Presented by Ella’s Music Club
Peter, Paul & Mary, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Bobby Darin, George Harrison and other contemporaries that performed with him in Greenwich village and across the country.
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After hitchhiking across America from Hibbings, Minnesota to meet his hero, Woody Guthrie, who is hospitalized in a sanitarium with Hodgkins’ disease, Dylan finds himself sleeping on the floor of the liquor storeroom at Gerd’s Folk City in New York’s Greenwich Village.
In less than a year he will perform in Carnegie Hall and be introduced to the icons of the Folk revival movement, such as Pete Seeger and by Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival. He will then be heralded by many of his peers as a talent to be reckoned with.
Dylan quickly rose to legendary status and was the contemporary of many future stars, including Judy Collins, John Sebastian of the Loving Spoonful, Maria Muldaur of “Midnight at the Oasis,” Phil Ochs, Stephen Stills and even Peter Tork of the Monkees amongst others.
“Blowing in the wind” would become an anthem of the Civil Rights movement, while “Hard rain’s a gonna fall,” written in response to the Cuban missile crisis, reflected on a possible coming apocalypse, which seemed all too likely.
Befriending the Beatles in New York on one of their early tours to America, Dylan introduced them to marijuana. When George Harrison later suggested that Dylan play “Blowin’ in the wind,” at the Concert for Bangladesh, Dylan replied that Harrison should play, “I want to hold your hand.”
His on again, off again affair with Joan Baez gave birth to her song, “Diamonds and Rust.” Baez would also go on to record dozens of his songs over the years.
With a viable career spanning more than 50 years, Dylan has outlasted virtually every one of his contemporaries and arguably produced a body of work unequaled in any other era.
Albert Grossman: Manager of Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary and The Birds, also pipelined many of Dylan’s songs to his other artists.
Dave Von Ronk and The Animals: “House of the Rising Sun” is a traditional American ballad dating back to the Civil War era.The arrangement we are most familiar with, was created by Dave Von Ronk.
Later on English band, “The Animals” saw Dylan’s performance of the song and had a major hit with it. Dylan himself had to then stop playing it, because people began asking why he was covering a hit by “The Animals.”
George Harrison/The Beatles: Dylan turned the Beatles onto pot in 1964 and John Lennon later said that the song “You’ve got to hide your love away” was him “doing” Dylan.
When in New York, Harrison would often spend time with Dylan in Woodstock to get away from it all. They then co-wrote material for Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass” album.
Anna Fiszman headed up her own Jazz quartet in Melbourne and was one of the founding members of the popular Australian comedy/cabaret group The Hot Bagels, performing regularly in leading comedy venues and festivals across the country, including the Last Laugh Theatre Restaurant, the Atheneum Theatre, opening for Phyllis Diller, Le Joke, the Melbourne Comedy Festival, the Spoleto Festival, Kinsellas in Sydney, Brisbane Expo and the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
The Hot Bagels were also regularly featured in major newspapers such as the Age, the Herald, the Sun and the Australian and had numerous TV appearances on “The Darryl Somers Show”, “Hey Hey It’s Saturday”, “Good Morning Melbourne”, “Shirl’s Neighbourhood”, “Good Morning Australia”, “The Midday Show” with Ray Martin, “Clive Robertson’s Newsworld”, “Hinch”, “The Bert Newton Show” and “Tuesday Night Live – The Big Gig.”
