With the next couple of e-mails I am going to publish my first Daily Dylan article, which will be about Bob Dylan’s early high school bands. We try to get it all straight and make the reading worthwhile, although we also tried to implement as many facts and findings as possible. We did split it into a few parts to make it more digestible.

If you have missed part 1, which was all about Bob’s very first band The Shadow Blasters, you can check it out it here!

Today: The Jokers!

1. The Shadow Blasters (fall of 1956 – early summer of 1957)

2. The Jokers (12/24/1956 - unknown)

Right in the middle of Bob’s engagement with The Shadow Blasters he went down to St. Paul for Christmas to meet his friend from Camp Herzl Larry Kegan and Howard Rutman, a cousin of Bob, and while in St. Paul Bob “founded” yet another band with whom he even did a record:

The Jokers (Bob Dylan on piano and lead vocals, Larry Kegan & Cousin Howard “Howie” Rutman on background vocals), founded in St. Paul, probably on the 24th of December 1956. We don’t know how long their engagement lasted.

We find a lot of information on The Jokers in Clinton Heylin’s “The Double Life of Bob Dylan”:
“According to Rutman, The Jokers was a real combo, playing high school dances and dreaming of greater things, “We were hugely ambitious, and we really wanted to do stuff.”

“By December 1956, his piano-playing was deemed sufficiently competent – at least by his close friend Larry – to make a record. It was Christmas Eve and Bobby was in St Paul, of all places, with Kegan and a cousin named Howard Rutman, when they decided to pay the five dollars necessary to make a double-sided, eight-minute acetate of the three of them singing a medley of their favorite songs. They called themselves The Jokers. With Bobby frequently drowned out by the atonal acrobatics of his off-key friends, the record hints at, well, nothing but three friends hopped up on Christmas bonhomie.”

They recorded at Telinde Music in St. Paul (just a few blocks away from the Ten O’Clock Scholar and from where the new last name “Dylan” would be born in three years time). A copy of the acetate from the estate of Larry Kegan was offered for sale on eBay in October 2002 with the estimated value at 150.000–200.000 US-Dollars. The reserve was not met and the disc remained unsold. It is now said to be in the possession of Bob Dylan.

The track list shows as follows:

1.      Let The Good Times Roll (Shirley Goodman & Leonard Lee)
2.      Boppin' The Blues (Carl Perkins & Howard Griffin)
3.      Won't You Be My Girl? (Michael Henderson)
4.      Lawdy, Miss Clawdy (Lloyd Price)
5.      Ready Teddy (John Marascalco & Robert Blackwell)
6.      Confidential (Dolinda Morgan)
7.      In The Still Of The Night (The 5 Satins)
8.      Earth Angel (Dootsie Williams/Curtis Williams)

An unidentified song with almost no lyric beyond the phrase "Won't you be my girl?" [Possibly Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers' "I Want You To Be My Girl”]                         

Above: Picture from Duncan Hannah of this very record (Mixin’ Up The Medicine)

From Bob Stacy:

“From unverified sources: the recording is supposedly approx. 8 mins. long but the sound quality is generally poor. My assumption: the brief duration with multiple songs implies an extended medley arrangement, not unlike what The Jokers might’ve typically performed. I've seen "awful" used as a description but don't know if that referred to the sound quality, the performance, or both. Still, it would be worth hearing.”

In “Mixin’ Up The Medicine” there is a wonderful entry from Lee Ranaldo, who came to see and listen to this very record. With 6 pieces on one side with always just one or two verses of each song, roughly 30-40 seconds long and 2 more pieces on the other side. The record did cost 5$, roughly 50$ in todays worth. Lee mentions that in 2020 he came to hear that Bob himself allegedly has no memories at all having made that record and neither to the Terlinde-store itself.

Above: The Google Maps location of Terlinde Music in St. Paul and the building which used to house it.

Louie Kemp: “Larry and Bob would sing at camp all the time, and in the city they would jam together. But that record was a one-off. That guy Howard may have sung with them the odd time, [but] he lived in St. Paul.”

So, we don’t know how long The Jokers “officially” existed, and if they even ever really made a clear cut or not. But what we know is that Bob Dylan with The Jokers recorded a 8-minutes-record that is already an important part of Bob Dylan-history.

In the next part we are going to explore the most famous of all of Bob’s high school bands and we also have a very interesting rivalry between two teenage bands coming up. Don’t you dare miss it!

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