The two musicians Bob Dylan badgered for an autograph: “It didn’t mean anything to us”
The concept of Bob Dylan being starstruck and reduced to a blubbering fan at the sight of anyone is like witnessing a pig flying through the air. It just doesn’t happen.
But then again, isn’t this just the image we’ve been conditioned into thinking of him by? After all, this is the same man who travelled to New Jersey to track down his senile musical hero, Woody Guthrie, to perform for him and prove he had a shot. If nothing else, that screams someone who takes the idolisation of their favourite stars very seriously.
Dylan, by his very inimitable nature, commands a persona in which the air of nonchalance and impenetrability that surrounds him is more like a thick fog. Yet that is only something he has painstakingly crafted over the course of years and decades of stardom. Back in the day, he was just Robert Zimmerman – a kid with dreams as big as anybody else’s.
As much as this might seem like eliciting dark truths from him now, let’s not forget that the real Dylan was someone that many people got to see in all his nascent prime, not least the British folk duo Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Their acquaintance may have seemed an unlikely crossover, but here was the truth: Dylan was the pair’s biggest badgering fan.
This was in the days before the singer even travelled to New Jersey in search of Guthrie, when he was still keeping up the pretence of college academia. “Bob was always around whenever Ewan and I played in Minneapolis, where he was a student at the university,” Seeger later explained. “He’d ask us for our autographs. He was always very neat and carried a little briefcase.”
Yet the transformation that ensued for that needy fan was somewhat lost on the pair. “Two years later, when we went back to Minneapolis, the organiser said, ‘Remember that little fella who was always attached to you? You know that’s Bob Dylan, right?” Seeger recalled.
“You’d be astounded at how far away from the pop scene Ewan and I were, so when Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, it didn’t mean anything to us.”
Peggy Seeger
That might sound surprising to some, especially in the context of Dylan supposedly being an overnight sensation who all at once captured the heart of the all-American 1960s dream. The reality was that it was mainly the younger audiences at the time who were only really paying attention, and for everyone else outside the sphere, he somewhat passed them by.
Of course, as time went on, with audiences ageing and sounds transcending the decades, Dylan became a much bigger force than just the latest teen fad. Seeger and MacColl would be remiss to ignore him by that point, but it must still have been difficult to join up the image of that neat young man with the briefcase with the riotous rock star who appeared before them.
This paints Dylan with some sort of chameleon-like ability, to a certain degree, where he could constantly morph and change his demeanour depending on what was in front of him. Quite clearly, this is something that has been kept as a mainstay throughout the course of everything for him, but just think: it all started with him as a college kid, asking for an autograph.
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