Bob Dylan’s time in New York City was formative for his work as a musician, but he also spent time in Cambridge before he rose to success. Here, he quickly involved himself in the folk scene, but people didn’t take him all that seriously at first. A fellow musician, Eric von Schmidt, once compared Dylan to a gnome, though not because of his musical abilities.
The ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ singer stopped in Cambridge early in his career
In the early 1960s, Cambridge had a small coffee house turned music venue called Club 47, just a few blocks from Harvard Square. Club 47 co-founder Joyce Chopra told WBUR the area “was considered the hinterlands … You were slumming it if you went down there.”
Joan Baez played at Club 47 when she was still a teenager, and Dylan wanted to begin playing there too. When he first arrived, hoping to get a gig in 1961, he was refused. Club owner Paula Kelley said it was hard to take him seriously.
“I vividly remember Bob Dylan coming in as a really scrawny, shabby kid,” she said. “He’s the only person I’ve ever seen with green teeth. Singing in between sets for nothing and then going out and saying that he’d sung at the Club 47. It’s so funny now to look back.”
Bob Dylan came across as a ‘spastic gnome’ to another musician
Dylan tried to fit in with the musicians at Cambridge, including von Schmidt. Von Schmidt invited him to play croquet, which Dylan accepted.
“We played croquet out at Robert L’s and Dylan was absolutely the worst player I have ever seen” von Schmidt wrote in his book Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years. “He was having a ball, giggling like mad. A little spastic gnome.”
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Luckily for Dylan, he was far better at playing music than he was at croquet. Von Schmidt recognized Dylan’s ear for music on that same day.
“Dylan playing croquet under the influence of half a bottle of red wine and some grass was really hilarious,” Von Schmidt said, per Bob Dylan Roots. “He couldn’t hit the ball with the mallet half the time, and the great thing about it was that he just kind of gloried in it. It was a wonderful meeting, and he ended up at my apartment, and I sang him a bunch of songs, and, with that spongelike mind of his, he remembered almost all of them when he got back to New York.”
Bob Dylan once wrote liner notes for his musician friend’s album
Dylan and von Schmidt became friends, and Dylan later wrote liner notes for von Schmidt’s 1969 album, Who Knocked the Brains Out of the Sky. In them, he sang von Schmidt’s praises.
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“He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire,” Dylan wrote, per The Hollywood Reporter. “He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.”
