DYLAN-WHISPERER GREILMARCUSON THE 1960 MADISON PARTY TAPE: ADOCUMENT OF THE BARD’S BECOMING.

WHENBOB DYLAN LEFT MINNEAPOLIS IN THE late fall of 1960, seeking New York City as if he didn’t exactly know where it was, he landed in Madison, Wisconsin, in the bohemian milieu around the university. He has spoken often over the years of a kind of secret society of folk music people: if you knew where to go, who to call, where to wait, within hours you could find yourself within the confines of what he called “like-minded people”, sharing songs, sharing food, sharing tiny apartments, even if you slept on the floor – there wasn’t room for a couch. For Madison, Dylan had a number for Ron Radosh. Born in New York, he was from a Communist Party background; Pete Seeger was his guitar teacher. Now he was a folkie and a graduate student: “I was a 5-string banjo picker and guitarist and wanted to be a professional folk singer,” he wrote to me in 2021, “and gave that up when I realised my limitations.” (As a scholar, notable among his books is, with Joyce Milton, from 1983, The Rosenberg File, a convincing case for the guilt of [nuclear spies] Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Radosh must have flinched when he heard the bootlegged Julius And Ethel, from the same year, perhaps as musically bad and intellectually clueless as anything Bob Dylan has ever written or recorded; it was never released.) Radosh didn’t have room to put Dylan up, but he had those secret society connections: he sent Dylan to Danny Kalb, then an 18-year-old freshman and guitar player. Within hours Dylan was meeting people, staying at different apartments, part of whatever was happening. He was playing at parties; at one Socialist Club night, people complained that he wouldn’t stop singing his Woody Guthrie songs when there were serious politics that needed talking about.