Michael Bloomfield, Perry Lederman, Bob Dylan
and me
My conversation with Bob, (in his dressing room before his concert in Rotterdam, September 19, 1987), about making a film tribute to Michael Bloomfield – the reason I had wanted to talk to him – had been diverted by Bob´s remembering that when we´d met at his concert in San Francisco in 1980, I was accompanied by Perry Lederman, an old friend of both Bob and Michael. He asked me how Perry was doing, and since I had mixed feelings about the guy and had recently heard he´d been responsible for a deadly fire in the house of someone he´d been staying with, (which didn´t surprise me), I answered, "Well…I don´t know about Perry". Bob scowled at me and said, "Yeah, you don´t know about Perry." This was a side of Bob I was to see on many occasions, the watchdog against anyone being unfairly judged.
When Bob arrived in New York in 1961 and met Perry Lederman, he was already a fingerpicking legend in Greenwich Village, and though I wasn´t sure I could believe Perry when he told me he had "taught Dylan how to hitchhike", I knew he´d taught him some things on the guitar.
I was living with Michael in the fall of 1980, and Perry, who had been living in the Bay Area, studying the sarod with Ali Akbar Khan, would often visit Michael at his home in Mill Valley, which was close to Ali Akbar Khan´s school of Indian music. Perry and Michael would quickly settle down to playing favorite old folk songs like "The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night". I loved being asked to sing along. We could keep a song like that going for half an hour, each of them weaving intricate, exciting solos, which felt to me like watching birds swooping, spiraling, and diving through the air. Perry would push the tempo faster and faster until it seemed he reached some kind of plateau, a zone in which he was just channeling the music and the guitar was playing itself.