Underestimating Albert
revisiting Albert Grossman’s management of Bob Dylan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v8i2.189Keywords:
authenticity, Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman, artist management, Folk Revival, Greenwich Village, music contracts, music publishing, royalties, A&RAbstract
This article represents an exploration of the contribution made by Albert Grossman to the career of Bob Dylan. Dylan is such a distinctive performer and songwriter that he can easily appear to be entirely self-made. Certainly, Dylan has a forceful character and appears to delight in confounding all who would ask questions of him. Further, the role of Grossman, his first manager, has all but entirely been written out of Dylan’s early history (not least by Dylan himself). The fact that Grossman died in 1986 has facilitated this process. The concern of ‘Underestimating Albert’ is to argue the reverse, that Grossman’s role in the creation of Dylan as a popular music success cannot be underestimated.
References
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Goodman, F. 1997. The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce. London: Jonathan Cape.
Gordon, D. 2010. Liner notes to Folksinger’s Choice. Leftfield Media.
Gray, M. 2006. The Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia. New York and London: Continuum.
Marsh, D. 2008. The Beatles Second Album (Rock of Ages). Emmaus: Rodale.
Rotolo, S. 2009. A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. London: Aurum Press.
Shelton, R. 2011. No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. Revised edn. London: Omnibus.
Spitz, B. 1998. Dylan: A Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Published
2014-05-20
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Jones, M. (2014). Underestimating Albert: revisiting Albert Grossman’s management of Bob Dylan. Popular Music History, 8(2), 189-204. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v8i2.189
