Bob Dylan’s Village Trip: An Evening of Songs and Stories
September 22 @ 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm EDT
$29.15 – $40.31
“Those early days in the Village were great,” Bob Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton around 1970, shortly after he had moved into his townhouse on MacDougal Street, trying to recreate the magic of the early 1960s, when there was “music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.”
He didn’t stay long, hounded out of his MacDougal Street townhouse by people invading his privacy – not least notorious self-styled “garbologist” A J Weberman – and he and his family settled in Malibu. But he returned for a third time in 1975, and most nights could be found hanging out once more in the clubs where his career had begun, keeping company with Bobby Neuwirth and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. Desire, planned in what became Dylan’s regular booth at the Bitter End, was recorded in New York. And it was in New York, at Gerdes Folk City, on October 23, 1975, at an impromptu birthday party for Mike Porco, that the Rolling Thunder Review took flight.
Bob Dylan’s Village Trip takes a ramble back through the foggy ruins of time with an evening of songs and stories about Dylan’s time in the Village, in which he first set foot on a frigid January day in 1961. Join historian Sean Wilentz, author of the book Bob Dylan in America, whose family owned the Eighth Street Bookshop, where Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg; New York musician David Amram, who recorded with Dylan and Ginsberg; and scholar, musician, and critic Fabio Fantuzzi, editor of the book Bob Dylan and the Arts and curator of the first catalog and retrospective exhibition of “mysterious” artist Norman Raeben, who taught Dylan “how to see,” inspiring the albums Blood on the Tracks, Desire, and Street Legal, and the film Renaldo & Clara. Liz Thomson, revising editor of No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic whose review launched Dylan’s career, will moderate.
Live music from Bert Lee, Chris Lowe, Fabio Fantuzzi, and David Amram – and maybe a special guest or two.
