FREEHosting...

JOHN PHILLIPS

---

Any copyrighted material on these pages is used in "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
Audio files are DELIBERATELY encoded "low-fi" to enable faster streaming and are intended as "illustrations" and "appetizers" only.
Official and "hi-fi" recordings can (and should) be purchased at your local record dealer or through a number of web-based companies, like CDNow.

JOHN PHILLIPS:

The Journeymen were soon signed to Werber-Cardenas and Capitol. By March, we were booked at Gerdes Folk City, a genuine folk mecca in the Village. Werber had us believing we couldn't fail to make it. We soon learned that he planned to sign us as insurance against the imminent -- but still secret -- breakup of the Kingston Trio. We played Folk City for six weeks in the spring and each of us pulled down $125 a week. We were making it in the folk mecca. We shared the stage with great acts like the Clancy Brothers and the venerable Mississippi Delta blues legend Lightnin' Hopkins.

In mid-April, we were on a bill with a scruffy, anemic-looking kid who had been kicking around the Village. This was his first paid gig. He looked pale and fragile, like he had just gotten over mononucleosis, but his audiences were spellbound. He sang with an angry, nasal whine and seemed to work at his "look": tousled hair, rumpled shirt, jeans, boots, cap, the watchful, restless squint. When we had met him backstage before the show, Lightnin' was helping him tune his guitar. There were all kinds of wild stories going around about the guy. All we knew was that he was from Minnesota and went by the name of Bob Dylan.

John Phillips (with Jim Jerome), Papa John: An Autobiography, New York, NY, 1987, pp. 135-136.