Biography bob dylan album cover jones street

On a bitterly cold day, February 1963, a singer/songwriter and his girlfriend come walking down Jones Street toward 4 West Street, West Village, New York. Music echoes in their footsteps: How many roads must a man…

On either side of a snow covered Jones, a Volkswagon camper, a truck, a car and other traffic are parked up narrowing the one way road. A fresh-faced Bob Dylan, freezing in the icy weather, has his hands thrust deep into his pockets, while Suze Rotolo hangs on his arm. Unseen, photographer Don Hunstein is waiting to shoot them as they move toward him.

“This was totally Don’s idea,” DeeAnne, Don Hunstein’s wife of 50 years, told me of the iconic photograph that became the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album. “The reason he was taking pictures at that time was because Columbia records had already issued Bob Dylan’s very first album and they knew he was on the road to being a popular artist…and they had no pictures. So, they said to Don, who was on the staff there, go down and take some pictures of him.”

What Hunstein caught that day were candid shots of a youthful and, somewhat, awkward fledgling pop star Dylan with girlfriend. In one shot where they have just stepped outside, Dylan is looking back up the steps of the apartment building toward the photographer, Suze clinging to his arm. The singer looks unsure, almost vulnerable, in these well crafted and natural photographs.

“Don went over to Dylan’s apartment, where the singer was living with his then girlfriend Suze Rotolo,” DeeAnne explained. “They were young (Dylan and Rotolo), I think she was 18, he was 20. They had a little apartment in a brownstone, up on the fifth floor walk-up. So, he took a bunch of pictures…then they went outside and it was a very cold and nasty day with a lot of snow in the street.”

DeeAnne laughs – a warm infectious

The Village and East Village have long been the home of music-makers and music venues; their streets and sites on more than one occasion the inspiration for song-writers and the subject of many a song line.

But perhaps nothing has imprinted an image of these neighborhoods in the popular music-consuming consciousness in the same way as their depiction on the cover of record albums.  And some of the most iconic album covers of the last few generations were shot in the Village and East Village.

As mentioned in a prior post marking the death of Suze Rotolo, the cover of the epoch-making album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was shot at the head of one-block long Jones Street in the South (some might say West) Village.  Recently landmarked after several years of agitation by GVSHP and a broad coalition of community groups, Jones Street today looks not much different than it did in 1963, the main difference being the addition of street trees some time in the last forty-eight years.

Heading east, Extra Place, a tiny alley coming off 1st Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue, is probably one of the least known streets anywhere in Manhattan.  But it was well-known to performers at CBGB’s, located at 313 Bowery, which had a rear exit that led out onto it. It was there that the Ramones made Extra Place an emblem of the nascent punk movement when they shot the cover for their third album, ‘Rocket to Russia,’ there in 1977.

There’s little sign of those days on Extra Place now, as condo and dorm construction on almost all sides have erased most of the gritty, bare-brick walls.  In fact, the Extra Place of 1977 looked to have much more in common, visually at least, with the Extra Place of 1934 as captured in the photo below from the archives of the New York Public Library than it does with the Extra Place of today.

Several blocks east but a year (and arguably an entire musical generation) earlie

Gramercy Park Revisited: My Search for Bob Dylan Album Cover Locations in New York City

Executive Summary of this site (for you busy beavers):

My search for the long-lost location of the Blonde on Blonde album cover shoot (which I have still not found), led me to discover two other memorable Dylan album photo sites - that of Highway 61 Revisited and also that of Another Side of Bob Dylan - in places in New York City that I would never have thought of.

Album: Highway 61 Revisited (released August 1965 by Columbia records)
Photo courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.
Photographer: Daniel Kramer.
Location: Front steps of 4 Gramercy Park West, New York City.

Album: Another Side of Bob Dylan (released August 1964 by Columbia Records)
Photo courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment.
Photographer: Sandy Speiser.
Location: Southwest corner of 52nd Street and Broadway, Times Square, New York looking east. Dylan is looking west.

Intro: My Own Back Pages

I've been walking around New York City for half my life. There's always something new - or something old - around every corner, and thousands of personal memories from the back pages of my life.

Washington Square Park, Greenwich Village, NY

I've always been interested in seeing where famous events happened - where movies were filmed, where books were written, where famous photos were shot -- and there are dozens of these spots in Greenwich Village, one of the older neighborhood sections of Manhattan, whose small streets have been home to many writers, musicians, and painters, and also, where I used to live.

Being a longtime Dylan fan, I have long known where the cover of "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was taken; it was on the north end of Jones Street, only a block from Cornelia Street, where I had my first apartment in Manhattan in 1977. (Ground floor $150 a month.). I even took my parents-in-law's picture there one snowy winter day, with them posing as Dylan a

"Art is the perpetual motion of illusion," Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1978. "The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?"

Famous for creating much and explaining little, Dylan has dipped his toes into just about every form of art there is: music, literature, painting, theater, film. But if art is the perpetual motion of illusion, then Dylan has been moving swiftly for some six decades, perhaps most clearly displaying this sentiment on the covers of his albums.

Some feature depictions of himself that seem to encapsulate the moment in time — his stark stare on the front of 1966's Blonde on Blonde or guileful grin on the cover of 1969's Nashville Skyline. Other LPs feature Dylan's brushstrokes (he has painted canvases since the '60s) or photographs of strangers taken from entirely different eras.

Other individuals have appeared alongside Dylan on the covers of some of his most famous albums, like the red-dressed, cigarette-smoking woman on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, or the hodgepodge group surrounding him on 1975's The Basement Tapes. In true freewheelin' spirit, there have also been instances where one image was selected, only to be replaced at the last moment with something different.

Each Dylan album has a distinctive cover design. We're taking a look at the backstories for 20 of them.

Odd Couples: Bob Dylan and Michael Bolton