http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/nyregion/bob-dylan-new-york.html 2016-10-14 11:32:23 Bob Dylan and New York: A Complicated, Fertile Romance Mr. Dylan may have styled himself early on as a vagabond country boy, but those familiar with his life know he first rose to prominence as a driven folk singer in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. === In Indeed, Mr. Dylan may have styled himself as a vagabond country boy, but those familiar with his life know he first rose to prominence as a driven folk singer hanging out in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village. His first apartment was at 161 West Fourth Street, and Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend at the time, suggested strongly in her 2008 memoir that the crowing came from roosters in a nearby store near the intersection of Thompson and Bleecker Streets that sold freshly slaughtered chickens to residents of what was then a largely Italian-American neighborhood. Mr. Dylan, who on Thursday won the A. J. Weberman, an iconoclastic member of the Yippies who made a career out of studying Mr. Dylan and produced a concordance of his lyrics, infamously Mr. Weberman, with typical New York insouciance, shrugged off the episode. “I deserved it,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “I don’t hold it against him.” Mr. Dylan first came to New York in January 1961 as a cherubic but determined 19-year-old from a middle-class Jewish Midwestern home. He promptly visited his musical idol, Woody Guthrie, Greenwich Village then was the epicenter of folk music, though many strummers of hillbilly and bluegrass tunes were the sons and daughters of the Bronx and Brooklyn. Many of them were also self-invented; Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, for example, was actually Elliott Adnopoz, son of a Brooklyn doctor. On his first day in the Village, Mr. Dylan showed up at Cafe Wha?, played harmonica and that night had his first gig. He soon had bookings at Gerde’s Folk City and the Gaslight Cafe and charmed the more seasoned folk singers. By July, at a hootenanny at Riverside Church, he met Ms. Rotolo, at the time a 17-year-old from a leftist Queens family. He described her in his memoir “ According to John Strausbaugh’s neighborhood history, “The Village,” Ms. Rotolo educated Mr. Dylan about social issues and took him to see Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art as well as several Off Broadway plays, one of which was a pastiche of Brecht and Weill songs that dazzled Mr. Dylan. On Fourth Street — Mr. Dylan’s bitter “Positively Fourth Street” came out in 1965 — was the Music Inn, which sold instruments, and Allan Block’s Sandal Shop, which provided the folk-uniform footwear and where musicians could jam with the fiddle-playing owner. At Izzy Young’s Folklore Center, indigent troubadours like Mr. Dylan could listen to records. “In those early years Bob Dylan was a painter searching for his palette,” Ms. Rotolo, an artist who died in 2011, wrote in “ He also, she wrote, “had an uncanny ability to complicate the obvious and sanctify the banal — just like a poet.” Robert Shelton, then the folk music reviewer for The New York Times, saw Mr. Dylan perform at Gerde’s in September 1961 and Ms. Rotolo was the striking young woman on the cover of Mr. Dylan’s breakthrough 1963 album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” which, in addition to “Don’t Think Twice,” featured such signature songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” She is shown clasping his arm as they stroll, hunched over against the cold, on snow-blanketed Jones Street. The scene epitomized the offbeat sweetness of a Village romance, short-lived as theirs proved to be — they broke up in 1964 partly over Mr. Dylan’s affair with Ms. Baez. (Appearing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., on Thursday night, Ms. Baez honored Mr. Dylan by singing four of his songs and saying of his Greenwich Village was not Mr. Dylan’s only New York address. During the early 1970s, he lived in a rented townhouse on East 49th Street next door to Katharine Hepburn. In a