One afternoon in the early 1960s in New York City, a friend invited Dylan to look through his record collection. It included a few record albums of old 78s. One was The Spirituals to Swing Concert at Carnegie Hall, a collection of performances by Count Basie, Meade Lux Lewis, Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and others. Another was a Woody Guthrie set of about twelve double‐sided records. Dylan had listened casually to some of Guthrie’s recordings when he was living in Hibbing, but hadn’t paid them close attention. This day in New York City was going to be different.
Dylan put one of the old 78s on the turntable, “and when the needle dropped, I was stunned. I didn’t know if I was stoned or straight.” He listened entranced to Guthrie singing solo a range of his own compositions: “Ludlow Massacre,” “1913 Massacre,” “Jesus Christ,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Jackhammer John,” “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues,” and “This Land Is Your Land.”
“All these songs together, one after another made my head spin,” he said. “It made me want to gasp. It was like the land parted. I had heard Guthrie before but mainly just a song here and there—mostly things that he sang with other artists. I hadn’t actually heard him, not in this earth shattering kind of way. I couldn’t believe it. Guthrie had such a grip on things. He was so poetic and tough and rhythmic. There was so much intensity, and his voice was like a stiletto.”
Guthrie sang like no other singer Dylan had listened to, and he wrote songs like no one he’d ever heard. Everything about Guthrie—his style, his content, his mannerisms—came to him as a revelation of what folk music could be and had to be.
“It all just about knocked me down. It was like the record player itself had just picked me up and flung me across the room. I was listening to his diction, too. He had perfected a style of singing that it seemed like no one else had ever thought about. He would throw in the sound of the last letter of a word whenever he felt like it and it would come like a punch. The songs themselves, his repertoire, were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them. Not one mediocre song in the bunch. Woody Guthrie tore everything in his path to pieces. For me it was an epiphany, like some heavy anchor had just plunged into the waters of the harbor.”
Dylan listened to Guthrie for the rest of that day “as if in a trance.” It was not only a moment of revelation about Guthrie; it was a moment of truth for Dylan. “I felt like I had discovered some essence of self‐command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system feeling more like myself than ever before. A voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’ I could sing all these songs, every single one of them, and they were all that I wanted to sing. It was like I had been in the dark and someone had turned on the main switch of a lightning conductor.”
By traveling to New York City to find like‐minded people, Dylan was looking for himself. By discovering the journey of Woody Guthrie, he began to imagine his own. Like Newton, he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Circles of Influence
Tribes are circles of influence, and they can take many forms. They may be scattered far and wide or huddled closely together. They may be present only in your thoughts or physically present in the room with you. They may be alive or dead and living through their works. They may be confined to a single generation or cross over them.
Nobel laureate Richard Feynman spoke of ultra‐miniaturized machines long before anyone had any thought of creating such things. Years later, Marvin Minsky, inspired by Feynman’s idea, became the founding father of artificial intelligence and moved the conversation forward. Then K. Eric Drexler approached Minsky at MIT, and asked the esteemed professor to sponsor his thesis on miniature devices. That thesis served as the foundation for Drexler’s pioneering work in nanotechnology. Through an extended, multigenerational tribe, a concept that critics dismissed as purely science fiction when Feynman introduced it became a reality.
When tribes gather in the same place, the opportunities for mutual inspiration can become intense. In all domains, there have been powerful groupings of people who have driven innovation through their influence on each other and the impetus they’ve created as a group.
Sociologist Randall Collins writes about how nearly all great philosophical movements came via the dynamics of tribes. In ancient Greece, the history of philosophy “can be recounted in terms of a series of interlinked groups: the Pythagorean brotherhood and its offshoots; Socrates’ circle, which spawned so many others; the acute debaters of the Megara school; Plato’s friends, who constituted the Academy; the breakaway faction that became Aristotle’s Peripatetic school; the restructuring of the network that crystallized with Epicurus and his friends withdrawing into their Garden community, and their rivals, the Athenian Stoics, with their revisionist circles at Rhodes and Rome; the successive movements at Alexandria.”
If it can happen in Ancient Greece, in can happen in Hollywood. The documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls examines the “raucous, inspired, and occasionally sordid cultural revolution” that led to the reinvention of Hollywood filmmaking in the 1960s. In a few short years, the bobby socks and beach blankets that characterized wholesome 1950s Americana were replaced with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Inspired by the French New Wave and British New Cinema, a new generation of directors and actors set out to revolutionize American cinema and make films that expressed their personal vision.
The breakthrough successes of landmark films such as Easy Rider, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver gave these filmmakers unprecedented financial and creative independence. The box‐office and critical success of their films forced the old guard of the Hollywood studio system to relinquish their power. This became the age of a new breed of iconic filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Dennis Hopper.
With each success, the filmmakers gained greater creative control. They created a culture of feverish innovation as each inspired the others to explore new themes and forms for popular movies. This newfound freedom also gave birth to an explosion of excess, ego, soaring budgets, and a seemingly endless supply of drugs. Eventually, the filmmakers’ mutual support and encouragement degenerated into intense competition and bitter rivalries. The emergence from this culture of blockbuster movies such as Jaws and Star Wars changed the landscape of Hollywood films once again, and creative and financial control returned to the hands of the studios.
The power of tribal clustering was clear too in the period of wild invention surrounding the software industry that accompanied the dawn of the personal computer. Silicon Valley has had a huge impact on digital technology. But, as Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap have noted, it’s surprisingly small geographically. “Viewing the valley from the flight approach to San Francisco International, one is struck by how small the region is. As Venture Law Group’s Craig Johnson notes, Silicon Valley ‘is like any gas that is compressed; it gets hotter.’ Its tribes overlap socially and professionally based on work discipline (software engineers, for example), organizational affiliation (Hewlett‐Packard), or background (Stanford MBAs or South Asian immigrants). The most skillful players do not have to travel far to make deals, change jobs, or find professional partners. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins is fond of saying that the Valley is a place where you can change your job without changing your parking spot.