John Cohen (2) (1932–2019)

This slim collection combines black-and-white photos John Cohen made soon after Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with transcripts of radio interviews with Oscar Brand, Cynthia Gooding, and Studs Terkel. As Cohen writes, "the portraits presented a side of Bob that I didn't recognize when they were originally taken. . . . They preserved something that was invisible when they were made. They were a remembrance of things to come."
Taken together, the photos and interviews hint at the contradiction at Dylan's core, then and ever since. On the one hand, the master of disguise, spinning yarns to make his childhood and youth a vagabondage out of the pages of Jack Kerouac, meant to obscure not only his small-town middle-class origins but also, one suspects, the intensity of his ambition. On the other, the genuine everyman whose life's calling is no better nor worse than that of any other honest handyman. As Dylan tells Terkel: "I go to saw a tree down, I cut myself. If I go to spit tacks, I swallow tacks. It's a tool--that's all I use it as. My life is a street where I walk. This music, my guitar, that's my tool."
The book also features, as a coda, the color photos Cohen made eight years after the first set, as Dylan was preparing the album, Self-Portrait. One of the photos graced the album's back cover.
When Self-Portrait first appeared, I and many others wondered if the title was ironic, since most of the songs on it were cover versions of other people's songs. It turns out that the irony ran even deeper. At the time, I assumed that the bucolic photo in early spring in New York state was taken on his property near Woodstock in the Saugerties. But it wasn't; it was Cohen's place. Other shots, unseen until this book was published, show him wearing Cohen's jacket and hat, feeding Cohen's chickens, talking with Cohen's dog. We didn't know it at the time, but Dylan had left the Woodstock area and returned to Greenwich Village. But, as usual, covering his trail.… (meer)

I have a story which I think really shows the essential Lenny Bruce although it's not in this, or any other book.

I was editing one of [a:Jay Landesman|341564|Jay Landesman|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1336280345p2/341564.jpg]'s many manuscripts at the time and we were talking about his St Louis nightclub, the Crystal Palace and how Barbra Streisand got discovered. Jay told me that Barbra who was only 18, had been acting like a madwoman, coming in dressed up like a babushka with a scarf over her head and going from table to table giving the customers apples from her basket and on other nights, other stunts. And all the while begging for a chance to perform. On the last night she got herself into Lenny Bruce's changing room and there they were together and all of a sudden Lenny stabs her bottom with a full syringe of heroin. Barbra goes down screaming, in comes Jaye and off to the hospital go all three.

Lenny was an enthusiastic heroin addict, a sociable one, he didn't like to do it alone and was always trying to persuade people to try it, although perhaps with Barbra, the 'persuasion' was a little extreme.

The only way Jay could get Barbra to calm down and not go to the police was to give her a chance to perform, which she did, singing and performing brilliantly(she was a comedienne as much as a singer) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Jay's book. Did this story make it? No, the lawyers thought that Landesman wasn't rich enough to afford the fallout if Barbra didn't like it!

The Essential Lenny Bruce was a good, long read about an unusual and very iconoclastic man whose fame rested on his tight sardonic satire and his excellent timing. His humour apparently inspired infectious laughter even whilst his delivery was obscene and offensive. I've listened to him, he's brilliant, but I would really have loved to have seen him in person. Even all these years since I read the book, I remember how impressed with it I was and so... 5 stars.… (meer)