,In 1964, my first job, one I really liked, was working at M. Witmark & Sons, then a leading publisher of sheet music for the “Tin Pan Alley” music industry. Although “Tin Pan Alley” no longer exists, it originally was a concentrated area in New York City, West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, where there was a collection of New York City centered music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music in the U.S. during the late 19th century and early 20th century. In those early days, the music houses in lower Manhattan had a steady stream of songwriters, vaudeville and Broadway performers, musicians and song pluggers coming and going. Aspiring songwriters came to demonstrate tunes they hoped to sell. ‘"Song pluggers" were pianists and singers who made their living demonstrating songs to promote sales of sheet music. In 1936, Witmark was bought out by Warner Bros, and by 1963, when I went to work there, it was run by Artie Mogul, an A&R legend who had discovered Peter, Paul and Mary, an American folk singing trio who ultimately became one of the biggest acts of the 1960s. The trio was composed of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers. Albert Grossman, Peter, Paul and Mary’s manager, had brought the trio to Artie and now he was bringing his newest act, who he was raving about, a singer/songwriter named Bob Dylan, nee Robert Allen Zimmerman from Hibbling, Minn. Artie had made a deal with Dylan, negotiated for him by Grossman, for the princely sum of $1,000 a song But Artie never doubted that he had found someone special in Dylan and shouted his praises to all who would listen. Artie Mogul, a very talented A & R man, and a funny, likeable guy, was also a degenerate gambler, and my main job was to keep the bookies around the country to which he owed money, off his back. It was not an easy thing to do, especially when I had to endlessly beg them not to come over to the office and break his legs, bash in his head, render him impotent or just throw him out a window. I spent the day on the phone with these apes, or sometimes stood guard against them in the waiting room. But my secondary job, given to me when Simeon Saber, the 65 year old professional copier who had worked for Witmark for over forty years, and whose job it was to produce lyrics and sheet music from the artists under contract for the publisher to sell, had been asked to transcribe the lyrics of, among other songs, “Blowin In The Wind”, “The Times They Are A-Changin” and “Mr. Tambourine Man“. After a few days, Simeon threw up his hands and asked Artie to find a younger copier. Happily, thrillingly, although I was not a professional anything, that job fell to me to me and I began to spend that part of the day when I wasn’t fielding threats to Artie, transcribing the lyrics of new songs that that Bob Dylan had recently composed, and which he sent us on tapes, on which he sang, played the harmonica, and sometimes played guitar or piano. He usually accompanied each tape with a sheet of lined, legal sized paper on which he wrote the lyrics to each song, some of which had crossed out lines and additions. For me, neither the songs themselves, nor the written out lyrics, were not all that easy to understand, so I had to play them over and over again to get each word, each phrase, so they would be accurate as sheet music. The more I listened, the more I heard, the more I understood, the more I fell in love with Bob Dylan. I had never heard anyone say the things he said, and especially the way he said them. Listening to him opened my mind to a world beyond anything I had known and for the first time in my life I began to feel as if I had found a kindred spirit and was ready to find my own way in the world. Since then and to the present, I love Bob Dylan
