Two Legends Together: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Program, 1963

In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel intro­duced Chica­go radio lis­ten­ers to an up-and-com­ing musi­cian, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huck­le­ber­ry Finn, if he lived in the 20th cen­tu­ry. His name is Bob Dylan.” (Lis­ten to the inter­view below.)

Dylan had just fin­ished record­ing the songs for his sec­ond album, The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, when he trav­eled from New York to Chica­go to play a gig at a lit­tle place part­ly owned by his man­ag­er, Albert Gross­man, called The Bear Club. The next day he went to the WFMT stu­dios for the hour-long appear­ance on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram. Most sources give the date of the inter­view as April 26, 1963, though Dylan schol­ar Michael Krogs­gaard has giv­en it as May 3.

Things were mov­ing fast in Dylan’s life at that time. He was just emerg­ing as a major song­writer. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up most­ly of oth­er peo­ple’s songs. The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan, which was fin­ished but had­n’t yet been released, con­tained almost all orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al, includ­ing sev­er­al songs that would become clas­sics, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” With­in a few months Dylan would make his debut at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val and per­form at the his­toric March on Wash­ing­ton. But when Dylan vis­it­ed WFMT, it’s like­ly that many of Terkel’s lis­ten­ers had nev­er heard of him. In the record­ed broad­cast he plays the fol­low­ing songs:

1. Farewell
2. A Hard Rain’s a‑Gonna Fall
3. Bob Dylan’s Dream
4. Boots of Span­ish Leather
5. John Brown
6. Who Killed Dav­ey Moore?
7. Blowin’ In The Wind

Dylan tells Terkel that “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” is not about atom­ic fall­out, even though he wrote the song in a state of anx­i­ety dur­ing the Cuban mis­sile cri­sis. “No, it’s not atom­ic rain,” Dylan says, “it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fall­out rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just got­ta hap­pen.… In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pel­lets of poi­son are flood­ing their waters,’ that means all the lies that peo­ple get told on their radios and in their news­pa­pers.”

But as the con­ver­sa­tion pro­gress­es it becomes clear that the moti­va­tion behind Dylan’s com­ments isn’t to dis­pel myths or to clear up any of the “lies that peo­ple get told on their radios.” Rather, he’s dri­ven by his life-long dread of being pigeon­holed by oth­ers. Dylan is hap­py to spread his own myths. At one point he tells Terkel a “stretch­er” that would have made Huck­le­ber­ry Finn proud: He claims that when he was about ten years old he saw Woody Guthrie per­form in Bur­bank, Cal­i­for­nia. Regard­less of its fac­tu­al­i­ty, the Dylan-Terkel inter­view is an enter­tain­ing hour, a fas­ci­nat­ing win­dow on the young artist as he was enter­ing his prime. You can stream it here.

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