Did I hear him right? I dragged the cursor back and listened
again. Sure enough, Bob Dylan just said the most meaningful person he’d ever
been on stage with was Bobby Vee. If you were alive in the early 1960s and
turned on a radio, you'd have heard Bobby Vee. He had a string of hits: Devil or Angel, Rubber Ball, Take Good Care
of my Baby (written by Carole King and Gerry Goffen), Run to Him and The Night has
a Thousand Eyes to name a few. Between 1959 and 1970, Bobby Vee had 38 top
100 hits and 7 gold records. He was part of the popular music phenomenon that
filled a void shortly after 1959. Around that time Elvis entered the army,
Little Richard quit singing to become a preacher, Jerry Lee Lewis went to jail
for marrying his 14 year old cousin and Buddy Holly along with the Big Bopper
and Richie Valens died in a plane crash. Early rock & roll was all but dead
and into the void rushed a bunch of good looking male singers, singing catchy pop
tunes. We called it “bubble gum music”. It’s greatest appeal was to young teenage
girls, “bubblegummers”. Bobby Vee was one
of the most popular of the bubble gum hit makers.
In 1964 rock & roll was revived by the Beatles and Dylan. Dylan’s influence spawned the birth of the singer/songwriter and blended folk
and rock music. Popular music moved away from the catchy pop songs of
singers like Bobby Vee and became more relevant and meaningful with more
musical complexity. So why is Dylan so
reverential towards a pop star, who sang the kind of music that he broke
away from and stood in stark contrast to. To understand this we have to go back
to “the day the music died”, as Don McLean put it in his song American
Pie.
On February 3, 1959,
a plane crashed in Minnesota killing Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie
Valens along with the pilot. They were part of a concert tour called Winter
Dance Party, which also featured Dion and the Belmonts. The plane was on its
way to Moorhead, Minn for their next concert. It was a tragedy, but the concert
tickets were sold and the manager wanted the show to go on. He put an add out on the radio for a band who could fill in. A local group made up of the Velline brothers, Sidney and Bill, responded to the add and were asked to fill in for
the lost musicians. Sidney and Bill let their 15 year old brother Bobby sit in with
the band for the concert. Bobby had been perfecting a singing style that sounded
like Buddy Holly, which made him perfect for the gig. Just before the performance, the Velline brothers were asked
what their group was called and Bobby spontaneously said "The Shadows". The Shadows were a hit that night and went on to record
four sides for the Soma label, one of the songs being Suzie Baby , featuring Bobby singing in his Buddy Holly style.
In the summer of 1959, The Shadows hired an 18 year old musician
from Hibbing, Minnesota who was working in Fargo as a busboy at the Apple Café,
named Bobby Zimmerman. Here is how Dylan puts it in his autobiographical book Chronicles Volume One. Talking about
Bobby Vee he writes, “In the summer of
’59, he had a regional hit record out called Suzie Baby on a local label. His band was called The Shadows and I
had hitchhiked out there and talked my way into joining his group as a piano
player on some of his local gigs, one in a basement of a church. I played a few
shows with him, but he really didn’t need a piano player and besides, it was
hard finding a piano that was in tune in the halls that he played.”
The young Dylan credits Bobby Vee for inspiring him to go on in his own career. He admired Bobby,thought he had a great Rock-a-Billy style of performing and was grateful to be given an opportunity to play with his band. They both left the mid-west and had extremely divergent careers. Bobby Zimmerman went to New York, where he changed his name to Bob Dylan and invented his Woody Guthrie, troubadour persona and Bobby Velline got picked up by Liberty records, changed his name to Bobby Vee and became a pop star and teen heartthrob .
Dylan says in Chronicles: “ Bobby Vee and me had a lot in
common, even though our paths would take such different directions. We had the
same musical history and came from the same place and the same point of time.”
“I’d always thought of him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name somewhere,
it was like he was in the room.”
