CPI Archive 2009: On a balmy summer evening in 1959, John ‘Spider’ Koerner first turned Bob Dylan onto folk. Andrew Hamilton chats to the legendary American about life as a musical maverick and being a blues man in a folk world.
There were never fans inside the Ten O’Clock Scholar. Even in August, the Minneapolis heat would besiege the walls of the grotty student haunt, mingling and scheming with the whistling steam of endless coffees, bewitching all who entered with the twin lures of free love and marijuana. To those inside, the sun-stricken world would slowly dissolve and melt, almost becoming translucent under the weight of heat, noise and smoke. It was in this den of 1960’s Americana, that John ‘Spider’ Koerner first met Bob Dylan. Koerner, an engineering student with a talent for folk and blues riffs and a voice built to frighten, liked the young Dylan - and slowly began to introduce him into his world. Starting, of course, with the music. “I had no idea about music or anything until I went to university in Minneapolis. I was there for a year and a half as an engineering student. A friend of mine invited me up to his house to listen to some music and it was folk music. He had a few records and could play himself and it was really interesting. He loaned me his guitar and a folk music book and somehow, within a few weeks, I was able to play a few tunes. That was the beginning of it,” says Koerner.
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