Friday, June 3: Rich with Possibility

When Bob Dylan first arrived in New York in 1961, he came “out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd….It had just as big an impact on me as Elvis.”  The Beats and Elvis seem an unlikely combination, but we can here in Dylan’s description the roots of his restless and relentlessly inventive art. He may have been singing folk songs and dressing like Woody Guthrie, but in the clubs, coffee houses, and bars of Greenwich Village, he absorbed Beat energies: the fury of Ginsberg, the wild stories of Kerouac, and generative surrealism of Burroughs. He claimed that On the Road “changed my life” and later told Ginsberg that Kerouac’s writing “spoke [my] own American language.”

We hear this language develop and mutate across Dylan’s early music, from the visions that trouble “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” to the anger of “The Times They Are A’Changin’” and the sheer strangeness of the phrases in Tarantula that propelled Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.  Understanding Dylan’s early work thus means coming to terms with the Beats themselves, and this first day of the symposium will explore their art, vision, and legacy.  It will then finish with a reading and talk by a special guest poet, whose art expanded the Beat vision and who joined with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and appeared in Renaldo and Clara.  The day will end with a concert marking International Jazz Day on Guthrie Green, just outside the conference venue.