On Saturday, May 18, 1963, a 22-year-old singer/songwriter from Hibbing, Minnesota, took the stage at the Monterey County Fairgrounds’ Pattee Arena. Born Robert Zimmerman, the slight young man had recently changed his stage name to Bob Dylan (many believe he did so to honor poet Dylan Thomas, but, obviously not a fan, he refuted that assumption, telling a New York Times reporter in 1966, “Dylan Thomas’ poetry is for people that aren’t really satisfied in their bed–for people who dig masculine romance,” and “I’ve done more for Dylan Thomas than he’s ever done for me.”).
This appearance at the Monterey Folk Festival was Dylan’s first West Coast gig, and he wasn’t particularly well known at that point. Headliners, including Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Andrews Sisters, Barbara Dane and The Weavers, were all seasoned acts the audience was familiar with. It’s well known that Dylan was fond of inventing stories about his past, and his statements in the festival program are prime examples. One example: claiming he toured with a carnival at 14 playing piano and guitar, he traveled east when he heard Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads” to meet that legendary songsmith. In this period, he also claimed to have had a troubled childhood, to have been a teenage runaway circus roustabout, prostitute and heroin addict. None of that was true. He led a fairly stable early life in Minnesota.
The nascent artist’s first Columbia Records release, “Bob Dylan,” had dropped the year before, and his second, the seminal “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” wouldn’t hit the shelves for another 10 days. He performed several tunes, including “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and “Master of War.” When he performed “With God on Our Side,” he was joined at the microphone by Joan Baez, an already successful folk singer, and a woman who would soon become his lover. According to Barbara Dane, “He went over very badly.” Record executive Jac Holzman said of Dylan’s show, “He didn’t play very long. I think people were laughing at him.” Little did that audience realize that this skinny, bedraggled guy would soon become one of the most recognized and revered musicians of the 20th century. Not everyone was laughing, however. Time Magazine said, “He has something unique to say, and he says it in songs of his own invention that are the best songs of their style since Woody Guthrie’s.”
The 2024 film “A Complete Unknown” depicted the Dylan/Baez duo at the festival, albeit in a venue that through the magic of movies only vaguely resembled the historic arena made famous a few years later when the Monterey Pop Festival took place there. Fun fact: Two other seminal 1960s musicians would appear at both `rrygarcia.com, he also entered an amateur banjo contest during the festival. He finished second.
Several sources claim that Dylan and Baez became inseparable after that Monterey Folk Festival experience, seen canoodling under the spreading limbs of the bucolic fairground’s majestic oak trees. But before that fire was lit, they had actually met earlier, in April 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village when Dylan opened for bluesman John Lee Hooker. Baez owned a hillside home in Carmel Valley around this time. She wrote in her memoir “And a Voice to Sing With” (in an odd switch of tenses in which the narrative becomes like a personal letter to Dylan) “We went to coffee houses on Cannery Row, drove up and down the Big Sur coast and bought an upright piano for $200. You stood at the big kitchen windows with your typewriter perched on the waist-high adobe structure and faced the hills.” She maintains that he wrote “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” there. However, more than six decades gone, accounts of this period vary quite a bit. Baez also rented a home in the Carmel Highlands around this period, and some say that’s where the two stayed.
Thirty-two years after his Monterey Folk Festival appearance, Dylan returned to the area in 1995, headlining a show at Laguna Seca Daze at Laguna Seca Raceway, (now known as WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca). That was an eclectic concert opened by The Black Crowes and George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars.
In 2010, he brought what fans call his “Never Ending Tour” back to the well-worn boards of the Pattee Arena stage for a sold-out show where he began performing in front of large audiences. And the show goes on in 2025: Since that Saturday in May 1963, Bob Dylan has played more than 2,500 concerts. Though it won’t be bringing him back to Monterey, his scheduled 2025 “Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour” is bringing his music to fans around the U.S. and Europe. He seems to rightfully enjoy every minute of his time in the spotlight. As he told an interviewer in 2007, “Music attracts the angels in the universe.”