At a memorabilia auction, Bob Dylan reunites with another noteworthy Bob — and the unsung women behind their careers

By Jim Sullivan
March 5, 2025

This is a tale of two women and two men named Bob.

The Bobs were friends and collaborators, both musicians and painters, both Jewish. One Bob is very famous and alive; the other, far less famous, died on May 18, 2022. The Bobs have  been reunited in a sense with an online auction featuring their artifacts and memorabilia: a 1975 Martin D-41 acoustic guitar, clothes, photos, harmonicas.

The Bobs are Dylan and Neuwirth.

The women are Terri Thal and Paula Batson.

Thal was Dylan’s first manager and promoter. She recorded what’s being called his first demo tape, a Sept. 6, 1961 recording of six songs at the Gaslight Café in New York City. She used a reel-to-reel Ampex tape recorder and brought her recordings to folk music clubs outside the city to try and secure bookings for the young singer-songwriter-guitarist newly transplanted from Minnesota.

Paula Batson, a former major label music publicist, was Neuwirth’s longtime companion of nearly three decades; she’s the producer of A Musical Celebration of Bob Neuwirth, a work-in-progress documentary about Neuwirth’s life and music, featuring footage from a 2022 tribute concert in LA.

Neuwirth, also a singer-songwriter-guitarist, was Dylan’s close pal and playing partner back in the Greenwich Village days of the early ‘60s and then a ringleader of Dylan’s famous multi-act Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975-76.

“Neuwirth would often say they put a living room on the stage,” Batson said of the bill that featured, among others, at times, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson and Sam Shepherd. “The idea of almost like a commedia dell’arte troupe, picking up people along the way — this collaborative creativity, mixing poets with musicians with playwrights.”

“Right from the start you could tell Neuwirth had a taste for provocation and nothing was going to restrict his freedom,” Dylan wrote in Chronicles: Volume One. “He was in a mad revolt against something. You had to brace yourself. He could talk to anybody until they felt all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody feel uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.  If there was ever a renaissance man leaping in and out of things, he would have to be it. Neuwirth was a bulldog. He didn’t provoke me, though, not in any way. I got a kick out of everything he did and liked him.”

Thal and Batson were both in Boston in late February at the Boch Center, where many of the auction items were on display.

“It was good times,” said Thal, speaking of those early pre-fame folk music days in Greenwich Village. “There was an incredibly accepting world that really wanted to welcome people. It sounds silly, but it was real.” In 2022, Thal published a book about those days, My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob and Me.

Thal had been studying at Brooklyn College, but gained entry into that world via Village mainstay, singer-songwriter-guitarist Dave Van Ronk, whom she later married. The folkies played the Gaslight, the Bitter End and the Other End. They jammed, they frequently shared the stage, there was ever-present camaraderie.

“Nobody thought anybody we knew would ever become what Bob has become culturally,” Thal said. “But I thought, ‘Boy, this guy is more than good.’ We were very impressed and when I say we, I’m talking about me and Dave and most of the people around the burgeoning folk music scene in New York.”

“Bob,” she continued, “is one of the few people who made an interesting transition from a limited kind of musical genre — we didn’t use the word back then but we use it now — through writing and speaking in metaphor. I think it was his use of metaphor that turned so many people onto him.”

That demo tape, recorded in front of perhaps 20 people, is expected to go for at least $20,000 at the auction which closes March 12.

“I sort of knew I had it, but I never really thought about it very much,” she said. “It was kept on the top of cabinet in my bedroom. I had that and some other stuff that I paid no attention to.”

In 2023, Thal met Richard Barone, a musician-producer who’d co-led the Hoboken-based new wave band the Bongos. Barone, Thal said, “got really enthusiastic about it and pushed me to listen to the thing.” She decided to put it up for auction because, she said with a deadpan laugh,“I’m 85.”

Bootlegged versions of the tape have long circulated.  “I haven’t a clue how,” said Thal. “I always said ‘Don’t copy it’ and they said ‘Sure.’” But she believes that someone made a copy when she went to a studio to have the Ampex reel copied, so she would not have to schlep the original around with her when she visited and pitched clubs.

“There were multiple reproductions and the sound on those bootlegs was dreadful,” she said.

Without telling her, in August 1962 Dylan left Thal to sign with manager Albert Grossman. “I kind of shrugged at the fact that he was doing it,” Thal said. “I was pissed at the way he did it. He should not have signed with Albert and then come to me saying ‘Albert wants to manage me.’ I felt he should have been honest, upfront, and should have said ‘Albert can do a lot more for me than you can and I would like to work with him.’ I certainly more than understood that. Albert was a commercial manager. I was young and not in that league.”

She stayed friendly with Dylan for another year, but, Thal said, “he started to slowly move socially into the Grossman world.”

“People move on,” she said. “It happens.”

The other Bob

Batson, now 76, wasn’t there when the two Bobs met. But she said she knew from talking to Neuwirth that “there was this mutual attraction.”

“There was a friendship,” she said. “I think Neuwirth had a way of telling people the truth and being able to pull out what was essential in a situation. He could do that with Dylan and I’m not so sure there were that many other people in Dylan’s life who could do that. They enjoyed each other’s company, and sometimes they go up to no good.”

Neuwirth got too deep in the drink and for all the fun he had on the Rolling Thunder tour, he later regretted he hadn’t played better.  He finally got sober in 1978, after going to Paris and making a movie in 1976 called Couleur chair with Dennis Hopper. (One can only imagine what those two got up to off-set.)

“He had 40-plus years of sobriety when he died,” Batson said. “Bob did a lot of speaking about it.”

Neuwirth also continued to paint — that’s how Batson said he primarily defined himself — and play music. He released his eponymous debut album in 1974 – the first of five, plus a 1994 collaboration with John Cale – and decades later remixed and remastered it. It was re-released last September.

“Bob started that project before he died,” said Batson, “and he really wanted to change things on that record. Bob wasn’t sober yet and the record. he felt. could be better. That’s why we went ahead with doing it.”

Batson continues to work on the documentary. Raising funds for the film, she said, is the primary reason she joined the team for the auction. Consisting entirely of Neuwirth’s songs, the concert featured T-Bone Burnett (who was also on Rolling Thunder) and Eric Clapton who played an acoustic version of Neuwirth’s “The Call” on last year’s tour.

Of “The Call,” Batson said, “People have responded because the song is about old friends, musicians who are talking together.”

The song may not specifically be about Dylan and Neuwirth having an imagined chat, but it’s possible to listen to it with that interpretation. And having Clapton cover the song may lend Neuwirth’s songwriting a posthumous gravitas. Neuwirth is dead, but his music lives on

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