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 Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conference
« Thread Started on Aug 31, 2007, 1:33am »

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Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conference--A Closer Look


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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.

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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'

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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.

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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.



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"I'd like to know the meaning of the cover photo on your album...Highway 61."
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"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.



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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.

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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.
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If something was ever happening, photographer Jim Marshall was there. His body of work is unsurpassed.


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Gary Goodrow was a founding member of the comedy improv troupe The Committee.

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Gary Goodrow and The Committee on The Dick Cavett Show July 1969

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Goodrow with Janis Joplin and Committee member Howard Hesseman

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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:
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L to R--Rollin Post, Robert Shelton, Phil Elwood

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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.


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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.



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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


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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


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Lisa Hobbs turned in this article for the Examiner:

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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.




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Michael Grieg wrote for the Chronicle:

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'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.



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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:
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Michelle Basil and David Greenfield

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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.


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KGO 7 news anchor Jerry Jensen 1934-1984

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Local broadcaster Van Amburg


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KQED staffer Claude Mann

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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


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Poets Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg (is that Rick Danko behind Allen?) were never far from Dylan's entourage during his Bay Area visit

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Jean Gleason (1918-2009) and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Bob Neuwirth keeps a low profile in the back of the room.


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The press conference was rebroadcast the following Thursday.

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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.

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©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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« Last Edit: Aug 1, 2009, 12:37am by cripes » Link to Post - Back to Top  IP: Logged
dino
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 Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conferenc
« Reply #1 on Sept 3, 2007, 10:28am »

ah... the greatest thread ever started on the history of the internet... great to have it back!
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 Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conferenc
« Reply #2 on Oct 18, 2008, 12:25am »

While this thread is bumped, I'll bung in these bits:

Period entertainment ads (December '65):
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Copy of KRON news broadcast outline for December 3, 1965.
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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
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 Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conferenc
« Reply #3 on Oct 18, 2008, 5:00am »


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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 Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conferenc
« Reply #4 on Mar 14, 2009, 6:04pm »

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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 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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 Re: Bob Dylan's 1965 San Francisco Press Conferenc
« Reply #6 on Jan 8, 2010, 2:15pm »

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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