“‘Preoccupied with his vengeance’: Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,’ and the Crafting of a Biographical Episode”

By Marc A. Mamigonian

“when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”¹

Of all the twice-told tales of Bob Dylan’s anni mirabiles of 1965 and 1966, few are more memorable than that of the breach between Dylan and folksinger and sometime friend and admirer Phil Ochs.

In its most basic form, the story is: Dylan played Ochs his new single, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” and Ochs was somewhat dismissive, incurring Dylan’s wrath and resulting in Dylan’s ordering Ochs out of his limousine and, effectively, out of his life.

Biographers have presented the Dylan-Ochs incident as emblematic of the cost in human terms of Dylan’s ascent to stardom: there was no longer a place for the kind of friendships that existed in the “freewheelin’ days” when everybody was on more or less equal footing. As such, no account of Dylan’s supposed transition from the community of folk music to the big business of rock is complete without some version of the incident; thus, it has been told and retold, albeit with limited efforts to verify the known facts and seemingly capricious authorial embellishments.

The story appears in every major Dylan and Ochs biography as well as in other more narrowly focused works. In this article I will take a synoptic view; and, although ultimately it is not possible to state definitively what really happened, it is possible to point out aspects of the accounts that simply cannot have happened or did not happen in the way presented. One would like such an approach to lead to a kind of epistemology of Dylan’s biographical works: how do we know what we think we know as facts are indeed facts (or are even likely to be facts)? Peter Doggett is on the mark in his observation that the incident “has been mythologized beyond the reach of accurate recall.”² Yet it continues to be treated by biographers as a settled fact—or as “settled” as something with entirely fluid details can be.

By the early 1970s the story was already established as symbolic of the dissolution of the Dylan-Ochs relationship and of Dylan’s evolution from approachable Village folkie to remote rock god. For example, in 1974 Ben Fong-Torres wrote that “Ochs used to hang out with Dylan … and served as a target for Dylan’s celebrated personal attacks on Village friends. The most popular of the incidents had Ochs getting thrown out of Dylan’s limousine one day, for not thinking ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window’ [sic] would be a smash.”³ As such, the story has become inseparable from discussions of the song itself, and some version features in most accounts of the recording and its release, such as in Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon’s Bob Dylan: All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track.⁴

The Dylan-Ochs contretemps has subtle and not-so-subtle variations across the various biographical accounts—so many, in fact, that it should give serious readers (as well as serious biographers) pause. For anyone seeking to distinguish fact from fiction or exaggeration it is a challenge to determine how (or if) the authors know what they are writing is factual and from where the specific details that give character to the various versions derive. Serious challenges exist for readers seeking to separate fact from fiction and to ascertain from where authors derived information presented as factual.

Phil Ochs himself seems ultimately to be the source for the story—or stories, since he offered versions somewhat at odds with each other in a 1968 interview later released on Folkways Records, to Anthony Scaduto sometime later, and to his biographer Marc Eliot in 1972.⁵ Ochs might not have been the most reliable source, and may be engaging in the human tendency to make himself look more perceptive by employing the gift of hindsight; but at least he was initially interviewed at a time when the incident in question was not a long-ago occurrence. The only other person who may have been present who has been interviewed, photographer Jerry Schatzberg, spoke to Daryl Sanders in 2016, more than half a century after the alleged incident and long after it had passed into myth. Dylan has never referred to the story. The other person who figures in most versions of the story, singer, songwriter, and actor David Cohen (aka David Blue), appears never to have commented on it. He died in 1982.⁶

Before examining the theme and variations of the Phil Ochs incident, it is instructive to look at what is known about the recording and release of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” which in most of the accounts is the apple of discord. For decades, confusion about the facts of the recording, release, and (alleged) performance of the song contributed to the inconsistent or factually incorrect accounts of the Dylan-Ochs incident. However, much more specific and reliable information is available today than was accessible to most of the biographers. Prior to the release of The Bootleg Series, vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 in its multiple forms in 2015, but most pertinently for this discussion, in its most expansive version, the “Collector’s Edition” which compiles each take of every Dylan studio recording from 1965 and 1966, the recording history of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was a muddle.⁷ Various outtakes from both the Highway 61 Revisited sessions and the fall 1965 revisitation of the song which resulted in the version released as a single in late 1965, were in circulation on bootlegs since the early 1970s but without accurate documentation.

The multiple takes of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” recorded during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions all date from July 30, 1965. The song was, of course, not included on the LP that was released at the end of August. One of the five complete takes was inadvertently released in limited quantities in September as the A-side of a single under the title of “Positively 4^th Street.”⁸ No satisfactory explanation has ever been offered for this error.

In light of Bob Dylan’s very long history of leaving important songs off albums, it is risky to speculate why “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was left unreleased. Perhaps Dylan was unsatisfied with the results; perhaps he had temporarily lost faith in the song; perhaps he was already rethinking what he would like it to sound like. Certainly, the re­recorded and released version to be discussed below is strikingly different from the July 30 one; or perhaps there simply was no room for it on the album and, unlike “Positively 4^th Street,” it was not seen as a viable stand-alone single at that time.

After the final Highway 61 Revisited session on August 4, Dylan did not go into the studio again until October 5, when he returned to Columbia’s Studio A in New York City for a session that concentrated on recording the new song “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” presumably for use as a single; but it would not be released until it surfaced on the 1985 Biograph box set.⁹ The session would be the first of a series through January 1966 that produced little material deemed releasable at the time. The other musicians on the October 5 session are The Hawks—Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm—who had begun backing Dylan in the “electric” half of his concerts in late September. The session also included recordings of the fragments “Jet Pilot” (released in slightly truncated form on Biograph where it was misidentified as coming from the Highway 61 Revisited sessions), “Medicine Sunday” (containing lyrics later recycled for use in “Temporary Like Achilles” on Blonde on Blonde), a fine instrumental that came to be known as “Number One” on bootlegs, and two run-throughs of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” one very slow, one a little faster, and both lasting only for a single verse.¹⁰

A rumor that seems to originate (in print, at least) with Dylan sessionographer Michael Krogsgaard has it that Dylan rehearsed “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” with The Hawks in Woodstock in September and performed the song live with them on October 1 during his concert at Carnegie Hall.¹¹ There is no circulating recording of that show, though rumors have long existed that such a recording exists somewhere; it did not surface in the live 50^th Anniversary Collection: 1965 archival release that functioned as a supplement to The Cutting Edge: 1965–1966. Nevertheless, the official bobdylan.com site presents a setlist for the show that includes “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”¹² A healthy skepticism about this is suggested until and unless further evidence emerges.¹³

After the none-too-fruitful October 5 session, Dylan was busy performing concerts with The Hawks nearly through Christmas but was able to fit in a couple of recording sessions. Levon Helm left the group just before the next attempt to record, on November 30 at Studio A in New York, and was replaced by Bobby Gregg, who had played on much of Highway 61 Revisited.¹⁴ After a number of frantic, ultimately unsuccessful, but nevertheless riveting attempts to record a rock version of “Visions of Johanna,” with Dylan’s exasperation at not getting what he wants audible, then recording an equally riveting, but also rejected, slower version, Dylan turned back to “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”

Ten takes, three of them complete, culminated in an acceptable version—the final take—which was subjected to a little editing during the outro and rush released as a single by Columbia.¹⁵ The new arrangement of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” worked up for the November 30 session, with its stops and starts, heavy cowbell, and Robertson’s stabbing guitar, is striking and sounds like hardly anything else out at the time (and bears little resemblance to the July 30 recording even though the lyrics are largely unchanged). However, it failed to rise above #58 on the American charts and would never be played live. Years later, Dylan would dismiss the song, saying “I was pressured to do another single. That’s why that one came out, I think.”¹⁶ This account of a song that Dylan made two serious attempts to record separated by several months strains credibility, but one can believe that that is how Dylan remembers it. Dylan’s struggles in the studio continued as 1966 began. On January 21 Dylan and the band futilely wrestled with the brilliant “She’s Your Lover Now” and failed to pin it down. On January 25, rejected versions of “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” were recorded along with “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” which would be Dylan’s next single in February (and part of the Blonde on Blonde LP released later that year). One more New York session took place on January 27, producing no recordings deemed releasable.

In the folk tale that has emerged featuring Dylan, Phil Ochs, and (usually) “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” it is the less successful Ochs who tells emperor Dylan that he has no clothes, or at least that his new single is a dud, and is cast out of the kingdom as a result: a classic case of blaming the messenger. It is worth noting that Ochs was in general an ardent defender of Dylan’s move in 1964-66 from topical/protest songs to visionary rock and roll, praising Highway 61 Revisited as basically impossible to top. If he was critical of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” it was not because he thought it was too commercial; if anything, he seemed to be arguing that it was not commercial enough:

My first reaction when “Positively 4^th Street” came out was total disappointment. I said, “Oh no, that’s not a single at all! What are you trying to do? You’re trying to blow it.” It was a hit anyway, but I thought it was a disastrous thing to do and then they put out “Please Crawl Out Your Window” [sic] and stuff like that and they literally took him off the air. He went from having achieved total air play and that possible Elvis niche—he just completely—he threw it all away.¹⁷

In its earliest published telling, in Anthony Scaduto’s 1971 Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography, we are informed that:

One night Dylan played his new single, Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, for Ochs and [David] Cohen [aka David Blue]. Before he put it on he told them: “This is the one I’ve been trying to do for years, this is the record that’s really got it.” He played it and asked: “What do ya think?” Cohen said he thought it was simply great … Ochs said: “It’s okay.” Dylan reacted as if he’d been knifed. … He played it once more and again asked: “Well, what do ya think?” And Ochs replied, “It’s okay, but it’s not going to be a hit.” Dylan’s anger turned to cold fury. “What do ya mean, it’s not going to be a hit? You’re crazy, man. It’s a great song. Ya only know protest, that’s all.”

A little later, a limo arrived to take them out to a club, but after riding for a few blocks Dylan “turned to Ochs and said: ‘Get out of here, Ochs. … You’re not a folksinger. You’re just a journalist.’”¹⁸ (Ochs was, in fact, also a journalist.) No date is given for the incident. However, in the full-length version of Scaduto’s interview with Ochs, only published in its entirety in 2021, Ochs actually stated that the new single in question was not “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” but rather “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” which was recorded in late January 1966 and released as a single in February, also to no chart success. Moreover, the anecdote lacks the memorable send-off, “You’re not a folksinger. You’re just a journalist.” ¹⁹

Ochs had told another version of the story in a 1968 Folkways interview, released posthumously on LP in 1976 as Broadside Ballads Vol. 11: Interviews With Phil Ochs. In this recounting, “one day [Dylan] was being photographed by Jerry Schatzberg and he was playing one of his new singles. And he was asking everybody what they thought. And he asked me what I thought, and I said I didn’t like it    I said, ‘Well, it’s not as good as your old stuff, and speaking commercially, I don’t think it’ll sell.’ We were all in a limousine, David Blue [i.e., David Cohen] was there  He [Dylan] said ‘Get out of the car.’” Notably, Ochs never specifies what the new single was. He does, though, go on to say that he did not see Dylan again after this incident for some two years; this is noteworthy because Scaduto writes about another incident that occurred in March 1966 when Ochs and journalist Jules Siegel had an unpleasant run-in with Dylan in the Hollywood Hills.²⁰

According to Robert Shelton, the incident triggered by Ochs’s insufficient enthusiasm for “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” took place two months before a different incident with Ochs that Shelton witnessed just before Christmas 1965, thus in October.²¹ This is problematic inasmuch as “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” was not recorded until November 30. Shelton seems not to have been present for the earlier incident and perhaps is deriving his account from Scaduto’s.

Dylan had played his single “Crawl out Your Window” [sic] for [David] Cohen and Ochs. Dave loved it, but Phil said he didn’t think it would be a hit. That night, Dylan stopped his limousine and made Ochs crawl out the door, saying: “You’re not a folk singer, you’re just a journalist.”²²

It is worth noting that it’s theoretically possible that earlier in the fall Dylan could have played Ochs the Highway 61 Revisited outtake version of the song and that is what he reacted to negatively, thus prompting Dylan to rerecord the song. This would itself be a remarkable story, but it is not a story that anyone has told.

Bob Spitz’s Dylan: A Biography gives the story another spin, presenting what have since come to be known as “alternative facts.”

It had been in 1966, after one of Bob’s appearances at Carnegie Hall. Backstage, he played Phil the final mix of his new single, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window [sic],” and was told it wasn’t up to snuff. Enraged, Bob invited Phil to a post-concert party and offered him a ride so that he could order his limo driver to pull over and throw Phil out of the car.²³

Spitz’s cited source for his account is Shelton’s No Direction Home, from which it nevertheless differs in several fundamental ways. Shelton placed the event in 1965, not 1966, and made no mention of Carnegie Hall. Certainly, if the event took place in 1966 it did not take place after a Dylan concert at Carnegie Hall, since Dylan did not play there in 1966. He did play there on October 1, 1965, as we have seen, which would jibe with Shelton’s statement that it occurred “a couple of months before” Christmas. But he couldn’t very well have played Ochs the final mix of the “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” single, since the single hadn’t been recorded yet. Still, one appreciates Spitz’s added touch, almost certainly fictional, of Dylan’s offering Ochs a ride just to have an opportunity to have him thrown out of the limo.

Howard Sounes adds his own interpretation in Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, writing,

That winter Bob went back into the studio with The Hawks (with Bobby Gregg temporarily replacing Levon Helm on drums). They rerecorded “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” as a swaggering single. The lyric was slight, utilizing the opening phrase from “Positively 4^th Street,” but the band swung like a wrecking ball. Bob proudly played the song to Phil Ochs as they were riding together in a limousine. When Ochs’s reaction was less than enthusiastic, Bob told the driver to stop. “Get out, Ochs,” he said. “You’re not a folksinger.” Going for the jugular, he added: “You’re just a journalist.”²⁴

It wasn’t yet winter when Dylan went back into the studio, and the playing of the single now somewhat implausibly (though not impossibly) takes place in the limousine itself, thereby somewhat streamlining the story: but what is new here is not likely to be true, and what is true is not new. Sounes also adds that “the two men continued an uneasy friendship,” which is hard to figure since by most accounts Dylan and Ochs did not see each other after 1966 for many years.

Clinton Heylin’s presentations of this incident deserve special attention, if only because he has written more Dylan books than anyone else. In accounts from Behind the Shades and Behind the Shades Revisited, he places the incident nebulously in late fall 1965 and is content to quote from the Ochs Folkways interview, but states that the song in question was “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” although Ochs did not specify the song in that interview.²⁵

In Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments, Heylin notes that in late December 1965:

After spending the day at a photo session with Jerry Schatzberg (probably the outdoor shots used on the Blonde on Blonde inner sleeve); the evening sees Dylan launch into one of his so-called truth-attacks on Phil Ochs, who has unwisely expressed disappointment with Dylan’s’ new single “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” while sitting in Dylan’s limousine. After the verbal onslaught Dylan orders Ochs out of the car.²⁶

Heylin likely could not have known at the time that the outdoor photos used on the Blonde on Blonde cover and inner sleeve (i.e., the two “scarf photos”) were actually done by Schatzberg in February 1966 and that Ochs was not present.²⁷ Moreover, Heylin’s 1996 Stolen Moments account differs from his 1991, 2001, and 2011 Behind the Shades versions, each of which imply an earlier date based on the erroneous belief that “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” had been recorded at the beginning of October, and with Levon Helm on drums.

In The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966, Heylin offers a slightly different account. Jettisoning his own previous Ochs-derived presentations of the incident, he fashions a revised version mostly based on that of Daryl Sanders.²⁸ He places the event sometime in February 1966, three weeks after Dylan was on Bob Fass’s WBAI radio show on January 26. Coming in the context of a discussion of the commercial failure of both “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” the latter of which was released as a single on February 14, Heylin takes Ochs’s critique (“I don’t think it’ll sell”) to refer to the former.²⁹ Following the lead of Sanders, he sets the scene at Jerry Schatzberg’s studio and quotes Schatzberg as saying “Dylan didn’t take too kindly to” Ochs’ criticism. Heylin differs from Sanders, however, in placing the incident in February 1966 rather than on December 28, 1965. According to this iteration:

[Dylan] sat there quietly seething until it was time to go clubbing, at which point he offered Ochs a lift and then ordered him out of the limo, having come up with the perfect rebuttal: “Phil, you’re not a songwriter, you’re just a journalist.”³⁰

One notes the subtle variation: Dylan no longer demeans Ochs by saying he is not a folksinger, as in the other accounts, but instead he is not a songwriter.³¹ Yet, in the second volume of his Double Life of Bob Dylan, Heylin states that the last time Dylan and Ochs had spoken was not February 1966 but December 1965, “when he had tossed him out of his limo.”³² Perhaps having a double life allows both accounts to be true.

Daniel Mark Epstein’s The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, is not a biography per se but nevertheless includes a sketch of the incident within a larger discussion of Dylan’s “sadistic” treatment of Ochs (and others). Although his cursory endnotes disappear entirely for this section, Epstein’s account is clearly derived from Scaduto’s biography as well as from Ochs’ 1968 Broadside interview, but features a new setting. Now occurring in Dylan’s apartment, to which Ochs and David Cohen are invited to hear the new single, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” Cohen again approves and Ochs dissents, resulting in, later, his expulsion from Dylan’s limousine with the rejoinder, “You’re not a folksinger. You’re just a journalist.”³³

Ian Bell’s account in Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan, the sources for which are entirely opaque, more or less follows the template. Placing the event in December 1965, and arguably with a nod to the ambiguity around the incident, he writes: “[a]s the story goes, his offence was to fail to appreciate the new single, ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’ Or rather, he failed to praise the track as lavishly as, it seems, Dylan had come to expect.”³⁴ Exit Phil Ochs from the limousine.

In That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde, Daryl Sanders presents a somewhat more coherent narrative. He specifically dates the incident to December 28, 1965, one week after the “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” single was released, at the studio of Jerry Schatzberg. Present were Schatzberg, Dylan, Ochs, and David Blue. Dylan plays his new song and the same sequence unfolds: Ochs responds that “It’s okay, but it’s not going to be a hit.” Later, on the way out to a club, Dylan orders Ochs out of the limousine with the line, “Phil, you’re not a writer, you’re just a journalist.”³⁵

Sanders adds to the account the corroboration of Schatzberg, whom he interviewed in 2016, and who recalled that “[i]n front of everybody, Phil was just as honest as he always was, and Dylan didn’t take too kindly to it.”³⁶

Sanders indicates that he is deriving some of the details of the story from Scaduto’s interview with Ochs. We now know, though, that Ochs told Scaduto the new single was “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” which Scaduto seems to have silently “corrected” to “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” And he may have been right to do so; certainly if the event did take place on December 28, the new single was “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” since “One of Us Must Know” had not yet been recorded.

Confused readers will find no comfort in the work of Ochs’s biographers, who are not models of accuracy or consistency on this incident either. Marc Eliot, who wrote the first book-length biography of Ochs, and Michael Schumacher, who wrote the second, provide narratives that simply cannot be squared with either plausibility or possibility. Both set the scene at Carnegie Hall (which perhaps explains Spitz’s otherwise unaccounted for placement of it there), specifically in September 1965 at the Sing-In for Peace. As Eliot tells it, “[e]veryone in the folk world participated, including Dylan,” who performed “Blowin’ in the Wind,” no less, but was more interested in what people thought of “his newest single, ‘Sooner or Later’ [sic]. Backstage he sang it twice for Phil, who wasn’t impressed.”³⁷ “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” wasn’t released, recorded, or written in September, nor even in 1965 at all.³⁸ What follows can be predicted based on other versions of the story.

Schumacher’s account offers some different details: it was “one evening after [Ochs], Dylan, and a host of others performed at a ‘Sing-In for Peace’ at Carnegie Hall. Dylan had a new song—‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window [sic]’—that he wanted to play for Phil and David Blue.” Blue apparently “knew better than to offer anything but an unqualified endorsement,” but not fearless Phil Ochs. Inevitably, the limousine arrives “to take Dylan, Phil, and others to an uptown club,” and “[i]t had only gone a few blocks up Sixth Avenue” when Dylan expelled Ochs from the vehicle with the by now familiar denunciation: “You’re not a folksinger . . . You’re a journalist.”

Schumacher credits Ochs with “being on the mark with his assessment of the song’s commercial potential” but “Dylan, not surprisingly, had the final say, not only to Phil, but to all the people who he felt were putting him down or holding him back, when he issued ‘Positively Fourth [sic] Street.’”³⁹ Of course, “Positively 4^th Street” had been released in early September, which means Dylan had already had the final say even before the incident occurred; but perhaps that is what visionaries do.

Even more problematic is the utter implausibility of Bob Dylan in fall 1965 performing at the Sing-In for Peace, much less singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”⁴⁰ This landmark event on September 24, 1965, was organized by Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber, the latter of whom had been among the most vocal of the folk music old guard in lamenting the demise of Bob Dylan, Protest Singer, as exemplified by his “Open Letter to Bob Dylan” in the November 1964 issue of Sing Out! The Sing-In for Peace featured dozens of performers, from Pete Seeger to The Fugs, but Bob Dylan was not among them, since he was in Austin, Texas, performing for the first time with The Hawks. However, as noted above, Dylan would perform a concert at Carnegie Hall a week later, on October 1.

The vagueness and errors inevitably have seeped into more general works that draw on the biographies.

Mark Brend’s American Troubadors: Groundbreaking Singer-Songwriters of the ‘60s is circumspect in its treatment of the alleged incident or incidents, noting aptly that it “has since passed into legend”—and, thus, beyond the realm of the mere fact. He places the scene in autumn 1965, and it “may have been in September after the two singers participated in a Sing­in for Peace at Carnegie Hall” (although, as stated above, it in fact could not have been), or else “[i]t may have been during a Dylan photoshoot at about the same time.” Similarly, the song in question “may have been ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window [sic],’ or ‘One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).’ … It’s possible that Ochs criticised both songs at different times, and the incidents have been fused into a single event.” Fair enough, and he does not belabor the inconsistencies and downright oddities of the various versions of the incident. “Reports differ,” he offers: an understatement.⁴¹

Peter Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ‘60’s Counter-Culture is similarly muddled on this incident. Like Brend, Doggett recognizes the shortcomings of the received narratives, writing that in September 1965 “Ochs and Dylan clashed ideologies in a meeting that has been mythologised beyond the reach of accurate recall.” Nevertheless, he provides the “essentials” of the event (which may contain the elements of several incidents as well as entirely fictional elements): “Ochs lectured Dylan about his social responsibilities; Dylan demurred, and played Ochs a new song (either ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window [sic]’ or ‘One of Us Must Know’, accounts differ),” and Dylan “dismissed Ochs . . . with a damning phrase that haunted him into the grave: ‘You’re nothing [or perhaps ‘You’re not a songwriter’] but a journalist.” Doggett tacks on the ending: “At some point, there was a car journey, from which Ochs was expelled after goading Dylan once too often.”⁴²

Since none of these biographers provides much in the way of documentation, it is hard to know how much of this entire incident is real, or made up, or distorted. Even the most recent publication referred to here, Heylin’s The Double Life of Bob Dylan (both volumes), written with the benefit of access to the official Bob Dylan Archive and thus presenting considerable new and valuable information for the first time, lacks proper endnotes, settling for a list of sources, published and unpublished, primary and secondary, for each chapter; which is better than nothing, to be sure, but only just.

As for Phil Ochs himself, who seems to be the ultimate source for most versions of this narrative, there are good reasons to take his accounts—which, as we have seen, are not entirely consistent with each other—with a grain of salt. By the time he spoke of it on the record it was well-established that Dylan’s two singles (“Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and “One of Us Must Know”) had been major commercial disappointments. However, these setbacks were temporary. Even allowing for the up-and-down nature of the reception of his post-Blonde on Blonde work, Dylan remained undisputedly a major figure.

In contrast, things did not go well for Ochs in the years after 1966. Perhaps he was within his rights to stake out a piece of high ground and point out that he had been right and Dylan had been wrong. After all, Ochs was neither the first nor the last person to second-guess Dylan’s career moves. Ochs said that he did not see Dylan again until the Woody Guthrie memorial concert on January 20, 1968. He describes himself seething at the concert—over who was included and who, namely himself, was excluded—but “I went there only because Dylan was there. Psychologically I had to look at Dylan. I had to see him, because I hadn’t seen him since I had the fight and I had to look at him, just to see what he looked like. So I went there and I saw Dylan.”⁴³

It is beyond the scope of this article to engage in an in-depth psychological study of Phil Ochs. He was a talented and troubled man, and his love/hate relationship with Dylan seemed to occupy an especially large place in his psyche. Suze Rotolo, in her memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, observes that “their friendship was complicated. Phil Ochs came to know his limitations as a songwriter in the context of his admiration for what he believed were the unlimited abilities of Bob Dylan.”⁴⁴ Another contemporary, Tom Paxton, recalled, “Phil was very envious of Bob. All of us were envious of Bob’s success. What the hell! We all started out with the same equipment—guitars and voices—and one of us was suddenly a comet. It’s unsettling, and nobody’s going to handle it perfectly.”⁴⁵ Paxton, however, was able to go on with his life and his career; Ochs less so. It would be unfair and a gross simplification to suggest that all that went wrong with Ochs up to and including his tragic suicide in 1976 should be attributed to Ochs’s obsession with Dylan; and yet some have. Liam Clancy rather callously declared that “Phil Ochs couldn’t take Dylan’s success and committed suicide,” while Clinton Heylin writes, that Dylan “doubtless blamed himself, as others did, for writing Phil’s last rejection slip.” Robert Shelton even less ambiguously asserts that “some said his exclusion from the RTR was the last in a long line of crushing events that gave him no way out.”⁴⁶

In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm, in a now widely quoted passage, writes that “[i]n a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction . . . In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios—there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.”⁴⁷ Setting aside Malcolm’s comments on imaginative literature, her observations on the uncertainties that lie at the heart of biographies must give us pause: what is truth? But the lesson to be drawn from this is not that biographers are at liberty to invent and embroider as they see fit; rather, they have a heavy responsibility to be transparent and readers have a responsibility to read critically. Biographers can expedite this transparency by being clear about their sources and why they privilege some over others; readers must do the hard work of delving into footnotes and comparing accounts that do not necessarily agree. As Malcolm also writes, “The world likes to hold on to its fantasy, rumor, politics, and ghoulish gossip, not dispel them…………………………………………… The pleasure of hearing ill of the dead is not a negligible one, but it pales before the pleasure of hearing ill of the living.”⁴⁸ In the final assessment, the problem with the various accounts of the Dylan-Ochs spat is not that biographers have seized on a juicy story—that is what biographers do. Just as the story of Dylan “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 has been told and retold with endless variations, pet theories, and revelations crowding the frame, the Dylan-Ochs incident is not going to go away.⁴⁹

Nor, for that matter, is it of paramount importance whether the Ochs incident took place in December 1965 or February 1966 or in some other proximate timeframe, whether it took place in a car or in a club or somewhere else, or whether the disputed song was “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” or “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” to mention but three of the variations in the accounts. It is clear enough that there was a fundamental rupture between Dylan and Ochs around this time.

The problem lies in the shoddy attention to detail, the cumulative novelization of the alleged incident, the cherry-picking of this detail from one account and that detail from another account even though the accounts as a whole may actually contradict each other, and the utter opacity about sources. The ambiguity around the alleged incident should not grant biographers a license to retell it with unsupported (and in some cases unsupportable) details. One quarter of the way into the 21^st century, what is the function of Dylan biographies? To retell the same familiar stories with variations seemingly based on little more than the whims of the biographers? To what end? Some readers of Dylan (or Ochs) biographies may still be looking merely for a fan-level celebrity bio; there will always be an audience for such books. But with the proliferation of academic events and publications focusing on Dylan’s work, surely it is time to expect higher standards of research.

¹ Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 169.

² Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of the ‘60s Counter-Culture (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007), p. 63.

³ Ben Fong-Torres, Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door: On the Road in ’74 (New York: Pocket Books, 1974), 25.

⁴ Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, Bob Dylan: All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2015), pp. 208-209.

⁵ In Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971), Scaduto mentions that he interviewed Dylan in January 1971; I infer that he interviewed Ochs in 1969 or 1970, since the interview with Dylan was done later. Unfortunately, no dates are given for Scaduto’s interviews as published in Stephanie Trudeau, ed., The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Players, and Lovers Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). See also Interviews with Phil Ochs: Broadside Vol. 11 (Folkways Records-FW05321, 1976); Marc Eliot, Phil Ochs: Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs (London: Omnibus Press, 1990), p. 97; also in Eliot, Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995), p. 108.

⁶ David Blue, born Stuart David Cohen, was a notable fixture on the Greenwich Village scene at the time. He released several records, including his eponymous 1966 album issued on Elektra and which vies with the LP Dick Campbell Sings Where It’s At and Mouse’s single “A Public Execution” for the most entertaining products of the first wave of Dylan imitators. His monologue while playing pinball is among the highlights of Dylan’s 1978 film Renaldo & Clara, and he also appeared in Neil Young’s Human Highway (released in 1982). See also David Browne, “Man Out of Time: The Music and Mystery of David Blue,” Rolling Stone, June 20, 2020, accessed at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/david-blue-singer-songwriter-mystery-bob-dylan-joni-mitchell-1005073/.

⁷ Even the exact title remains somewhat debatable: on the original single release the title is printed emphatically as “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”

⁸ According to Paul Cable’s early guide Bob Dylan: His Unreleased Recordings (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), the erroneous pressings occurred at the Los Angeles pressing plant and consequently were available only in that area (p. 69).

⁹ “I always thought it was a good song,” Dylan is quoted as saying in the Biograph notes, “but it just never made it onto an album.”

¹⁰ In Revolution in the Air, Clinton Heylin confidently assigns the recording of the version of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” released as a single in December to this date: “A November 30 studio date, assigned by others, is decidedly unlikely” (p. 254). Nonetheless, it was so.

¹¹ Glen Dundas, Tangled: A Recording History of Bob Dylan (Thunder Bay, Ont.: SMA Services, 2004), 32. (This is the 5^th edition of Dundas’s work earlier published as Tangled Up in Tapes and Tangled Up in Tapes Revisited.) Dundas notes that the Woodstock rehearsals and the Carnegie Hall concert tapes were reported in the draft copy of Krogsgaard’s book Master of the Tracks, but that no evidence of the existence of these tapes has emerged. Krogsgaard does not list either in his later Positively Bob Dylan: A Thirty-Year Discography, Concert & Recording Guide, 1961-1991 (Ann Arbor, MI: Popular Culture, Ink., 1991). I thank Clyde Allen for helping to track down these references.

¹² See https://www.bobdylan.com/date/1965-10-01-carnegie-hall/. The site does not provide sources for this information. Oddly, the site omits the setlist for the October 29 or 31 Boston performance that is included (in poor audio quality) on the 50th Anniversary Collection: 1965.

¹³ The likelihood seems very small. “No recording exists in the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, and no recording is known to exist” (private communication). I thank them for their efforts in looking for this probably non-existent needle in a haystack.

¹⁴ For many years, the October 5 and November 30 sessions—or the selection of songs from them that circulated on bootleg—came to be known as the “Los Angeles Tape,” even though (or perhaps, following the logic of bootlegs, because) none of the recordings were done in LA. For decades, precisely what was recorded when was obscure. But it was not easy to gather such information in “the old days.”

¹⁵ Dylan’s exclamation, “Oh my God!” is snipped down to “Oh my.”

¹⁶ Biograph notes.

¹⁷ The Dylan Tapes, p. 146. Ochs sort of has a point—“Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” were commercial failures; but a few months later, three songs from Blonde on Blonde—“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “I Want You,” and “Just Like a Woman”—would make the top 40. It is also the case that “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” were less ostentatious failures in the UK, reaching 17 and 33, respectively. Furthermore, while reasonable people can disagree over the merits of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?,” the commercial failure of “One of Us Must Know” may be an indictment of the public or the label, but not of the artist who created it.

¹⁸ Anthony Scaduto, Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971), p. 229.

¹⁹ The Dylan Tapes, p. 147. This is not the only difference between the original interview and the account in Scaduto’s biography; the latter is rather more dramatized, presumably for effect.

²⁰ Scaduto, pp. 229, 234. It is likely that Scaduto did not have access to the Folkways interview, which had not been released when he wrote his book.

²¹ Shelton, p. 331. One sometimes gets the impression that Dylan did very little in late 1965 and early 1966 other than find opportunities to abuse Phil Ochs.

²² Ibid.

²³ Bob Spitz, Dylan: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), pp. 434-35.

24 Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York: Grove Press, 2001), p. 193.

²⁵ Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1991), p. 152; Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited (New York: William Morrow, 2001), p. 234, as well as Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: 20^th Anniversary Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), p. 234.

²⁶ Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: A Life in Stolen Moments (London: Omnibus Press, 1996), p. 88.

²⁷ See Daryl Sanders, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019), p. 173; also Bob Egan’s valuable Pop Spots website for a thorough discussion of the photo shoot and its location: https://popspotsnyc.com/blonde_on_blonde/.

²⁸ Sanders’ book is listed as one of many secondary sources Heylin lists for the chapter, but the absence of specific citations means that determining the origin of any given quote or fact requires familiarity with each and every listed source.

²⁹ Clinton Heylin, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966 (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2021), p. 385-86.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ I thank Clyde Allen for noticing this and bringing it to my attention. What rationale was there for altering the account? Is it an echo of Sanders’ version? (For which, see below.)

³² Clinton Heylin, The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Vol. 2: 1966-2021: Far Away from Myself (London: Jonathan Cape, 2023), p. 207.

³³ Daniel Mark Epstein, The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), p. 137.

³⁴ Ian Bell, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan (New York: Pegasus Books, 2012), p. 437.

³⁵ Again, note the change from “you’re not a folk singer” to “you’re not a writer.”

³⁶ Sanders, pp. 49-50.

³⁷ Marc Eliot, Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979), p. 104.

³⁸ However poorly it fits with his altogether muddled account, Eliot is nevertheless insistent on the song in question, adding a footnote to in the revised edition of Death of a Rebel stating that “Although it has always been reported the song in question was ‘Won’t You Please Crawl Out My Window [sic],’ Phil, in an interview with the author, April 18, 1972, insisted the song in question was ‘Sooner or Later’” (Eliot [1990], p. 97).

³⁹ Michael Schumacher, There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs (New York: Hyperion, 1996), p. 106.

⁴⁰ It is unclear exactly when he had last performed the song, since setlists are far from complete for 1963, 1964, and parts of 1965. The last definitely documented performance was at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963. In the interest of full disclosure, it is alleged that Dylan also played the song on February 11, 1966, in Richmond, VA (see The Wicked Messenger [a supplement to Isis magazine], May 3, 1999), which is also almost certainly incorrect.

⁴¹ Mark Brend, American Troubadours: Groundbreaking Singer-Songwriters of the ‘60s (United Kingdom: Backbeat Books, 2001), p. 103.

⁴² Doggett, p. 63. No specific source is provided, but Doggett mentions Scaduto.

⁴³ Broadside Ballads Vol. 11: Interviews With Phil Ochs (Folkways Records, 1976).

⁴⁴ Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), p. 246.

⁴⁵ Quoted in Heylin, Behind the Shades Revisited, p. 233.

⁴⁶ Clancy is quoted in Kathleen Mackay, Bob Dylan: Intimate Insights from Friends and Fellow Musicians (London: Omnibus Press, 2007), p. 23; Heylin, Behind the Shades: 20^th Anniversary Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), pp. 434-35; Shelton, p. 452.

⁴⁷ Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 155.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 24.

⁴⁹ The variations, pet theories, and revelations literally crowd the frame in the culmination of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2025). Since the film ends with Newport 1965, viewers are denied (or spared) a cinematic treatment of the Dylan-Ochs battle royale.

Works Cited

Bell, Ian. Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan. New York: Pegasus Books, 2012.

Cable, Paul. Bob Dylan: His Unreleased Recordings. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980.

Brend, Mark. American Troubadors: Groundbreaking Singer-Songwriters of the ’60s. United Kingdom: Backbeat Books, 2001.

Doggett, Peter. There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of ’60’s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Dundas, Glen. Tangled: A Recording History of Bob Dylan. Thunder Bay, Ont.: SMA Services, 2004.

Dylan, Bob. The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12, The Cutting Edge 1965-66 (Complete Edition). Columbia, 2015.

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Epstein, Daniel Mark. The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait. New York: Harper Collins, 2011.

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Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades: 20^th Anniversary Edition. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.

Heylin, Clinton. The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2021.

Heylin, Clinton. The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Vol. 2: 1966-2021: Far Away from Myself. London: Jonathan Cape, 2023.

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Irwin, Colin. Legendary Sessions: Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited. New York: Billboard Books, 2008.

Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Margotin, Philippe and Guesdon, Jean-Michel. Bob Dylan: All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2015.

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Rotolo, Suze. A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. New York: Broadway Books, 2008.

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