April
30
Bob Dylan's first manager: The fast, strange life of Roy Silver
Funny, you don't look famous: Roy Silver, Bob Dylan's first manager
A new Bob Dylan album is always cause for curiosity, especially when it comes to the extras that have been a feast for hard-core Bobologists. The deluxe edition of his latest, "Together Through Life," continues this tradition with "Roy Silver: The Lost Interview," a genuinely engaging DVD oddity that features Dylan's earliest manager.
Conducted shortly before Silver's death in 2003, the interview was intended for the Martin Scorsese doc "No Direction Home" and provides refreshingly candid peek into the beginning of the Dylan legend. On screen, Dylan dismisses Silver as "a hustler" and "one of those guys always selling something." In kind, Silver remembers the 1961 Dylan as "weird" and a malleable pawn of the famously overpowering Albert Grossman -- the manager who escorted Dylan into fame after he "convinced" Silver that selling him Dylan's management contract for $10,000 would be a good idea.
Silver went on to manage Bill Cosby and become an investor in the Rainbow Bar and Grill, but he is perhaps best remembered in Hollywood as an owner (along with recording czar Neil Bogart and future studio chief Peter Guber) of another Sunset Strip establishment, Roy's. For those who don't remember the establishment, Josh Karp's biography of National Lampoon cofounder Doug Kenney, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture," contains this reminiscence:
Roy's was an after-hours club (open until three or four AM) for people such as the Eagles, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Burt Reynolds, Hunter Thompson... In the back were booths built to resemble separate Pullman cars — cabins that seated four to six, with a large drape that could be drawn around each table. Roy himself catered to his clientele by providing instant access to cocaine for anyone who wanted it. If there wasn't enough available from the restaurant's private stock, Roy called a dealer who arrived in minutes. Even the dinner plates at Roy's were billed as perfect for using to snort lines.
Ah, the '70s. -- Steve Gaydos
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I just bought two of Bob Dylan's old managers suits at a garage sale
Posted by: Dylan Conroy | May 01, 2009 at 07:52 AM
Strange DVD extra and strange character these Silver boy. I don't understand how Sony put this in the deluxe edition of Dylan's album. Only, the nostalgic note of the Blowin in the wind's birth. Rare guy this Dylan, old Kaa serpent. Maybe a documentary about him, "Broadway Roy Rose", could be fine. Greetings
Posted by: Javier | May 07, 2009 at 08:02 AM
does this man really matter in the scheme of things? only for garage sale junkies and memorabilia flea markets maybe
Posted by: daniesza | May 17, 2009 at 05:02 PM
I remember Roy as a helluva handball player at age 15, back in the Bronx. We played against the side of an apartment building on Clarke Place. He was a likeable easygoing but energetic kid, this Lloyd who later became Roy, who wanted to be a scientific farmer, and soon attended a school in New England for that purpose. So it came as a surprise to me, years later, when he phoned me in L.A. and said he'd become an artist's manager. When Roy arrived, he introduced my then-wife and myself to a recently-acquired client, a lovely girl, somewhat overweight, but possessed of a magnificent voice. So we gave this girl her first -- rather modest-- birthday party in L.A. Too bad that Marlo Thomas impishly sneaked a slice of the birthday cake before we could present it to Cass Elliot, but Cass really didn't mind.
Posted by: Ross | July 08, 2009 at 12:11 AM