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Tucked away in his archives for more than 30 years, when Douglas Gilbert unveiled a virtually unknown series of black-and-white Bob Dylan photographs from 1964, it was a monumental event. Released in 2005, his book, Forever Young: Photographs of Bob Dylan, portrays a rarely seen Dylan, unguarded and at ease among friends. Accompanied with an essay by American rock critic Dave Marsh, the volume features around 100 images of Dylan at 23 years old, shot just after he'd finished recording his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Gilbert Gets the Assignment
Just hired on as a staffer at Look magazine, Douglas Gilbert was only 21 in April 1964 when he pitched a feature about Bob Dylan to his editors. Pairing him up with writer Sam Castan, they trusted his senses and gave him the project. For Gilbert, it was a dream assignment. He became an instant fan of Dylan's music a year earlier when his college roommate's 13-year-old brother loaned him a copy of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. “What he was doing was really writing and explaining, as well as articulating, what was percolating in my own mind but I didn't have the words for,” says Gilbert. “...It was just a powerful connection.”
Gilbert met with Dylan in June, and over the next few weeks caught him in different locations and circumstances. At the time, Dylan was gravitating between his favorite haunts in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, New York, where he buzzed around on his Triumph 500, drifting between his manager Albert Grossman's house and the “White Room” above the Cafe Espresso, an art studio where he'd sit at a small manual typewriter and let the lyrics fly.
Hoping Dylan would play at a civil rights demonstration or some other exciting event, he was disheartened to discover his subject had no such plans. But Gilbert soon realized this was even better. “I was able to photograph a more private Dylan, surrounded by friends in a familiar environment,” he said. “I think I was with him in the period before he closed himself off from the press and withdrew. I saw some wonderful moments of warmth, humor, and openness.”
What's Inside
“My way of photographing has always been to be as inconspicuous and unobtrusive as possible—a fly on the wall,” writes Gilbert in the preface. “I photographed using only existing light and quiet Leica rangefinder cameras.”
The book has eight sections capturing Dylan in various settings, beginning with several frames of him sitting behind a typewriter in the White Room (when Dylan left the room for a minute, Gilbert ambled over to see what he'd been typing, and it was the liner notes to his forthcoming fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan). One of the frames from this series would eventually grace the cover of Dylan's Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962-1964 released in October 2010.
Other chapters include short series of Dylan playing with the kids of his Woodstock friends, the Paturels, followed by a series of Dylan and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the beginning of their friendship. Another section finds Dylan in the Cafe Espresso, sitting around a table with his soon-to-be wife, Sara Lownds, the co-author of the novel Candy, Mason Hoffenberg, Dylan's road companion, Victor Maymudes, and a baby-faced John Sebastian, who tags along as Dylan's sidekick throughout the book.
Gilbert also caught up with Dylan in Greenwich Village, browsing titles at a local bookshop and hanging with Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Kettle of Fish. And the final section reveals some true gems of Gilbert's live concert footage of Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, including both day and night shots, and frames of Dylan both performing solo and doing a duet with Joan Baez.
A Long Time Coming
Three weeks after Gilbert and Castan turned in their spread, Look's editors killed the story, saying “He's too scruffy for a family magazine” (surprise, surprise; a year later, Look ran an ultra-slick Dylan feature using studio portraits). “I must admit I was angry,” said Gilbert. “I thought at the time and I thought even more in the years since, they don't know what they're doing. I mean, they had a chance to come out with something which was really pretty important.”
The photographs got shelved, where they collected dust for seven more years until Gilbert snatched them up from Look's archives when the magazine folded in 1971. And then, thirty-some years later in 2004, fortuna smiled on Gilbert when he learned that he owned the copyrights, and the following February, the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles ran its exhibit called Bob Dylan: Unscripted.
Unleashed on the world, Gilbert's rare collection suddenly enjoyed huge demand. Around the time, Sony was preparing to release The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall—the famed Halloween performance that took place just a few months after Gilbert's Look shoot, and they used some of his images for the CD booklet. And if that weren't enough, more frames from the series were soon picked up to be used in Martin Scorcese's 2005 Dylan documentary, No Direction Home.
Documenting an Age
Gilbert's series is important. It captures Dylan at that moment between folk and pop when he was still somewhat innocent, on the verge of fame but not quite there, during a time when he was making a major transition in his songwriting and performing style. While he was already wearing the Rayban shades, he hadn't yet traded his suede for black leather. It was a moment when Dylan was just developing the public persona that—almost immediately after Gilbert's time with him—he would groom across the decades through all of his reinventions.
Meanwhile, Marsh's essay puts the photos in both historical and musical perspective, illuminating Dylan's daily habits, the places he frequented, and his mindset during this epoch. Aside from detailing the story behind the series, Marsh fleshes out Dylan's transition out of politics and into popular music, his friendship with Allen Ginsberg, the controversial speech at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and the friction Dylan received from the “Folk Police” in 1964 during his artistic evolution.
As he wrote in his essay, “The Dylan Douglas Gilbert's photos reveal isn't the rascal on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, let alone the wraith on Highway 61 Revisited, or the stern man who doubtfully welcomes us to Blonde on Blonde. In Douglas Gilbert's photos, Dylan's still a young man, almost a kid, enjoying his life and his friends. More than anything, he seems unburdened.”
Tucked away in his archives for more than 30 years, when Douglas Gilbert unveiled a virtually unknown series of black-and-white Bob Dylan photographs from 1964, it was a monumental event. Released in 2005, his book, Forever Young: Photographs of Bob Dylan, portrays a rarely seen Dylan, unguarded and at ease among friends. Accompanied with an essay by American rock critic Dave Marsh, the volume features around 100 images of Dylan at 23 years old, shot just after he'd finished recording his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Gilbert Gets the Assignment
Just hired on as a staffer at Look magazine, Douglas Gilbert was only 21 in April 1964 when he pitched a feature about Bob Dylan to his editors. Pairing him up with writer Sam Castan, they trusted his senses and gave him the project. For Gilbert, it was a dream assignment. He became an instant fan of Dylan's music a year earlier when his college roommate's 13-year-old brother loaned him a copy of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. “What he was doing was really writing and explaining, as well as articulating, what was percolating in my own mind but I didn't have the words for,” says Gilbert. “...It was just a powerful connection.”
Gilbert met with Dylan in June, and over the next few weeks caught him in different locations and circumstances. At the time, Dylan was gravitating between his favorite haunts in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, New York, where he buzzed around on his Triumph 500, drifting between his manager Albert Grossman's house and the “White Room” above the Cafe Espresso, an art studio where he'd sit at a small manual typewriter and let the lyrics fly.
Hoping Dylan would play at a civil rights demonstration or some other exciting event, he was disheartened to discover his subject had no such plans. But Gilbert soon realized this was even better. “I was able to photograph a more private Dylan, surrounded by friends in a familiar environment,” he said. “I think I was with him in the period before he closed himself off from the press and withdrew. I saw some wonderful moments of warmth, humor, and openness.”
What's Inside
“My way of photographing has always been to be as inconspicuous and unobtrusive as possible—a fly on the wall,” writes Gilbert in the preface. “I photographed using only existing light and quiet Leica rangefinder cameras.”
The book has eight sections capturing Dylan in various settings, beginning with several frames of him sitting behind a typewriter in the White Room (when Dylan left the room for a minute, Gilbert ambled over to see what he'd been typing, and it was the liner notes to his forthcoming fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan). One of the frames from this series would eventually grace the cover of Dylan's Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962-1964 released in October 2010.
Other chapters include short series of Dylan playing with the kids of his Woodstock friends, the Paturels, followed by a series of Dylan and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the beginning of their friendship. Another section finds Dylan in the Cafe Espresso, sitting around a table with his soon-to-be wife, Sara Lownds, the co-author of the novel Candy, Mason Hoffenberg, Dylan's road companion, Victor Maymudes, and a baby-faced John Sebastian, who tags along as Dylan's sidekick throughout the book.
Gilbert also caught up with Dylan in Greenwich Village, browsing titles at a local bookshop and hanging with Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Kettle of Fish. And the final section reveals some true gems of Gilbert's live concert footage of Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, including both day and night shots, and frames of Dylan both performing solo and doing a duet with Joan Baez.
A Long Time Coming
Three weeks after Gilbert and Castan turned in their spread, Look's editors killed the story, saying “He's too scruffy for a family magazine” (surprise, surprise; a year later, Look ran an ultra-slick Dylan feature using studio portraits). “I must admit I was angry,” said Gilbert. “I thought at the time and I thought even more in the years since, they don't know what they're doing. I mean, they had a chance to come out with something which was really pretty important.”
The photographs got shelved, where they collected dust for seven more years until Gilbert snatched them up from Look's archives when the magazine folded in 1971. And then, thirty-some years later in 2004, fortuna smiled on Gilbert when he learned that he owned the copyrights, and the following February, the Perfect Exposure Gallery in Los Angeles ran its exhibit called Bob Dylan: Unscripted.
Unleashed on the world, Gilbert's rare collection suddenly enjoyed huge demand. Around the time, Sony was preparing to release The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964, Concert at Philharmonic Hall—the famed Halloween performance that took place just a few months after Gilbert's Look shoot, and they used some of his images for the CD booklet. And if that weren't enough, more frames from the series were soon picked up to be used in Martin Scorcese's 2005 Dylan documentary, No Direction Home.
Documenting an Age
Gilbert's series is important. It captures Dylan at that moment between folk and pop when he was still somewhat innocent, on the verge of fame but not quite there, during a time when he was making a major transition in his songwriting and performing style. While he was already wearing the Rayban shades, he hadn't yet traded his suede for black leather. It was a moment when Dylan was just developing the public persona that—almost immediately after Gilbert's time with him—he would groom across the decades through all of his reinventions.
Meanwhile, Marsh's essay puts the photos in both historical and musical perspective, illuminating Dylan's daily habits, the places he frequented, and his mindset during this epoch. Aside from detailing the story behind the series, Marsh fleshes out Dylan's transition out of politics and into popular music, his friendship with Allen Ginsberg, the controversial speech at the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and the friction Dylan received from the “Folk Police” in 1964 during his artistic evolution.
As he wrote in his essay, “The Dylan Douglas Gilbert's photos reveal isn't the rascal on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, let alone the wraith on Highway 61 Revisited, or the stern man who doubtfully welcomes us to Blonde on Blonde. In Douglas Gilbert's photos, Dylan's still a young man, almost a kid, enjoying his life and his friends. More than anything, he seems unburdened.”
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