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Bob Dylan on Cynthia Gooding’s Radio Show 3.11.1962

Thursday, March 9, 2006

Here we have a 20-year old Bob Dylan, who’d just made his way to Greenwich Village and had already created quite a name for himself, sitting for an extended interview with New York radio host Cynthia Gooding and playing several songs to boot. Throughout the hour-long program, he’s affable if not a bit shy, denying the “folk” tag, which he obviously should have—part of Dylan’s genius was that he was able to transcend simple generic convention, even before they’d been carved in stone through popular discourse. It’s completely taken for granted these days that new artists don’t want to be pigeonholed into a specific category, but Dylan was the first to preface this sort of artistic independence as part of his public persona (of course, it was reactionary—goaded on by clueless media-types looking for a figurehead). Gooding seems awestruck during most of the interview segments—early on, sounding amazed that “there was just one man doing all that” and referring to “The Death of Emmitt Till” as being “the greatest contemporary ballad I’ve ever heard”. It’s an amazing document of pre-Columbia debut Dylan. Here’s the program in full:

Update: Waaaaaaayyyy too many people have been hotlinking to the actual files, which makes my bandwidth go boom. So, the mp3s have to go. See, now? This is why we can’t have nice things.

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