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Bob Dylan · S1 E3
The Golden Chords
His first band plays Little Richard covers at the Hibbing High talent show. The principal cuts the microphone. Bobby Zimmerman does not stop singing
The Hibbing High School auditorium, 1958. Bobby Zimmerman and The Golden Chords hit the first chord of a Little Richard cover so loud that the principal stands up from his seat and starts walking toward the stage.
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues. Chaotic, electric, rule-breaking. The spirit of The Golden Chords cranked up to eleven. This is what Bobby Zimmerman sounded like before anyone tried to make him respectable.
Subterranean Homesick Blues -- Bob Dylan
The opening track of Bringing It All Back Home (1965), widely considered one of the first music videos thanks to the famous cue-card clip. Dylan rattles off surreal wordplay at machine-gun speed over a rock and roll rhythm section. The song borrows its cadence from Chuck Berry's 'Too Much Monkey Business' and its attitude from the Beat poets. It reached number 39 on the Billboard Hot 100, Dylan's first single to chart in the US.
The Golden Chords
Bobby's first real band plays Little Richard, Elvis, and early rock and roll at school dances and talent shows in Hibbing. Bobby pounds the piano, screams the vocals, and performs with an intensity that has nothing to do with the polite folk music he will later become famous for. The Golden Chords are raw, loud, and completely wrong for Hibbing. That is the point.
TAP TO REVEAL: Who did Bobby Zimmerman see perform three days before they died?
“The first thing that ever really knocked me out was rock and roll. I played rock and roll piano, Little Richard stuff. When I was growing up, that was the only thing that really mattered.”
— Bob Dylan, interview with Cameron Crowe, liner notes for Biograph, Columbia Records, 1985
Mixed-Up Confusion -- Bob Dylan
Dylan's very first single (1962), a rockabilly track that Columbia Records quickly pulled from shelves because it did not fit his folk image. Proof that before 'Blowin' in the Wind,' before Greenwich Village, Bobby Zimmerman was a rock and roller. The Golden Chords never really left him.
What was the name of Bobby Zimmerman's first band in Hibbing?
Bobby has outgrown every band in Hibbing and every stage the town can offer. Next: the University of Minnesota, a neighborhood called Dinkytown, and the night Bobby Zimmerman introduces himself as 'Bob Dylan' for the first time.
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