Tiny Tim says that “Bob Dylan was in Woodstock and he heard that the Band was backing me there. He remembered me from California so he invited me up to Woodstock.”
The story about his visit is very sweet. He said that first a “big black limousine” took him to Albert Grossman’s place…then he had to wait there ’till it got dark. Then he got back into the limousine and it took him to Bob Dylan’s house. “I couldn’t tell where it was because it was all camouflaged.”
Tiny Tim had taken his big shopping bag of cosmetics with him because he was staying overnight. He got to Bob’s around 11:00 p.m. and was taken to a “big gigantic suite” where he freshened up for his visit.
Bob knew Tiny Tim was a hockey fan and asked him to go to a game with him some time at Madison Square. And Tiny Tim told Bob that he thought what Bob was doing in 1967 was similar to what Rudy Vallee was doing in 1929. According to Tiny Tim, “When the electric radio first came in, in the ’10s and ’20s, it was hard for singers to adjust to electricity. Everyone was shouting into the microphone, as if trying to put a song out over the wires was like telephoning through Dixie Cups. Rudy Vallee came over and put a sound into the microphone at the Hi Ho Club in 1928, piped through the WMCA radio, with a sound like this…(Tiny Tim croons a line of Rudy Vallee song). He was the first one to put sex and romance and softness into the microphone. Women flocked to the club.”
Then Tiny Tim did his version of Rudy Vallee singing “Like a Rolling Stone” AND he did his version of Bob Dylan singing a Rudy Vallee song! (I wonder which one.)
He said that Bob seemed interested in Tiny Tim’s ideas on this point. And later that night, Bob sang “Cool Water” for him, and Tiny Tim sang an Irving Kaufman song from 1922. (Again, I wonder which one.)
One thing that Tiny Tim said puzzled me: “It’s funny but he did have me do some films. He was doing some filming for ‘Stage 67’.” Hmmmm. Anybody else know anything about these films???