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cripes
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Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
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Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conference--A Closer Look
In
December of 1965 Bob Dylan met with the Bay Area press
at KQED studios at 4th and
Bryant Street in the south of Market area of San
Francisco. KQED was a trailblazing Public Educational TV
station that started broadcasting in 1954.
525 4th St today. Originally a truck
warehouse, in 1956 KQED moved in and rented the space
for $500 a month, with many donations of furnishings,
equipment, lumber, and egg cartons for soundproofing
(KQED originated this cost-efficient idea - since copied
worldwide). A sign was hung in the bathroom that said
'Don't flush during broadcast'
Inside KQED--then and now
At
1:00 PM on Friday December 3rd 1965 Bob met the press to
promote his 5 Bay Area shows. Dylan fans can thank Ralph Gleason for
preserving on video the entirety of the broadcast.
Gleason's association with KQED dated back to 1963. He
produced a music show Jazz Casual which featured many of the
top jazz artists of the day.
Ralph Gleason wrote in
1973: When Bob Dylan's five concerts in the San
Francisco Bay Area were scheduled in December 1965, the
idea was proposed that he hold a press conference in the
studios of KQED, the educational television
station.
Dylan accepted and flew out a day early
to make it.
He arrived early for the press
conference accompanied by Robbie Robertson and several
other members of his band, drank tea in the KQED office
and insisted that he was ready to talk about "anything
you want to talk about." His only request was that he be
able to leave at 3 PM so that he could rehearse in the
Berkeley Community Theater where he was to sing that
night.
At the conclusion of the press conference,
he chatted with friends for a while, jumped into a car
and went back to Berkeley for the rehearsal. He cut the
rehearsal off early to go to the hotel and watch the TV
program which was shown that night and repeated the
following week.
This is the only full length
press conference by Dylan ever televised in it's
entirety.
"I'd
like to know the meaning of the cover photo on your
album...Highway 61."
"I've
thought about it a great deal."
Eric Weil asks the first question of
the day. By all accounts, Eric was just one of those
guys who showed up everywhere with a camera. My efforts
to track down Eric were unsuccessful. One person I
interviewed was pretty sure Eric ended up doing time in
prison not long afterwards.
Michael Butterfield, a
freelance writer who has conducted over a decade of
extensive research on the notorious San Francisco Zodiac Killer case
contends that Eric ended up in a mental hospital in
Oakland where, on October 22, 1969 he called attorney Melvin Belli on a TV call
in show claiming to be the Zodiac killer.
This
can be seen on this YouTube link. The
voice on the phone doesn't sound like the same guy to
me, but it's hard to tell. A look through the master
index of the San Francisco Chronicle at the library
yielded no mention of Eric Weil.
Michael
Butterfield's article connecting Eric and the Zodiac can
be found here.
Mary Ann Pollar produced many folk
concerts in the Bay Area in the early '60s, including
Bob's. At the tail end of the press conference video you
can hear her say "Everyone wants to know 'where's the
party?'." The after show party was actually held at Mary
Ann's house on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Pollar
fondly remembered that Bob Neuwirth worked the door
keeping out the undesirables. She died in
1999.
Up and coming promoter Bill Graham was
there as well. He even managed to get Bob to plug an
upcoming Mime Troupe benefit show at The
Fillmore.
If something was ever happening,
photographer Jim Marshall was
there. His body of work is
unsurpassed.
Gary Goodrow was a
founding member of the comedy improv troupe The
Committee.
Gary Goodrow and The Committee on The Dick
Cavett Show July 1969
Goodrow with Janis Joplin and Committee
member Howard Hesseman
Another Commitee member in attendance was Larry Hankin. Most will
recognize Hankin as the the actor who played Kramer in
the Seinfeld "Making the Pilot" episodes. He remains a
popular character actor with an impressive list of film
credits.
Some writers:
L to R--Rollin Post, Robert Shelton, Phil
Elwood
Rollin Post was
working for KPIX/CBS channel 5 at the time. He went on
to become one of the Bay Area's premier political
commentators until his retirement in
1999.
Phil Elwood was
the jazz critic for the San Francisco Examiner (and
later the Chronicle) for more than 35 years. He died in
2006. He wrote this at the time:
Bob
Dylan's Concert--Provocative, Rewarding
By
Philip Elwood
It was a hard day's night for
Bob Dylan at his Berkeley concert last evening. But by
it's conclusion he had fought off apparant boredom (his
own and, surprisingly the audience's) and emerged
victorious as he sang a whole set of his recent material
accompanied by a predominantly electronic rhythm
quintet.
"Concerts are a kick," Dylan had said
during his enervating afternoon press conference, "but
the albums are more important: they're more concise and
the words are easier to hear."
By the
intermission last night, Dylan's opening 45 minutes (in
solo) had left much of the crowd in agreement. They had
expected some of the kicks and what they got most
frequently, was spiritless and often incomprehensible
mediocre Dylan.
But Dylan came roaring back after
the break, and with his rocking band laying down a
vibrating gospel beat, he shouted out the typically
catatrophic words to "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues": the
audience stirred, shouted and stomped, Dylan beamed, and
the show took off.
No matter how many versions of
his familiar standards ("Like a Rolling Stone," "It
Ain't Me Babe," etc.) one heard, Dylan's wholly original
renditions are always more interesting, forceful, and
lasting.
"You know something is happening here
but you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones," goes
"Ballad of a Thin Man." Ironically, at the press
conference Dylan had explained away his own astonishing
popularity as "just a happening, I guess."
But if
hundreds of adult Mr. Joneses in the Berkeley concert
audience are baffled by "the happening," there are
thousands of the under-thirties (Dylan still has six
years to go) to whom Bob Dylan is a symbol of
bitter-sweet criticism of the artificialities found in
contemporary society.
Dylan is disarmingly
honest, almost consistently dour and his songs seldom
achieve any full unity of concept.
Like a jigsaw
puzzle, many of the separate parts, and occasionally
some of the combined pieces, are fascinating and
obviously the product of a talented craftsman in
imagery. But on none of Dylan's compositions is a full
picture ever completed.
Dylan's songs are as
unclassifiable as the costumes of his most devoted young
admirers because uniformity and conformity are the
antithesis of this restless and cynical generation's
philosophy.
He doesn't really sing much either.
It's mostly a shouting, wailing narrative, and his blank
verse lyrics are as irregular as the charts and
meters.
It isn't emotionally or physically easy
to attend a Dylan concert but it's provocative and
rewarding in a degree seldom found elsewhere in American
artistic expression. Four more Bay Area concerts are
scheduled for this week and next.
Robert Shelton
should be familiar to all reading this. He wrote what
many consider to be the definitive biography of Bob in
the sixties No Direction Home in which he
chronicles Bob's 1965 Bay Area visit in some
detail
Jonathan Cott was
a writer for Ramparts magazine at the time. Ralph
Gleason was the editor of Ramparts, so he invited Mr.
Cott to tag along. Cott was to later interview Dylan
extensively in Rolling Stone when Bob was talking up
Renaldo & Clara in 1977. In 1983 he put together a
nice coffee table book with lots of pictures called Dylan
Lisa Hobbs turned in this article for
the Examiner:
Bob
Dylan's Idea For a Symphony
by Lisa
Hobbs
Bob Dylan, a mental free-floater in
two-inch high boots, has made but one commitment to the
future--he would like to write a symphony.
It's
the only firm commitment verbal, philosophic, or social
that he offered yesterday to a world that he perceives
as being otherwise without hope.
It will be like
no other symphony, just like the 24 year old Dylan is
like no other writer-singer.
As the high priest
of the folk-rock cult described it to reporters at KQED,
it will have "different melodies, words and ideas all
being the same and rolled on top of each
other".
He made a delicate gesture with delicate
hands as if he were kneading pastry dough.
Dylan
denied that his songs have any subtle message, although
he has written and sung over 150.
"Where did you
hear they have a message?" he asked a pert teenage
editor from a Bay Area high school newspaper.
"In
a movie magazine" she giggled.
This sets dozens
of beards in the audience shaking. Some beards even
removed their sunglasses to wipe off the tears. (Poet
Allen Ginsberg, one of the guests invited for what turn
out to be a rather fruitless mental autopsy, would have
won the prize for Best Beard easlly.)
Dylan, who
looks like an under-nourished kewpie doll, also denied
that he played folk-rock.
"I call it vision
music, mathematical music," he said in a barely audible
mutter which made this reporter feel positively
decrepit.
"The words are just as important as the
music. There would be no music without the words. I do
the words first. I know what music I want when I hear
the words. But sometimes on a gentle instrument like a
harpsichord or a harmonica, I hear the melody first and
know the words that should fit to it. That never happens
with the guitar. It's too hard an
instrument."
Asked what poets did he dig, Dylan
replied: "W.C. Fields, the trapeze family in the
circus, Ginsburg, Charlie Rich."
He denied that
he wanted to change anyone's lives by being hard on them
in his songs.
"I just want to needle
'em."
He also digs flicks----will make one
himself next year and thinks Joan Baez interprets his
earlier songs "all right."
Smoking continually,
flicking ash and rubbing his little suede boots
together, the pale and aesthetic-faced Dylan said he'll
know when to quit because "I'll just start to itch and
something goes through a terrifying turn and it has
nothing to do with anything."
A newsman commented
that Dylan's voice was inaudible until he spoke about
the booings he had received but then it became quite
clear.
"Are you doing a pennance of silence?"
Dylan was asked.
"No," he replied. "It's always
silent where I am."
"They shouldn't have asked
any reporters over 30," one
sighed.
Michael Grieg wrote for the
Chronicle:
'It's
Lonely Where I Am'
By Michael
Grieg
An anemic looking young man in suede
boots and a pepper tweed jacket with action shoulders
gazed soulfully at the TV cameras.
"It's always
lonely where I am," said Bob Dylan in a ghost-like
whisper.
He, Dylan, mighty monied cult singer,
current king of the cats, was holding what was billed as
his "only meeting with the press during his week-long
stay in the Bay Area."
And, possibly for
posterity, Channel 9 was taping the performance
yesterday.
The performance? Well, the fey smile
that flitted across the wan features of the 24 year old
poet-composer-singer-style setter seemed to be a live
giveway that he seemed to be playing to-or deliberately
ignoring--an audience made up largely Dylan
devotees.
After being introduced as one of
America's leading poets by Ralph J. Gleason, The
Chronicle columnist, Dylan was asked how he would
describe himself.
"What can I say?" he said. "A
song-and-dance man, how's that?"
Then, speaking
of poets, he went on to whisper, while ashes from his
cigarette floated over the bank of microphones, that his
own favorite poets included Rimbaud, someone named
Smokey Robinson, "Oh and...yes...W.C. Fields...uh...and,
of course, Allen Ginsberg."
Ginsberg, in the
audience, leaned over to say: "Dylan is a great
influence on me. Why, for one thing, I've taken up
singing."
Dylan spoke up a little louder--as if
Ginsberg might try to sing. Someone had asked if the
hugely successful composer of "Subterranean Homesick
Blues" and "Like a Rolling Stone" had not sold out,
after all, to the big commercial
interests.
"Well, I don't feel guilty," he said.
Anyway, if I did sell out, it would be ladies'
garments."
And what was his purpose in
life?
"To stay as long as I can."
His
attitude on protest marches?
None of the
demonstrations were his kind of demonstration he
indicated.
"Oh I do like to carry
cards...uh...the jack of diamonds and, well, the ace of
spades. I'd like to picket with them in front of the
post office. Oh, and I'd have some words on the
signs--words like CAMERA and MICROPHONE and
MICE..."
Listening, perhaps, to some distant
drummer, his own words grew louder, and now--more
audibly--he continued to resist efforts to pinpoint him
like some rare butterfly.
Asked to define his
philosophy, he said: "I don't think anything planned
ever turns out the way you want it--not that this means
anything."
Dylan went on to say that he was
dealing rather cavalierly with the questions because he
felt that real communication was practically impossibe,
that people saw different houses "when they
say...uh...house."
"Then why did he write poetry?
Why did he sing?"
"I have nothing else to
do."
Then, wondering out loud about the possible
reasons for his phenomenal success, he added,
"I
have no idea. I haven't really struggled for success. It
just happened."
And his voice dropped to a
whisper again. "Sometimes it doesn't happen...sometimes
they boo me."
For a moment, it seemed impossible
to believe. It seemed as strange as saying "boo" to a
ghost.
Elsa Knight Thompson was a leading
progressive journalist and a pioneer for women in
broadcasting who spent a large part of her career as a
Public Affairs Director at KPFA and was active in other
Bay Area political and community
efforts
Four junior year students from
Redwood High School in
Larkspur in Marin County:
Michelle Basil and David
Greenfield
John Campbell and Henry
Farre
Michelle Basil (who coaxed Dylan
into one of his few genuine laughs of the conference
with her 'movie magazine' reply) had directly contacted
Bob's manager Albert Grossman for a press pass into the
conference. The journalism students were on the school's
'Student News Bureau'. Other notable alumni from
Redwood High include comedian Robin Williams and current
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.
KGO 7 news anchor Jerry
Jensen 1934-1984
Local
broadcaster Van
Amburg
KQED staffer Claude
Mann
Robert N. Zagone was in charge of the
2 cameras KQED used to film the press conference. Zagone
went on to direct The Stand In along with many other
films
Poets Michael McClure
and Allen Ginsberg (is
that Rick Danko behind Allen?) were never far
from Dylan's entourage during his Bay Area
visit
Jean Gleason
(1918-2009) and poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Bob Neuwirth keeps
a low profile in the back of the
room.
The
press conference was rebroadcast the following
Thursday.
On
New Years Eve in 1979 KQED showed the Bob Dylan 1965
press conference once again. Dubs from that broadcast
circulated among Dylan fans for many years.
The
San Francisco press conference finally saw proper DVD release on
October 31, 2006.
©2005
Blair Miller (revised 2009) Thanks to Mary Ann
Pollar, Michael Dorn, Jim Marshall, Rollin Post, Toby
Gleason, Kevin Jackson, Jim D., Robert Zagone &
Jonathan Cott for their assistance. Photos
©iconpix
If you were at the press conference or
know the names of anyone not mentioned here, please
contact me at glenncripes@comcast.net
This
article first appeared in The Bridge #23
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dino member
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #1 on Sept
3, 2007, 10:28am » |
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ah... the
greatest thread ever started on the history of the
internet... great to have it back! |
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cripes
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #2 on Oct
18, 2008, 12:25am » |
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While this
thread is bumped, I'll bung in these bits:
Period
entertainment ads (December '65):
Copy
of KRON news broadcast outline for December 3,
1965.
Big
thanks to Rollin Post. He was the first guy I
interviewed for this project. Very nice guy with an
incredible memory.
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manho member
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #3 on Oct
18, 2008, 5:00am » |
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that's
some choice of cultural events there: andy film, lenny
live, oliver with georgia brown, king rat (one of my
favourite films), danny kaye live, brendan behan play...
and check out how many of those "60s" guys were really
50s guys. until 66 the 60s was still the fifties. |
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mjdorn member
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #4 on Mar
14, 2009, 6:04pm » |
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Re: the
girl identified as Sujanna Kosky -- that's
incorrect. At the time her name was Michelle Basil --
she's now Michelle McFee (she was married to Bay Area
music Bob McFee). For a short bio of her: http://www.kinkaidfoundation.org/michellebio.htm In
1965 she was at Redwood High School -- as were 3 other
people in the audience at the press conference. BTW
Michelle was less than thrilled by being included in
Scorsese's documentary No Direction Home without
permission/notification. Maybe Marty had been looking
for Sujanna Kosky.
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cripes
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #5 on May
17, 2009, 2:28am » |
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Wife
of music critic Ralph J. Gleason dies Joel
Selvin, Special to The Chronicle
Jean Rayburn
Gleason, wife of former Chronicle pop music critic Ralph
J. Gleason, died at her Berkeley home on May 5 after
suffering a fall earlier this year. She was 90. Ms.
Gleason was an activist wife in an era where other women
played less collaborative roles in their husbands'
professional lives. She was her husband's editor,
typist, mail clerk, confidant and adviser. She took his
columns to the bus stop where AC Transit would take the
typewritten copy and deliver it to a waiting Chronicle
copy boy at the Transbay Terminal. "She was his first
and primary editor," said son Toby Gleason. "She was
personally responsible for the Gleason family gaining
back the rights to my dad's television programs. She was
instrumental in everything having to do with my father.
Plus she raised a family." Born in 1918 in Pittsburgh
but raised in upstate New York, Jean Rayburn was already
a jazz fan when she was introduced to Columbia
University dropout Gleason. They courted at the jazz
nightspots of New York's 52nd Street and married in
1940. She worked alongside her husband publishing
Jazz Information, one of the first magazines devoted to
jazz. She also helped him produce concerts featuring New
Orleans jazz musician Bunk Johnson at Stuyvesant Casino
in New York in 1945. They moved to San Francisco the
following year to present appearances by the
rediscovered New Orleans tailgate trombonist Kid
Ory. Her husband went to work full time at The
Chronicle in 1950, the first staff jazz critic on a
daily newspaper in the country. He was a founding editor
of Rolling Stone magazine and produced numerous programs
for public television, including 28 episodes of "Jazz
Casuals," live performances by jazz greats such as Duke
Ellington, John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck. After her
husband's death in 1975, Jean Gleason took back title to
his television programs. "She did it solely with the
idea of preserving them," Toby Gleason said. "She had no
idea that we had any rights, but she thought we would do
a better job of preserving them than public
television." She is survived by her children: Bridget
of Greenbrae, Stacy of Wauconda, Wash., Toby of Oakland
and Katherine Haynes-Sanstad of Berkeley. She is also
survived by five grandchildren. The memorial service
will be private.
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cripes
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Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press
Conferenc « Reply #6 on Jan
8, 2010, 2:15pm » |
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Michael
Dorn, who went to high school with many of the student
reporters seen at the SF press conference (and was a big
help to this article) has a blog where he recounts
seeing Dylan in Berkeley in '65. You can read part one
here. |
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