the gig; a freshman and soon-to-be college dropout, at the University of Minnesota, where he discovered the outsiderness of folk music in the clubs of the Dinkytown district of Minneapolis, the Twin Cities’ response to the much more bohemian Greenwich Village; and a youngster who, very early on, decided to change his name and model a new persona. Those lives, however, had been lived by Robert Zimmerman, and becoming “Bob Dylan” was perhaps one more act of creation, deception, and imagination.
