Albert Grossman: Bob Dylan’s “colonel Tom Parker figure”
In 1956, Albert Grossman had a rather bright idea. After watching rising folk singer Bob Gibson at the Off Beat Room, the former Roosevelt University graduate opened a “listening room” to showcase Gibson and his fellow folkies. It was good timing – the American folk revival moment was booming, and Grossman quickly found himself managing some of the most promising acts on the scene, including Roger McGuinn, an 18-year-old Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan.
By the time Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, Greenwich Village was a bubbling cauldron of creativity. “Everybody knew everybody else on the street at that time,” Sally Grossman told Musician Magazine. “It was incredible. The folk music scene was starting to happen, the beat poets were all around. Bill Cosby used to test out his new material after hours at the Gaslight. Soon I figured that what was happening on the street was a lot more interesting than studying seventeenth-century English literature, so I dropped out of Hunter and began working as a waitress. I worked at the Cafe Wha?, and then the Bitter End, all over,” Sally laughs. “I had real upward mobility as a waitress… Back then, Albert never even said hello to me. He was too purposeful, too busy.”
Grossman was indeed very busy – busy schmoozing Bob Dylan, who had already won a glowing review for his concert at Carnegie Hall. After months of courting, Dylan finally signed Albert Grossman as his manager. Things started moving pretty quickly from that point on. Peter, Paul and Mary scored a huge hit with Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ shortly before it was released on The Freewheelin’ Bon Dylan in May 1963. The next few years were, according to Sally, “a total blur”, with Albert joining Dylan on the road for his tours in the UK and Europe while also managing Ian and Sylvia, Richie Havens, Gordon Lightfoot and a host of other musicians and poets. “Usually when he talked,” Dylan wrote of Grossman in Chronicles, “His voice was loud, like the booming of war drums”.
In the second half of the 1960s, Grossman started buying up property near Woodstock, an artist’s colony 100 miles north of Manhattan. Looking to escape the spotlight, Dylan began spending more and more time there, initially at Peter Yarrow’s house and then at one of Grossman’s holdings in Bearsville, which he purchased in 1965. That same year, Sally Grossman was photographed outside her Woodstock home dressed in a red trouser suit for the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan was on his way to the Grossman’s property after concluding his 1966 World Tour when he crashed his 500cc Triumph Tiger 100, prompting an eight-year touring hiatus. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on,” Dylan later revealed in Chronicles. “Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me, and I was seeing everything through different glasses.”
In 1969, two years after singing Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, Grossman built Bearsville Studios in Woodstock. In the August of that year, he travelled to the UK for the Isle of Wight Festival. Ahead of Dylan’s performance, he was asked about the rumours that The Beatles might be joining him onstage. “Of course, The Beatles would like to join Dylan on stage,” he replied. “I would like to fly to the moon.” Dylan would never experience such fervent guardianship again.
In the July of 1970, after Dylan discovered Grossman had taken 50% of his song publishing rights, the contracts between them were dissolved. “He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker Figure,” Dylan recalled in Scorsese’s No Direction Home, “You could smell him coming”. By this time, Grossman’s empire was starting to collapse. “In the end, it all just got to be more than Albert could handle,” Jonathan Taplin, a longtime associate of Grossman’s, told Rory O’Conner. “He made everybody move up to Woodstock, then lost his heart for the music and started getting into restaurants and real estate. As far as Bob goes, Albert just got too greedy. He kept a huge percentage of Dylan’s publishing rights at a time when many other artists completely controlled their own publishing.”
Grossman’s greed bred mistrust, and in 1971 Dylan cut his ties with him once and for all. “I finally had to sue him. Because Albert wanted it quiet, he settled out of court,” he told Robert Shelton. “He had me signed up for ten years… for part of my records, for part of my everything. He only had me for 20%.”
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